 | VI. In The Bishop's Carriage |  |
6. VI.
I got into the train, Mag, the happiest girl in all the country. I'd a big basket of things for Tom. I was got up in my Sunday best, for I wanted to make a hit with some fellow with a key up there, who'd make things soft and easy for my Tommy.
I had so much to tell him. I knew just how I'd take off every member of the company to amuse him. I had memorized every joke I'd heard since I'd got behind the curtain — not very hard for me; things always had a way of sticking in my mind. I knew the newest songs in town, and the choruses of all the old ones. I could show him the latest tricks with cards — I'd got those at first hand from Professor Haughwout. You know how great Tom is on tricks. I could explain the disappearing woman mystery, and the mirror cabinet. I knew the clog dance that Dewitt and Daniels do. I had pictures of the trained seals, the great elephant act, Mademoiselle Picotte doing her great tightrope
Yes, it was a whole vaudeville show, with refreshments between the acts, that I was taking up to Tom Dorgan. I don't care much for a lot of that truck — funny, isn't it, how you get to turn up your nose at the things you'd have given a finger for once upon a time? But Tom — oh, I'd got everything pat for him — my big, handsome Tom Dorgan in stripes — with his curls all shaved off — ugh!
I'd got just so far in my thoughts, sitting there in the train, when I gave a shiver. I thought for a minute it was at the idea of my Tom with one of those bare, round convict-heads on him, that look like fat skeleton faces. But it wasn't. It was —
Guess, Mag.
Moriway.
Both of us thought the same thing of each other for the first second that our eyes met. I could see that. He thought I was caught at last. And I thought he'd been sharp once too often.
And, Mag, it would be hard to say which of us would have been happier if it had been the truth.
He got up and came over to me, smiling wickedly. Se took the seat behind me, and leaning forward, said softly:
“Is Miss Omar engaged to read to some invalid up at Sing Sing? And for how long a term — I should say, engagement?”
I'd got through shivering by then. I was ready for him. I turned and looked at him in that very polite, distant sort o' way Gray uses in her act when the Charity superintendent speaks to her. It's the only decent thing she does; chances are that that's how Lord Gray's mother looks at her.
“You know my sister, Mr. — Mr. — ” I asked humbly.
He looked at me, perplexed for just a second.
“Sister be hanged!” he said at last. “I know you, Nat, and I'm glad to my finger-tips that you've got it in the neck, in spite of all your smartness.”
“You're altogether wrong, sir,” I said very stately, but hurt a bit, you know. “I've often been taken for my sister, but gentlemen usually
He grinned.
“Liars should have good memories,” he sneered. “Miss Omar said she was an orphan, you remember, and had not a relative in the world.”
“Did she say that? Did Nora say that?” I exclaimed piteously. “Oh, what a little liar she is! I suppose she thought it made her more interesting to be so alone, more appealing to kind-hearted gentlemen like yourself. I hope she wasn't ungrateful to you, too, as she was to that kind Mr. Latimer, before he found her out. And she had such a good position there, too!”
I wanted to look at him, oh, I wanted to! But it was my rôle to sit there with downcast eyes, just — the picture of holy grief. I was the good one — the good, shocked sister, and though I wasn't a bit afraid of anything he could do to me, or any game he could put up, I yearned to make him believe me — just because he was so suspicious, so wickedly smart, so sure he was on.
But his very silence sort of told me he almost believed, or that he was laying a trap.
“Will you tell me,” he said, “how you — your sister got Latimer to lie for her?”
“Mr. Latimer — lie! Oh, you don't know him. He expected a lady to read to him that very evening. He had never seen her, and when Nora walked into the garden — ”
“After getting a skirt somewhere.”
“Yes — the housekeeper's, it happened to be her evening out — why, he just naturally supposed Nora was Miss Omar.”
“Ah! then her name isn't Omar. What might it be?”
“I'd rather not tell — if you don't mind.”
“But when Latimer found out she had the diamonds — he did find out?”
“She confessed to him. Nora's not really so bad a girl as — ”
“Very interesting! But it doesn't happen to be Latimer's version. And you say Latimer wouldn't lie.”
I got pale — but the paleness was on the inside of me. Think I was going to flinch before a chump like Moriway, even if I had walked straight into his trap?
“It isn't?” I exclaimed.
“No. Latimer's note to Mrs. Kingdon said the diamonds were found in the bell-boy's jacket the thief had left behind him.”
“Well! It only shows what a bad habit lying is. Nora must have fibbed to me, for the pure pleasure of fibbing. I'll never dare to trust her again. Do you believe then that she didn't have anything to do with the hotel robbery? I do hope so. It's one less sin on her wicked head. It's hard, having such a girl in the family!” Oh, wasn't I grieved!
He looked me straight in the eye. I looked at him. I was unutterably sad about that tough sister of mine, and I vow I looked holy then, though I never did before and may never again.
“Well, I only saw her in the twilight,” he said slowly, watching my face all the time. “You two sisters are certainly miraculously alike.”
The train was slowing down, and I got up with my basket. I stood right before him, my full face turned toward him.
“Are we?” I asked simply. “Don't you think it's more the expression than anything else, and the voice? Nora's really much fairer than I am. Good-by.”
He watched me as I went out. I felt his eyes on the back of my jacket, and I was tempted to turn at the door and make a face at him. But I knew something better and safer than that. I waited till the train was just pulling out, and then, standing below his window, I motioned to him to raise it.
He did.
“I thought you were going to get out here,” I called. “Are you sure you don't belong in Sing Sing, Mr. Moriway?”
I can see his face yet, Mag, and every time I think of it, it makes me nearly die of laughing. He had actually been fooled another time. It was worth the trip up there, to make a guy of him once more.
And whether it was or not, Mag, it was all I got, after all. For — would you believe Tom Dorgan would turn out such a sorehead? He's kicked up such a row ever since he got there, that it's the dark cell for him, and solitary confinement. Think of it — for Tom!
I begged, I bluffed, I cried, I coaxed, but many's the Nance Olden that has played her game against the rules of Sing Sing, and lost. They
All the way back I had him in my mind. He's a tiger — Tom — when he's roused. I could see him, shut up there by himself, with not a soul to talk to, with not a human eye to look into, with not a thing on earth to do — Tom, who's action itself! He never was much of a thinker, and I never saw him read even a newspaper. What would he do to kill the time? Can't you see him there, at bay, back on his haunches, cursing and cursed, alone in the everlasting black silence?
I saw nothing else. Wherever I turned my eyes, that terrible picture was before me. And always it was just on the verge of becoming something else — something worse. He could throttle the world with his bare hands, if it had but one neck, in the mood he must be in now.
It was when I couldn't bear it a moment longer that I set my mind to find something else to think of.
I found it, Mag. Do you know what it was?
After all, Miss Monahan, this graft of honesty they all preach so much about hasn't anything mysterious in it. All it is, is putting your wits to work according to the rules of the game and not against them. I was driven to it — the thought of big Tom crouching for a spring in the dark cell up yonder sent me whirling out into the thinking place, like the picture of the soul in the big book at Latimer's I read out of. And first thing you know, 'pon honor, Mag, it was as much fun planning how to “earn it now” as any lifting I ever schemed. It's getting the best of people that always charmed me — and here was a way to fool 'em according to law.
So busy I was making it all up, that the train pulled into the station before I knew it. I gave a last thought to that poor old hyena of a Tom, and then put him out of my mind. I had other fish to fry. Straight down to Mother Douty I went with my basket.
“A fool girl, mother, on her way up to Sing Sing, lost her basket, and Nance Olden found it; it ought to be worth a good deal.”
She grinned. You couldn't make old Douty believe that the Lord himself wouldn't steal if He got a chance. And she knows the chances that come butting up against Nancy Olden.
Why did I lie to her? Not for practice, I assure you. She'd have beaten me down to the last cent if she thought it was mine, but she always thinks there'll be a find for her in something that's stolen. So I let her think I'd stolen it in the railway station, and we came to terms.
With what she gave me I bought a wig. Mag, I want you some day, when you can get off, to come and see that wig. I shouldn't wonder but you'd recognize it. It's red, of very coarse hair, but a wonderful color, and so long it — yes, it might be your own, Mag Monahan, it's so much like it. I went to the theater and got my Charity rig, took it home, and sat for hours there just looking at 'em both. When evening came I was ready to “earn it now.”
You see, Obermuller had given me the whole day to be away, and neither Gray nor the other three Charities expected me back. I had to do it on the sly, you sassy Mag! Yes, it was partly because I love to cheat, but more because I was bound to have
I came to the theater in my Charity rig and the wig. It looked as if I'd slept in it, and it came down to the draggled hem of the skirt. All the way there I walked like you, Mag. Once, when a newsboy grinned at me and shouted “Carrots!” I grinned back — your own, old Cruelty grin, Mag. I vow I felt so much like you — as you used to be — that when I lurched out on the stage at last, stumbling over my shoe laces and trying to push the hair out of my eyes, you'd have sworn it was little Mag Monahan I making her début in the Cruelty room.
Oh, Mag, Mag, you darling Mag! Did you ever hear a whole house, a great big theater full of a peevish vaudeville audience, just rise at you, give one roar of laughter they hadn't expected at all to give, and then settle down to giggle at every move you made?
Girl alive, I just had 'em! They couldn't take their eyes of me. If I squirmed, they howled. If I stood on one foot, scratching the torn leg of my stocking with the other — you know, Mag! — they yelled. If I grinned, they just roared.
Oh, Mag, can't you see? Don't you understand? I was It. The center of the stage I carried round with me — it was just Nancy Olden. And for ten minutes Nancy had nothing to do but to play with 'em. 'Pon my life, Mag, it's just like stealing; the old graft exactly; it's so fascinating, so busy, and risky, except that they play the game with you and pay you and love you to fool 'em.
When the curtain fell it was different. Grays followed by the Charities, all clean and spick-and-span and — not in it; not even on the edge of it — stormed up to Obermuller standing at the wings.
“I'll quit the show here and now,” she squawked. “It's a shame, a beastly shame. How dare you play me such a trick, Fred Obermuller? I never was treated so in my life — to have that dirty little wretch come tumbling on like that, without even so much as your telling me you'd made up all this new business for her! It's indecent, anyway. Why, I lost my cue. There was a gap for a full minute. The whole act was such a ghastly failure that I — ”
“That you'd better go out now and make your prettiest bow, Gray. Phew! Listen to the house roar. That's what I call applause. Go on now.”
She went.
Me? I didn't say a word. I looked at Obermuller and — and I just did like this. Yes, winked, Mag Monahan. I was so crazily happy I had to, didn't I?
But do you know what he did? Do you know what he did?
Well, I suppose I am screaming and the Troyons will put me out, but — he just — winked — back!
And then Gray came trailing back into the wings, and the shrieking and thumping and whistling out in front just went on — and on — and on — and on. Um! I just listened and loved it — every thump of it. And I stood there like a demure little kitten; or more like Mag Monahan after she'd had a good licking, and was good and quiet. And I never so much as budged till Obermuller said:
“Well, Nance, you have earned it. The gall of you! But it only proves that Fred Obermuller never yet bought a gold brick. Only, let me in on your racket next time. There, go on — take it. It's yours.”
Oh, to have Fred Obermuller say things like that to you!
He gave me a bit of a push. 'Twas just a love-pat. I stumbled out on to the stage.
| VI. In The Bishop's Carriage | |