Now old feelings rose to swell his pity as he traced the girl’s features in the woman’s face. “You have a daughter. You have been married since we parted,” he said.
“Yes. It is for her sake I have troubled you,” was her answer. “She is a good girl — oh, so good! But she has no one in the world except me, and I am leaving her. Poor Grissel!”
“She is on the stage?” he inquired gravely.
“Yes; and she has succeeded young, as I did. We have not been unhappy together. You remember the life my mother and I had? I think it has been the same over again.”
She smiled ever so little. He remembered something of the quiet pathos of that life. “Your husband is dead?” he asked.
“Dead! I wish he were!” she answered bitterly, the smile passing from her face. “My girl had better be alone than with her father. Ah, you do not know! When he went to America years ago — with another woman — I thanked God for it. Dead? Oh, no! There is no chance that he is dead.”
Mr. Yale was shocked. “You have not got a divorce?” he said.
“No. After he left me I fell ill, and there were expenses. We were very poor until last year, when Grissel made a good engagement. That is why we are here. Now that her name is known he will come back and find her out. She plays as Kittie Latouche, but the profession know who she is, and — and what can I do? Oh, Mr. Yale! tell me what I can do for her.”
Her anxiety unnerved him. Her terror of the future, not her own, but her child’s, wrung his heart. He had a presentiment whither she was leading him; and he tried to escape, he tried to murmur some commonplace of encouragement.
“You may yet recover,” he urged. “At any rate, there will be time to talk of this again.”
“There will not be time,” she entreated him. “I have scarcely three days to live, and then my child will be alone. Oh, Mr. Yale! help me. She is young and handsome, with no one to guide her. If her father return, he will be her worst enemy. There is some one, too — some gentleman — who has fallen in with her, and been here. He may be a friend — what you were to me — or not! Don’t you understand me?” she cried piteously. “How can I leave her unless you — there is no one else whom I can ask — will protect her?”
He started and looked round for relief, but found none. “I? It is impossible!” he cried. “Oh dear, dear! I am afraid that it is impossible, Mrs. Kent.”
“Not impossible! I do not ask you to give her a home or money! Only care. If you will be her guardian — her friend — —”
She was a woman dying in sore straits. He was a merciful man. In the end he promised to do what she wished. Then he hastened to escape her gratitude, unconscious, as he passed down the stairs, of the whispering and giggling, the slatternliness and dirt, which had been so dreadful to him on his entrance.
He walked along Oxford Street in a reverie, “Poor thing!” falling from him at intervals, until he reached the corner of Tottenham Court Road, and his eye rested upon a hoarding — at the first idly, then with a purpose, finally with a sidelong glance. The advertisement which had caught his attention was a coarse engraving of half a dozen heads, arranged in a circle, with one in the centre. Under this last, which was larger and more staring, and less to be evaded than the others, appeared the words, “Miss Kittie Latouche.” He went on with a shiver, crossing here and there to avoid the hoardings, but only to fall in with a string of sandwich-men bearing the same device. He plunged into the haven of Soho as if he were a political conspirator.
The portrait and the name of his ward! In a few days he would be left in charge of an actress whose name was known to all London — guardian, in loco parentis, what you will, of the closest and most responsible, to a giddy girl of unknown antecedents, and too well-known name! He wondered whether Archdeacon had ever been in such a position before, a position which it would be hard to acknowledge and impossible to explain. He could talk of his old friendship for her mother, the actress, and his duty to a dying woman. But would the world believe him? Would even his wife believe him? Would not she read much between the lines, though the space were white as snow? He, a man of nearly sixty, grew red and white by turns as he thought of this.
“I will tell Jack the story,” was his first resolve. “I will tell it him at dinner to-night,” he groaned. But would he have the courage? He had much respect for his son’s practical nature. He had heard him called “hard as nails.” And when he found himself opposite to him, and eyed the close-shaven young lawyer, who looked a decade older than his years, he resorted to a subterfuge.
“Jack,” he said, “I want your opinion for a friend of mine.”
“It is at your service, sir,” his son said, his hand upon the apricots. “What is the subject? Law?”
“Not precisely,” the Archdeacon replied, clearing his throat. “It is rather a question of knowledge of the world. You know, my boy,” he went on, “that I have a very high opinion of your discretion.”
“You are very good,” said Jack. And he did that which was unusual with him. He blushed; but the other did not observe it.
“My friend, who, I may say, is a clergyman in my archdeaconry,” the elder gentleman resumed, “has been appointed guardian — it is a ridiculous thing for a man in his position — to a — a young actress. She is quite a girl, I understand, but of some notoriety.”
“Indeed,” said Jack drily. “May I ask how that came about? Wards of that kind do not fall from heaven — as a rule.”
The Archdeacon winced. “He tells me,” he explained, “that her mother was an old friend of his, and when she died, some time back, she left the girl as a kind of legacy, you see.”
“A legacy to him, sir?”
“To him, certainly,” the elder man said in some distress. “You follow me?”
“Quite so,” said Jack. “Oh, quite so! A common thing, no doubt. Did you say that your friend was a married man, sir?”
“Yes,” the Archdeacon replied faintly.
“Just so! just so!” his son said, in the same tone, a tone that was so dreadful to the Archdeacon that it needed Jack’s question, “And what is the point upon which he wants advice?” to induce him to go on.
“What he had better do, being a clergyman.”
“He should have thought of that earlier — ahem! — I mean it depends a good deal on the young lady. There are actresses and actresses, you know.”
“I suppose so,” the Archdeacon admitted grudgingly. He was in a mood to see the darkest side of his difficulty.
“Of course there are!” Jack said, for him quite warmly. And indeed that is the worst of barristers. They will argue in season and out of season if you do not agree with them quickly. “Some are as good — as good girls as my mother when you married her, sir.”
“Well, well, she may be a good girl — I do not know,” the elder man allowed.
“You always had a prejudice against the stage, sir.”
The Archdeacon looked up sharply, thinking this uncalled for; unless, horrible thought! his son knew something of the matter, and was chaffing him. He made an effort to get on firmer ground. “Granted she is a good girl,” he said, “there are still two difficulties. Her father is a rascal, and there is a man, probably a rascal too, hanging about her, and likely to give trouble in another way.”
Jack nodded and sagely pondered the position. “I think I should advise your friend to get some respectable woman to live with the girl,” he suggested, “and play the duenna — first getting rid of your second rascal.”
“But how will you do that? And what would you do about the father?”
“Buy him off!” said Jack curtly. “As to the lover, have an interview with him. Say to him, ‘Do you wish to marry my ward? If you do, who are you? If you do not, go about your business.’”
“But if he will not go,” the Archdeacon said, “what can my friend do?”
“Well, indeed,” replied Jack, looking rather nonplussed, “I hardly know, unless you make her a ward of court. You see,” he
added apologetically, “your friend’s position is a little — shall I say a little anomalous?”
The Archdeacon shuddered. He dropped his napkin and picked it up again, to hide his dismay. Then he plunged into a fresh subject. When his son upon some excuse left him early, he was glad to be alone. He had now a course laid down for him, and acting upon it, he next day saw the landlady in Sidmouth Street and requested her to take charge of the young lady in the event of the mother’s death and to guard her from intrusion until other arrangements could be made. “You will look to me for all expenses,” the Archdeacon added, seizing with eagerness the only ground on which he felt himself at home. To which the landlady gladly said she would, and accepted Mr. Yale’s address at the Athenæum Club as a personal favour to herself.
So the Archdeacon, free for the moment, went down to Studbury, and as he walked about his shrubberies with the scent of his wife’s old-fashioned flowers in the air, or sat drinking his glass of Leoville ‘74 after dinner while Vinnells the butler, anxious to get to his supper, rattled the spoons on the sideboard, he tried to believe it a dream. What, he wondered, would Vinnells say if he knew that master had a ward, and that ward a play-actress? Or, as Studbury would prefer to style her, a painted Jezebel? And what would Mrs. Yale say, who loved lavender, and had seen a ballet — once? Was Archdeacon ever, he asked himself, in a position so — so anomalous before?
“My dear,” his wife remarked when he had read his letters one morning, a week or two later, “I am sure you are not well. I have noticed that you have not been yourself since you were in London.”
“Nonsense,” he replied tartly.
“It is not nonsense. There is something preying on your mind. I believe,” she persisted, “it is that visitation, Cyprian, that is troubling you.”
“Visitation? What visitation?” he asked incautiously. For indeed he had forgotten all about that very important business, and could think only of a visitation more personal to himself. Before his wife could hold up her hands in astonishment, “What visitation! indeed!” he had escaped into the open air. Mrs. Kent was dead.
Yes, the blow had fallen; but the first shock over, things were made easy for him. He wrote to his ward as soon after the funeral as seemed decent, and her answer pleased him greatly. Ready as he was to scent misbehaviour in the air, he thought it a proper letter, a good girl’s letter. She did not deny his right to give advice. She had not, she said, seen the gentleman he mentioned since her mother’s death, although Mr. Charles Williams — that was his name — had called several times. But she had given him an appointment for the following Tuesday, and was willing that Mr. Yale should see him on that occasion.
All this in a formal and precise way; but there was something in the tone of her reference to Mr. Williams which led the Archdeacon to smile. “She is over head and ears in love,” he thought. And in his reply, after saying that he would be in Sidmouth Street on Tuesday at the hour named, he added that if there appeared to be nothing against Mr. Charles Williams he, the Archdeacon, would have pleasure in forwarding his ward’s happiness.
“I am going to London to-morrow, my dear, for two nights,” he said to his wife on the Sunday evening. “I have some business there.”
Mrs. Yale sat silent for a moment, as if she had not heard. Then she laid down her book and folded her hands. “Cyprian,” she said, “what is it?”
The Archdeacon was fussing with his pile of sermons and did not turn. “What is what, my dear?” he asked.
“Why are you going to London?”
“On business, my dear; business,” he said lightly.
“Yes, but what business?” replied Mrs. Yale with decision. “Cyprian, you are keeping something from me; you were not used to have secrets from me. Tell me what it is.”
But he remained obstinately silent. He would not tell a lie, and he could not tell the truth.
“Is it about Jack?” with sudden conviction. “I know what it is; he has entangled himself with some girl!”
The Archdeacon laughed oddly. “You ought to know your son better by this time, my dear. He is about as likely to entangle himself with a girl as — as I am.”
But Mrs. Yale shook her head unconvinced. The Archdeacon was a landowner, though a poor one. It was his ambition, and his wife’s, that Jack should some day be rich enough to live at the Hall, instead of letting it, as his father found it necessary to do. But while the Archdeacon considered that Jack’s way to the Hall lay over the woolsack, his wife had in view a short cut through the marriage market; being a woman, and so thinking it a small sin in a man to marry for money. Consequently she lived in fear lest Jack should be entrapped by some penniless fair one, and was not wholly reassured now. “Well, I shall be sure to find out, Cyprian,” she said warningly, “if you are deceiving me.”
And these words recurred disagreeably to the Archdeacon’s mind on his way to town and afterwards. They rendered him as sensitive as a mole in the sunshine. He found London almost intolerable. He could not walk the streets without seeing those horrid placards, nor take up a newspaper without being stared out of countenance by the name “Kittie Latouche.” While his conscience so multiplied each bill and poster and programme that in twenty-four hours London seemed to him a great hoarding of which his ward was the sole lessee.
Naturally he shrank into himself as he passed down Sidmouth Street next day. He pondered, standing on the steps of No. 14, what the neighbours thought of the house; whether they knew that “Kittie Latouche” lived there. He was spared the giggling and dirty plates on the stairs, but looking round the room at the ten photographs, and thinking what Mrs. Yale would say could she see him, he shuddered. Nervously he picked up the first pamphlet he saw on the table. It was a trifle in one act: “The Tench,” Lacy’s edition, by Charles Williams. He set it down with a grimace, and a word about birds of a feather. And then the door by which he had entered opened behind him, and he turned.
One look was enough. The kindly expression faded from his handsome features. His face turned to flame. The veins of his forehead swelled with passion, and he strode forward as though he would lay hands on the intruder. “How dare you,” he cried when he could find his voice— “how dare you follow me? How dare you play the spy upon me, sir? Speak!”
But Jack — for Jack it was — had no answer ready. He seemed to have lost for once (astonished at being taken in this way, perhaps) his presence of mind. “I do not — understand,” he said helplessly.
“Understand? You understand,” the Archdeacon cried, his son’s very confusion condemning him unheard, “that you have meanly followed me to — to detect me in — in — —” And then he came to a deadlock, and, redder than before, thundered, “Are you not ashamed of yourself, sir?”
“I thought I saw a back I knew,” Jack muttered, looking everywhere but at his father, which was terribly irritating. “I was coming through the street.”
“You were coming through the street? I suppose you often pass through Sidmouth Street!” retorted the Archdeacon with withering sarcasm. But his wrath was growing cool.
“Very often,” said Jack so sturdily that his father could not but believe him, and was further sobered. “I saw a back I thought I knew, and I came in here. I had no intention of offending you, sir. And now I think I will go,” he added, looking about him uneasily, “and — and speak to you another time.”
But the Archdeacon’s anger was quite gone now. A wretched embarrassment was taking its place as it dawned upon him that after all Jack might by pure chance have seen him enter and have followed innocently. In that case how had he committed himself by his outbreak — how indeed! “Jack,” he said, “I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon, Jack. I see I was mistaken. Do not go, my boy, until I have explained to you why I am here. It is not,” he went on, smiling a wretched smile at the pretty faces round him, “quite the place in which you would expect to find me.”
“It is certainly not the place in which I did expect to find you,” Jack said bluntly. An
d he looked about him, also in a dazed fashion, as if the Archdeacon and the photographs were not a conjunction for which he was prepared.
“No, no,” assented the Archdeacon, wincing, however. “But it is the simplest piece of business in the world which has brought me here.” And he recalled to his son’s memory their talk at the club.
“Ah, I understand!” Jack said, as if he did, too. “You have come about your friend’s business.”
The Archdeacon could not hide a spasm. “Well, not precisely. To tell you the truth, there never was a friend, Jack. But,” he went on hurriedly, holding up a hand of dignified protest, for Jack was looking at him queerly, very queerly, “you know me too well to doubt me, I hope, when I say there is no ground for doubt?”
The son’s keen eyes met the father’s for an instant, and then a rare smile softened them as the men’s hands met. “I do, sir. You may be sure of that!” he said brightly.
The Archdeacon cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said; “now I think you will understand the position. Miss Kent, the young lady in question, lives here; and I have called to-day to see her by appointment.”
“The dickens you have! It is like your impudence!” cried some one — some one behind them.
Both men swung round at the interruption. In the doorway, holding the door open with one hand, while with the other set against the wall he balanced himself on his feet, stood a smart Jewish-looking man. “The dickens you have!” this gentleman repeated, leering on the two most unpleasantly. “So that is your game, is it? Ain’t you ashamed of yourself,” he continued, addressing himself to the shuddering Archdeacon — and how far away seemed Vinnells and the lavender, and the calm delights of Studbury at that moment!— “ain’t you ashamed of yourself, old man?”
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 823