"Yes-m!" quickly replied the property boy beside me; "yes-m, that's the very beast he reminds me of!"
Certainly, I never expect to find another Dr. Osborne so capable of contradicting a savage growl with a tender caress.
Mr. Parselle, as the gentle old Latin scholar, tutor, and acting godfather, was beyond praise. He admitted to me one night, coming out of a brown study, that he believed Bélin was a character actually beyond criticism, and that, next to creating it as author, he ranked the honor of acting it; but there spoke the old-school actor who respected his profession.
And those children—were they not charming? That Sister Jane, given so sweetly, so sincerely by the daughter of the famous Matilda Heron, who, christened Helène, was known only by the pet name Bijou, in public as well as in private life. And the boy Paul, her little brother. Almost, I believe, Mabel Leonard was herself created expressly to play that part. Never did female thing wear male clothes so happily. All the impish perversity, all the wriggling restlessness of the small boy were to be found in the person of the handsome, erratic, little Mabel.
Even the two maids were out of the common, one being played by a clever and very versatile actress, who had been a friend of my old Cleveland days. She came to me out of the laughing merry past, but all pale and sad in trailing black, for death had been robbing her most cruelly. She wished for a New York engagement and astonished me by declaring she would play anything, no matter how small, if only the part gave her a foothold on the New York stage.
I sought Mr. Palmer and talked hard and long for my friend, but he laughed and answered: "An actress as clever as that will be very apt to slight a part of only two scenes."
But I assured him to the contrary; that she would make the most of every line, and the part would be a stepping-stone to bigger things. He granted my prayer, and Louise Sylvester, by her earnestness, her breathless excitement in rushing to and fro, bearing messages, answering bells, and her excellent dancing, raised Kitty to a character part, while Louise, the smallest of them all, was played with a brisk and bright assurance that made it hard to believe that Helen Vincent had come direct from her convent school to the stage-door—as she had.
A great, great triumph for everyone was that first night of "Miss Multon," and one of the sweetest drops in my own cup was added by the hand of New York's honored and beloved poet, Edmund Clarence Stedman, for, all nested in a basket of sweet violets, came a sonnet from him to me, and though my unworthiness was evident enough, nevertheless I took keenest joy in the beauty of its every line—surely a very sweet and gracious token from one who was secure to one who was still struggling. And now, when years have passed, he has given me another beautiful memory to keep the first one company. I was taking my first steps in the new profession of letters, which seems somewhat uncertain, slow, and introspective, when compared with the swift, decisive, if rather superficial profession of acting, and Mr. Stedman, in a pause from his own giant labor on his great "Anthology," looked at, nay, actually considered, that shivering fledgling thing, my first book, and wrote a letter that spelled for me the word encouragement, and being a past-master in the art of subtle flattery, quoted from my own book and set alight a little flame of hope in my heart that is not extinguished yet. So gently kind remain some people who are great. Just as Tomasso Salvini, from the heights of his unquestioned supremacy—but stay, the line must be drawn somewhere. It would not be kind to go on until my publisher himself cried: "Halt!"
So I shall stop and lock away the pen and paper—lock them hard and fast, because so many charming, so many famous people came within my knowledge in the next few years that the temptation to gossip about them is hard to resist. But to those patient ones, who have listened to this story of a little maid's clamber upward toward the air and sunshine, that God meant for us all, I send greeting, as, between mother and husband, with the inevitable small dog on my knee, I prepare to lock the desk—I pause just to kiss my hands to you and say Au revoir!
THE END