It was at the end of the first act
of the first night of “The Sultana,” and
every member of the Lester Comic Opera Company, from
Lester himself down to the wardrobe woman’s son,
who would have had to work if his mother lost her
place, was sick with anxiety.
There is perhaps only one other place
as feverish as it is behind the scenes on the first
night of a comic opera, and that is a newspaper office
on the last night of a Presidential campaign, when
the returns are being flashed on the canvas outside,
and the mob is howling, and the editor-in-chief is
expecting to go to the Court of St. James if the election
comes his way, and the office-boy is betting his wages
that it won’t.
Such nights as these try men’s
souls; but Van Bibber passed the stage-door man with
as calmly polite a nod as though the piece had been
running a hundred nights, and the manager was thinking
up souvenirs for the one hundred and fiftieth, and
the prima donna had, as usual, began to hint
for a new set of costumes. The stage-door keeper
hesitated and was lost, and Van Bibber stepped into
the unsuppressed excitement of the place with a pleased
sniff at the familiar smell of paint and burning gas,
and the dusty odor that came from the scene-lofts
above.
For a moment he hesitated in the cross-lights
and confusion about him, failing to recognize in their
new costumes his old acquaintances of the company;
but he saw Kripps, the stage-manager, in the centre
of the stage, perspiring and in his shirt-sleeves
as always, wildly waving an arm to some one in the
flies, and beckoning with the other to the gas-man
in the front entrance. The stage hands were striking
the scene for the first act, and fighting with the
set for the second, and dragging out a canvas floor
of tessellated marble, and running a throne and a
practical pair of steps over it, and aiming the high
quaking walls of a palace and abuse at whoever came
in their way.
“Now then, Van Bibber,”
shouted Kripps, with a wild glance of recognition,
as the white-and-black figure came towards him, “you
know you’re the only man in New York who gets
behind here to-night. But you can’t stay.
Lower it, lower it, can’t you?” This to
the man in the flies. “Any other night
goes, but not this night. I can’t have it.
I Where is the backing for the centre entrance?
Didn’t I tell you men ”
Van Bibber dodged two stage hands
who were steering a scene at him, stepped over the
carpet as it unrolled, and brushed through a group
of anxious, whispering chorus people into the quiet
of the star’s dressing-room.
The star saw him in the long mirror
before which he sat, while his dresser tugged at his
boots, and threw up his hands desperately.
“Well,” he cried, in mock
resignation, “are we in it or are we not?
Are they in their seats still or have they fled?”
“How are you, John?” said
Van Bibber to the dresser. Then he dropped into
a big arm-chair in the corner, and got up again with
a protesting sigh to light his cigar between the wires
around the gas-burner. “Oh, it’s
going very well. I wouldn’t have come around
if it wasn’t. If the rest of it is as good
as the first act, you needn’t worry.”
Van Bibber’s unchallenged freedom
behind the scenes had been a source of much comment
and perplexity to the members of the Lester Comic
Opera Company. He had made his first appearance
there during one hot night of the long run of the
previous summer, and had continued to be an almost
nightly visitor for several weeks. At first it
was supposed that he was backing the piece, that he
was the “Angel,” as those weak and wealthy
individuals are called who allow themselves to be led
into supplying the finances for theatrical experiments.
But as he never peered through the curtain-hole to
count the house, nor made frequent trips to the front
of it to look at the box sheet, but was, on the contrary,
just as undisturbed on a rainy night as on those when
the “standing room only” sign blocked
the front entrance, this supposition was discarded
as untenable. Nor did he show the least interest
in the prima donna, or in any of the other pretty
women of the company; he did not know them, nor did
he make any effort to know them, and it was not until
they inquired concerning him outside of the theatre
that they learned what a figure in the social life
of the city he really was. He spent most of his
time in Lester’s dressing-room smoking, listening
to the reminiscences of Lester’s dresser when
Lester was on the stage; and this seclusion and his
clerical attire of evening dress led the second comedian
to call him Lester’s father confessor, and to
suggest that he came to the theatre only to take the
star to task for his sins. And in this the second
comedian was unknowingly not so very far wrong.
Lester, the comedian, and young Van Bibber had known
each other at the university, when Lester’s
voice and gift of mimicry had made him the leader
in the college theatricals; and later, when he had
gone upon the stage, and had been cut off by his family
even after he had become famous, or on account of
it, Van Bibber had gone to visit him, and had found
him as simple and sincere and boyish as he had been
in the days of his Hasty-Pudding successes. And
Lester, for his part, had found Van Bibber as likable
as did every one else, and welcomed his quiet voice
and youthful knowledge of the world as a grateful
relief to the boisterous camaraderie of his
professional acquaintances. And he allowed Van
Bibber to scold him, and to remind him of what he
owed to himself, and to touch, even whether it hurt
or not, upon his better side. And in time he
admitted to finding his friend’s occasional
comments on stage matters of value as coming from
the point of view of those who look on at the game;
and even Kripps, the veteran, regarded him with respect
after he had told him that he could turn a set of
purple costumes black by throwing a red light on them.
To the company, after he came to know them, he was
gravely polite, and, to those who knew him if they
had overheard, amusingly commonplace in his conversation.
He understood them better than they did themselves,
and made no mistakes. The women smiled on him,
but the men were suspicious and shy of him until they
saw that he was quite as shy of the women; and then
they made him a confidant, and told him all their
woes and troubles, and exhibited all their little jealousies
and ambitions, in the innocent hope that he would
repeat what they said to Lester. They were simple,
unconventional, light-hearted folk, and Van Bibber
found them vastly more entertaining and preferable
to the silence of the deserted club, where the matting
was down, and from whence the regular habitues
had departed to the other side or to Newport.
He liked the swing of the light, bright music as it
came to him through the open door of the dressing-room,
and the glimpse he got of the chorus people crowding
and pushing for a quick charge up the iron stairway,
and the feverish smell of oxygen in the air, and the
picturesque disorder of Lester’s wardrobe, and
the wigs and swords, and the mysterious articles of
make-up, all mixed together on a tray with half-finished
cigars and autograph books and newspaper “notices.”
And he often wished he was clever
enough to be an artist with the talent to paint the
unconsciously graceful groups in the sharply divided
light and shadow of the wings as he saw them.
The brilliantly colored, fantastically clothed girls
leaning against the bare brick wall of the theatre,
or whispering together in circles, with their arms
close about one another, or reading apart and solitary,
or working at some piece of fancy-work as soberly
as though they were in a rocking-chair in their own
flat, and not leaning against a scene brace, with
the glare of the stage and the applause of the house
just behind them. He liked to watch them coquetting
with the big fireman detailed from the precinct engine-house,
and clinging desperately to the curtain wire, or with
one of the chorus men on the stairs, or teasing the
phlegmatic scene-shifters as they tried to catch a
minute’s sleep on a pile of canvas. He even
forgave the prima donna’s smiling at him from
the stage, as he stood watching her from the wings,
and smiled back at her with polite cynicism, as though
he did not know and she did not know that her smiles
were not for him, but to disturb some more interested
one in the front row. And so, in time, the company
became so well accustomed to him that he moved in and
about as unnoticed as the stage-manager himself, who
prowled around hissing “hush” on principle,
even though he was the only person who could fairly
be said to be making a noise.
The second act was on, and Lester
came off the stage and ran to the dressing-room and
beckoned violently. “Come here,” he
said; “you ought to see this; the children are
doing their turn. You want to hear them.
They’re great!”
Van Bibber put his cigar into a tumbler
and stepped out into the wings. They were crowded
on both sides of the stage with the members of the
company; the girls were tiptoeing, with their hands
on the shoulders of the men, and making futile little
leaps into the air to get a better view, and others
were resting on one knee that those behind might see
over their shoulders. There were over a dozen
children before the footlights, with the prima donna
in the centre. She was singing the verses of
a song, and they were following her movements, and
joining in the chorus with high piping voices.
They seemed entirely too much at home and too self-conscious
to please Van Bibber; but there was one exception.
The one exception was the smallest of them, a very,
very little girl, with long auburn hair and black
eyes; such a very little girl that every one in the
house looked at her first, and then looked at no one
else. She was apparently as unconcerned to all
about her, excepting the pretty prima donna,
as though she were by a piano at home practising a
singing lesson. She seemed to think it was some
new sort of a game. When the prima donna
raised her arms, the child raised hers; when the prima
donna courtesied, she stumbled into one, and straightened
herself just in time to get the curls out of her eyes,
and to see that the prima donna was laughing
at her, and to smile cheerfully back, as if to say,
“We are doing our best anyway, aren’t
we?” She had big, gentle eyes and two wonderful
dimples, and in the excitement of the dancing and
the singing her eyes laughed and flashed, and the dimples
deepened and disappeared and reappeared again.
She was as happy and innocent looking as though it
were nine in the morning and she were playing school
at a kindergarten. From all over the house the
women were murmuring their delight, and the men were
laughing and pulling their mustaches and nudging each
other to “look at the littlest one.”
The girls in the wings were rapturous
in their enthusiasm, and were calling her absurdly
extravagant titles of endearment, and making so much
noise that Kripps stopped grinning at her from the
entrance, and looked back over his shoulder as he
looked when he threatened fines and calls for early
rehearsal. And when she had finished finally,
and the prima donna and the children ran off
together, there was a roar from the house that went
to Lester’s head like wine, and seemed to leap
clear across the footlights and drag the children back
again.
“That settles it!” cried
Lester, in a suppressed roar of triumph. “I
knew that child would catch them.”
There were four encores, and then
the children and Elise Broughten, the pretty prima
donna, came off jubilant and happy, with the Littlest
Girl’s arms full of flowers, which the management
had with kindly forethought prepared for the prima
donna, but which that delightful young person
and the delighted leader of the orchestra had passed
over to the little girl.
“Well,” gasped Miss Broughten,
as she came up to Van Bibber laughing, and with one
hand on her side and breathing very quickly, “will
you kindly tell me who is the leading woman now?
Am I the prima donna, or am I not? I wasn’t
in it, was I?”
“You were not,” said Van Bibber.
He turned from the pretty prima donna
and hunted up the wardrobe woman, and told her he
wanted to meet the Littlest Girl. And the wardrobe
woman, who was fluttering wildly about, and as delighted
as though they were all her own children, told him
to come into the property-room, where the children
were, and which had been changed into a dressing-room
that they might be by themselves. The six little
girls were in six different states of dishabille, but
they were too little to mind that, and Van Bibber
was too polite to observe it.
“This is the little girl, sir,”
said the wardrobe woman, excitedly, proud at being
the means of bringing together two such prominent
people. “Her name is Madeline. Speak
to the gentleman, Madeline; he wants to tell you what
a great big hit youse made.”
The little girl was seated on one
of the cushions of a double throne so high from the
ground that the young woman who was pulling off the
child’s silk stockings and putting woollen ones
on in their place did so without stooping. The
young woman looked at Van Bibber and nodded somewhat
doubtfully and ungraciously, and Van Bibber turned
to the little girl in preference. The young woman’s
face was one of a type that was too familiar to be
pleasant.
He took the Littlest Girl’s
small hand in his and shook it solemnly, and said,
“I am very glad to know you. Can I sit up
here beside you, or do you rule alone?”
“Yes, ma’am yes, sir,”
answered the little girl.
Van Bibber put his hands on the arms
of the throne and vaulted up beside the girl, and
pulled out the flower in his button-hole and gave
it to her.
“Now,” prompted the wardrobe
woman, “what do you say to the gentleman?”
“Thank you, sir,” stammered the little
girl.
“She is not much used to gentlemen’s
society,” explained the woman who was pulling
on the stockings.
“I see,” said Van Bibber.
He did not know exactly what to say next. And
yet he wanted to talk to the child very much, so much
more than he generally wanted to talk to most young
women, who showed no hesitation in talking to him.
With them he had no difficulty whatsoever. There
was a doll lying on the top of a chest near them, and
he picked this up and surveyed it critically.
“Is this your doll?” he asked.
“No,” said Madeline, pointing
to one of the children, who was much taller than herself;
“it’s ’at ’ittle durl’s.
My doll he’s dead.”
“Dear me!” said Van Bibber.
He made a mental note to get a live one in the morning,
and then he said: “That’s very sad.
But dead dolls do come to life.”
The little girl looked up at him,
and surveyed him intently and critically, and then
smiled, with the dimples showing, as much as to say
that she understood him and approved of him entirely.
Van Bibber answered this sign language by taking Madeline’s
hand in his and asking her how she liked being a great
actress, and how soon she would begin to storm because
that photographer hadn’t sent the proofs.
The young woman understood this, and deigned to smile
at it, but Madeline yawned a very polite and sleepy
yawn, and closed her eyes. Van Bibber moved up
closer, and she leaned over until her bare shoulder
touched his arm, and while the woman buttoned on her
absurdly small shoes, she let her curly head fall
on his elbow and rest there. Any number of people
had shown confidence in Van Bibber not in
that form exactly, but in the same spirit and
though he was used to being trusted, he felt a sharp
thrill of pleasure at the touch of the child’s
head on his arm, and in the warm clasp of her fingers
around his. And he was conscious of a keen sense
of pity and sorrow for her rising in him, which he
crushed by thinking that it was entirely wasted, and
that the child was probably perfectly and ignorantly
happy.
“Look at that, now,” said
the wardrobe woman, catching sight of the child’s
closed eyelids; “just look at the rest of the
little dears, all that excited they can’t stand
still to get their hats on, and she just as unconcerned
as you please, and after making the hit of the piece,
too.”
“She’s not used to it,
you see,” said the young woman, knowingly; “she
don’t know what it means. It’s just
that much play to her.”
This last was said with a questioning
glance at Van Bibber, in whom she still feared to
find the disguised agent of a Children’s Aid
Society. Van Bibber only nodded in reply, and
did not answer her, because he found he could not
very well, for he was looking a long way ahead at
what the future was to bring to the confiding little
being at his side, and of the evil knowledge and temptations
that would mar the beauty of her quaintly sweet face,
and its strange mark of gentleness and refinement.
Outside he could bear his friend Lester shouting the
refrain of his new topical song, and the laughter and
the hand-clapping came in through the wings and open
door, broken but tumultuous.
“Does she come of professional
people?” Van Bibber asked, dropping into the
vernacular. He spoke softly, not so much that
he might not disturb the child, but that she might
not understand what he said.
“Yes,” the woman answered,
shortly, and bent her head to smooth out the child’s
stage dress across her knees.
Van Bibber touched the little girl’s
head with his hand and found that she was asleep,
and so let his hand rest there, with the curls between
his fingers. “Are are you her
mother?” he asked, with a slight inclination
of his head. He felt quite confident she was not;
at least, he hoped not.
The woman shook her head. “No,” she
said.
“Who is her mother?”
The woman looked at the sleeping child
and then up at him almost defiantly. “Ida
Clare was her mother,” she said.
Van Bibber’s protecting hand
left the child as suddenly as though something had
burned it, and he drew back so quickly that her head
slipped from his arm, and she awoke and raised her
eyes and looked up at him questioningly. He looked
back at her with a glance of the strangest concern
and of the deepest pity. Then he stooped and drew
her towards him very tenderly, put her head back in
the corner of his arm, and watched her in silence
while she smiled drowsily and went to sleep again.
“And who takes care of her now?” he asked.
The woman straightened herself and
seemed relieved. She saw that the stranger had
recognized the child’s pedigree and knew her
story, and that he was not going to comment on it.
“I do,” she said. “After the
divorce Ida came to me,” she said, speaking more
freely. “I used to be in her company when
she was doing ‘Aladdin,’ and then when
I left the stage and started to keep an actors’
boarding-house, she came to me. She lived on
with us a year, until she died, and she made me the
guardian of the child. I train children for the
stage, you know, me and my sister, Ada Dyer; you’ve
heard of her, I guess. The courts pay us for
her keep, but it isn’t much, and I’m expecting
to get what I spent on her from what she makes on
the stage. Two of them other children are my
pupils; but they can’t touch Madie. She
is a better dancer an’ singer than any of them.
If it hadn’t been for the Society keeping her
back, she would have been on the stage two years ago.
She’s great, she is. She’ll be just
as good as her mother was.”
Van Bibber gave a little start, and
winced visibly, but turned it off into a cough.
“And her father,” he said, hesitatingly,
“does he ”
“Her father,” said the
woman, tossing back her head, “he looks after
himself, he does. We don’t ask no favors
of him. She’ll get along without
him or his folks, thank you. Call him a gentleman?
Nice gentleman he is!” Then she stopped abruptly.
“I guess, though, you know him,” she added.
“Perhaps he’s a friend of yourn?”
“I just know him,” said Van Bibber, wearily.
He sat with the child asleep beside
him while the woman turned to the others and dressed
them for the third act. She explained that Madie
would not appear in the last act, only the two larger
girls, so she let her sleep, with the cape of Van
Bibber’s cloak around her.
Van Bibber sat there for several long
minutes thinking, and then looked up quickly, and
dropped his eyes again as quickly, and said, with
an effort to speak quietly and unconcernedly:
“If the little girl is not on in this act, would
you mind if I took her home? I have a cab at
the stage-door, and she’s so sleepy it seems
a pity to keep her up. The sister you spoke of
or some one could put her to bed.”
“Yes,” the woman said,
doubtfully, “Ada’s home. Yes, you
can take her around, if you want to.”
She gave him the address, and he sprang
down to the floor, and gathered the child up in his
arms and stepped out on the stage. The prima
donna had the centre of it to herself at that
moment, and all the rest of the company were waiting
to go on; but when they saw the little girl in Van
Bibber’s arms they made a rush at her, and the
girls leaned over and kissed her with a great show
of rapture and with many gasps of delight.
“Don’t,” said Van
Bibber, he could not tell just why. “Don’t.”
“Why not?” asked one of
the girls, looking up at him sharply.
“She was asleep; you’ve wakened her,”
he said, gently.
But he knew that was not the reason.
He stepped into the cab at the stage entrance, and
put the child carefully down in one corner. Then
he looked back over his shoulder to see that there
was no one near enough to hear him, and said to the
driver, “To the Berkeley Flats, on Fifth Avenue.”
He picked the child up gently in his arms as the carriage
started, and sat looking out thoughtfully and anxiously
as they flashed past the lighted shop-windows on Broadway.
He was far from certain of this errand, and nervous
with doubt, but he reassured himself that he was acting
on impulse, and that his impulses were so often good.
The hall-boy at the Berkeley said, yes, Mr. Caruthers
was in, and Van Bibber gave a quick sigh of relief.
He took this as an omen that his impulse was a good
one. The young English servant who opened the
hall door to Mr. Caruthers’s apartment suppressed
his surprise with an effort, and watched Van Bibber
with alarm as he laid the child on the divan in the
hall, and pulled a covert coat from the rack to throw
over her.
“Just say Mr. Van Bibber would
like to see him,” he said, “and you need
not speak of the little girl having come with me.”
She was still sleeping, and Van Bibber
turned down the light in the hall, and stood looking
down at her gravely while the servant went to speak
to his master.
“Will you come this way, please, sir?”
he said.
“You had better stay out here,”
said Van Bibber, “and come and tell me if she
wakes.”
Mr. Caruthers was standing by the
mantel over the empty fireplace, wrapped in a long,
loose dressing-gown which he was tying around him
as Van Bibber entered. He was partly undressed,
and had been just on the point of getting into bed.
Mr. Caruthers was a tall, handsome man, with dark
reddish hair, turning below the temples into gray;
his moustache was quite white, and his eyes and face
showed the signs of either dissipation or of great
trouble, or of both. But even in the formless
dressing-gown he had the look and the confident bearing
of a gentleman, or, at least, of the man of the world.
The room was very rich-looking, and was filled with
the medley of a man’s choice of good paintings
and fine china, and papered with irregular rows of
original drawings and signed etchings. The windows
were open, and the lights were turned very low, so
that Van Bibber could see the many gas lamps and the
dark roofs of Broadway and the Avenue where they crossed
a few blocks off, and the bunches of light on the
Madison Square Garden, and to the lights on the boats
of the East River. From below in the streets
came the rattle of hurrying omnibuses and the rush
of the hansom cabs. If Mr. Caruthers was surprised
at this late visit, he hid it, and came forward to
receive his caller as if his presence were expected.
“Excuse my costume, will you?”
he said. “I turned in rather early to-night,
it was so hot.” He pointed to a decanter
and some soda bottles on the table and a bowl of ice,
and asked, “Will you have some of this?”
And while he opened one of the bottles, he watched
Van Bibber’s face as though he were curious
to have him explain the object of his visit.
“No, I think not, thank you,”
said the younger man. He touched his forehead
with his handkerchief nervously. “Yes, it
is hot,” he said.
Mr. Caruthers filled a glass with
ice and brandy and soda, and walked back to his place
by the mantel, on which he rested his arm, while he
clinked the ice in the glass and looked down into it.
“I was at the first night of
‘The Sultana’ this evening,” said
Van Bibber, slowly and uncertainly.
“Oh, yes,” assented the
elder man, politely, and tasting his drink. “Lester’s
new piece. Was it any good?”
“I don’t know,”
said Van Bibber. “Yes, I think it was.
I didn’t see it from the front. There were
a lot of children in it little ones; they
danced and sang, and made a great hit. One of
them had never been on the stage before. It was
her first appearance.”
He was turning one of the glasses
around between his fingers as he spoke. He stopped,
and poured out some of the soda, and drank it down
in a gulp, and then continued turning the empty glass
between the tips of his fingers.
“It seems to me,” he said,
“that it is a great pity.” He looked
up interrogatively at the other man, but Mr. Caruthers
met his glance without any returning show of interest.
“I say,” repeated Van Bibber “I
say it seems a pity that a child like that should be
allowed to go on in that business. A grown woman
can go into it with her eyes open, or a girl who has
had decent training can too. But it’s different
with a child. She has no choice in the matter;
they don’t ask her permission; and she isn’t
old enough to know what it means; and she gets used
to it and fond of it before she grows to know what
the danger is. And then it’s too late.
It seemed to me that if there was any one who had
a right to stop it, it would be a very good thing
to let that person know about her about
this child, I mean; the one who made the hit before
it was too late. It seems to me a responsibility
I wouldn’t care to take myself. I wouldn’t
care to think that I had the chance to stop it, and
had let the chance go by. You know what the life
is, and what the temptation a woman ”
Van Bibber stopped with a gasp of concern, and added,
hurriedly, “I mean we all know every
man knows.”
Mr. Caruthers was looking at him with
his lips pressed closely together, and his eyebrows
drawn into the shape of the letter V. He leaned forward,
and looked at Van Bibber intently.
“What is all this about?”
he asked. “Did you come here, Mr. Van Bibber,
simply to tell me this? What have you to do with
it? What have I to do with it? Why did you
come?”
“Because of the child.”
“What child?”
“Your child.” said Van Bibber.
Young Van Bibber was quite prepared
for an outbreak of some sort, and mentally braced
himself to receive it. He rapidly assured himself
that this man had every reason to be angry, and that
he, if he meant to accomplish anything, had every
reason to be considerate and patient. So he faced
Mr. Caruthers with shoulders squared, as though it
were a physical shock he had to stand against, and
in consequence he was quite unprepared for what followed.
For Mr. Caruthers raised his face without a trace
of feeling in it, and, with his eyes still fixed on
the glass in his hand, set it carefully down on the
mantel beside him, and girded himself about with the
rope of his robe. When he spoke, it was in a
tone of quiet politeness.
“Mr. Van Bibber,” he began,
“you are a very brave young man. You have
dared to say to me what those who are my best friends what
even my own family would not care to say. They
are afraid it might hurt me, I suppose. They
have some absurd regard for my feelings; they hesitate
to touch upon a subject which in no way concerns them,
and which they know must be very painful to me.
But you have the courage of your convictions; you
have no compunctions about tearing open old wounds;
and you come here, unasked and uninvited, to let me
know what you think of my conduct, to let me understand
that it does not agree with your own ideas of what
I ought to do, and to tell me how I, who am old enough
to be your father, should behave. You have rushed
in where angels fear to tread, Mr. Van Bibber, to
show me the error of my ways. I suppose I ought
to thank you for it; but I have always said that it
is not the wicked people who are to be feared in this
world, or who do the most harm. We know them;
we can prepare for them, and checkmate them.
It is the well-meaning fool who makes all the trouble.
For no one knows him until he discloses himself, and
the mischief is done before he can be stopped.
I think, if you will allow me to say so, that you
have demonstrated my theory pretty thoroughly and have
done about as much needless harm for one evening as
you can possibly wish. And so, if you will excuse
me,” he continued, sternly, and moving from
his place, “I will ask to say good-night, and
will request of you that you grow older and wiser
and much more considerate before you come to see me
again.”
Van Bibber had flushed at Mr. Caruthers’s
first words, and had then grown somewhat pale, and
straightened himself visibly. He did not move
when the elder man had finished, but cleared his throat,
and then spoke with some little difficulty. “It
is very easy to call a man a fool,” he said,
slowly, “but it is much harder to be called a
fool and not to throw the other man out of the window.
But that, you see, would not do any good, and I have
something to say to you first. I am quite clear
in my own mind as to my position, and I am not going
to allow anything you have said or can say to annoy
me much until I am through. There will be time
enough to resent it then. I am quite well aware
that I did an unconventional thing in coming here a
bold thing or a foolish thing, as you choose but
the situation is pretty bad, and I did as I would
have wished to be done by if I had had a child going
to the devil and didn’t know it. I should
have been glad to learn of it even from a stranger.
However,” he said, smiling grimly, and pulling
his cape about him, “there are other kindly disposed
people in the world besides fathers. There is
an aunt, perhaps, or an uncle or two; and sometimes,
even to-day, there is the chance Samaritan.”
Van Bibber picked up his high hat
from the table, looked into it critically, and settled
it on his head. “Good-night,” he said,
and walked slowly towards the door. He had his
hand on the knob, when Mr. Caruthers raised his head.
“Wait just one minute, please,
Mr. Van Bibber?” asked Mr. Caruthers.
Van Bibber stopped with a prompt obedience
which would have led one to conclude that be might
have put on his hat only to precipitate matters.
“Before you go,” said
Mr. Caruthers, grudgingly, “I want to say I
want you to understand my position.”
“Oh, that’s all right,”
said Van Bibber, lightly, opening the door.
“No, it is not all right.
One moment, please. I do not intend that you
shall go away from here with the idea that you have
tried to do me a service, and that I have been unable
to appreciate it, and that you are a much-abused and
much-misunderstood young man. Since you have
done me the honor to make my affairs your business,
I would prefer that you should understand them fully.
I do not care to have you discuss my conduct at clubs
and afternoon teas with young women until you ”
Van Bibber drew in his breath sharply,
with a peculiar whistling sound, and opened and shut
his hands. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that
if I were you,” he said, simply.
“I beg your pardon,” the
older man said, quickly. “That was a mistake.
I was wrong. I beg your pardon. But you have
tried me very sorely. You have intruded upon
a private trouble that you ought to know must be very
painful to me. But I believe you meant well.
I know you to be a gentleman, and I am willing to
think you acted on impulse, and that you will see
to-morrow what a mistake you have made. It is
not a thing I talk about; I do not speak of it to
my friends, and they are far too considerate to speak
of it to me. But you have put me on the defensive.
You have made me out more or less of a brute, and I
don’t intend to be so far misunderstood.
There are two sides to every story, and there is something
to be said about this, even for me.”
He walked back to his place beside
the mantel, and put his shoulders against it, and
faced Van Bibber, with his fingers twisted in the cord
around his waist.
“When I married,” said
Mr. Caruthers, “I did so against the wishes of
my people and the advice of all my friends. You
know all about that. God help us! who doesn’t?”
he added, bitterly. “It was very rich, rare
reading for you and for every one else who saw the
daily papers, and we gave them all they wanted of
it. I took her out of that life and married her
because I believed she was as good a woman as any of
those who had never had to work for their living,
and I was bound that my friends and your friends should
recognize her and respect her as my wife had a right
to be respected; and I took her abroad that I might
give all you sensitive, fine people a chance to get
used to the idea of being polite to a woman who had
once been a burlesque actress. It began over
there in Paris. What I went through then no one
knows; but when I came back and I would
never have come back if she had not made me it
was my friends I had to consider, and not her.
It was in the blood; it was in the life she had led,
and in the life men like you and me had taught her
to live. And it had to come out.”
The muscles of Mr. Caruthers’s
face were moving, and beyond his control; but Van
Bibber did not see this, for he was looking intently
out of the window, over the roofs of the city.
“She had every chance when she
married me that a woman ever had,” continued
the older man. “It only depended on herself.
I didn’t try to make a housewife of her or a
drudge. She had all the healthy excitement and
all the money she wanted, and she had a home here ready
for her whenever she was tired of travelling about
and wished to settle down. And I was and
a husband that loved her as she had everything.
Everything that a man’s whole thought and love
and money could bring to her. And you know what
she did.”
He looked at Van Bibber, but Van Bibber’s
eyes were still turned towards the open window and
the night.
“And after the divorce and
she was free to go where she pleased, and to live
as she pleased and with whom she pleased, without bringing
disgrace on a husband who honestly loved her I
swore to my God that I would never see her nor her
child again. And I never saw her again, not even
when she died. I loved the mother, and she deceived
me and disgraced me and broke my heart, and I only
wish she had killed me; and I was beginning to love
her child, and I vowed she should not live to trick
me too. I had suffered as no man I know had suffered;
in a way a boy like you cannot understand, and that
no one can understand who has not gone to hell and
been forced to live after it. And was I to go
through that again? Was I to love and care for
and worship this child, and have her grow up with
all her mother’s vanity and animal nature, and
have her turn on me some day and show me that what
is bred in the bone must tell, and that I was a fool
again a pitiful fond fool? I could
not trust her. I can never trust any woman or
child again, and least of all that woman’s child.
She is as dead to me as though she were buried with
her mother, and it is nothing to me what she is or
what her life is. I know in time what it will
be. She has begun earlier than I had supposed,
that is all; but she is nothing to me.”
The man stopped and turned his back to Van Bibber,
and hid his head in his hands, with his elbows on
the mantel-piece. “I care too much,”
he said. “I cannot let it mean anything
to me; when I do care, it means so much more to me
than to other men. They may pretend to laugh
and to forget and to outgrow it, but it is not so with
me. It means too much.” He took a
quick stride towards one of the arm-chairs, and threw
himself into it. “Why, man,” he cried,
“I loved that child’s mother to the day
of her death. I loved that woman then, and, God
help me! I love that woman still.”
He covered his face with his hands,
and sat leaning forward and breathing heavily as he
rocked himself to and fro. Van Bibber still stood
looking gravely out at the lights that picketed the
black surface of the city. He was to all appearances
as unmoved by the outburst of feeling into which the
older man had been surprised as though it had been
something in a play. There was an unbroken silence
for a moment, and then it was Van Bibber who was the
first to speak.
“I came here, as you say, on
impulse,” he said; “but I am glad I came,
for I have your decisive answer now about the little
girl. I have been thinking,” he continued,
slowly, “since you have been speaking, and before,
when I first saw her dancing in front of the footlights,
when I did not know who she was, that I could give
up a horse or two, if necessary, and support this
child instead. Children are worth more than horses,
and a man who saves a soul, as it says” he
flushed slightly, and looked up with a hesitating,
deprecatory smile “somewhere, wipes
out a multitude of sins. And it may be I’d
like to try and get rid of some of mine. I know
just where to send her; I know the very place.
It’s down in Evergreen Bay, on Long Island.
They are tenants of mine there, and very nice farm
sort of people, who will be very good to her.
They wouldn’t know anything about her, and she’d
forget what little she knows of this present life
very soon, and grow up with the other children to be
one of them; and then, when she gets older and becomes
a young lady, she could go to some school but
that’s a bit too far ahead to plan for the present;
but that’s what I am going to do, though,”
said the young man, confidently, and as though speaking
to himself. “That theatrical boarding-house
person could be bought off easily enough,” he
went on, quickly, “and Lester won’t mind
letting her go if I ask it, and and that’s
what I’ll do. As you say, it’s a good
deal of an experiment, but I think I’ll run
the risk.”
He walked quickly to the door and
disappeared in the hall, and then came back, kicking
the door open as he returned, and holding the child
in his arms.
“This is she,” he said,
quietly. He did not look at or notice the father,
but stood, with the child asleep in the bend of his
left arm, gazing down at her. “This is
she,” he repeated; “this is your child.”
There was something cold and satisfied
in Van Bibber’s tone and manner, as though he
were congratulating himself upon the engaging of a
new groom; something that placed the father entirely
outside of it. He might have been a disinterested
looker-on.
“She will need to be fed a bit,”
Van Bibber ran on, cheerfully. “They did
not treat her very well, I fancy. She is thin
and peaked and tired-looking.” He drew
up the loose sleeve of her jacket, and showed the
bare forearm to the light. He put his thumb and
little finger about it, and closed them on it gently.
“It is very thin,” he said. “And
under her eyes, if it were not for the paint,”
he went on, mercilessly, “you could see how
deep the lines are. This red spot on her cheek,”
he said, gravely, “is where Mary Vane kissed
her to-night, and this is where Alma Stantley kissed
her, and that Lee girl. You have heard of them,
perhaps. They will never kiss her again.
She is going to grow up a sweet, fine, beautiful woman are
you not?” he said, gently drawing the child
higher up on his shoulder, until her face touched
his, and still keeping his eyes from the face of the
older man. “She does not look like her mother,”
he said; “she has her father’s auburn
hair and straight nose and finer-cut lips and chin.
She looks very much like her father. It seems
a pity,” he added, abruptly. “She
will grow up,” he went on, “without knowing
him, or who he is or was, if he should
die. She will never speak with him, or see him,
or take his hand. She may pass him some day on
the street and will not know him, and he will not
know her, but she will grow to be very fond and to
be very grateful to the simple, kind-hearted old people
who will have cared for her when she was a little girl.”
The child in his arms stirred, shivered
slightly, and awoke. The two men watched her
breathlessly, with silent intentness. She raised
her head and stared around the unfamiliar room doubtfully,
then turned to where her father stood, looking at
him a moment, and passed him by; and then, looking
up into Van Bibber’s face, recognized him, and
gave a gentle, sleepy smile, and, with a sigh of content
and confidence, drew her arm up closer around his
neck, and let her head fall back upon his breast.
The father sprang to his feet with
a quick, jealous gasp of pain. “Give her
to me!” he said, fiercely, under his breath,
snatching her out of Van Bibber’s arms.
“She is mine; give her to me!”
Van Bibber closed the door gently
behind him, and went jumping down the winding stairs
of the Berkeley three steps at a time.
And an hour later, when the English
servant came to his master’s door, he found
him still awake and sitting in the dark by the open
window, holding something in his arms and looking
out over the sleeping city.
“James,” he said, “you
can make up a place for me here on the lounge.
Miss Caruthers, my daughter, will sleep in my room
to-night.”