But although the marquis and his lady had no further interest in subsequent events, growing out of their brief sojourn on earth, the contents of the will afforded a theme of gossip for the living and molded the affairs of one in new shape and manner. On the same day this public exposition appeared, Barnes and the young actress were seated in the law office of Marks and Culver, a room overlooking a court-yard, brightened by statues and urns of flowers. A plaster bust of Justinian gazed benignly through the window at a fountain; a steel engraving of Jeremy Bentham watched the butterflies, and Hobbes and John Austin, austere in portraiture, frowned darkly down upon the flowering garden. While the manager and Constance waited for the attorney to appear, they were discussing, not for the first time, the proviso of the will to which Straws had regretfully alluded.
“Yes,” said Barnes, folding the newspaper which contained Straws’ article and placing it in his pocket; “you should certainly give up the stage. We must think of the disappointments, the possible failure, the slender reward. There was your mother––such an actress!––yet toward the last the people flocked to a younger rival. I have often thought anxiously of your future, for I am old––yes, there is no denying it!––and any day I may leave you, dependent solely upon yourself.”
“Do not speak like that,” she answered, tenderly. “We shall be together many, many years.”
“Always, if I had my way,” he returned, heartily.
“But with this legacy you are superior to the fickle public. In fact, you are now a part of the capricious public, my dear,” he added in a jocular tone, “and may applaud the ‘heavy father,’ myself, or prattle about prevailing styles while the buskined tragedian is strutting below your box. Why turn to a blind bargain? Fame is a jade, only caught after our illusions are gone and she seems not half so sweet as when pursuing her in our dreams!”
But as he spoke, with forced lightness, beneath which, however, the young girl could readily detect the vein of anxiety and regret, she was regarding him with the clear eyes of affection. His face, seamed with many lines and bearing the deeply engraved handwriting of time, spoke plainly of declining years; every lineament was eloquent with vicissitudes endured; and as she discerningly read that varied past of which her own brief career had been a part, there entered her mind a brighter picture of a tranquil life for him at last, where in old age he could exchange uncertainty and activity for security and rest. How could she refuse to do as he desired? How often since fate had wrought this change in her life had she asked herself the question?
Her work, it is true, had grown dearer to her than ever; of late she had thrown herself into her task with an ardor and earnestness lifting each portrayal to a higher plane. Is it that only with sorrow comes the fulness of art; that its golden gates are never swung entirely open to the soul bearing no burden?