The Strollers

But by this time the marquis was speechless, and François, taking the valise in hand, deferentially left the room. He locked the door behind him and thrust the key into his pocket.

CHAPTER XII

IN THE OLD CEMETERY

The engagement at the new St. Charles was both memorable and profitable, The Picayune, before the fifties, an audacious sheet, being especially kind to the players. “This paper,” said a writer of the day, “was as full of witticisms as one of Thackeray’s dreams after a light supper, and, as for Editors Straws and Phazma, they are poets who eat, talk and think rhyme.” The Picayune contained a poem addressed to Miss Carew, written by Straws in a cozy nook in the veranda at the Lake End, with his absinthe before him and the remains of an elaborate repast about him. It was then quite the fashion to write stanzas to actresses; the world was not so prosaic as it is now, and even the president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, penned graceful verses to a fair ward of Thalia.

One noon, a few days after the opening performance, several members of the company were late for rehearsal and Barnes strode impatiently to and fro, glancing at his watch and frowning darkly. To avenge himself for the remissness of the players, he roared at the stage carpenters who were constructing a balcony and to the supers who were shifting flats to the scenery room. The light from an open door at the back of the stage dimly illumined the scene; overhead, in the flies, was intense darkness; while in front, the auditorium yawned like a chasm, in no wise suggestive of the brilliant transformation at night.

“Ugh!” said Susan, standing in one of the entrances. “It is like playing to ghosts! Fancy performing to an audience of specters! Perhaps the phantoms of the past really do assemble in their old places on occasions like this. Only you can’t hear them applaud or laugh.”

“Are you looking for admirers among ghosts?” remarked Hawkes, ironically.

“Don’t,” she returned, with a little shiver.

“So, ladies and gentlemen, you are all here at last?” exclaimed Barnes, interrupting this cheerful conversation. “Some of you are late again to-day. It must not happen again. Go to Victor’s, Moreau’s, or Miguel’s, as much as you please. If you have a headache or a heartache in consequence, that is your own affair, but I am not to be kept waiting the next day.”

“Victor’s, indeed!” retorted the elastic old lady. “As if–”

“No one supposed, Madam, that at your age”–began the manager.

“At my age! If you think–”

“Are you all ready?” interrupted Barnes, hastily, knowing he would be worsted in any argument with this veteran player. “Then clear the stage! Act first!” And the rehearsal began.

If the audience were specters, the performers moved, apparently without rhyme or reason, mere shadows on the dimly lighted stage; enacting some semblance to scenes of mortal life; their jests and gibes, unnatural in that comparatively empty place; their voices, out of the semi-darkness, like those of spirits rehearsing acts of long ago. In the evening it would all become an amusing, bright-colored reality, but now the barrenness of the scenes was forcibly apparent.

“That will do for to-day,” said the manager at the conclusion of the last act. “To-morrow, ladies and gentlemen, at the same time. And any one who is late–will be fined!”

“Changing the piece every few nights is all work and no play,” complained Susan.

“It will keep you out of mischief, my dear,” replied Barnes, gathering up his manuscripts.

“Oh, I don’t know about that!” returned Miss Susan, with a defiant toss of the head, as she moved toward the dressing-room where they had left their wraps. It was a small apartment, fairly bright and cheery, with here and there a portrait against the wall. Above the dressing-table hung a mirror, diamond-scratched with hieroglyphic scrawls, among which could be discerned a transfixed heart, spitted like a lark on an arrow, and an etching of Lady Gay Spanker, with cork-screw curls. Taglioni, in pencil caricature, her limbs “divinely slender,” gyrated on her toes in reckless abandon above this mute record of names now forgotten.

“What lovely roses, Constance!” exclaimed Susan, as she entered, bending over a large bouquet on one of the chairs. “From the count, I presume?”

“Yes,” indifferently answered the young girl, who was adjusting her hat before the mirror.

“How attentive he is!” cooed Susan, her tones floating in a higher register. “Poor man! Enjoy yourself while you may, my dear,” she went on. “When youth is gone, what is left? Women should sow their wild oats as well as men. I don’t call them wild oats, though, but paradisaical oats. The Elysian fields are strewn with them.”

As she spoke, her glance swept her companion searchingly, and, in that brief scrutiny, Susan observed with inward complacency how pale the other was, and how listless her manner! Their common secret, however, made Susan’s outward demeanor sweetly solicitous and gently sympathetic. Her mind, passing in rapid review over recent events, dwelt not without certain satisfaction upon results. True, every night she was still forced to witness Constance’s success, which of itself was wormwood and gall to Susan, to stand in the wings and listen to the hateful applause; but the conviction that the sweets of popular favor brought not what they were expected to bring, was, in a way, an antidote to Susan’s dissatisfaction.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and can sometimes be made annoying; in Susan’s case it was a weapon sharpened with honeyed phrase and consolatory bearing, for she was not slow to discover nor to avail herself of the irritating power this knowledge gave her. Constance’s pride and reticence, however, made it difficult for Susan to discern when her shafts went true. Moreover, although harboring no suspicion of Susan’s dissimulation, she instinctively held aloof from her and remained coldly unresponsive. Perhaps in the depths of Susan’s past lurked something indefinable which threw its shadow between them, an inscrutable impediment; and her inability to penetrate the young actress’ reserve, however she might wound her, awakened Susan’s resentment. But she was too world-wise to display her irritation. She even smiled sweetly now, as confidante to confidante, and, turning to her impulsively, said:

“Let me help you on with your cloak, dear?”

Out of the quiet, deserted theater, isolated from external din, to the busy streets, where drays went thundering by, and industry manifested itself in resounding clatter, was a sudden, but not altogether unwelcome, change to Constance. Without waiting for the manager, who paused at the rear entrance to impress his final instructions upon a stolid-looking property-man, she turned quickly into the noisy thoroughfares.

On and on her restlessness led her, conscious of the clangor of vehicles and voices and yet remote from them; past those picturesque suggestions of the one-time Spanish rulers in which the antiquarian could detect evidence of remote Oriental infusion; past the silken seductions of shops, where ladies swarmed and hummed like bees around the luscious hive; past the idlers’ resorts, from whence came the rat-a-tat of clinking billiard balls and the louder rumble of falling ten-pins.

In a window of one of these places, a club with a reputation for exclusiveness, a young man was seated, newspaper in hand, a cup of black coffee on a small table before him, and the end of a cigar smoking on the tray where he had placed it. With a yawn, he had just thrown aside the paper and was reaching for the thick, dark beverage–his hand thin and nervous–when, glancing without, he caught sight of the actress in the crowd. Obeying a sudden impulse, he arose, picking up his hat which lay on a chair beside him.

“Yo’ order am ready in a moment, Mr. Mauville,” said a colored servant, hurrying toward the land baron as the latter was leaving.

“I’ve changed my mind and don’t want it,” replied the other curtly.

And sauntering down the steps of the club with ill-concealed impatience, he turned in the direction the young girl had taken, keeping her retreating figure in view; now, so near her in the crowded street, he could almost touch her; then, as they left the devious ways, more distant, but ever with his eyes bent upon her. He had almost spoken, when in the throng he approached within arm’s length, but something–he knew not what–restrained him, and a press of people separated them. Only for a moment, and then he continued the questionable pleasure of following her.

Had she turned, she would probably have seen her pursuer, but absorbed in thought, she continued on her way, unconscious of his presence. On and on she hurried, until she reached the tranquil outskirts and lingered before the gate of one of the cemeteries. At the same time the land baron slackened his footsteps, hesitating whether to advance or turn back. After a moment’s indecision, she entered the cemetery; her figure, receding in the distance, was becoming more and more indistinct, when he started forward quickly and also passed through the gate.

The annual festival of the dead, following All Saint’s day, was being observed in the burial ground. This commemoration of those who have departed in the communion–described by Tertullian in the second century as an “apostolic tradition,” so old was the sacrifice!–was celebrated with much pomp and variety in the Crescent City. In the vicinity of the cemetery gathered many colored marchandes, their heads and shoulders draped in shawls and fichus of bright, diversified hues; before them, perambulating booths with baskets of molasses candy or pain-patate. Women, dressed in mourning, bore to the tomb flowers and plants, trays of images, wreaths, crosses, anchors of dried immortelles and artificial roses. Some were accompanied by priests and acolytes with censers, the former intoning the service:

Fidelium Deus omnium conditor–

A solemn peace fell upon the young girl as she entered and she seemed to leave behind her all disturbing emotions, finding refuge in the supreme tranquillity of this ancient city of the dead. She was surrounded by a resigned grief, a sorrow so dignified that it did not clash with the sweeter influences of nature. The monotonous sound of the words of the priests harmonized with the scene. The tongue of a nation that had been resolved into the elements was fitting in this place, where time and desolation had left their imprint in discolored marble, inscriptions almost effaced, and clambering vines.

– Animabus famulorum–

To many the words so mournfully intoned brought solace and surcease from sorrow. The sisters of charity moved among the throng with grave, pale faces, mere shadows of their earthly selves, as though they had undergone the first stage of the great metamorphosis which is promised. To them, who had already buried health, vitality and passion, was not this chant to the dead, this strange intoning of words, sweeter than the lullaby crooned by a nurse to a child, more stirring than the patriotic hymn to a soldier, and fraught with more fervor than the romantic dream of a lover?

Ut indulgentiam, quam semper optaverunt–

The little orphan children heard and heeded no more than the butterfly which lighted upon the engraven words, “Dust to dust,” and poised gracefully, as it bathed in the sunshine, stretching its wings in wantonness of beauty.

Piis supplicationibus consequantur–

Now Constance smiled to see the little ones playing on the steps of a monument. It was the tomb of a great jurist, a man of dignity during his mundane existence, his head crammed with those precepts which are devised for the temporal well-being of that fabric, sometimes termed society, and again, civilization. The poor waifs, with suppressed laughter–they dared not give full vent to their merriment with the black-robed sisters not far away–ran around the steps, unmindful of the inscription which might have been written by a Johnson, and as unconscious of unseemly conduct as the insects that hummed in the grass.

“Hush!” whispered one of the sisters, as a funeral cortège approached.

The children, wide-eyed in awe and wonder, desisted in their play.

“It is an old man who died last night,” said a nun in a low voice to Constance, noticing her look of inquiry.

The silver crucifix shone fitfully ahead, while the chanting of the priests, winding in and out after the holy symbol, fell upon the ear. And the young girl gazed with pity as the remains of the Marquis de Ligne, her father, were borne by.

Qui vivis et regnas. Glorificamus te.

CHAPTER XIII

AN INCONGRUOUS RÔLE

Longer and longer trailed the shadow of a tall tombstone until, as the sun went down, it merged into the general twilight like a life lengthening out and out and finally blending in restful darkness. With that transition came a sudden sense of isolation and loneliness; the little burial ground seemed the world; the sky, its walls and ceiling.

From the neighborhood of the gates had vanished the dusky venders, trundling their booths and stalls citywards. As abruptly had disappeared the bearers of flowers and artificial roses with baskets poised upon their heads, imparting to their figures dignity and erectness. The sad-eyed nuns had wended their way out of the little kingdom of the departed, surrounded by the laughing children and preceded by the priests and acolytes. All the sounds and activities of the day–the merriment of the little ones, the oblations of the priests, the greetings of friends–were followed by inertness and languor. Motionless against the sky spread the branches of the trees, like lines etched there; still were the clambering vines that clasped monolith and column.

But suddenly that death-like lull in nature’s animation and unrest was abruptly broken, and an uproarious vociferation dispelled the voiceless peace.