CHAPTER XIII.

MISS ST. ALBANS.

AS an individual who, by arduous and unremitting labour--by the sweat of his brow and the ceaseless working of his brain--had contrived to secure for himself a decent income in the present and a moderate provision for the future, Mr. Desmond was of course a fitting mark for the arrows of that free-lance of modern civilization--the begging-letter writer. Men and women whose faces he had never seen wrote him pitiful letters, or impudent letters, as the case might be, urging requests which, if all or even half of them had been granted, would speedily have left him penniless. That he should have those of his own kith or kin--that he should have personal friends, or benefactors of the past with powerful claims upon him in the present--that he should have obligations to discharge, or debts to pay, or artistic tastes to gratify, never entered the heads of these poor needy people. His name and address were in the Directory, and he was supposed to be tolerably well off; so there was no more to do but to procure a sheet of paper and a penny stamp, and entreat of him the loan or donation of any given number of pounds, from five to a hundred.

These applications were as painful to Mr. Desmond as such applications must always be to a man who has power to feel the extent of human want and wretchedness around and about him, without the power to relieve it. He read the piteous letters with a sigh, and passed them over to his sub-editor, who answered every appeal with the same polite formula. Laurence Desmond was not a hard man, however, and to an appeal that came from an old friend or fellow-worker he never turned a deaf ear.

Such an appeal came to him one dull, wintry morning after his return from the ducal château in Scotland. Among his letters there was a very painful one from Mrs. Jerningham, with the usual jealous murmurs, the oft-repeated complaints of neglect. This he read with a thoughtful brow, and laid aside with a sigh so heavy as to be almost a groan.

“I am tired of protestation and justification,” he said to himself; “there must be an end of these letters. If she doubts my truth because I spend half a dozen days without going to her, she can have little power to appreciate the unselfishness of my regard in the three long years in which I have made myself her slave. There must come an end to a bondage that is intolerable to me, and only a source of unhappiness to her.”

The rest of Mr. Desmond’s letters, with one exception, were on business connected with his journal. This one exception was a letter addressed in a hand that was very familiar to him.

“My old coach, Tristram Alford!” he cried, as he tore open the envelope. “I wonder how the poor fellow has been getting on since the old days at Henley, when Max Waldon, Frank Lawsley, and I were there with our boat, reading for ‘Greats.’ I suppose he has been writing a book, or doing a translation of a Greek tragedy, and wants me to give him a lift. It’s a long time since I’ve heard anything of him.”

This was the tutor’s letter:--

“MY DEAR DESMOND,--If I had not already tested and proved the goodness of your heart when I appealed to you some three or four years since for a loan,--which I then hoped would have been of a temporary character, but which, I regret to remember, has not yet been liquidated,--I should not now venture to address you as a suppliant.

“The favour which I am now about to ask is not of a pecuniary kind, and it is a favour which will be very easy for you to grant. You remember my little girl Lucy, who was so fond of your dogs and boats, and who used to sit listening with open eyes and mouth when we were construing _Sophocles_. The little rogue had an innate love of the drama, and performed the part of Electra with a metal tea-pot in a most affecting manner. Well, my dear boy, that inborn dramatic taste, which showed itself when the child was in pinafores, has grown with her growth; and when old enough to consider the question of getting her own living,--the generous-minded child being sensitively averse to remaining a burden to me,--she decided on becoming an actress.

“I need scarcely inform you, my dear Desmond, that such an idea was to me, at the first blush, absolute HORROR; but when my sweet girl urged her predilection for the drama, and reminded me of the handsome fortunes realized by Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Miss O’Neill, and other professors of that classic art, I relented, and allowed Lucy to have her own way. The dear girl had educated herself and reared herself, as it were, with so little help from me, that it would have seemed ill in me to frustrate her hopes by my cold reasoning or timid doubts. Nor had I any very agreeable alternative to offer her. My circumstances have year by year become more embarrassed since that pleasant summer we spent together at Henley, and the home which I can provide for my only child is of the poorest. Was I, then, to stand in the way of her advancement?

“To make a long story short, I yielded, and have since that time devoted my best energies to my dear girl’s service. She is but nineteen, and has already appeared at the Theatres Royal, Stony Stratford, Market Deeping, Oswestry, and Stamford, with considerable success. Her sympathies are with the buskin, rather than with the sock; but at Oswestry she performed the part of Lady Teazle, and received much applause from an appreciative, although somewhat limited, audience.

“We have now essayed a bolder venture. My Lucy has obtained, with inordinate difficulty, a London engagement. I had, in my ignorance of the dramatic world, fondly imagined that a young person of unmistakeable genius had only to apply to the manager of one of the patent theatres, in order to be placed at once upon the boards that Siddons trod. But I find, alas! that in most cases it is only after years of patient and ill-paid drudgery in small provincial towns the dramatic aspirant works his or her way to the metropolis,--nay, indeed, there are many who never reach that splendid goal, but who journey through life as the favourite actor of the Theatre Royal, Market Deeping or Oswestry, and who are not ill-pleased with their renown.

“But to return. My daughter’s engagement will be a brief one; but she is to appear in a wide range of the drama, in conjunction with Mr. Henry de Mortemar, a gentleman of some local celebrity, though as yet unknown to the metropolitan critics. The theatre is an obscure one, and Lucy must speedily return to the drudgery of a provincial stage unless some powerful and friendly hand shall be interposed in her behalf. Yours, my good friend, is the influence which I would solicit for my dear child. A word from you would doubtless immediately secure a profitable engagement at one of the West-end theatres. I beseech you, for the sake of ‘auld lang syne,’ to say that all-powerful word, and to confer a lasting obligation on your poor old friend and tutor,

“TRISTRAM ALFORD.

“_Paul’s Terrace, Islington, Nov. 14, 186--_”

“Poor Alford!” murmured the editor, somewhat touched by the earnestness of this appeal. “So he has allowed his daughter to go on the stage, and cherishes the fond delusion that she must needs be a Siddons or an O’Neill, because she has a childish fancy for gas-lamps and spangled petticoats. Yes, I remember the little girl--an angular chit in brown holland; a nice little girl, I think she was, with pretty, dreamy, blue eyes, and shy, childish ways, but an embryo blue-stocking, nevertheless. I have a faint recollection of her playing at Electra with the tea-pot one night, when she did not know that Waldon and I were looking at her. Well, I’ll do all I can. The West-end managers are _tant soit peu difficile_ now-a-days; but as the _Areopagus_ comes down rather savagely upon the modern drama and its professors now and then, they may strain a point to oblige me. I suppose the most friendly way of going to work would be to call on poor Alford.”

When his morning’s work was over, Mr. Desmond took a hansom from the nearest stand, and rattled up to the topmost heights of Islington, where, after considerable difficulty and aggravating waste of time, the cabman found Paul’s Terrace, a shabby little row of newly built houses, on the road to Ball’s Pond. The tutor, whom Mr. Desmond remembered the occupant of a pretty cottage near Henley, must indeed have fallen upon evil fortunes.

“Mr. Halford ’ave just stepped hout,” said a grimy-looking servant-girl who opened the door; “but he won’t be gone long, sir; which Miss Sent Halbans is in the parlour. P’r’aps you’d like to wait?”

“Well, yes, I think I had better wait,” replied the editor, disinclined to sacrifice his afternoon without benefit to his old friend.

The girl opened a door, and admitted Mr. Desmond into a very small parlour, powerfully perfumed with stale tobacco, and occupied by a young lady, who was standing by the window, with a little book in her hand.

This must of course be the Miss St. Albans of whom the servant had spoken,--a visitor or hanger-on of the old tutor, perhaps. Laurence Desmond wondered how Mr. Alford came to burden himself with a visitor, and how the visitor came by so fine a name.

Miss St. Albans was a fair-haired young lady, with a slight, girlish figure, and one of those faces which some people call “sweetly pretty,” and some only “interesting,”--a tender, winning countenance, with soft blue eyes and lovely mouth, but without the splendour of complexion and feature which attract universal admiration and secure immediate attention. Nor was this young lady’s appearance rendered striking by the art of milliner or mantua-maker. Upon her person, as upon the room she occupied, poverty had set its stamp. She wore a brown merino dress that had seen much service, and her head-dress was of the most unsophisticated order, consisting only of a small forest of curl-papers.

Mr. Desmond wondered to behold this exploded style of head-gear, and wondered still more at the manner of the young person, who started and blushed at sight of him, and then came towards him, with a certain hesitation and timidity that were not unpleasing.

“Mr. Desmond, I think?” she faltered.

“Yes, my name is Desmond.”

“Ah,” murmured the damsel in curl-papers, somewhat regretfully, “I see you have quite forgotten me.”

“Forgotten you! I don’t think that could have been possible, if I had ever had the honour to know you, Miss St. Albans,” replied the editor, smiling very kindly; for there was something in the girl’s candid and yet modest demeanour which pleased this _blasé habitué_ of West-end drawing-rooms.

“_If_ you had ever known me!” cried the young lady, reproachfully. “Then you have quite forgotten Henley, and our boat, and Champion, the Scotch terrier, and----”

“Not at all. I have a lively recollection of Henley and of Champion; but I cannot recall the name of St. Albans.”

“Ah, no, I forgot that the name is strange to you. But I must be very much altered since those happy days, or you would scarcely have forgotten Lucy.”

“Lucy--Lucy Alford!”

“Yes, Mr. Desmond. The Lucy to whom you used to be so kind.”

“Was I kind? You are very good to think so. And you are really Miss Alford, my dear old tutor’s daughter? Let me shake hands in token of our renewed friendship. Yes, I have a vague recollection of a very nice little girl, who had the prettiest blue eyes, and wore the cleanest holland pinafores in Christendom; and I am quite charmed to behold the same young lady, now she has outgrown the pinafores, but not the eyes.”

“You have only a vague recollection of me; yet I knew you directly you stepped out of the cab,” said the girl, in a tone of disappointment.

“Yes, but you are more changed than I, Miss Alford. You must consider what a gulf there is between seven and nineteen; while there is not much outward difference between twenty-three and thirty-five. Thirty-five is only so much dustier, and grayer, and shabbier; like a garment that has been worn and faded by continued hard wear.”

“Indeed you do not look worn and faded,” said the tutor’s daughter, with an involuntary glance at the hot-house flower in the fashionable editor’s faultless overcoat.

“I received a letter from your father this morning, Miss Alford; and I thought my best course would be to answer it in person. I am all the more happy to attend to my old friend’s request because your interests are involved in it.”

Lucy blushed again--not the blush of self-consciousness or coquetry, but the honest red of innocent gratitude and impulsive feeling.

“It was very, very kind of you to come,” she said. “Papa has told me how valuable your time is, and what a high position you hold on the press. He had no idea that you would respond so quickly to his appeal; and--and I am sure I ought to apologize for receiving you in these horrible curl-papers. They are for Pauline.”

“For Pauline!”

“Yes, I play Pauline to-night in the _Lady of Lyons_, you know; and she is always played in ringlets--I don’t exactly know why.”

“Pray do not apologize for the curl-papers. I know there is a prejudice against them; but I really think them becoming in your case. And so you play Pauline to-night? I remember seeing Helen----”

“Oh, please don’t!” cried the girl, with a pretty look of piteous supplication; “every one says that. ‘My dear,’ the ladies at the theatre say to me, ‘I have seen Miss Faucit in that character; and, without wishing to wound your feelings, I am bound to tell you that if you knew how _she_ played the cottage-scene, you would go home and cut your throat.’ At least that’s what Mrs. M’Grudder, who plays old women on the Oswestry circuit, said to me after--after I came off, so pleased at having been applauded.”

“The old harridan! I suppose she is a very great actress herself, this Mrs. M’Grudder.”

“Oh, no; she speaks the broadest, broadest Scotch; and in Lady Macbeth the boys in the gallery laugh at her dreadfully.”

“Then I do not think you need be made unhappy by that lady’s sneers. Are you very fond of acting?”

“I love it dearly, and I hope some day to get on, for papa’s sake. But I find the life of an actress much harder than I thought, and it is very difficult to get on. And I am so nervous.”

“You are afraid of your audience?”

“Oh, no, I don’t so much mind them; it is of the other actors and actresses I am most afraid.”

“Indeed.”

“Yes; they come to the wings and watch me; and then they tell me what they think; and they give me advice; and somehow they always contrive to make me miserable. I am sure sometimes, when I have been playing Ophelia, and have been quite carried away by the part, fancying that I have loved a prince and been forsaken by him, and that my father has been killed, and I am mad, I have happened to look towards the prompt entrance and see Mrs. M’Grudder standing there staring at me in her dreadful stony way, and have heard her say, ‘St--st--st!’ quite loud, and it has made me break down directly. You see, most actors and actresses have been a long time in the profession, and they have a kind of prejudice against amateurs and novices, and try to put them down. Mrs. M’Grudder had two daughters in the theatre, who both wanted to play the juveniles, and I suppose that’s what made her so unkind to me.”

“But I suppose you have done with Mrs. M’Grudder now you have come to London?”

“Oh, no, I fear not. My engagement at the Oxford-road Theatre is only for a fortnight. Mr. Mortemar has taken the house at his own risk, you know, in order to introduce himself to a London public; and when the season is over, I must go back to the country--and most likely to the Oswestry circuit--unless I can get a permanent engagement in town.”

She glanced at Mr. Desmond when she said this, as much as to say, “You are the all-powerful benefactor who can procure for me that inestimable boon.”

Laurence Desmond understood the meaning of that look, and replied to its appeal.

“If any influence of mine can get you the engagement you want, you shall not be long without it,” he said, kindly. “I don’t think you’ll find any Mrs. M’Grudders at the Pall Mall or the Terence.”

Mr. Alford came in while Laurence was saying this. He was an elderly man, and he looked older than he was, by reason of the whiteness of his straggling locks, and the stooping attitude which had become habitual to his tall frame. He was a man who bore upon him the unmistakeable stamp of gentle blood--a man whose good breeding no shabbiness of attire could disguise; and it must be confessed that he was very shabby.

“My dear Desmond,” he cried, delighted to recognize his old pupil, “this is more than kind! I expected kindness from you, but not such promptitude as this.”

“I should be very ungrateful if I were otherwise than prompt, when I remember how well you pulled me through when I was reading for ‘Greats’ twelve years ago,” answered Laurence, heartily. “Miss Alford and I have renewed our old acquaintance, and have become very confidential. I have pledged myself to do my uttermost on her behalf, and if a West-end engagement is her supreme desire, I think I can promise to gratify her wishes through my kind friend Hartstone, of the Theatre Royal, Pall Mall. But I cannot promise to secure her such characters as Pauline or Ophelia. Hartstone is one of the best fellows in Christendom, but he will think he does a good deal for friendship if he gives Miss Lucy some pretty little young-ladylike part in a _lever du rideau_.”

And hereupon Miss Alford murmured that to appear at the Pall Mall would be the honour and delight of her existence, however insignificant the character she might be permitted to perform. After this Mr. Desmond and his old tutor entered upon a very pleasant conversation about the coaching days at Henley, and the three jolly young fellows who had boated and read with Laurence at the Henley villa.

“Poor Max Waldon was ploughed,” said the editor. “He was asked who Saul was. ‘Which Saul?’ asked Max, in that sweetly calm way of his; ‘Saul of Tarsus?’ ‘No, sir; King Saul,’ replied the examiner, sternly. ‘Oh,’ said Max, ‘he was not a bad sort of fellow, only he had a nasty trick of throwing javelins at one.’ And they ploughed him; but he is doing wonders at the Equity bar, notwithstanding. Lawsley died at Pau the year after he took his degree; and I fear the ’Varsity training and pedestrianism had something to do with the decline that carried him off.”

The reminiscences of the Long Vacation seemed by no means unpleasant to Lucy Alford. She took up her work--it was Pauline’s bridal veil that she was patching and darning for the evening’s performance--and sat quietly by while her father and his pupil talked; but every now and then her face kindled, and she looked up with a smile that meant, “I too remember that.”

Mr. Desmond had been sitting in the shabby little lodging-house parlour a long time, when he stole a look at his watch, and was surprised to discover the lateness of the hour.

“I should like to see you play Pauline to-night, Miss Alford,” he said, as he shook hands with his tutor’s daughter.

Lucy blushed, and looked at her father.

“The _Market Deeping Examiner_ compared her to Helen Faucit, Desmond, and I doubt if any lady except Miss Faucit could touch Lucy’s Pauline.”

“Papa, how can you say such things!” cried the girl. “Please do not laugh at him, Mr. Desmond. I like the part of Pauline so much, and--and I should like you to be in the theatre to-night, only I know you will make me nervous.”

“What! do you place me in the same category as Mrs. M’Grudder?”

“O no, no, no! Only----”

“Only what?”

“I should be so anxious to please you; and the more I wished to please you, the more nervous I should be.”

“I suppose that is the penalty I am to pay for my editorial position. Very well, Miss Alford, I shall not say whether I am coming to the theatre to-night; but look out for the _Areopagus_ next Saturday morning, and----”

“And expect a washing,” cried the old tutor, rejoicing in the ’Varsity slang.

“Good-bye, Miss Lucy,” said Laurence, lingering over these adieux just a little more than was necessary. “Oh, by the way, I have not had the pleasure of seeing your friend Miss St. Albans after all. Is she too a member of the dramatic profession?”

Mr. Alford and his daughter laughed heartily at this question.

“The girl has one requisite for comedy if she can laugh like that on the stage,” thought the editor.

“I am Miss St. Albans,” said Lucy; “St. Albans is my stage name, you know. I really thought you understood that just now.”

“Not at all; I fully believed in Miss St. Albans as a separate entity. And so that is your _nom de théâtre_!--rather a high-sounding name, is it not?”

Mr. Alford blushed.

“Well, my dear boy, they like fine names, you see,” he explained, “the managers and the public. In point of fact, they will have something that looks well in the play-bills. St. Albans--De Mortemar: of course the more enlightened public are aware that those are not real names; but they go down, my dear Desmond, they go down.”

“I can only hope that the happiness of Miss Alford may be promoted by the success of Miss St. Albans,” said the editor of the _Areopagus_, as he made his farewell bow to the young lady in curl-papers.

Mr. Alford accompanied him to the street-door, and apologized for his inability to invite his old pupil to dinner.

“The world has not used me too well, Desmond, as you must perceive,” he said; “and yet I have worked my hardest. I have a couple of tragedies in my desk that might conduce to the revival of original dramatic literature in this country; but the ignorance and prejudice of theatrical managers are not easily overcome. I look to my daughter’s genius to elevate the English stage. She is a star, my dear Desmond--a newly-risen star; but one that will shine far and wide before long, if she has a chance. Go and see her to-night at the Oxford, and you will find that her poor old father does not exaggerate her merits.”

“Yes, I will go,” answered Laurence, smiling at the old man’s enthusiasm. “You must let me give you this, Alford, to--to make things a little pleasanter while you stay in town, for ‘auld lang syne.’”

It was a cheque for twenty pounds in his friend’s favour, which Mr. Desmond contrived to crush into the old man’s hand as he said this. He was gone before Tristram Alford could find time to thank him or remonstrate with him; but the help thus offered by friendship was too sweet to be rejected by pride, nor was Tristram Alford a man who had ever cherished that particular sin amongst the deadly seven. There were tears--grateful tears--in the old man’s eyes when he went back to his daughter.

“That noble-hearted fellow has given me twenty pounds, Lucy,” he said; “we can rub on comfortably for the next six weeks.”

To “rub on comfortably” had been Mr. Alford’s highest notion of financial prosperity for the last thirty years. He was a man upon whom the burden of youthful debts, the penalties of juvenile indiscretion, had pressed so heavily as to frustrate every attempt at progress in the race of life. Poor at school, poor at college, poor in youth, and poor in middle age, Tristram Alford had come at last to accept Poverty as a fellow-traveller, whose companionship must needs be endured to the end of the troublesome journey. The utmost he asked of Providence was a brief interval of rest and refreshment at some wayside inn, while his companion of the chain waited for him at the door.