The Story of a Play / A Novel

by William Dean Howells

XIX.

Louise came home in high spirits. The world seemed to have begun to move again. It was full of all sorts of gay hopes, or at least she was, and she was impatient to impart them to Maxwell. Now she decided that her great office in his life must be to cheer him up, to supply that spring of joyousness which was so lacking in him, and which he never could do any sort of work without. She meant to make him go into society with her. It would do him good, and he would shine. He could talk as well as Mr. Ray, and if he would let himself go, he could be as charming.

She rushed in to speak with him, and was vexed to find a strange man sitting in the parlor alone. The stranger rose at her onset, and then, when she confusedly retreated, he sank into his chair again. She had seen him black against the window, and had not made out any feature or expression of his face.

The maid explained that it was a gentleman who had called to see Mr. Maxwell earlier in the day, and the last time had asked if he might sit down and wait for him. He had been waiting only a few minutes.

"But who is he?" demanded Louise, with a provisional indignation in case it should be a liberty on some unauthorized person's part. "Didn't he give you a card?"

He had given the girl a card, and she now gave it to Mrs. Maxwell. It bore the name Mr. Lawrence Sterne, which Louise read with much the same emotion as if it had been Mr. William Shakespeare. She suspected what her husband would have called a fake of some sort, and she felt a little afraid. She did not like the notion of the man's sitting there in her parlor while she had nobody with her but the girl. He might be all right, and he might even be a gentleman, but the dark bulk which had risen up against the window and stood holding a hat in its hand was not somehow a gentlemanly bulk, the hat was not definitively a gentleman's hat, and the baldness which had shone against the light was not exactly what you would have called a gentleman's baldness. Clearly, however, the only thing to do was to treat the event as one of entire fitness till it proved itself otherwise, and Louise returned to the parlor with an air of lady-*like inquiry, expressed in her look and movement; if this effect was not wholly unmixed with patronage, it still was kind.

"I am sorry," she said, "that my husband is out, and I am sorry to say that I don't know just when he will be at home." She stood and the man had risen again, with his portly frame and his invisible face between her and the light again. "If I could be of any use in giving him a message—" She stopped; it was really sending the man out of the house, and she could not do that; it was not decent. She added, "Or if you don't mind waiting a few minutes longer—"

She sat down, but the man did not. He said: "I can't wait any longer just now; but if Mr. Maxwell would like to see me, I am at the Coleman House." She looked at him as if she did not understand, and he went on: "If he doesn't recall my name he'll remember answering my advertisement, some weeks ago in the Theatrical Register, for a play."

"Oh yes!" said Louise. This was the actor whom she had written to on behalf of Maxwell. With electrical suddenness and distinctness she now recalled the name, L. Sterne, along with all the rest, though the card of Mr. Lawrence Sterne had not stirred her sleeping consciousness. She had always meant to tell Maxwell what she had done, but she was always waiting for something to come of it, and when nothing came of it, she did not tell; she had been so disgusted at the mere notion of answering the man's advertisement. Now, here was the man himself, and he had to be answered, and that would probably be worse than answering his advertisement. "I remember," she said, provisionally, but with the resolution to speak exactly the truth; "I wrote to you for Mr. Maxwell," which did not satisfy her as the truth ought to have done.

"Well, then, I wish you would please tell him that I didn't reply to his letter because it kept following me from place to place, and I only got it at the Register office this morning."