The next day as the artist met Elsie on the beach on her way to the
bath-house, his face lighted up.
"Oh, Miss Marley, it all came back to me, after twenty years," he
exclaimed. "Something about you has haunted my memory ever since I
first saw you last week, and the song yesterday made it more definite
and more perplexing. I woke in the night and it all came back. I
heard that very same song on the train going South as a young
man--comparatively young, though you wouldn't call it so. Do you want
to sit down a moment and let me tell you?
"I haven't even thought of it for a dozen years," he said when they had
found a convenient bench. "As I said, we were bound southward, and it
was toward night. The seat in front of me was occupied by an
exceedingly pretty young lady and a gentleman who must have been her
brother or her husband--girls married younger in those days--for their
name, which escapes me, was the same. Farther ahead, on the opposite
side of the car, was a woman with an infant in her arms and a boy baby
of under two years at her side. As it grew late, the older baby grew
tired and cross. He wanted his mother, was jealous of the tiny one,
and finally he just howled. The young lady before me said a word to
her companion and went directly over.
"That kid, Miss Marley, was dirty and sticky beyond words, and she was
the daintiest, freshest, sweetest girl imaginable. But she smiled and
held out her arms and he just tumbled into them. She hugged the little
beggar close, never minding her pretty gown, and brought him back to
her seat. She seemed to know just what to do--took off his shoes,
loosened the neck of his dress and all that, then cuddled him down and
sang to him until he went to sleep and after. Her voice was as sweet
as yours, and she sang the very same thing, 'And Do You Ken Elsie
Marley'--I think she sang it twice or thrice."
Perhaps it was Elsie's fondness for children; perhaps it was because he
told the story so well; in any event, the girl was touched. And as
usual, to cover her feeling, she tried to smile, her dimples rather at
variance with the tears in her eyes.
He gazed at her curiously. "Wait, Miss Marley, that isn't all," he
exclaimed. "As I recalled the young lady, I saw her face only dimly.
Now do you know it suddenly comes to me that she had the largest,
deepest dimples I had ever seen, one in either cheek. And I remember
vowing then and there, in my youthful enthusiasm, that if ever I
attempted to paint Madonna she should have just such dimples; they
struck me as somehow significant, perhaps symbolic."
Elsie's heart was beating wildly.
"I wonder--could that have been your mother, Miss Marley?"
The girl could not speak for the tumult within her.
"It seems as if their name began with M, though it couldn't have been
Marley, else I should have noticed on account of the song," he went on
kindly, realizing her emotion. "May I ask what was your mother's
maiden name, Miss Marley?"
Quite upset, Elsie started to tell the truth; said Mi--and stopped
short.
"Middleton!" he exclaimed triumphantly.
"Pritchard," she said as quickly as she could get it out.
"_Pritchard?_" he repeated as if he must have heard wrong.
"Augusta Pritchard," the girl reiterated, her heart like a stone.
The artist was puzzled. But realizing that the loss of her mother
might have been so recent as to be still a painful subject, he
tactfully spoke of other things, cloaking his disappointment at not
being able to work out his problem to final solution. He feared lest
he might somehow have blundered upon some sad family secret. Even with
twenty years between them, he couldn't believe that his senses had so
deceived him, couldn't but feel that that young girl had been connected
with this girl of the big dimples. And he couldn't but believe that
the girl knew it. Only there was something that prevented her
acknowledging it. It might be tragedy; perhaps it was disgrace?
Though, somehow, he couldn't think it. Poor little thing! He let her
go on her way to her bath.
But Elsie returned to the hotel and went straight to her room. She
knew she would be undisturbed there, for Miss Pritchard had gone
driving with old friends while she was to have had her swim. The girl
flung herself upon her bed and, burying her face in her pillow, shed
the bitterest tears of her life.
She had denied her mother--that darling, adorable mother who had taken
the sticky baby to her heart, and sung "Elsie Marley" to him, just as
she had later sung it to her own little girl. She had cast off her
mother and taken on--_Augusta Pritchard_! What a name to exchange for
Elizabeth Middleton! For even though the former were the mother of the
lovely Elsie Marley who had gone to Enderby, she couldn't be compared
with her beautiful mother. And, of course, her denial was far worse in
that she was dead.
How proud, how happy, how humble, she should have been to say: "Why, of
course, that was my mother! I knew it without the dimples!" What a
wretch she must be! To have had such a mother as to have so impressed
a chance stranger that he should wish to paint the Madonna in her
likeness, and should have remembered her twenty years, and to have
repudiated her utterly!
She felt that she could not bear it, could not endure such a weight on
her heart. But what could she do? Say to Mr. Graham that it _was_ her
mother and her name _was_ Middleton? Then she would have to tell
Cousin Julia everything, and she would send her away, send her off to
poke and fret in Enderby, and serve tea in a conventional parsonage
drawing-room. And she would never be an actress, and the true Elsie
Marley would be dragged on to New York.
It would be hard on Elsie-Honey, for already she seemed just to love
that poky parsonage, and was apparently quite as attached to Uncle John
as she herself was to Cousin Julia. And even Cousin Julia--already
Elsie couldn't but realize that Cousin Julia had given her her whole
heart; she wouldn't have liked the other girl so well in the first
place, and now any such overturn would--it would just break her heart!
No, that couldn't be. After all, she couldn't have done otherwise.
She _had_ to say what she did on account of the game. Being cast for a
part, she had to play it, even though it might be disagreeable at
times. And it _wasn't_ worse because her mother was dead; being in
heaven, her mother would understand and condone. How did that hymn go?
She sat erect and sang, very sweetly, the stanza that applied:
"There is no place where earth's sorrows
Are so felt as up in heaven,
There is no place where earth's failings
Have such kindly judgment given."
That comforted her strangely. "Uncle John couldn't have administered
first aid himself more successfully," she said to herself humorously as
she dried her eyes.
She bathed her face and, standing before the mirror, addressed the
charming reflection in the pink frock. She mustn't expect plain
sailing all the time she warned her. She must expect to be _up against
it_ frequently. She must keep her class motto in mind and not expect
everything to be dead easy. It was hard not to be able to claim one's
beautiful mother; but she was playing a part; she was on the stage in
costume, and the part-she-was-playing's mother's name wasn't Middleton
nor Moss and was Augusta Pritchard. She must keep her motto in mind
and say continually to herself: "Act well your part, there all the
honor lies."
That very evening at dinner some one asked her where she got her
dimples--whether they were inherited?
"Or, perhaps, Miss Marley's a freak like the white peacock at the
gardens?" broke in a callow youth whom Elsie disliked.
"From my mother," she said quickly, and Miss Pritchard, sensitive to
the least sound of hurt in Elsie's voice, introduced another subject.
Nevertheless, she wondered. She hadn't seen Augusta Pritchard since
the latter was a girl of nineteen, but she couldn't recollect that she
had any dimples or shadows of dimples. She couldn't even imagine the
combination of dimples with her white, cold, rather expressionless
face, nor reconcile them with the true Pritchard temperament. It
seemed inconceivable that Elsie could have inherited them except
through the Marleys; and yet, of course, Elsie remembered her mother
who had died only three years ago.
She had to consider that the girl didn't like that fresh Jerrold boy
and had been nettled by his remark. Possibly in her indignation she
had said what first came into her mind, though it didn't seem like her.
Miss Pritchard sighed, for she had worshipped at the shrine of truth
all her life, and strive as she would, she couldn't but feel a
deviation from Elsie's wonted frankness here.
She pondered much upon the subject and later in the summer--on the
evening preceding their return to New York, it was--as they were
talking about Elsie's studying, Miss Pritchard suddenly became serious.
"Elsie, there's something I want to say to you as an older woman to a
young girl," she began. "You will have one difficulty to contend with
that I had in newspaper work, only in your case the temptation will be
greater, and your task correspondingly harder. There's a poem of a
child-actor of Queen Elizabeth's time, little Salathiel Pavy, who
constantly played the part of an old man. The verses relate that he
acted the part so naturally that the fates mistook him for an old man
and cut off his thread of life in his tender years. Now you, Elsie
dear, concerned with make-believe--fiction--as you will constantly be
in your study for the stage, eager, of course, to use every moment and
occasion, with one subject dominating your thoughts, will need to be
very, very careful with regard to your separate, personal life. In
other words, in good old-fashioned terms, you'll have to guard your
soul. Keep that good and pure and true. Keep that sacred, above and
apart from your work, and then whether you are ever a great actress or
not, you will be a good woman."
And then half shyly, but beautifully, she repeated Matthew Arnold's
"Palladium":
"Set where the upper streams of Simois flow,
Was the Palladium, high 'mid rock and wood;
And Hector was in Ilium far below,
And fought and saw it not, but there it stood.
It stood and sun and moonshine rained their light
On the pure columns of its glen-built hall.
Backward and forward rolled the waves of fight
Round Troy; but while this stood, Troy could not fall.
So in its lovely moonlight lives the soul.
Mountains surround it and sweet virgin air;
Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll:
We visit it by moments, ah, too rare!
Men will renew the battle on the plain
To-morrow; red with blood will Xanthus be;
Hector and Ajax will be there again,
Helen will come upon the wall to see.
Then we shall rust in shade or shine in strife,
And fluctuate 'twixt blind hopes and blind despairs,
And fancy that we put forth all our life,
And never know how with the soul it fares.
Still doth the soul from its lone fastness high,
Upon our life a ruling effluence send:
And when it fails, fight as we will, we die;
And, while it lasts, we cannot wholly end."