Belial, a play actress, and no old lady, anyway. I know nothing about
her ancestry--and I don’t believe that she did, either; but as to the
other two counts in the indictment I am afraid I must plead guilty for
Mrs. Fortescue. An actress she was, to the tips of her fingers, an
unconscious, involuntary, dyed-in-the-wool actress. She acted because
she could not help it, not from any wish to deceive or mislead, but just
because it came as natural to her as breathing. If you asked her to take
a piece of pie, it was not enough for her to want the pie, and to tell
you so, and to take the pie; she had to act out the whole dramatic
business of the situation--her passion for pie, her eager craving and
anxious expectation, her incredulous delight when she actually got the
pie, and her tender, brooding thankfulness and gratitude when she had
got outside of the pie, and put it where it couldn’t be taken away from
her. No; there wasn’t the least bit of humbug in it all. She did want
the pie; but she wanted to act, too.
[Illustration]
It was this characteristic of Mrs. Fortescue that got her into the Old
Ladies’ Home on false pretenses; for, to tell the truth, Mrs. Fortescue
was only an old lady by courtesy. She had beautiful white hair; but she
had had beautiful white hair ever since she was twenty years old. Before
she had reached that age she had had red hair, black hair, brown hair,
golden hair, and hair of half-a-dozen intermediate shades. Either the
hair or the hair dye finally got tired, and Mrs. Fortescue’s head became
white--that is, when she gave it a chance to be its natural self. That,
however, was not often; and, at last, there came a day when, as her
manager coarsely expressed it, “she monkeyed with her fur one time too
many.” For ten years she had been the leading lady in a small traveling
opera company, where tireless industry and a willingness to wait for
salary were accepted as substitutes for extreme youth and commanding
talent. Ten years is a long time, especially when it is neither the
first nor the second, and, possibly, not the third ten years of an
actress’s professional career; and when Mrs. Fortescue asked for a
contract for three years more, her manager told her that he was not in
the business for his health, and that While he regarded her as one of
the most elegant ladies he had ever met in his life, her face was not
made of India rubber; and, furthermore, that the public was just about
ready for the Spring styles in leading ladies. This did not hurt Mrs.
Fortescue’s feelings, for the leading juvenile had long been in the
habit of calling her “Mommer, dear,” whenever they had to rehearse
impassioned love scenes. But it did put her on her mettle, and she tried
a new hair dye, just to show what she could do. The result was a case of
lead poisoning, that laid her up in a dirty little second-class hotel,
in a back street of ’Quawket for three months of suffering and
helplessness. The company went its way and left her, and went to pieces
in the end. The greater part of her poor savings went for the expenses
of her sickness. At last, when the critical period was over, her doctor
got some charitably-disposed ladies and gentlemen interested in her
case; and, between them all, they procured admission to the Old Ladies’
Home for a poor, white-haired, half-palsied wreck of a woman, who not
only was decrepit before her time, but who acted decrepitude so
successfully that nobody thought of asking her if she were less than
eighty years old. I do not mean to say that Mrs. Fortescue willfully
deceived her benefactors: she was old--oldish, anyway--she was helpless,
partially paralyzed, and her system was permeated with lead; but when
she came to add to this the correct dramatic outfit of expression, she
was _so_ old, and _so_ sick, and so utterly miserable and stricken and
done for that the hearts of the managers of the Old Ladies’ Home were
opened, and they took her in at half the usual entrance fee; because, as
the matron very thoughtfully remarked, she couldn’t possibly live six
weeks, and it was just so much clear gain for the institution. By the
end of six weeks, however, Mrs. Fortescue was just as well as she had
ever been in her life, and was acting about twice as healthy as she
felt.
[Illustration]
With her trim figure, her elastic step, and her beautiful white hair
setting off her rosy cheeks--and Mrs. Fortescue knew how to have rosy
cheeks whenever she wanted them--she certainly was an incongruous
figure in an Old Ladies’ Home, and it was no wonder that her presence
made the genuine old ladies genuinely mad. And every day of her stay
they got madder and madder; for by the constitution of the Home, an
inmate might, if dissatisfied with her surroundings, after a two-years’
stay, withdraw from the institution, _taking her entrance fee with her_.
And that was why Mrs. Fortescue staid on in the Old Ladies’ Home,
snubbed, sneered at, totally indifferent to it all, eating three square
meals a day, and checking off the dull but health-giving weeks that
brought her nearer to freedom, and the comfortable little nest-egg with
which she meant to begin life again.
And yet the time came when Mrs. Fortescue’s histrionic capacity won for
her, if not a friend, at least an ally, out of the snarling sisterhood;
and for a few brief months there was just one old woman out of the lot
who was decently civil to her, and who even showed rudimentary systems
of polite intentions.
* * * * *
This old woman was Mrs. Filley, and this was the manner of her
modification.
One pleasant Spring day, a portly gentleman of powerful frame, with
ruddy cheeks and short, steel-gray hair--a man whose sturdy physique
hardly suited with his absent-minded, unbusiness-like expression of
countenance--ascended the terraces in front of the Old Ladies’ Home. His
brows were knit; he looked upon the ground as he walked, and he did not
in the least notice the eleven old ladies, the matron, the nurse, the
cook and the two “chore-girls” who were watching his every step with
profound interest.
Mrs. Fortescue was watching the gentleman with interest, because she
thought that he was a singularly fine-looking and well-preserved man, as
indeed he was. All the other inmates of the Home were watching him with
interest because he was Mr. Josiah Heatherington Filley, the millionaire
architect, civil engineer and contractor. Their interest, however, was
not excited by Mr. Filley’s fame as a designer of mighty bridges, of
sky-scraping office buildings, and of other triumphs of mechanical
skill; they looked on him with awe and rapture simply because he was the
richest man in ’Quawket, or, more properly speaking, in ’Quawket
Township; for Mr. Filley lived in the old manor-house of the Filley
family, a couple of miles out of town.
You might think that with a millionaire Mr. Filley coming up the steps,
the heart of indigent Mrs. Filley in the Old Ladies’ Home might beat
high with expectation; but, as a matter of fact, it did not. In
Connecticut and New Jersey family names mean no more than the name of
breeds of poultry--like Plymouth Rocks or Wyandottes. All Palmers are
kin, so are all Vreelands, and the Smiths of Peapack are of one stock.
But so are all speckled hens, and kinship may mean no more in one case
than it does in the other. In colonial times, Filleys had abounded in
’Quawket. But to Mrs. Filley of the Home the visit of Mr. Filley of the
Manor House was as the visit of a stranger; and very much surprised,
indeed, was she when the great man asked to see her.
[Illustration]
In spite of his absent-minded expression, Mr. Filley proved to be both
direct and business-like. He explained his errand briefly and clearly.
Mr. Filley was a bachelor, and the last of his branch of the family. His
only surviving relative was a half-brother by his mother’s first
marriage, who had lived a wandering and worthless life, and who had died
in the West a widower, leaving one child, a girl of nine, in a
Massachusetts boarding-school. This child he had bequeathed to the
loving care and attention of his brother. It is perfectly wonderful how
men of that particular sort, who never can get ten dollars ahead of the
world, will pick up a tremendous responsibility of that kind, and throw
it around just as if it were a half-pound dumb-bell. They don’t seem to
mind it at all; it does not weigh upon their spirits; they will pass
over a growing child to anybody who happens to be handy, to be taken
care of for life, just as easily as you would hand a towel over to the
next man at the wash-basin, as soon as you are done with it. Mr.
Filley’s half-brother may have died easily, and probably did, but he
could not possibly have made such a simple job of it as he did of
turning over Etta Adelina, his daughter, to the care of the half-brother
whom he hardly knew well enough to borrow money from oftener than once a
year.
Now, Mr. Josiah Filley had promised his mother on her death-bed that he
would assume a certain sort of responsibility for the consequences of
the perfectly legitimate but highly injudicious matrimonial excursion of
her early youth, and so he accepted the guardianship of Etta Adelina.
But he was not, as the worldly phrase it, “_too_ easy.” He was a
profound scientific student, and a man whose mind was wrapt up in his
profession, but he did not propose to make a parade-ground of himself
for everybody who might feel inclined to walk over him. He had no
intention of taking the care of a nine-year-old infant upon himself, and
the happy idea had come to him of hunting up the last feminine bearer
of his name in the ’Quawket Old Ladies’ Home, and hiring her for a
liberal cash payment to represent him as a quarterly visitor to the
school where the young one was confined.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, “there is any actual relationship between
us--”
“There ain’t none,” interrupted Mrs. Filley; “leastwise there ain’t been
none since your father got money enough to send you to college.”
[Illustration]
Mr. Filley smiled indulgently.
“Well,” he suggested, “suppose we re-establish relationship as cousins.
All you have to do for some years to come is to visit the Tophill
Institute once in three months, satisfy yourself that the child is
properly taken care of and educated, and kindly treated, and to make a
full and complete report to me in writing. If anything is wrong, let me
know. I shall examine your reports carefully. Whether it is favorable or
unfavorable, if I am satisfied that it is correct and faithful, I will
send you my check for fifty dollars. Is it a bargain?”
It was a bargain, but poor old Mrs. Filley stipulated for a payment in
cash instead of by check. She had once in her life been caught on a
worthless note, and she never had got the distinction between notes and
checks clear in her mind. As to Mr. Josiah Filley, he was not wholly
satisfied with the representative of his family, so far as grammar and
manners were concerned; but he saw with his scholar’s eye, that looked
so absent-minded and took in so much, that the old lady was both shrewd
and kindly-natured, and he felt sure that Etta Adelina would be safe in
her hands.
When I said that Mrs. Filley was kindly, I meant that as a human being
she was capable of kindness. Of course, as an inmate of an Old Ladies’
Home, she was just as spiteful as any other of the old ladies, and her
first natural impulse was to make a profound mystery of Mr. Filley’s
errand, not only because by so doing she could tease the other old
ladies, but from a natural, old-ladylike fear that somebody else might
get her job away from her. But she found herself unable to carry out her
pleasant scheme in its entirety. Nine of her aged comrades, and all the
members of the household staff, consumed their souls in bitterness,
wondering what the millionaire had wanted of his humble kinswoman; and
three times in the course of one year they saw that excellent woman put
on her Sunday black silk and take her silent way to the railroad
station. On the day following they saw her return, but where she had
been or why she had been there they knew not. By the rules of the Home
she had a right to eight days of absence annually. She told the matron
that she was going to see her “folks.” The matron knew well that she had
not a folk in the world, but she had to take the old lady’s word.
[Illustration]
But did not those dear old ladies ask the ticket-agent at the station
what station Mrs. Filley took tickets for? Indeed they did, bless them!
And the ticket-agent told them that Mrs. Filley had bought a
thousand-mile ticket, and that they would have to hunt up the conductors
who took up her coupons on the next division of the road, if they wanted
to find out. (A thousand-mile ticket, gentle reader, is a delightful
device by means of which you can buy a lot of travel in one big chunk,
and work it out in little bits whenever you want to. Next to a sure and
certain consciousness of salvation, it gives its possessor more of a
feeling of pride and independence than anything else this life has to
offer.)
And yet Mrs. Filley’s happiness was incomplete, for it was necessary to
let one person into her secret. She put it on her spectacles, which had
not been of the right kind for a number of years, owing to the
inferiority of modern glass ware, but defective education was what
brought Mrs. Filley to making a confidant of Mrs. Fortescue. No
spectacles that ever were made would have enabled Mrs. Filley to spell,
and when she began her first report thus:
“i sene the gerl She had or to hav cod-livor roil--”
even she, herself, felt that it was hardly the report for Mr. Filley’s
fifty-dollars. Here is the way that Mrs. Fortescue started off that
report in her fine Italian hand:
“It gives me the greatest pleasure, my dear Mr. Filley, to inform you
that, pursuant to your instructions, I journeyed yesterday to the
charming, and I am sure salubrious shades of Tophill, to look after the
welfare of your interesting and precocious little ward. Save for the
slight pallor which might suggest the addition of some simple tonic
stimulant, such as codliver oil, to the generous fare of the Tophill
Academy, I found your little Etta Adelina in every respect--”
Mrs. Filley’s name was signed to that report in the same fine Italian
hand; and it surprised Mr. Filley very much when he saw it. But there
was more surprise ahead for Mr. Filley.
* * * * *
As a business man Mr. Filley read the paper, but not the local papers of
’Quawket, for it was seldom that the papers were local there long enough
to get anybody into the habit of reading them. Thus it came about that
he failed to see the notice of the death of old Mrs. Filley, which
occurred in the Old Ladies’ Home something less than a twelve-month
after the date of his first and only visit. The death occurred, however,
but the reports kept on coming in the same fine Italian hand, and with
the same generous freedom in language of the most expensive sort. No man
could have got more report for fifty dollars than Mr. Filley got, and
the report did not begin to be the most of what he was getting.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
Sometimes clergymen but slightly acquainted with the theatrical business
are surprised when traveling through small towns to see lithographs and
posters displaying the features of great stars of the theatrical and
operatic world, who are billed to appear in some local opera house about
two sizes larger than a cigar-box. The portraits are familiar, the names
under them are not; you may recognize the features of Joe Jefferson and
Adelina Patti, with labels on them establishing their identity as
“Comical Maginnis, the Monkey Mugger,” and “Sadie Sylvester, the Society
Clog Artiste.” These are what are known as “Stock-printing,” and it is
pleasant to reflect that the printers who get them up for a fraud on the
public rarely are able to collect their bills from the actors and
actresses that use them, and that the audiences that go to such shows
don’t know the difference between Adelina Patti and an oyster patty.
This explanation of an interesting custom is made to forestall the
reader’s surprise at learning that two years and a half after her
retirement from the stage, and ten years, at least, after the
retirement of such of her youthful charms as might have justified
the exhibition, the portrait of Mrs. Fortescue, arrayed in silk tights,
of a most constricted pattern--not constrained at all, simply
constricted--decorated scores of fences in what theatrical people call
the “’Quawket Circuit,” which circuit includes the charming and
presumably salubrious shades of Tophill. There was no mistaking Mrs.
Fortescue’s face; Mrs. Fortescue’s attire might have given rise to
almost any sort of mistake. The name under the picture was not that of
Mrs. Fortescue; it was that of a much advertised young person whose
“dramatic speciality” was entitled “Too Much for London; or, Oh, My! Did
you Ever!”
* * * * *
Now it is necessary to disinter old Mrs. Filley for a moment, and to
smirch her character a little by way of introducing some excuse for
what Mrs. Fortescue did.
[Illustration]
By the time Mrs. Fortescue had cooked her third report, she had found
out that the old lady had not quite kept faith with her employer. At the
Tophill Institute she had represented herself as Mr. Filley’s mother,
gaining thereby much consideration and many cups of tea. So that when
she died, with the rest of her secret hidden from all but Mrs.
Fortescue, the latter lady, having fully made up her mind to appropriate
the job, felt that it behooved her to go her predecessor one better, and
when she made her appearance at Tophill it was in the character of Mr.
Filley’s newly married wife. She told the sympathetic all about it, how
Mr. Filley and she had known each other from childhood, how he had
always loved her, how she had wedded another to please her family, how
the other had died, and Mr. Filley had renewed his addresses, how she
had staved him off (I am not quoting her language) until his dear old
mother had died, and left him so helpless and lonely that she really had
to take pity on him. Mrs. Filley No. 2 got all the consideration she
wanted, and the principal sent out for champagne for her, under the
impression that that was the daily and hourly drink in all millionaire
families. He never found out otherwise from Mrs. Filley, either.
Probably Mrs. Fortescue-Filley had calculated on keeping up her pretty
career of imposture until her time of probation at the Home was up, and
she could withdraw her entrance fee and vanish at once from ’Quawket and
Tophill. She had the report business well in hand; her employer
occasionally wrote her for detailed information on minor points of the
child’s work or personal needs, but in general expressed himself
perfectly satisfied; and she felt quite safe, so far as he was
concerned, when he commissioned her to put the child through an
all-round examination, and sent her fifty dollars extra with his
“highest compliments” on her manner of doing it. Indeed, in this she was
no humbug. She could have put the principal, himself, through his
scholastic facings if she had cared to.
But the appearance of those unholy portraits came without warning, and
did their work thoroughly. Even if it had not been that every child in
the institute could recognize that well-known countenance, a still more
damning disclosure came in the prompt denunciation of the fraud by the
“Indignant Theatre Goer” with a long memory, who wrote to the local
paper to protest against the profanation, as he put it, of the features
of a peerless Mrs. Fortescue, once an ornament of the stage, and now
dwelling in retirement in ’Quawket. Ordinary, common, plain, every-day
gossip did the rest.
[Illustration]
Mrs. Fortescue saw the posters on her way to Tophill, but she
dauntlessly presented herself at the portal. She got no further. The
principal interposed himself between her and his shades of innocents,
and he addressed that creature of false pretenses in scathing
language--or it might have scathed if the good man had not been so angry
that he talked falsetto. It did not look as if there were much in the
situation for Mrs. Fortescue, but it would be a strange situation out of
which the lady could not extract just the least little bit of acting.
She drew herself up in majestic indignation, hurled the calumnies back
at the astonished principal, and with a magnificent threat to bring Mr.
Filley right to the spot to utterly overwhelm and confute him, she swept
away, leaving the Institute looking two sizes smaller, and its principal
looking no particular size at all.
* * * * *
And, what is more, she did, for her magnificent dramatic outburst made
her fairly acting-drunk. She could not help herself; she was inebriated
with the exuberance of her own verbosity, to use a once famous phrase,
and she simply had to go off on a regular histrionic bat.
She went straight off to the old Filley Manor House at the extreme end
of ’Quawket township; she bearded the millionaire builder in his great
cool, darkened office, among his mighty plans and elevations and
mysterious models, and she told that great man the whole story of her
imposture with such a torrent of comic force, with such marvelous
mimicry of the plain-spoken Mrs. Filley and the prim principal, and with
so humorous an introduction of the champagne episode that her victim lay
back in his leather arm-chair, slapped his sturdy leg, roared out mighty
peals of laughter, told her she was the most audacious little woman in
the whole hemisphere, and that he never heard of anything so funny in
his life, and that he’d call down any number of damn schoolmasters if
she wanted him to.
“I don’t see how we can arrange a retroactive, Ma’am; I’m a little too
old for that sort of thing, I’m afraid. But I’ll tell you what I can do.
I’ll send my agent at once to take the child out of school, and I’ll see
that my man doesn’t give him any satisfaction or a chance for
explanation.
“Why, damn it!” concluded the hearty Mr. Filley; “if I ever see the
little prig I’ll tell him I think it is a monstrous and great
condescension on your part to let yourself be known as the wife of a
plain old fellow like me. Why doesn’t a man know a handsome woman when
he sees her?”
“Then I am forgiven for all my wickedness?” said Mrs. Fortescue--but,
oh! _how_ she said it!
[Illustration]
“Forgiveness?” repeated Mr. Filley, thoughtfully. “Yes; I think so.”
Then he rose, crossed the room to a large safe, in which he opened a
small drawer. From this he took a small package of papers which he
placed in Mrs. Fortescue’s hands. She recognized her own reports, and
also a curious scrawl on a crumpled and discolored piece of paper, which
also she promptly recognized. It was a “screw” that had held three
cents’ worth of snuff, and she had seen it in Mrs. Filley’s hand just
about the time that dear old lady was passing away. She read it now for
the first time:
[Illustration]
“dere mr Filley i kno that fort escew woman is gone to kepon senden them
re ports an nottel you ime dedd but iam Sara Filley.”
* * * * *
“She sent that to me,” said Mr. Filley, “by Doctor Butts, the house
physician, and between us we managed to get a ‘line’ on you, Mrs.
Fortescue; so that there’s been a little duplicity on both sides.”
Mrs. Fortescue looked at him with admiration mingled with respect; then
she looked puzzled.
“But why, if you knew it all along, why did you--”
“Why did I let you go on?” repeated Mr. Filley. “Well, you’ve got to
have the whole duplicity, I see.” He went back to the drawer and took
out another object. It was a faded photograph of a young lady with her
hair done up in a net, and with a hat like a soap-dish standing straight
up on her head.
“Twenty-five years ago,” said Mr. Filley, “boy; three dollars a week in
an architect’s office; spent two-fifty of them, two weeks running, for
flowers for that young lady when she played her first engagement in New
Haven. Walked there. Paid the other fifty cents to get into the theatre.
Lived on apples the rest of the week. Every boy does it. Never forgets
it. Place always remains soft.”
And, as Mrs. Fortescue sat and looked long and earnestly at the picture,
a soft color came into her face that was born rather of memory than of
her love for acting; and yet it wonderfully simulated youth and fresh
beauty and a young joy in life.
“THE MAN WITH THE PINK PANTS.”
This is a tale of pitiless and persistent vengeance, and it shows by
what simple means a very small and unimportant person may bring about
the undoing of the rich, great and influential. It was told to me by my
good friend, the Doctor, as we strolled through the pleasant suburbs of
a pretty little city that is day by day growing into greatness and
ugliness, as what they call a manufacturing centre.