Marie Van Vorst - The Girl From His Town

He could see that in his box the boy sat transfixed and absorbed. Dan went out in the second entr’acte and was absent when the curtain went down. Ruggles, as well, left before the performance was over, to make his way outside the theater to the stage exit, where there was already gathered a little group, looked after by a couple of policemen. Close to the curb a gleaming motor waited, the footman at its door. Ruggles buttoned his coat up to his chin and took his place close to the door, over which the electric light showed the words “Stage Entrance.” A poor woman elbowed him, her shabby hat adorned by a scraggly plume, a gray shawl wrapped round her shoulders. A girl or two, who might have been flower sellers in Piccadilly in the daytime, a couple of toughs, a handful of other vagrants smelling of gin, a decent man in working clothes, a child in his arms, formed the human hedge Letty Lane was to pass between – a singular group of people to spend an hour hanging about the streets at the exit of a theater well toward midnight. So the naïve Ruggles thought, and better understood the appearance of the young fellows in evening clothes who hovered on the extreme edge of the little crowd. Dan, however, was not of these.

“Look sharp, Cissy,” the workingman spoke to his child, holding her well up. “When she comes hout she’ll pass close to yer, and you sing hout, ‘God bless yer.’”

“Yes, Dad, I will,” shrilled the child.

The woman in the gray shawl drew it close about her. “Aw she’s a true lidy, all right, ain’t she? I expect you’ve had some kindness off her as well?”

The man nodded over the child’s shoulder. “Used to be a scene shifter, and Miss Lane found out about my little girl last year – not this lass, not Cissy, Cissy’s sister – and she sent ’er to a place where it costs the eyes out of yer head. She’s gettin’ well fast, and we, none of us, has seen her or spoken to Miss Lane. She doesn’t know our names.”

And the woman answered: “She does a lot like that. She’s got a heart bigger’n her little body.”

And a big boy in the front row said back to the others: “Well, she makes a mint of money.”

And the woman who had spoken before said: “She gives it nearly all to the poor.”

Ruggles was evidently on the poor side of the waiting crowd; the handful of riffraff around him with its stench of dirt and gin. A better looking set collected opposite and there was the gleam of white shirt fronts.

“Now, there she comes,” the father saw her first. “Sing out, Cissy.”

The door opened and a figure quickly floated from it, like a white rose blown out into the foggy darkness. It floated down the few steps to the street between the double row of spectators. A white cloak entirely covered the actress. Her head was hidden by a white scarf, and she almost ran the short gantlet to her motor, between the cries of “God bless you!” – “Three cheers for Letty Lane” – “God bless you, lady!” She didn’t speak or heed, however, or turn her head, but held her scarf against her face, and the man who slowly lounged behind her to the car, and put her in and got in after her, was not the man Joshua Ruggles had waited there to see. He hung about until the footman had sprung up and the car moved softly away, the stage entrance door shut, then he followed along with the crowd, with the few faithful ones who had waited an hour in the cold mist to cry out their applause, not to a singer in Mandalay but to a woman’s heart.

The Duchess of Breakwater was not sure how close Dan Blair’s thoughts were to marriage, but the boy from Montana was the easiest prey that had come across the beautiful and unscrupulous woman’s range. He had told her that he stayed on up in London to see a man from home, and when after four days he still lingered in town, she found his absence unbearable, and sent him a wire so worded that if he had a spark of interest in her he must immediately return to the Park. She had never been more lovely than when Dan found her waiting for him.

She had ordered tea in her sitting-room. She told him that he looked frightfully seedy, asked him what he had been doing and why he had stopped so long away, and Blair told her that old Ruggles, his father’s friend, had run over to see him with a lot of papers for Dan to read and sign and closed with a smile, telling her that he guessed she “didn’t know much about business.”

“I only know the horrid things of business – debts, and loans, and bills, and fussing.”

“Those things are not business,” Dan answered wisely; “they are just common or garden carelessness.”

She asked him why he had not brought Ruggles out to Osdene, and he told her he couldn’t have done a stroke of work with the old boy down here at the Park.

Stirring his tea, he appreciated the duchess. The agreeable picture she made impressed him mightily.

“Do you know,” he asked suddenly, “what you make me think of?”

And she responded softly: “No, dear.”

“A box of candy. This room with its stuffed walls, and you in it are good enough – ”

“To eat?” she laughed aloud. “Oh, you perfectly killing creature, what an idea!”

And as he met her eyes with his clear ones, with a simplicity she could never hope to reach, he put his tea-cup down; and as he did so the duchess observed his strong hands, their vigor, well-kept and muscular, but not the dandified hands of the man who goes often to the manicure.

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