Poor Relations Part 33

"I've broken in upon your inspiration," boomed Miss Bond in tones that she usually reserved for her most intensely tragic moments.

In vain did the author a.s.severate that he was delighted to see her; she rushed away without another word; but that evening she wrote him an ecstatic letter from her dressing-room about what it had meant to her and what it always would mean to her to think of his working like that for her.

"But we mustn't deride Janet Bond," said the author to his secretary, who was looking contemptuously at the actress's heavy caligraphy. "We must remember that she will create Joan of Arc."

"Yes, it's a pity, isn't it?" Miss Hamilton commented, dryly.

"Oh, but won't you allow that she's a great actress?"

"I will indeed," she murmured with an emphatic nod.

Carried along upon his flood of correspondence John nevertheless managed to steer clear of his relations, and in his present frame of mind he was inclined to attribute his successful course like everything else that was prospering just now to the advent of Miss Hamilton. However, it was too much to expect that with his newly discovered talent he should resist dictating at any rate one epistolary sermon to his youngest brother, of whose arrival at Ambles he had been sharply notified by Hilda. This weighty address took up nearly a whole morning, and when it was finished John was disconcerted by Miss Hamilton's saying:

"You don't really want me to type all this out?"

"Why not?"

"Oh, I don't know. But it seems to me that whatever he's done this won't make him repent. You don't mind my criticizing you?"

"I asked you to," he reminded her.

"Well, it seems to me a little false--a little, if I may say so, complacently wrathful. It's the sort of thing I seem to remember reading and laughing at in old-fashioned books. Of course, I'll type it out at once if you insist, but it's already after twelve o'clock, and we have to go over the material for the third act. I can't somehow fit in what you've just been dictating with what you were telling me yesterday about the scene between Gilles de Rais and Joan. I'm so afraid that you'll make Joan preach, and of course she mustn't preach, must she?"

"All right," conceded John, trying not to appear mortified. "If you think it isn't worth sending, I won't send it."

He fancied that she would be moved by his sensitiveness to her judgment; but, without a tremor, she tore the pages out of her shorthand book and threw them into the waste-paper basket. John stared at the ruthless young woman in dismay.

"Didn't you mean me to take you at your word?" she asked, severely.

He was not altogether sure that he had, but he lacked the courage to tell her so and checked an impulse to rescue his stillborn sermon from the grave.

"Though I don't quite like the idea of leaving my brother at Ambles with nothing to occupy his energies," John went on, meditatively, "I'm doubtful of the prudence of exposing him to the temptations of idleness."

"If you want to give him something to do, why don't you intrust him with getting ready the house for your Christmas party? You are always worrying about its emptiness."

"But isn't that putting in his way temptations of a more positive kind?"

he suggested.

"Not if you set a limit to your expenditure. Can you trust his taste? He ought to be an adept at furnishings."

"Oh, I think he'd do the actual furnishing very well. But won't it seem as if I am overlooking his abominable behavior too easily?"

With a great effort John kept his eyes averted from the waste-paper basket.

"You must either do that or refuse to have anything more to do with him," Miss Hamilton declared. "You can't expect him to be the mirror of your moral superiority for the rest of his life."

"You seem to take quite an interest in him," said John, a little resentfully.

Miss Hamilton shrugged her shoulders.

"All right," he added, hurriedly. "I'll authorize him to prepare the house for Christmas. He must fight his own battles with my sister, Hilda. At any rate, it will annoy her."

Miss Hamilton shook her head in mock reproof.

"Act Three. Scene One," the dramatist announced in the voice of a mystic who has at last shaken himself free from earthly clogs and is about to achieve levitation. It was consoling to perceive that his secretary's expression changed in accord with his own, and John decided that she really was a most attractive young woman and not so unsympathetic as he had been upon the verge of thinking. Moreover, she was right. The important thing at present, the only thing, in fact, was the progress of the play, and it was for this very purpose that he had secured her collaboration--well, perhaps collaboration was too strong a word--but, indeed, so completely had she identified herself with his work that really he could almost call it collaboration. He ought not to tax his invention at this critical point with such a minor problem as the preparation of Ambles for a family reunion. Relations must go to the deuce in their own way, at any rate until the rough draft of the third act was finished, which, under present favorable conditions, might easily happen before Christmas. His secretary was always careful not to worry him with her own domestic bothers, though he knew by the way she had once or twice referred to her mother that she was having her own hard fight at home. He had once proposed calling upon the old lady; but Doris had quickly squashed the suggestion. John liked to think about Mrs. Hamilton, because through some obscure process of logic it gave him an excuse to think about her daughter as Doris. In other connections he thought of her formally as Miss Hamilton, and often told himself how lucky it was that so charming and accomplished a young woman should be so obviously indifferent to--well, not exactly to himself, but surely he might allege to anything except himself as a romantic playwright.

Meanwhile, the play itself marched on with apparent smoothness, until one morning John dictated the following letter to his star:

MY DEAR MISS BOND,--Much against my will, I have come to the conclusion that without a human love interest a play about Joan of Arc is impossible. You will be surprised by my abrupt change of front, and you will smile to yourself when you remember how earnestly I argued against your suggestion that I might ultimately be compelled to introduce a human love interest. The fact of the matter is that now I have arrived at the third act I find patriotism too abstract an emotion for the stage. As you know, my idea was to make Joan so much positively enamoured of her country that the ordinary love interest would be superseded. I shall continue to keep Joan herself heart free; but I do think that it would be effective to have at any rate two people in love with her. My notion is to introduce a devoted young peasant who will follow her from her native village, first to the court at Chinon, and so on right through the play until the last fatal scene in the market place at Rouen. I'm sure such a simple lover could be made very moving, and the contrast would be valuable; moreover, it strikes me as a perfectly natural situation. Further, I propose that Gilles de Rais should not only be in love with her, but that he should actually declare his love, and that she should for a brief moment be tempted to return it, finally spurning him as a temptation of the Devil, and thereby reducing him to such a state of despair that he is led into the horrible practices for which he was finally condemned to death. Let me know your opinion soon, because I am at this moment working on the third act.

Yours very sincerely,

JOHN TOUCHWOOD.

To which Miss Bond replied by telegram:

Complete confidence in you, and think suggestion magnificent, there should be exit speech of renunciation for Joan to bring down curtain of third act.

JANET BOND.

"You agree with these suggestions?" John asked his secretary.

"Like Miss Bond, I have complete confidence in you," she replied.

He looked at her earnestly to see if she was laughing at him, and put down his pen.

"Do you know that in some ways you yourself remind me of Joan?"

It was a habit of John's, who had a brain like a fly's eye, to perceive historical resemblances that were denied to an ordinary vision.

Generally he discovered these reincarnations of the past in his own personality. While he was writing _The Fall of Babylon_ he actually fretted himself for a time over a fancied similarity between his character and Nebuchadnezzar's, and sometimes used to wonder if he was putting too much of himself into his portrayal of that dim potentate; and during his composition of _Lucretia_ he was so profoundly convinced that Caesar Borgia was simply John Touchwood over again in a more pa.s.sionate period and a more picturesque costume that, as the critics pointed out, he presented the world with an aspect of him that would never have been recognized by Machiavelli. Yet, even when Harold was being most unpleasant, or when Viola and Bertram were deafening his household, John could not bring himself to believe that he and Gilles de Rais, who was proved to have tortured over three hundred children to death, had many similar traits; nor was he willing to admit more than a most superficial likeness to the feeble Dauphin Charles. In fact, at one time he was so much discouraged by his inability to adumbrate himself in any of his personages that he began to regret his choice of Joan of Arc and to wish that he had persevered in his intention to write a play about Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom, allowing for the sundering years, he felt he had more in common than with any other historical figure.

Therefore he was relieved to discover this resemblance between his heroine and his secretary, in whom he was beginning to take nearly as much interest as in himself.

"Do you mean outwardly?" asked Miss Hamilton, looking at an engraving of the bust from the church of St. Maurice, Orleans. "If so, I hope her complexion wasn't really as scaly as that."

"No, I mean in character."

"I suppose a private secretary ought not to say 'what nonsense' to her employer, but really what else can I say? You might as well compare Ida Merritt to Joan of Arc; in fact, she really is rather like my conception of her."

"I'm sorry you find the comparison so far-fetched," John said, huffily.

"It wasn't intended to be uncomplimentary."