Concerning Belinda Part 22

"She's my only daughter, and her mother is gone," he explained to Miss Ryder, leaving her to vague speculation concerning the manner of Mrs.

Wilson's departure.

"The boys are all right. I can fix them, but Addie's different, and I guess she needs a good school and some sensible women to look after her.

She's a good girl, but she has some silly notions."

Looking at Addie, Belinda accepted the theory of the silly notions, but wondered just what those notions might be. She would have to find out, sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner; so she rose, set her diplomatic lance at rest, and charged the young woman.

"I'm afraid you'll feel a trifle lonely at first," she said with her most friendly smile.

The new girl made room for the Youngest Teacher upon the sofa beside her, and executed a smile of her own--a mechanical, studied, carefully radiant smile that left Belinda gasping.

"Oh, no; I'm never lonely. I'm used to being apart," said Adelina in resigned and impressive tones.

Belinda met the shock with admirable calm.

"Yes, you have no sisters," she said; "brothers are nice, but they're different."

Adelina sighed.

"It isn't my being an only daughter that makes the difference," she explained. "It's my genius, my ambition. n.o.body understands and can really sympathise with me, so I've worked on alone."

The "alone" was tolled sadly and accompanied by a slow, sweet, die-away smile that worked automatically.

Belinda's brain fumbled for a clew to the girl's words and affectation, and she looked closely for any earmarks of genius that might clear up the situation.

Suddenly Adelina clasped her hands around her crossed knees, struck a photographic pose, and languis.h.i.+ngly turned her great eyes full upon Belinda.

"Do you think I look like Langtry?" she asked. "Lots of people have noticed the resemblance. Of course, I don't know, but I can't help believing what people tell me. There's a young gentleman who crossed on the same steamer with Langtry, and he says I'm the very image of her--only more spiritual."

The Youngest Teacher had found her clew. She was sitting beside an embryonic tragedy queen, a histrionic genius in the rough.

"Well, you're near Langtry's size," she admitted, "and the shape of your face is something like hers."

Adelina relaxed her pose.

"Yes, I guess it's so. At first I wasn't very well suited, I'd hoped I'd be more like Bernhardt. I just adore the thin, mysterious, snaky kind, don't you? I think those serpentine, willowy, tigerish, squirmy actresses are perfectly splendid. They're so fascinating, and they can wear such lovely, queer clothes. I wouldn't have minded being like Mrs.

Pat Campbell, either. There's something awfully taking about that hollow-chested, loppy sort of woman. But you just can't choose what you'll look like. I got long enough for anything, but then I just began to spread out and get fat, and there wasn't any stopping it, so I had to give up any idea of being the willowy kind. I was awfully disappointed for a while, and I hardly ate anything for months, trying to stay thin, but it didn't make a bit of difference. I kept right on getting fat just the same. After all, it isn't shape that counts so much if you've got genius. Mary Anderson's pictures look awfully healthy, and I know lots of folks think Langtry's finer than Bernhardt. Which do you like best?"

Belinda diplomatically evaded the question. "You hope to go on the stage?" she asked.

Adelina lapsed into tragedy. "I'd die if I couldn't. I was just born for the stage. Papa and the boys don't seem to understand. They think I'm silly, stage-struck, like girls who go on in the chorus and are Amazons and things. I can't make them see that I'm going to be a star, and that being a great actress is an entirely different thing from being an Amazon. Folks up home are all so dreadfully narrow. A genius hardly ever gets sympathy in her own home, though. I've read lots of lives that showed that--but you can't keep real genius down."

The retiring bell rang.

Belinda rose with alacrity.

In her own room, with the door closed behind her, she gave way to unseemly mirth. Then she sallied forth to tell Miss Barnes of the young Rachel within their gates; but there was a troubled look from between her twinkling eyes.

"She's silly enough to do something foolish," she thought. "I hope she's _too_ silly to do it."

The stage-struck Adelina's hopes and ambitions were known throughout the length and breadth of the school within twenty-four hours. Some of the girls thought her ridiculous. Some of the romantic set sympathised with her aims. All found her a source of considerable entertainment and treated her with good-natured tolerance.

Miss Ryder and the teachers shook their heads disapprovingly, but had no real cause for complaint.

The Stage-struck One didn't s.h.i.+ne in her cla.s.ses, but the same criticism might have been made concerning a large a.s.sortment of girls who made no pretensions to dramatic talent.

Adelina obeyed the rules, attended recitations, was respectful to her teachers and amiable toward her schoolmates. If she spent her recreation hours in memorising poetry and drama, or spouting scenes from her favourite plays, the proceedings could hardly be labelled misdemeanors.

To be sure, she broke considerable bedroom crockery in the course of strenuous scenes, and in one of her famous death falls she dislodged plaster on the ceiling of the room below, but she cheerfully provided new crockery and paid for ceiling repairs, so Miss Ryder's censure, though earnest and emphatic, was not over-severe.

Belinda's English literature cla.s.s became popular to an unusual degree, and its sessions were diverting rather than academic. In this cla.s.s only did Adelina take a fervid interest. The midwinter semester was being devoted to consideration of Elizabethan drama, and in the Shakespearian readings, recitations and discussions which were a feature of the study the Cayuga County genius played a star role. The other girls might search out and memorise the shortest possible quotations--Adelina absorbed whole scenes, entire acts, and ranted through them with fine frenzy, until stopped in full career by the teacher's stern command.

With folded arms and frowning brow she rendered Hamlet's soliloquy. She gave a version of Ophelia that proved beyond question that luckless heroine's fitness for a padded cell. She frisked through Rosalind's coquetries like a gamesome calf, and kept Lady Macbeth's vigils with groans and sighs and shuddering horrors.

Only by constantly snuffing her out could the Youngest Teacher maintain anything like order in the cla.s.s; and, as it was, the enjoyment of Adelina's cla.s.smates often verged upon hysteria. As for the Gifted One's own honest pride and satisfaction in her prowess, words cannot do justice to it, and it would have been pathetic had it not been so amusing.

But it was in her own room that Adelina was at her best. There she rendered with wild intensity scenes from a score of plays, and there the girls resorted during their leisure hours, in full certainty of prodigal entertainment.

In one of the trunks brought from home Langtry's counterpart had a choice a.s.sortment of costumes, constructed chiefly from cheesecloth and cotton flannel, but reenforced by tinsel paper, beads, swan's-down and other essentials for regal roles. There were artificial flowers, too, among the supplies, and a make-up box--jealously guarded from the notice of a faculty p.r.o.ne to narrow prejudices--was used by the tragedienne with wonderful and fearful results.

Adelina did not--intentionally--lean toward comedy. Tragedy was her sphere. She loved to s.h.i.+ver, and shudder, and groan, and shriek, and swoon, and die violent deaths; and although she admitted, as all true artists must, the claims of Shakespeare, she, in her secret soul, considered Sardou the immortal William's superior.

An indiscriminate course of theatre-going during visits to New York with an indulgent and un.o.bservant father had introduced her to a cla.s.s of modern dramas that are, to put it mildly, not meant for babes--though the parents of New York babes seem blandly indifferent to the unfitness--and the chances are that had the teachers been thoroughly posted as to her repertoire it would have been suddenly and forcibly abridged; but she reserved Shakespearian roles for the edification of the faculty.

Miss Emmeline pa.s.sing through the hall one day was much perturbed by hearing from behind a closed door emphatic iteration of "Out, d.a.m.ned spot," and even Miss Lucilla's firm a.s.surance that the lines were Shakespeare's could not wholly reconcile the younger princ.i.p.al to such language.

Heavy sobbing, maniacal laughter, and cries of "My child, my child!" or "Spare him! I will tell all," ceased to attract the slightest attention upon the third floor.

Beyond restricting performances to recreation hours, insisting that they should not interfere with regular study, and supervising strictly the choice of real plays which Adelina and her fellow-pupils were allowed to attend, the powers that be did not take the dramatic mania seriously nor attempt to suppress it. So many fads come and go during a boarding-school year, peris.h.i.+ng usually of their own momentum.

"The girls will soon tire of it," said Miss Ryder, very sensibly, "and Adelina will be through with the nonsense the more quickly for being allowed to work it off."

Incidentally she wrote to Mr. Wilson, pere, asking for his opinion. He replied in a typewritten, businesslike note that he, too, believed the stage fever would soon run its course; and there, so far as official action was concerned, the matter dropped.

Gradually the girls ceased to find sport in the dramatic exhibitions and fell away, but Adelina pursued her course valiantly and unflaggingly.

Occasionally Belinda labored with her honestly, trying to insert into her brain some rational and practical ideas concerning stage life, dramatic art and vaulting ambition; but her efforts were of no avail, and she, too, fell into an att.i.tude of tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt, quite free from alarm.

It was during the last week of March that the unexpected happened. One Tuesday morning Adelina failed to appear at chapel. The teacher sent to investigate reported her room in order but without occupant. A maid was sent to look through the house for the recreant, but came back without her.

Then Belinda, with a flash of intuition, ran up to the vacant room.

The bed had not been slept in. The trunks were there, but the girl's dress-suit case, coat, hat, furs and best street frock were missing.

Pinned to the pincus.h.i.+on Belinda found a note, written in Adelina's spidery hand. It ran:

"I am going away to carve out a career for myself. It will be useless to try to find me. I have some money, and, if necessary, I will p.a.w.n my jewels; but I will soon be making plenty of money, and as soon as I am famous I will come back to see you all.

"Tell my father not to worry. I will be all right and he won't miss me, and I can't let him keep me from my Art any longer. If he is willing to let me study for the stage he can advertise in the papers."

Even in the midst of her annoyance and her apprehension the Youngest Teacher could not smother a chuckle over the melodramatic tone of the letter, the reference to the jewels--consisting of three rings, a breastpin and a watch--the serene egotism and confidence in imminent fame and fortune.