"Well, Ray! Have you forgotten the way to the other side of your head, or are you enchanted for a hundred years? I shall want the gla.s.s to-morrow morning."

Ray roused up from her abstraction.

"I was thinking," she said.

"Yes'm. I suppose you'll be always thinking now. You had just outgrown that trick, a little. It was the affliction of my childhood; and now it's got to begin again. 'Don't talk, Dot; I'm thinking.' Good-by."

There was half a whimper in Dorothy's last word.

"Dot! You silly little thing!"

And Rachel came over to the bedside, and put her arms round Dorothy, all crumpled as she was into a little round white ball.

"I was thinking about Marion Kent."

CHAPTER XVI.

RECOMPENSE.

That night, Marion Kent was fifty miles off, in the great, mixed-up, manufacturing town of Loweburg.

She had three platform dresses now,--the earnings of some half-dozen "evenings." The sea-green silk would not do forever, in place after place; they would call her the mermaid. She must have a quiet, elegant black one, and one the color of her hair, like that she had seen the pretty actress, Alice Craike, so bewitching in. She could deepen it with chestnut tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, all toning up together to one rich, bright harmony. Her hair was "_blond cendre_,"--not the red-golden of Alice Craike's; but the same subtle rule of art was available; "_cafe-au-lait_" was her shade; and the darker velvet just deepened and emphasized the effect.

She was putting this dress on to-night, with some brown and golden leaves in the high, ma.s.sed braids of her hair. She certainly knew how to make a picture of herself; she was just made to make a picture of.

The hotel waitress who had brought up her tea on a tray, had gone down with a report that Miss Kent was "stunning;" and two or three housemaids and a number of little boys were vibrating and loitering about the hall and doorway below, watching for her to come down to her carriage. It was just as good, so far as these things went, as if she had been Mrs. Kemble, or Christine Nilsson, or anybody.

And Marion, poor child, had really got no farther than "these things," yet. She reached, for herself, to just what she had been able to appreciate in others. She had taken in the housemaid and small-boy view of famousness, and she was having her shallow little day of living it. She had not found out, yet, how short a time that would last. "Verily," it was said for us all long ago, "ye shall have each your reward," such as ye look and labor for.

One great boy was waiting for her, _ex officio_, and without disguise,--the President of the Lyceum Club, before which she was to read to-night.

He sat serenely in the reception-room, ready to hand her to her carriage, and accompany her to the hall.

The little boys observed him with exasperation. The housemaids dropped their lower jaws with wonder, when she swept down the staircase; her _cafe-au-lait_ silk rolling and glittering behind her, as if the breakfast for all Loweburg were pouring down the Phoenix Hotel stairs.

The President of the People's Lyceum Club heard the rustle of elegance, and met her at the stair-foot with bowing head and bended arm.

That was a beautiful, triumphant moment, in which she crossed the s.p.a.ce between the staircase and the door, and went down over the sidewalk to the hack. What would you have? There could not have been more of it, in her mind, though all Loweburg were standing by. She was Miss Kent, going out to give her Reading. What more could f.a.n.n.y Kemble do?

Around the hall doors, when they arrived, other great boys were gathered. She was pa.s.sed in quickly, to the left, through some pa.s.sages and committee rooms, to the other end of the building, whence she would enter, in full glory, upon the platform.

She came in gracefully; a little breezy she could not help being; it was the one movement of the universe to her at that moment, her ten steps across the platform,--her little half bow, half droop, before the applauding audience,--the taking up of the bouquet laid upon her table,--her smile, with a scarcely visible inclination again,--and the sitting down among those waves of amber that rose up shining in the gas-light, about her, as she subsided among her silken draperies.

She was imitative; she had learned the little outsides of her art well; but you see the art was not high.

It was the same with her reading. She had had drill enough to make her elocution pa.s.sable; her voice was clear and sweet; she had a natural knack, as we have seen, for speaking to the galleries. When there was a sensational, dramatic point to make, she could make it after her external fashion, strongly. The deep magnetism--the electric thrill of soul-reality--these she had nothing to do with.

Yet she read some things that thrilled of themselves; the very words of which, uttered almost anyhow, were fit to bring men to their feet and women to tears, with sublimity and pathos. Somebody had helped her choose effectively, and things very cunningly adaptive to herself.

The last selection for the first part of her reading to-night was Mrs. Browning's "Court Lady."

"Wear your fawn-colored silk when you read this," Virginia Levering had counseled.

Her self-consciousness made the first lines telling.

"Her hair was tawny with gold,--her eyes with purple were dark; Her cheeks pale opal burned with a red and restless spark."

Her head, bright with its golden-dusty waves and braids, leaned forward under the light as she uttered the words; her great, gray-blue eyes, deepening with excitement to black, lifted themselves and looked the crowd in the face; the color mounted like a crimson spark; she glowed all over. Yes, over; not up, nor through; but some things catch from the outside. A flush and rustle ran over the faces, and the benches; she felt that every eye was upon her, lit up with an admiring eagerness, that answered to her eagerness to be admired.

O, this was living! There was a pulse and a rush in this! Marion Kent _was_ living, with all her nature that had yet waked up, at that bewildering and superficial moment.

But she has got to live deeper. The Lord, who gave her life, will not let her off so. It will come. It is coming.

We know not the day nor the hour; though we go on as if we knew all things and were sure.

At this very instant, there is close upon you, Marion Kent, one of those lightning shafts that run continually quivering to and fro about the earth, with their net-work of fire, in this storm of life under which we of to-day are born. All the air is tremulous with quick, converging nerves; concentrating events, bringing each soul, as it were, into a possible focus continually, under the forces that are forging to bear down upon it. There are no delays,--no respites of ignorance. Right into the midst of our most careless or most selfish doing, comes the summons that arrests us in the Name of the King.

"She rose to her feet with a spring.

_That_ was a Piedmontese! And this is the Court of the King!"

She was upon her feet, as if the impulse of the words had lifted her; she had learned by rote and practice when and how to do it; she had been poised for the action through the reading of all those last stanzas.

She did it well. One hand rested by the finger-tips upon the open volume before her; her glistening robes fell back as she gained her full height,--she swayed forward toward the a.s.sembly that leaned itself toward her; the left hand threw itself back with a n.o.ble gesture of generous declaring; the fingers curving from the open palm as it might have been toward the pallet of the dead soldier at her side. She was utterly motionless for an instant; then, as the applause broke down the silence, she turned, and grandly pa.s.sed out along the stage, and disappeared.

Within the door of the anteroom stood a messenger from the hotel. He had a telegraph envelope in his hand; he put it into hers.

She tore it open,--not thinking, scarcely noticing; the excitement of the instant just past moved her nerves,--no apprehension of what this might be.

Then the lightning reached her: struck her through and through.

"Your ma's dying: come back: no money."

Those last words were a mistake; the whole dispatch, in its absurd homeliness and its pitiless directness, was the work of old Mrs.

Knoxwell, the blacksmith's wife, used to hammers and nails, and believing in good, forceful, honest ways of doing things; feeling also a righteous and neighborly indignation against this child, negligent of her worn and lonely mother; "skitin' about the country, makin' believe big and famous. She would let her know the truth, right out plain; it would be good for her."

What she had meant to write at the end was "Pneumonia;" but spelling it "Numoney," it had got transmitted as we have seen.

It struck Marion through and through; but she did not feel it at first. It met the tide of her triumph and elation full in her throbbing veins; and the two keen currents turned to a mere stillness for a moment.

Then she dropped down where she was, all into the golden ma.s.s and shine of her bright raiment, with her hands before her eyes, the paper crumpled in the clinch of one of them.

The President of the People's Lyceum Club made a little speech, and dismissed the audience. "Miss Kent had received by telegraph most painful intelligence from her family; was utterly unable to appear again."

The audience behaved as an American People's Club knows so well how to behave; dispersed quietly, without a grumble, or a recollection of the half value of the tickets lost. Miss Kent's carriage drove rapidly from a side door. In two hours, she was on board the night train down from Vermont.