A few moments later there was a knock at the door, and a man in a long
overcoat and brown kid gloves, carrying a silk hat in his fat hand
entered.
"Excuse me," he said, "I presume this is Miss Hahlström?"
"Yes. I am Miss Hahlström."
"My name is Lilienfeld--manager of the Cosmopolitan Theatre." He handed
Frederick his card, which announced that he was also manager of a variety
theatre and impresario in general. "I obtained your address from Mr.
Stoss, the armless marksman, you know. I heard you had had some
unpleasantness with Webster and Forster, and I said to myself, I must go
and call on the daughter of a good old friend of mine. I knew both your
father and mother." Mr. Lilienfeld, in tactfully subdued tones, wound up
his rather lengthy address with delicate expressions of sympathy and his
personal sorrow at Hahlström's death.
Ingigerd being helpless as a child in business matters, Frederick had
taken it upon himself to represent her, and he used the pause in the
impresario's speech to put in a word. The man's personality was by no
means displeasing to him, and his presence for several reasons was highly
welcome.
"Owing to the state of her health, Miss Hahlström was unable until now to
appear in public. I as her physician am responsible for her refusal to
dance, but Webster and Forster used such rough methods of coercion both
through intermediaries and through the mail that Miss Hahlström of her
own accord decided in no circumstances to dance under their management."
"Never!" explained Ingigerd. "Absolutely never."
"Besides," Frederick continued, "their terms are miserable. We have
received letters offering three and four times as much."
"Exactly what was to be expected," declared Lilienfeld. "Pardon me if I
give you a bit of advice. In the first place, be perfectly easy in your
mind about Webster and Forster's attempts to intimidate you. For various
reasons the contract with Mr. Hahlström is legally invalid. It so happens
that I have pretty accurate information regarding the terms of the
divorce between your father and mother. They themselves told me, and what
is more, my brother was counsel for your father. Your mother was made
your legal guardian. Your father had no right to make a contract for you.
You ran away. You went with your father because you were devoted to him
body and soul and the relation between you and your mother may not have
been quite so pleasant. I do not hesitate to say you acted wisely, very
wisely. Your father's training has made a great artist of you."
"Thank you," Ingigerd laughed, at the mere memory of her training
involuntarily protesting against her artistic education. "For hours at a
time, while he sat in a chair comfortably smoking his meerschaum, I had
to dance for him without a stitch of clothing on and perform all sorts of
contortions and acrobatic feats on a rug. In the afternoon he would play
the piano and I would have to go through the same thing all over again."
"Your father was a positive marvel as a trainer. He put two or three
international stars on their dancing legs, if you will permit the
expression. He was the dancing master of two worlds and"--the impresario
laughed significantly--"many other interesting things besides. But to
stick to the matter in hand--if you want, your contract with Webster and
Forster is null and void." He paused for an instant and began again, this
time addressing himself more to Frederick. "I do not deny that I am a
business man--always within the limits of gentlemanliness--and I should
like to ask you a question, Doctor von Kammacher. Is it your intention
to let Miss Hahlström dance at all again, or have you and she decided
that she is to retire to private life?"
"Oh, no," said Ingigerd very decidedly.
Frederick felt something like cold iron enter his soul. He seemed to
himself to be a sword-swallower unable immediately to extract the steel
from his body.
"No, we have not," he, too, said, "though I for my part should like Miss
Hahlström to give up the stage because she has a delicate constitution.
But she maintains she needs the sensation of it. And when I see the
offers she receives, I do not know whether I have the right to persuade
her against her will."
"Don't, Doctor von Kammacher, don't!" cried Mr. Lilienfeld. "Miss
Hahlström, Doctor von Kammacher, let me take up the cudgels for you
against Webster and Forster--bloodsuckers, I tell you--and they've
insulted the lady, besides. I assure you, they are the source of a lot
of vile rumours about her."
"Mention names," said Frederick, turning white. "I shall have no
difficulty, I fancy, in finding a second, and I hope the same code of
honour holds for gentlemen here as in Europe."
"Tush--tush!" The impresario lifted his fat hands in pacification, and it
seemed to Frederick as if the business man's round head, set low between
his shoulders, were trying to make signs to him, as if he were winking
his eyes furtively and were suppressing a broad smile, unexpectedly
upsetting his business zeal and gravity. "You make entirely too much of
it." He looked Frederick straight in the face in a peculiar way with a
significant expression in his large round eyes. Then he continued: "For
an engagement of twenty evenings in cities to be decided upon, I offer
you one hundred and fifty dollars more per evening than anybody else has
yet offered you, the engagement to begin inside of four days. If you are
agreed, we can go to the lawyer this minute."
Within less than half an hour Frederick and Ingigerd were standing in a
huge elevator, which was to take them to the fifth floor of a New York
City office building. Ingigerd was the only woman in the elevator, and it
pleased her that for her sake the nineteen gentlemen in the car held
their hats in their hands.
"If you have never before seen such a thing," Lilienfeld said to
Frederick, "the offices of a big American lawyer will astonish you. This
is a law firm, two partners, Brown and Samuelson; but Brown's a
nincompoop and Samuelson is the whole thing."
The offices of the famous New York lawyer, Samuelson, were partitioned
off with wood and ground glass from an immense hall, a writing factory,
in which there was a horde of assistants working typewriters. Samuelson
made the impression of a man of nearly forty. He was not very tall, had a
bad, pallid complexion, and wore a short, pointed beard. The clothes of
this man, whose share of the firm's income was estimated at three hundred
thousand dollars a year, though of the correct cut, were by no means new;
in fact, they were rather shabby, and his entire appearance suggested
that he was scarcely a model of American cleanliness. He spoke in a very
low, thick voice, as if suffering from a sore throat.
Within less than fifteen minutes, the contract between Lilienfeld and
Ingigerd had been concluded, a contract, which owing to the fact that
Ingigerd was a minor, was no more valid than the contract with Webster
and Forster. Samuelson showed that he was informed of all the details of
the case of Hahlström _vs._ Webster and Forster. When the question of
their demands arose, he merely smiled with an air of great disdain and
said:
"We will quietly lie low and let them make the advance."
When Ingigerd and Frederick were sitting alone together in a closed cab
on the way home, he put his arms about her passionately.
"If you dance on the stage, Ingigerd, I'll go out of my mind. I feel as
if you and I and our love would be exposed in the pillory. If it were I
instead of you, it would not be half so hard to stand."
The poor young scholar began again to pour out before the little vampire
all the anguish he had been suffering, this time with hot kisses and
embraces.
"I am a drowning man. If you do not hold your hand out to me I shall sink
forever. You are stronger than I am. You can save me. The world is
nothing to me. What I lost is nothing, was nothing and will always be
nothing to me, if only I can exchange it for you. Come with me, and you
shall be all in all to me, the one thing of significance in my life."
"You are not weak," the girl whispered with a dying-away look in her
eyes. She breathed heavily, her narrow lips parted, and that fatal,
seductive smile spread over her languishing face, like a mask.
"Take me! Run away with me!"
For a time they were silent as the cab rolled along easily on its rubber
tires.
"They can wait a long while for you, Ingigerd," Frederick at length said.
"To-morrow we shall be with Peter Schmidt in Meriden."
But she laughed. Yes, she laughed at him, and Frederick clearly saw he
had melted her body, not her soul; or a soul was a thing this girl did
not possess.
The cab came to a halt in front of the club-house. Frederick seemed to
have lost his speech. Without saying a word, he escorted Ingigerd to the
door, pressed her hand, and returned to the cab. He chose a place at
random, and called to the coachman to drive him there.