Elsie Marley, Honey Part 19

"Then I don't believe it's wrong for you--only for the other boy," she averred.

They turned. Nothing more was said until they reached the parsonage.

"Much obliged, Miss Moss," the boy said quietly. "And that's good to remember--not getting anything out of it for yourself. Good night."

She heard him whistling cheerily as he went on his way. But her own heart was heavy. Not to get anything out of it for oneself! Oh, what would d.i.c.k Clinton think, what would every one think, to know that she wasn't Elsie Moss at all! He had been sadly troubled because he had played the part of another one night--a silent part that required no spoken words. What would he think to learn that she was an interloper at the parsonage? It was in part, it is true, for the sake of another.

But it was also in part--in large part, now--for her own sake.

CHAPTER XXVIII

One evening in the early spring, during the interval between the films in a motion-picture theatre on lower Broadway, a thrill of excitement went through the audience, which was of the sort that desires to live on thrills.

Perhaps to-night, however, there was reasonable excuse for genuine antic.i.p.ation. For the song-dance specialty that was about to take place was of a different order from anything that had been known in that theatre heretofore. There was real grace and beauty in the dancing, genuine melody in the voice of the singer, and something sweet and wholesome about the whole performance.

The act was ent.i.tled "And Do You Ken Elsie Marley, Honey?" And one whispered to another that the best of it was, that that was her real name--honestly it was--at least it had always been her stage name, so that probably the song had been written especially for her--and she that young--and it wasn't real ragtime either. And her dimples were real too; possibly they were enlarged and deepened by the make-up, but she had them off the stage.

Heavy applause greeted the entrance of the actress.

She was only a slip of a girl--a mere child she looked, partly, they said, because of her hair--the "Castle bob," you know. She tripped lightly before the footlights, smiled charmingly as she put the question of the first line, and sang the song through with dancing between the stanzas and dramatic rendering of the lines. She smiled and sparkled and dimpled; but though she was so pretty and piquant and coquettish, so graceful and vivacious, so completely the actress, there was a look of youth and innocence about her that pleased the blase audience, and touched one alien member of it to tears.

Once and again was Elsie Marley recalled to repeat the act. The young actress had other things prepared, but though they might be well received, they were followed by clamor for "Elsie Marley, Honey," until only the forcible resumption of the pictures availed to quiet it.

And on Sat.u.r.day night at the end of the second week, even that did not avail. The last appearance of that bill having been announced, the audience could not let Elsie Marley go. Finally, the manager came out and announced that Miss Marley had been engaged for another week. And again, while there was intense satisfaction elsewhere, to one person the statement was like a blow.

In truth, on the day when Elsie had announced the opportunity that had been offered her of appearing in a "specialty" on the stage of a second-cla.s.s cinema theatre, Miss Pritchard had been aghast. The chance had come through the school in the person of Mr. Coates, who had first seen possibilities in the song the girl had known since childhood, and who had developed it to its limit, and trained her in a more artificial though still charming rendering, the music having been adapted more nearly to music-hall ragtime. When he had announced to her what he had known from the first--that she was to go upon the stage with it--Elsie had been so elated that Miss Pritchard had been powerless before her. She couldn't be a wet blanket; neither, however, could she force herself to express any gratification.

And when first she had seen this last member of her family before the footlights of the cheap little theatre, with the bad air, the mixed audience, and the poor pictures, she felt she couldn't endure it. The image of the stately, aristocratic Aunt Ellen Pritchard rose before her vision, overwhelmingly severe and reproachful. It would actually have killed her to witness once what Julia Pritchard had to witness every night for two weeks--or so she thought at first.

On this Sat.u.r.day night when the engagement was extended, they were later than usual in getting to their carriage. Elsie was wrapped snugly in the rose-colored opera-cloak. Her eyes were very bright, her cheeks flushed. She had not really required any make-up, but they had insisted upon deepening the color of her lips and darkening the lower eye-lids. Miss Pritchard, too depressed to force any semblance of cheerfulness, saw her dimples appear and disappear in happy reverie.

She sighed. Through it all, the child was absolutely enchanting to her.

Elsie, catching the sigh, snuggled up to her.

"Oh, Cousin Julia, I'm so happy, so happy I'm afraid I'll just burst like a circus balloon. Oh, dear darling, you're so good to me. And I suppose you're sick to death of the same old thing, and dread the thought of another week of it."

As a matter of fact, Miss Pritchard was as captivated by the song specialty as any of the audience. She confessed that it wore well.

"But, oh, Elsie," she couldn't forbear adding, "I do wish you weren't going to have another week in that cheap place."

"Oh, but Cousin Julia, one can't begin at the top," remonstrated the girl. "Why, I'm the luckiest guy ever was. How much do you suppose I'm going to get for this next week?"

Miss Pritchard had no heart for guessing. The sum the girl mentioned was indeed surprising, but it only seemed to remove her further from her and from the family they both represented.

"I should be only too glad to do it for the experience alone," Elsie rattled on, "and of course what I get is only what is over and above what they pay the school. And I shall get other chances, Mr. Coates says, and--oh, Cousin Julia, I don't dare tell you--you don't"--there was a catch in her voice--"you don't sympathize. You were so different! And now you're just like--well, almost as bad as the others."

Miss Pritchard drew the little rose-colored figure close.

"Yes, I do sympathize, dear little cousin," she said, "only----"

She could not go on. And they went the rest of the way in silence. It was the first time that anything, recognized by both of them, had come between them. As the excitement that had buoyed her up for the evening began to die away, Elsie's heart was like a stone. Later it would ache. She wondered rather drearily how it would be after she was in bed. Even now she recognized something that would have been absurd if it weren't so terribly serious. To think of her demanding sympathy from Cousin Julia--of appearing almost aggrieved not to receive it--she who should be cowering beneath her scorn! How was it that she should so forget, should feel and act as if everything were true--and square?

It was being on the stage, she supposed, a real actress at last. At last! Why, it was almost _at first_. Who had ever been so fortunate as she! To be on the stage in New York well within a year of her first entering the city! And only to think that this might have been the last night of her engagement! How terrible that seemed now! How would she ever live without the evening to look forward to? How blissful to have another week before her--six more appearances before that vast, applauding throng! How happily would she go to sleep tonight to the music of the lullaby of the thought: "Another week at the Merry Nickel, another week at the Merry Nickel! Bliss! Bliss! Bliss!"

And yet it wasn't at all a blissful face which Miss Pritchard bore in memory to her own room that night after she had kissed Elsie, put out the light, and opened the windows. Since the girl had been at the theatre, Miss Pritchard had dropped into the habit of going in to her the last thing every night and tucking her in as if she had been a child. For somehow she had seemed, since striking out into professional life, only the more a child, more innocent, more appealingly youthful, more than ever to be sheltered and guarded. She had tried her wings, it is true; she believed she had proved them (and perchance she had!); but more than ever was she a precious and tender nestling.

As she sat by her window in the darkness, Miss Pritchard shook her head sadly. She said to herself this couldn't go on--this state of things couldn't continue. Despite Elsie's elation over the fact that she was booked for another week at the theatre, she looked more mournful and wistful and worn than ever. Some strain was wearing the child out. It wasn't the work, nor yet the excitement, for she lived on them, and not altogether unhealthily. There was no other possible explanation: it was nothing less than the strain of combating her own disapproval, tacit or expressed. Elsie was too warm-hearted to enjoy her legitimate happiness alone, too sensitive not to suffer from want of sympathy.

The change in the girl had begun to be apparent directly after Christmas. Elsie hadn't been herself since that time, which proved beyond peradventure that Miss Pritchard's suspicion was correct. The joyous, sparkling little creature whom she had found in her room on the day after Christmas, bubbling over with excitement, eager to share her good news, had become thin and wan. Her charmingly brilliant little face was not only peaked, but in repose was generally wistful or plaintive. Many a time one could have looked on it without suspecting the existence of dimples. Only in the evening did she resemble her real self. From dinner until the moment she lay in her bed, she was the Elsie Marley she had been (with negligible interruptions) since the night when she had walked straight into Miss Pritchard's heart before she had known who she was. At other times she was a pale shadow, the little ghost of the girl she had been or should be.

Miss Pritchard sighed deeply. If it were for want of sympathy--approving sympathy--the child drooped and pined, must she not have it, w.i.l.l.y-nilly? But again she sighed, and yet more deeply.

Whatever her effort, was such a thing possible?

As for Elsie herself, the lullaby didn't prove a lullaby at all, and, as usual these days, the girl cried herself to sleep. Every night, of late, the reaction came. Every morning she awoke with a sense of a heavy burden weighing her down. All day her heart ached, though dully and vaguely for the most part; for if the pain threatened to become acute, she could still drug it with antic.i.p.ation of the excitement of the evening.

In the weeks that had pa.s.sed, Elsie hadn't once faced her conscience.

She had never squarely confronted the situation which was now so much further complicated. When the unexpected and thrilling opportunity had come to her the day after Christmas--the very day that was to consummate her renunciation--the girl had been completely carried away by it. She hadn't repudiated the decision she had come to so painfully, she had simply disregarded it--ignored it utterly as if there had been no such thing. And she had gone on ignoring it. In the very first of it, the excitement of working directly for the stage had rendered her oblivious of everything else. Then when certain faint murmurings of conscience began to be audible, came the actual prospect of the Merry Nickel to stifle them, and then there was the stage itself and the actual footlights. Nevertheless, avoid the issue as she would, more and more had her daylight hours come to be haunted with misgivings, and now her heart was never light except in the evenings.

And combat any such direct thought as she might, she felt dimly that in giving over her purpose to square her conduct with the right, she had doubled and trebled the original wrong. Unvowing a vow must be equivalent to signing a covenant with the powers of darkness. Now and again lines from the poem Cousin Julia had repeated to her so impressively that she could never forget it, came to her suddenly in uncanny fas.h.i.+on. At such times, if questioned, Elsie would have acknowledged that her Palladium had indeed fallen, with all the awful consequences.

Lines from another and more familiar poem came to the girl the next day as she sat in the afternoon with Miss Pritchard in their sitting-room, the snow falling outside as if it were December. As she gazed at the steadily falling, restful, soothing curtain of flakes which deadened all sound and veiled all save its own beauty, unconsciously she was repeating verses of a poem she had learned as a child. But as she came to the words, "I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn," she recollected herself. And somehow her mind turned instinctively to Miss Pritchard's lover. It was because he, too, was dead, she supposed, and this snow was rounding above his grave. But before she made the natural application or drew the familiar comparison between his failure and her own, Elsie clapped the lid down on her thoughts with a thud. Turning resolutely to Miss Pritchard, she asked her, with strange intonation, if she thought the snow would continue all night.

"I rather hope so," Miss Pritchard returned in a quiet voice that was like a part of the silent storm, "for it's so late that we can't expect another snowfall, and it seems really a privilege to have it now--like plucking violets at Thanksgiving."

For a little, her gaze, too, lost itself outside. Then she turned and looked at Elsie with a kindness in which there was something wistful.

"I know what you have been thinking, dear," she said. "You're thinking that I'm not consistent nor fair--and you're right. I am neither. I agree with you absolutely. Having in the first place consented to your studying for the stage, I should have looked ahead and faced just this.

As you say, one can't begin at the tip-top--nor yet at the top. One must make use of humble stepping-stones."

But it seemed that the struggle she had been through to bring herself to this att.i.tude had been in vain. On a sudden she lost all that she had gained. Her heart sank as Elsie's face brightened eagerly--became transformed, indeed.

"The trouble is," she went on sadly, "that the stepping-stones--oh, Elsie, I'm so afraid the stepping-stones will only lead on and on and on--never higher. They'll be and remain on a dead level, and you will step from one to another, one to another, year after year, over the same dreary waste. I hate awfully to say all this, dear, but when those people refuse to allow you to do anything but the Elsie-Honey business over and over, it comes to me what a fate it would be to be doomed forever to that one stunt."

"Oh, Cousin Julia!" Elsie cried deprecatingly.

"Yes, dear, that's what I am exactly, an old killjoy; but truly I cannot help it, though I have tried. I have struggled hard against my prejudice. Elsie, last night you stopped yourself as you were about to tell me something, but I fear I can guess what it was like. Some one suggested your going on the road, as they say, with that one thing as your repertoire--making a tour of the cheap moving-picture houses of a certain section?"

Elsie grew very pale; her lips trembled. One interested wholly in her dramatic career, seeing her at that moment, might have concluded that the girl had it in her to develop a capacity for tragedy as well as comedy.

"Cousin Julia," she said with tremulous dignity, "I don't want you to come with me this week. I can go back and forth in a carriage by myself. I've got to go through it, for I promised and they will have made arrangements, but--please don't come with me any more."

She gazed at Miss Pritchard through reproachful tears, but when she saw tears streaming down Miss Pritchard's plain, staunch face, she ran to her arms.

"My dear, it's only because I love you so, because you are the very apple of my eye, that I talk so," the latter declared, and the warm words went straight to the girl's sore heart. "I know I'm not just, but dear, we won't let anything come between us--ever. I'll do my best to see your side of it, and you must be patient with me. It's hard, I know, for youth to bear with age, for inexperience to hear the ugly words of experience; but now we'll just go through the week together and await what comes."

What came demanded further patience on her part and increased Elsie's infatuation. Before the end of the week the young actress had an offer from a rival establishment which would take her to the edge of summer at a salary that fairly made her gasp. The second theatre was perhaps a shade better, but not sufficiently so to reconcile Miss Pritchard to it. But she held her peace. Whereupon the first manager increased the sum offered by his rival, and, Miss Pritchard still tolerant, Elsie agreed to remain there until June.