More "Short Sixes"

by H. C. Bunner

All the other old ladies said that Mrs. Fortescue was a daughter of 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.

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.

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.