He was practising, and Iris heard him walking back and forth, playing with mechanical precision. She shuddered at the sound of it, for, strangely enough, she was conscious of bitter resentment against Lynn. His hand had destroyed her dream and levelled it to the dust. In the darkness, she had leaned, insensibly, upon the writer of the letters, and now she knew that it was only Lynn—Lynn, who had no heart.
There comes a time to most of us, when the single prop gives way and, absolutely alone, we either stand or fall. In the hard school of life, sooner or later, one learns self-reliance. Iris began to perceive that, in the end, she could depend upon no one but herself.
With a sigh, she turned to the papers once more. There was the report of the detective whom Aunt Peace had engaged at the beginning, voluminous, and obscured by legal phrases. Two or three letters, bearing upon the subject, were attached to it. In the bottom of the box were a wide, showy band of gold which, presumably, had been her mother’s wedding ring, and two photographs.
One was of a man whose weakness was indelibly stamped upon every feature—the low, narrow forehead, the eyes slanting inward, the full lips, and receding chin. On the back of it, Aunt Peace had written: “Supposed to be her father.” Looking at it, Iris wondered how her mother could have cared for a man like that—weak and frankly sensuous. Yet there was an air of gay carelessness about the picture, a sort of friendly camaraderie, distantly related to those genial ways which stamp a higher grade of man as “a good fellow.”
Over the other photograph, she lingered long. The first Iris Temple was pictured in the panoply of a stage queen. The crown of paste brilliants upon her head, the tawdry gown, elaborately trimmed with tinsel, and the gilded sceptre were all discredited by the face. Beneath its mask of artificiality was a woman, a very human woman, impulsive, eager, and loving, whose trustful eyes looked straight at Iris with intimate comprehension. Plainly, the life of the stage was not to her taste; she hungered, as every normal woman hungers, for the quiet hearthstone and the simple joys of home.
In all her dreams of her mother, Iris had never imagined her like this, and yet she was not disappointed. At times, looking back upon her miserable childhood, she had bitterly blamed her for it, but now, for the first time, she understood. “Poor little mother,” said Iris, “you did the very best you could.”
If things had been different, she and her mother could have had a little home of their own. Rebellion was hot in the girl’s heart, when she suddenly remembered something Fräulein Fredrika had said long ago. “Wherever one may be, that is the best place. The dear God knows.”
She folded up the papers and put them back in the box, with the photographs and the wedding ring. For the moment, she wondered what her real name might be, for Iris Temple was only a stage name. Then she dismissed the matter as of no importance, for she certainly would not care to bear the name of the man who had deserted her mother in her hour of need.
She wondered why Aunt Peace had never given her the papers before, but, after all, what good could it have done? What had she gained by it, even now? In a flash of insight, she saw that she had been given a feeling of definite relationship with the woman in the tawdry stage trappings, who had loved much and suffered more—that though an old grave divided them, she was not quite motherless, not quite alone. For the first time since Aunt Peace was stricken with the fever, balm came into the girl’s sore heart.