In the Bishop's Carriage Part 18

I tell you, Mag Monahan, there's one thing that's stronger than wine to a woman--it's being beautiful. Oh! And I was beautiful. I knew it before I got that quick hush, with the full applause after it. And because I was beautiful, I got saucy, and then calm, and then I caught Fred Obermuller's voice--he had taken the book from the prompter and stood there himself--and after that it was easy sailing.

He was there yet when the act was over, and I trailed out, followed by my Lord. He let the prompt-book fall from his hands and reached them both out to me.

I flirted my jeweled fan at him and swept him a courtesy.

Cool? No, I wasn't. Not a bit of it. He was daffy with the sight of me in all that glory, and I knew it.

"Nance," he whispered, "you wonderful girl, if I didn't know about that little thief up at the Bronsonia I'd--I'd marry you alive, just for the fun of piling pretty things on you."

"The deuce you would!" I sailed past him, with Topham and my Lord in my wake.

They didn't leave me till they'd stripped me clean. I felt like a Christmas tree the day after. But, somehow, I didn't care.

VIII.

Is that you, Mag? Well, it's about time you came home to look after me. Fine chaperon you make, Miss Monahan! Why, didn't I tell you the very day we took this flat what a chaperon was, and that you'd have to be mine? Imagine Nancy Olden without a chaperon--Shocking!

No, 'tisn't late. Sit down, Maggie, there, and let me get the stool and talk to you. Think of us two--Cruelty girls, both of us--two mangy kittens deserted by the old cats in a city's alleys, and left mewing with cold and hunger and dirt, out in the wet--think of us two in our own flat, Mag!

I say, it makes me proud of us! There are times when I look at every stick of furniture we own, and I try to pretend to it all that I'm used to a decent roof over my head, and a dining-room, kitchen, parlor, bedroom and bath. Oh, and I forgot the telephone the other tenant left here till its lease is up. But at other times I stand here in the middle of it and cry out to it, in my heart:

"Look at me, Nancy Olden, a householder, a rent-payer, the head of the family, even if it's only a family of two and the other one Mag! Look at me, with my name in the directory, a-paying milk bills and meat bills and bread bills! Look at me with a place of my own, where n.o.body's right's greater than my own; where no one has a right but me and Mag; a place where--where there's nothing to hide from the police!"

There's the rub, Mag, as Hamlet says--(I went to see it the other night, so that I could take off the Ophelia--she used to be a good mimic herself, before she tried to be a leading lady.) It spoils you, this sense of safeness that goes with the honesty graft. You lose the quickness of the hunter and the nerve of the hunted. And--worse--you lose your taste for the old risky life. You grow proud and fat, and you love every stick in the dear, quiet little place that's your home--your own home. You love it so that you'd be ashamed to sneak round where it could see you--you who'd always walked upright before it with the step of the mistress; with nothing in the world to be ashamed of; nothing to prevent your staring each honest dish-pan in the face!

And, Mag, you try--if you're me--to fit Tom Dorgan in here--Tom Dorgan in stripes and savage sulks still--all these months--kept away from the world, even the world behind bars! Maggie, don't you wish Tom was a ventriloquist or--or an acrobat or--but this isn't what I had to tell you.

Do you know what a society entertainer is, Miss Monahan? No? Well, look at me. Yes, I'm one. Miss Nance Olden, whose services are worth fifty dollars a night--at least, they were one night.

Ginger brought me the note that made me a society entertainer. It was from a Mrs. Paul B. Gates, who had been "charmed by your clever impersonations, Miss Olden, and write to know if you have the leisure to entertain some friends at my house on Thursday of this week."

Had I the leisure--well, rather! I showed the note to Gray, just to make her jealous. (Oh, yes, she goes on all right in the act with Lord Harold every night. Catch her letting me wear those things of hers twice!) Well, she just turned up her nose.

"Of course, you won't accept?" she said.

"Of course, I will."

"Oh! I only thought you'd feel as I should about appearing before a lot of sn.o.bs, who'll treat you like a servant and--"

"Who'll do nothing of the sort and who'll pay you well for it," put in Obermuller. He had come up and was reading the note I had handed to him. "You just say yes, Nance," he went on, after Gray had bounced of to her dressing-room. "It isn't such a bad graft and--and this is just between us two, mind--that little beggar, Tausig, has begun his tricks since you turned his offer down. They can make things hot for me, and if they do, it won't be so bad for you to go in for this sort of thing--unless you go over to the Trust--"

I shook my head.

"Well, this thing will be an ad for you, besides,--if the papers can be got to notice it. They're coy with their notices, confound them, since Tausig let them know that big Trust ads don't appear in the same papers that boom anti-Trust shows!"

"How long are you going to stand it, Mr. O?"

"Just as long as I can't help myself; not a minute longer."

"There ought to be a way--some way--"

"Yes, there ought, but there isn't. They've got things down to a fine point, and the fellow they don't fear has got to fear them.... I'll put your number early to-night, so that you can get off by nine. Good luck, Nance."

At nine, then, behold Nancy Olden in her white muslin dress, long-sleeved and high-necked, and just to her shoe-tops, with a big white muslin sash around her waist. Oh, she's no baby, is Nance, but she looks like one in this rig with her short hair--or rather, like a school-girl; which makes the stunts she does in mimicking the corkers of the profession all the more surprising.

"We're just a little party," said Mrs. Paul Gates, coming into the bedroom where I was taking of my wraps. "And I'm so glad you could come, for my princ.i.p.al guest, Mr. Latimer, is an invalid, who used to love the theaters, but hasn't been to one since his attack many years ago. I count on your giving him, in a way, a condensed history in action of what is going on on the stage."

I told her I would. But I didn't just know what I was saying. Think of Latimer there, Maggie, and think of our last meeting! It made me tremble. Not that I fancied for a moment he'd betray me. The man that helps you twice don't hurt you the third time. No, it wasn't that; it was only that I longed to do well--well before him, so that--

And then I found myself in an alcove off the parlors, separated from them by heavy curtains. It was such a pretty little red bower. Right behind me was the red of the Turkish drapery of a cozy corner, and just as I took my place under the great chandelier, the servants pulled the curtains apart and the lights went out in the parlors.

In that minute I got it, Mag--yes, stage fright. Got it bad. I suppose it was coming to me, but Lordy! I hadn't ever known before what it was. I could see the black of the men's clothes in the long parlors in front of me, and the white of the women's necks and arms. There were soft ends of talk trailing after the first silence, and everything was so strange that I seemed to hear two men's voices which sounded familiar--Latimer's silken voice, and another, a heavy, coa.r.s.e ba.s.s, that was the last to be quieted.

I fancied that when that last voice should stop I could begin, but all at once my mind seemed to turn a somersault, and, instead of looking out upon them, I seemed to be looking in on myself--to see a white-faced little girl in a white dress, standing alone under a blaze of light in a glare of red, gazing fearfully at this queer, new audience.

Fail? Me? Not Nancy, Maggie. I just took me by the shoulders.

"Nancy Olden, you little thief!" I cried to me inside of me. "How dare you! I'd rather you'd steal the silver on this woman's dressing-table than cheat her out of what she expects and what's coming to her."

Nance really didn't dare. So she began.

The first one was bad. I gave 'em Duse's Francesca. You've never heard the wailing music in that woman's voice when she says:

"There is no escape, Smaragdi.

You have said it; The shadow is a gla.s.s to me, and G.o.d Lets me be lost."

I gave them Duse just to show them how swell I was myself; which shows what a ninny I was. The thing the world loves is the opposite of what it is. The pat-pat-pat of their gloves came in to me when I got through. They were too polite to hiss. But it wasn't necessary. I was hissing myself. Inside of me there was a long, nasty hiss-ss-ss!

I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear to be a failure with Latimer listening, though out there in that queer half-light I couldn't see him at all, but could only make out the couch where I knew he must be lying.

I just jumped into something else to retrieve myself. I can do Carter's Du Barry to the Queen's taste, Maggie. That rotten voice of hers, like Mother Douty's, but stronger and surer; that rocky old face pretending to look young and beautiful inside that talented red hair of hers; that whining "Denny! Denny!" she squawks out every other minute.

Oh, I can do Du Barry all right!

They thought I could, too, those black and white shadows out there on the other side of the velvet curtains. But I cared less for what they thought than for the fact that I had drowned that sputtering hiss-ss-ss inside of me, and that Latimer was among them.

I gave them Warfield, then; I was always good at taking off the sheenies in the alley behind the Cruelty--remember? I gave them that little pinch-nosed Maude Adams, and dry, corking little Mrs. Fiske, and Henry Miller when he smooths down his white breeches lovingly and sings Sally in our Alley, and strutting old Mansfield, and--

Say, isn't it funny, Mag, that I've seen 'em all and know all they can do? They've been my college education, that crowd. Not a bad one, either, when you come to think of what I wanted from it.

They pulled the curtains down at the end and I went back to the bedroom. I had my hat and jacket on when Mrs. Gates and some of the younger ladies came to see me there, but I caught no glimpse of Latimer. You'd think--wouldn't you--that he'd have made an opportunity to say just one nice word to me in that easy, soft voice of his? I tried to believe that perhaps he hadn't really seen me, lying down, as he must have been, or that he hadn't recognized me, but I knew that I couldn't make myself believe that; and the lack of just that word from him spoiled all my satisfaction with myself, and I walked out with Mrs.

Gates through the hall and past the dining-room feeling as hurt as though I'd deserved that a man like Latimer should notice me.

The dining-room was all lighted, but empty--the colored, shaded candlesticks glowing down on the cut gla.s.s and silver, on delicate china and flowers. The ladies and gentlemen hadn't come out to supper yet; at least, only one was there. He was standing with his back to me, before the sideboard, pouring out a gla.s.s of something from a decanter. He turned at the rustle of my starched skirt, and, as I pa.s.sed the door, he saw me. I saw him, too, and hurried away.

Yes, I knew him. Just you wait.