He entered Thornburg’s office. His manner was decidedly lugubrious.
The manager held out his hand expansively. “You’ve come to congratulate me,” he said. And then he took in Baron’s mood.
“Oh, I see!” he went on. “There’s something that needs explaining. I played fair with you all right, Baron. You see, I was in the dark myself, in some ways.”
He took occasion to light a cigar, which he puffed at absent-mindedly. “Just before Bonnie May showed up here—when you got hold of her—I learned that her mother had died. It had been kept from me. You see, I was sending the mother money. And when the little one was only a year or so old I got a letter from her mother offering to give her up to me. I’ve told you what happened then. I—I couldn’t take her. Then I got another letter from the mother saying she was turning Bonnie May over to her sister for the time being, and that I was to send the remittances to her. That was Miss Barry.
“I believed the arrangement was only temporary. I didn’t understand it, of course. But when several years went by I began to suspect that something was wrong. I didn’t like Miss Barry. She was never the woman her sister was. She was—well, the brazen sort of woman. I wasn’t willing to leave the little daughter with her any longer. I wrote to her and told her she might send Bonnie May to me, if she cared to, but that there weren’t to be any more remittances. I thought that would fetch her. I meant to put the little daughter in a home or a school somewhere. And then they blew in here, and you got her—and your getting her was just the thing I wanted.”
An incandescent light on the manager’s desk winked once and again. “The curtain’s going up,” he informed Baron, and the latter hurried back to his seat.
As he entered the box a flood of cold air from the stage swept over the audience. And when his mother shivered slightly he observed that Peter Addis, sitting immediately behind her, quietly leaned forward and lifted a quilted satin wrap from a chair, placing it deftly about her shoulders.
She yielded with a nestling movement and with a backward flash of grateful recognition which told a story of their own.
The audience was stilled again as the second setting was revealed—“the home of the autumn leaves.” Here was a masterpiece of designing and painting, Baron realized. A house was being constructed for the Sprite. Much disputation arose. The sort of talk which precedes the planning of a home was heard—save that the terms were grotesquely altered. Then the action was complicated by the arrival of a band of vikings, driven ashore by a gale.
And then Baron, too, forgot that Bonnie May was a human being, as Baggot seemed to have done, and was lost in the ingenious whimsicality of the play.