blushed to his ears as he bestowed the flowers upon the stranger, who first motioned the others back and then acknowledged the tribute alone with profound courtesies to Mrs. Vickery and to unseen and unheard plauditors at the right and left. Her smile was the bizarre parody of innocence imitating sophistication. Then she threw off the mien of artifice and became informal and a child again. The game was evidently over.
Mrs. Vickery, realizing now that she was the belated audience at a tragedy, assumed her most lion-hunting manner and pleaded, meekly, “Won’t somebody please introduce me to Mrs. Siddons!”
Dorothy gasped with amazement and gulped with amusement at her mother’s stupidity. But before she could make the presentation the stranger cried:
“Oh, how did you know?”
“Know what, my dear?”
“That my name was Siddons!”
“Is it, really? But I was referring to the famous actress. She’s been dead for a hundred years, I think.”
“Oh yes, but I’m named after her. My middle name is Mrs. Siddons—of course I mean just Siddons. I’m a linyural descender from her.”
Dorothy broke in, seriously enough now: “Why, Sheila Kemble, how you talk! You know you’re no such thing. Your name is Kemble. Isn’t it, Clyde?”
Clyde nodded and Dorothy exclaimed, “Yah!”
Dorothy had not the faintest idea who Mrs. Siddons might be, save that she was evidently a person of distinction, but Dorothy had a child’s ferocious resentment at seeing any one else obtaining prestige under false pretenses. Sheila regarded her with a grandmotherly pity and answered:
“My name is Kemble, yes; but if you know so much, Miss Smarty-cat, you ought to know that Mrs. Siddons’s name was Miss Kemble before she married Mr. Siddons.” And now in her turn she added the deadly “Yah!”
Mrs. Vickery, in the office of peacemaker, tried to change the subject: “ ‘Sheila’—what a beautiful name!” she cried. “It’s Irish, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes, ma’am. My papa says that if you’re a great actor you have to have a streak of either Irish or Jew in you!”
“Indeed! And is your father a great actor?”
“Is he? Ask him!”
Mrs. Vickery was tormented with an intuitional suspicion that she was in the presence of a stage-child. She had never met one on the hither side of the footlights. It was uncanny to stumble upon it dressed like other children and playing among them as a child. There was a kind of weirdness about the encounter as if she had found a goblin or a pixie in the living-room, or a waif suspected of scarlet fever.
It was she and not the pixie that felt the embarrassment! The first defense of a person in confusion is usually a series of questions, and Mrs. Vickery was reduced to asking:
“What sort of plays does your father play?”
“Draw’n-room commerdies mostly. People call ’em Roger Kemble parts.”
Mrs. Vickery spoke with a sudden increase of respect:
“So your father is the great Roger Kemble! And is your mother an actress, too?”
“Is my mother an actress? Why, Mrs. Vickery, didn’t you ever hear of Miss Polly Farren?”
It would have been hard indeed to escape the name of Miss Polly Farren. It was incessantly visible in newspapers and magazines, and on bill-boards in letters a yard high, with colossal portraits attached. Mrs. Vickery had seen Polly Farren act. A girlish, hoydenish thing she was, who made even the women laugh and love her. Mrs. Vickery felt at first a pride in meeting any relative of hers. Then a chill struck her. She lowered her voice lest the children hear:
“But Miss Farren isn’t your mother?”
“Indeed and she is! And I’m her daughter.”
“And Roger Kemble is your father?”
“Yes, indeedy. We’re all each other’s.”
Mrs. Vickery turned dizzy; the room began to roll like a merry-go-round—without the merriment. Sheila, never realizing the whirl she had started, brought it to a sudden and gratifying stop by her next chatter.
“You see, when mamma married papa” (Mrs. Vickery’s relief was audible) “they wanted to travel as Mr. and Mrs. Kemble, but the wicked old manager objected. He said mamma’s name was a household word, and she was worth five hunderd a week as Polly Farren and she wasn’t worth seventy-five as Mrs. Kemble.”
Mrs. Vickery, whose husband was proud of his hundred a week, was awestruck at the thought of a woman who earned five hundred.
Of course it was wicked money, but wasn’t there a lot of it? She was reassured wonderfully, and, though a trifle tinged with shame for her curiosity, she baited the child with another question:
“And have you been on the stage, too?”
“Indeed, I have! Oh yes, Mrs. Vickery. I was almost born on the stage—they tell me. I don’t ’member much about it myself. But I ’member bein’ carried on when I was very young. They tell me I behaved perf’ly beau’fully. And then once I was one of the little princes that got smothered in the Tower, at a benefit, and then once we childern gave a childern’s performance of ‘The Rivals.’ And I was Mrs. Mallerpop.”
Mrs. Vickery shook her head over her in pity and sighed, “You poor child!”
Sheila gasped, “Oh, Mrs. Vickery!” Her eyes were enlarged with wonder and protest as if she had been struck in the face.
Mrs. Vickery hastened to explain: “To be kept up so late, I mean: and—and—weren’t you frightened to death of all those people?”
“Frightened? Why, they wouldn’t hurt me. They always applauded me and said, ‘Oh, isn’t she sweet!’ ”
Mrs. Vickery had read much about the woes of factory children and of the little wretches who toil in the coal-mines, and she had heard of the agitation to forbid the appearance of children on the stage. The tradition of misery was so strong that she was blinded for the moment to the extraordinary beauty, vigor, and vivacity of this example. She felt sorry for her.
Sheila had encountered such mysterious pity once or twice before and she flamed to resent it. But even as eloquence rushed to her lips she remembered her mother’s last words as she kissed her good-by—they had been an injunction to be polite at all costs.
The struggle to defend her mother’s glory and to obey her mother’s self-denying ordinance was so bitter that it squeezed a big tear out of each big eye.
Mrs. Vickery, seeming to divine the secret of her plight, cuddled her to her breast with a gush of affectionate homage. Reassured by this surrender, Sheila became again a child.
And now Dorothy, with that professional jealousy which actors did not invent and do not monopolize, that jealousy which is seen in animals and read of in gods—Dorothy stood aloof and pouted at the invader of her
