CHAPTER XVI
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."