But the appearance of those unholy portraits came without warning, and did their work thoroughly. Even if it had not been that every child in the institute could recognize that well-known countenance, a still more damning disclosure came in the prompt denunciation of the fraud by the “Indignant Theatre Goer” with a long memory, who wrote to the local paper to protest against the profanation, as he put it, of the features of a peerless Mrs. Fortescue, once an ornament of the stage, and now dwelling in retirement in ’Quawket. Ordinary, common, plain, every-day gossip did the rest.
Mrs. Fortescue saw the posters on her way to Tophill, but she dauntlessly presented herself at the portal. She got no further. The principal interposed himself between her and his shades of innocents, and he addressed that creature of false pretenses in scathing language—or it might have scathed if the good man had not been so angry that he talked falsetto. It did not look as if there were much in the situation for Mrs. Fortescue, but it would be a strange situation out of which the lady could not extract just the least little bit of acting. She drew herself up in majestic indignation, hurled the calumnies back at the astonished principal, and with a magnificent threat to bring Mr. Filley right to the spot to utterly overwhelm and confute him, she swept away, leaving the Institute looking two sizes smaller, and its principal looking no particular size at all.
* * *
And, what is more, she did, for her magnificent dramatic outburst made her fairly acting-drunk. She could not help herself; she was inebriated with the exuberance of her own verbosity, to use a once famous phrase, and she simply had to go off on a regular histrionic bat.
She went straight off to the old Filley Manor House at the extreme end of ’Quawket township; she bearded the millionaire builder in his great cool, darkened office, among his mighty plans and elevations and mysterious models, and she told that great man the whole story of her imposture with such a torrent of comic force, with such marvelous mimicry of the plain-spoken Mrs. Filley and the prim principal, and with so humorous an introduction of the champagne episode that her victim lay back in his leather arm-chair, slapped his sturdy leg, roared out mighty peals of laughter, told her she was the most audacious little woman in the whole hemisphere, and that he never heard of anything so funny in his life, and that he’d call down any number of damn schoolmasters if she wanted him to.
“I don’t see how we can arrange a retroactive, Ma’am; I’m a little too old for that sort of thing, I’m afraid. But I’ll tell you what I can do. I’ll send my agent at once to take the child out of school, and I’ll see that my man doesn’t give him any satisfaction or a chance for explanation.
“Why, damn it!” concluded the hearty Mr. Filley; “if I ever see the little prig I’ll tell him I think it is a monstrous and great condescension on your part to let yourself be known as the wife of a plain old fellow like me. Why doesn’t a man know a handsome woman when he sees her?”
“Then I am forgiven for all my wickedness?” said Mrs. Fortescue—but, oh! how she said it!
