RIGHT in the rear of the First Congregational Church of ’Quawket, and cornerwise across the street, the Old Ladies’ Home of Aquawket sits on the topmost of a series of velvety green terraces. It is a quiet street; the noisiest thing in it, or rather over it, is the bell in the church steeple, and that is as deep toned and mellow as all church bells ought to be and few church bells are. As to the Old Ladies’ Home, itself, it looks like the veritable abode of peace. A great wistaria clambers over its dull brown stucco walls. Beds of old-fashioned flowers nod and sway in the chastened breezes on its two sunny sides, and thick clumps of lilacs and syringas shield it to the north and east. Dainty little dimity curtains flutter at the open windows all Summer long; and, whether it comes from the immaculately neat chambers of the old ladies, or from some of the old-fashioned flower beds, there is always, in warm weather, a faint smell of lavender floating down upon the breeze to the passer-by in the quiet street. You would never dream, to look at it, that the mad, inhuman, pitiless strife and fury of an Old Ladies’ Home raged ceaselessly, year after year, within those quiet walls.

There were eleven inmates of the ‘Old Ladies’ Home of Aquawket, besides the matron, the nurse, the cook, and a couple of “chore-girls.” These two last led a sort of life that came very near to qualifying them for admission to the institution on a basis of premature old age. Of the real old ladies in the home, every one of the eleven had a bitter and undying grievance against at least one, and, possibly, against ten of her companions, and the only thing that held the ten oldest of the band together was the burning scorn and hatred which they all felt for the youngest of the flock, Mrs. Williametta Fortescue, who signed what few letters she wrote “Willie,” and had been known to the world as “Billy” Fortescue when she sang in comic opera and wore pink tights.

All the other old ladies said that Mrs. Fortescue was a daughter of Belial, a play actress, and no old lady, anyway. I know nothing about her ancestry—and I don’t believe that she did, either; but as to the other two counts in the indictment I am afraid I must plead guilty for Mrs. Fortescue. An actress she was, to the tips of her fingers, an unconscious, involuntary, dyed-in-the-wool actress. She acted because she could not help it, not from any wish to deceive or mislead, but just because it came as natural to her as breathing. If you asked her to take a piece of pie, it was not enough for her to want the pie, and to tell you so, and to take the pie; she had to act out the whole dramatic business of the situation—her passion for pie, her eager craving and anxious expectation, her incredulous delight when she actually got the pie, and her tender, brooding thankfulness and gratitude when she had got outside of the pie, and put it where it couldn’t be taken away from her. No; there wasn’t the least bit of humbug in it all. She did want the pie; but she wanted to act, too.

It was this characteristic of Mrs. Fortescue that got her into the Old Ladies’ Home on false pretenses; for, to tell the truth, Mrs. Fortescue was only an old lady by courtesy. She had beautiful white hair; but she had had beautiful white hair ever since she was twenty years old. Before she had reached that age she had had red hair, black hair, brown hair, golden hair, and hair of half-a-dozen intermediate shades. Either the hair or the hair dye finally got tired, and Mrs. Fortescue’s head became white—that is, when she gave it a chance to be its natural self. That, however, was not often; and, at last, there came a day when, as her manager coarsely expressed it, “she monkeyed with her fur one time too many.” For ten years she had been the leading lady in a small traveling opera company, where tireless industry and a willingness to wait for salary were accepted as substitutes for extreme youth and commanding talent. Ten years is a long time, especially when it is neither the first nor the second, and, possibly, not the third ten years of an actress’s professional career; and when Mrs. Fortescue asked for a contract for three years more, her manager told her that he was not in the business for his health, and that While he regarded her as one of the most elegant ladies he had ever met in his life, her face was not made of India rubber; and, furthermore, that the public was just about ready for the Spring styles in leading ladies. This did not hurt Mrs. Fortescue’s feelings, for the leading juvenile had long been in the habit of calling her “Mommer, dear,” whenever they had to rehearse impassioned love scenes. But it did put her on her mettle, and she tried a new hair dye, just to show what she could do. The result was a case of lead poisoning, that laid her up in a dirty little second-class hotel, in a back street of ’Quawket for three months of suffering and helplessness. The company went its way and left her, and went to pieces in the end. The greater part of her poor savings went for the expenses of her sickness. At last, when the critical period was over, her doctor got some charitably-disposed ladies and gentlemen interested in her case; and, between them all, they procured admission to the Old Ladies’ Home for a poor, white-haired, half-palsied wreck of a woman, who not only was decrepit before her time, but who acted decrepitude so successfully that nobody thought of asking her if she were less than eighty years old. I do not mean to say that Mrs. Fortescue willfully deceived her benefactors: she was old—oldish, anyway—she was helpless, partially paralyzed, and her system was permeated with lead; but when she came to add to this the correct dramatic outfit of expression, she was so old, and so sick, and so utterly miserable and stricken and done for that the hearts of the managers of the Old Ladies’ Home were opened, and they took her in at half the usual entrance fee; because, as the matron very thoughtfully remarked, she couldn’t possibly live six weeks, and it was just so much clear gain for the institution. By the end of six weeks, however, Mrs. Fortescue was just as well as she had ever been in her life, and was acting about twice as healthy as she felt.

With her trim figure, her elastic step, and her beautiful white hair setting off her rosy cheeks—and Mrs. Fortescue knew how to have rosy cheeks whenever she wanted them—she certainly was an incongruous figure in an Old Ladies’ Home, and it was no wonder that her presence made the genuine old ladies genuinely mad. And every day of her stay they got madder and madder; for by the constitution of the Home, an inmate might, if dissatisfied with her surroundings, after a two-years’ stay, withdraw from the institution, taking her entrance fee with her. And that was why Mrs. Fortescue staid on in the Old Ladies’ Home, snubbed, sneered at, totally indifferent to it all, eating three square meals a day, and checking off the dull but health-giving weeks that brought her nearer to freedom, and the comfortable little nest-egg with which she meant to begin life again.

And yet the time came when Mrs. Fortescue’s histrionic capacity won for her, if not a friend, at least an ally, out of the snarling sisterhood; and for a few brief months there was just one old woman out of the lot who was decently civil to her, and who even showed rudimentary systems of polite intentions.

* * *

This old woman was Mrs. Filley, and this was the manner of her modification.

One pleasant Spring day, a portly gentleman of powerful frame, with ruddy cheeks and short, steel-gray hair—a man whose sturdy physique hardly suited with his absent-minded, unbusiness-like expression of countenance—ascended the terraces in front of the Old Ladies’ Home. His brows were knit; he looked upon the ground as he walked, and he did not in the least notice the eleven old ladies, the matron, the nurse, the cook and the two “chore-girls” who were watching his every step with profound interest.

Mrs. Fortescue was watching the gentleman with interest, because she thought that he was a singularly fine-looking and well-preserved man, as indeed he was. All the other inmates of the Home were watching him with interest because he was Mr. Josiah Heatherington Filley, the millionaire architect, civil engineer and contractor. Their interest, however, was not excited by Mr. Filley’s fame as a designer of mighty bridges, of sky-scraping office buildings, and of other triumphs of mechanical skill; they looked on him with awe and rapture simply because he was the richest man in ’Quawket, or, more properly speaking, in ’Quawket Township; for Mr. Filley lived in the old manor-house of the Filley family, a couple of miles out of town.

You might think that with a millionaire Mr. Filley coming up the steps, the heart of indigent Mrs. Filley in the Old Ladies’ Home might beat high with expectation; but, as a matter of fact, it did not. In Connecticut and New Jersey family names mean no more than the name of breeds of poultry—like Plymouth Rocks or Wyandottes. All Palmers are kin, so are all Vreelands, and the Smiths of Peapack are of one stock. But so are all speckled hens, and kinship may mean no more in one case than it does in the other. In colonial times, Filleys had abounded in ’Quawket. But to Mrs. Filley of the Home the visit of Mr. Filley of the Manor House was as the visit of a stranger; and very much surprised, indeed, was she when the great man asked to see her.

Mr. Filley was a bachelor, and the last of his branch of the family. His only surviving relative was a half-brother by his mother’s first marriage, who had lived a wandering and worthless life, and who had died in the West a widower, leaving one child, a girl of nine, in a Massachusetts boarding-school. This child he had bequeathed to the loving care and attention of his brother. It is perfectly wonderful how men of that particular sort, who never can get ten dollars ahead of the world, will pick up a tremendous responsibility of that kind, and throw it around just as if it were a half-pound dumb-bell. They don’t seem to mind it at all; it does not weigh upon their spirits; they will pass over a growing child to anybody who happens to be handy, to be taken care of for life, just as easily as you would hand a towel over to the next man at the wash-basin, as soon as you are done with it. Mr. Filley’s half-brother may have died easily, and probably did, but he could not possibly have made such a simple job of it as he did of turning over Etta Adelina, his daughter, to the care of the half-brother whom he hardly knew well enough to borrow money from oftener than once a year.

Now, Mr. Josiah Filley had promised his mother on her death-bed that he would assume a certain sort of responsibility for the consequences of the perfectly legitimate but highly injudicious matrimonial excursion of her early youth, and so he accepted the guardianship of Etta Adelina. But he was not, as the worldly phrase it, “too easy.” He was a profound scientific student, and a man whose mind was wrapt up in his profession, but he did not propose to make a parade-ground of himself for everybody who might feel inclined to walk over him. He had no intention of taking the care of a nine-year-old infant upon himself, and the happy idea had come to him of hunting up the last feminine bearer of his name in the ’Quawket Old Ladies’ Home, and hiring her for a liberal cash payment to represent him as a quarterly visitor to the school where the young one was confined.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, “there is any actual relationship between us—”

“There ain’t none,” interrupted Mrs. Filley; “leastwise there ain’t been none since your father got money enough to send you to college.”

It was a bargain, but poor old Mrs. Filley stipulated for a payment in cash instead of by check. She had once in her life been caught on a worthless note, and she never had got the distinction between notes and checks clear in her mind. As to Mr. Josiah Filley, he was not wholly satisfied with the representative of his family, so far as grammar and manners were concerned; but he saw with his scholar’s eye, that looked so absent-minded and took in so much, that the old lady was both shrewd and kindly-natured, and he felt sure that Etta Adelina would be safe in her hands.

When I said that Mrs. Filley was kindly, I meant that as a human being she was capable of kindness. Of course, as an inmate of an Old Ladies’ Home, she was just as spiteful as any other of the old ladies, and her first natural impulse was to make a profound mystery of Mr. Filley’s errand, not only because by so doing she could tease the other old ladies, but from a natural, old-ladylike fear that somebody else might get her job away from her. But she found herself unable to carry out her pleasant scheme in its entirety. Nine of her aged comrades, and all the members of the household staff, consumed their souls in bitterness, wondering what the millionaire had wanted of his humble kinswoman; and three times in the course of one year they saw that excellent woman put on her Sunday black silk and take her silent way to the railroad station. On the day following they saw her return, but where she had been or why she had been there they knew not. By the rules of the Home she had a right to eight days of absence annually. She told the matron that she was going to see her “folks.” The matron knew well that she had not a folk in the world, but she had to take the old lady’s word.

And yet Mrs. Filley’s happiness was incomplete, for it was necessary to let one person into her secret. She put it on her spectacles, which had not been of the right kind for a number of years, owing to the inferiority of modern glass ware, but defective education was what brought Mrs. Filley to making a confidant of Mrs. Fortescue. No spectacles that ever were made would have enabled Mrs. Filley to spell, and when she began her first report thus:

“i sene the gerl She had or to hav cod-livor roil—”

even she, herself, felt that it was hardly the report for Mr. Filley’s fifty-dollars. Here is the way that Mrs. Fortescue started off that report in her fine Italian hand:

“It gives me the greatest pleasure, my dear Mr. Filley, to inform you that, pursuant to your instructions, I journeyed yesterday to the charming, and I am sure salubrious shades of Tophill, to look after the welfare of your interesting and precocious little ward. Save for the slight pallor which might suggest the addition of some simple tonic stimulant, such as codliver oil, to the generous fare of the Tophill Academy, I found your little Etta Adelina in every respect—”

Mrs. Filley’s name was signed to that report in the same fine Italian hand; and it surprised Mr. Filley very much when he saw it. But there was more surprise ahead for Mr. Filley.

* * *

As a business man Mr. Filley read the paper, but not the local papers of ’Quawket, for it was seldom that the papers were local there long enough to get anybody into the habit of reading them. Thus it came about that he failed to see the notice of the death of old Mrs. Filley, which occurred in the Old Ladies’ Home something less than a twelve-month after the date of his first and only visit. The death occurred, however, but the reports kept on coming in the same fine Italian hand, and with the same generous freedom in language of the most expensive sort. No man could have got more report for fifty dollars than Mr. Filley got, and the report did not begin to be the most of what he was getting.

Sometimes clergymen but slightly acquainted with the theatrical business are surprised when traveling through small towns to see lithographs and posters displaying the features of great stars of the theatrical and operatic world, who are billed to appear in some local opera house about two sizes larger than a cigar-box. The portraits are familiar, the names under them are not; you may recognize the features of Joe Jefferson and Adelina Patti, with labels on them establishing their identity as “Comical Maginnis, the Monkey Mugger,” and “Sadie Sylvester, the Society Clog Artiste.” These are what are known as “Stock-printing,” and it is pleasant to reflect that the printers who get them up for a fraud on the public rarely are able to collect their bills from the actors and actresses that use them, and that the audiences that go to such shows don’t know the difference between Adelina Patti and an oyster patty.

This explanation of an interesting custom is made to forestall the reader’s surprise at learning that two years and a half after her retirement from the stage, and ten years, at least, after the retirement of such of her youthful charms as might have justified the exhibition, the portrait of Mrs. Fortescue, arrayed in silk tights, of a most constricted pattern—not constrained at all, simply constricted—decorated scores of fences in what theatrical people call the “’Quawket Circuit,” which circuit includes the charming and presumably salubrious shades of Tophill. There was no mistaking Mrs. Fortescue’s face; Mrs. Fortescue’s attire might have given rise to almost any sort of mistake. The name under the picture was not that of Mrs. Fortescue; it was that of a much advertised young person whose “dramatic speciality” was entitled “Too Much for London; or, Oh, My! Did you Ever!”

* * *

Now it is necessary to disinter old Mrs. Filley for a moment, and to smirch her character a little by way of introducing some excuse for what Mrs. Fortescue did.

By the time Mrs. Fortescue had cooked her third report, she had found out that the old lady had not quite kept faith with her employer. At the Tophill Institute she had represented herself as Mr. Filley’s mother, gaining thereby much consideration and many cups of tea. So that when she died, with the rest of her secret hidden from all but Mrs. Fortescue, the latter lady, having fully made up her mind to appropriate the job, felt that it behooved her to go her predecessor one better, and when she made her appearance at Tophill it was in the character of Mr. Filley’s newly married wife. She told the sympathetic all about it, how Mr. Filley and she had known each other from childhood, how he had always loved her, how she had wedded another to please her family, how the other had died, and Mr. Filley had renewed his addresses, how she had staved him off (I am not quoting her language) until his dear old mother had died, and left him so helpless and lonely that she really had to take pity on him. Mrs. Filley No. 2 got all the consideration she wanted, and the principal sent out for champagne for her, under the impression that that was the daily and hourly drink in all millionaire families. He never found out otherwise from Mrs. Filley, either.

Probably Mrs. Fortescue-Filley had calculated on keeping up her pretty career of imposture until her time of probation at the Home was up, and she could withdraw her entrance fee and vanish at once from ’Quawket and Tophill. She had the report business well in hand; her employer occasionally wrote her for detailed information on minor points of the child’s work or personal needs, but in general expressed himself perfectly satisfied; and she felt quite safe, so far as he was concerned, when he commissioned her to put the child through an all-round examination, and sent her fifty dollars extra with his “highest compliments” on her manner of doing it. Indeed, in this she was no humbug. She could have put the principal, himself, through his scholastic facings if she had cared to.

But the appearance of those unholy portraits came without warning, and did their work thoroughly. Even if it had not been that every child in the institute could recognize that well-known countenance, a still more damning disclosure came in the prompt denunciation of the fraud by the “Indignant Theatre Goer” with a long memory, who wrote to the local paper to protest against the profanation, as he put it, of the features of a peerless Mrs. Fortescue, once an ornament of the stage, and now dwelling in retirement in ’Quawket. Ordinary, common, plain, every-day gossip did the rest.

And, what is more, she did, for her magnificent dramatic outburst made her fairly acting-drunk. She could not help herself; she was inebriated with the exuberance of her own verbosity, to use a once famous phrase, and she simply had to go off on a regular histrionic bat.

She went straight off to the old Filley Manor House at the extreme end of ’Quawket township; she bearded the millionaire builder in his great cool, darkened office, among his mighty plans and elevations and mysterious models, and she told that great man the whole story of her imposture with such a torrent of comic force, with such marvelous mimicry of the plain-spoken Mrs. Filley and the prim principal, and with so humorous an introduction of the champagne episode that her victim lay back in his leather arm-chair, slapped his sturdy leg, roared out mighty peals of laughter, told her she was the most audacious little woman in the whole hemisphere, and that he never heard of anything so funny in his life, and that he’d call down any number of damn schoolmasters if she wanted him to.

“I don’t see how we can arrange a retroactive, Ma’am; I’m a little too old for that sort of thing, I’m afraid. But I’ll tell you what I can do. I’ll send my agent at once to take the child out of school, and I’ll see that my man doesn’t give him any satisfaction or a chance for explanation.

“Why, damn it!” concluded the hearty Mr. Filley; “if I ever see the little prig I’ll tell him I think it is a monstrous and great condescension on your part to let yourself be known as the wife of a plain old fellow like me. Why doesn’t a man know a handsome woman when he sees her?”

“Then I am forgiven for all my wickedness?” said Mrs. Fortescue—but, oh! how she said it!

“Forgiveness?” repeated Mr. Filley, thoughtfully. “Yes; I think so.” Then he rose, crossed the room to a large safe, in which he opened a small drawer. From this he took a small package of papers which he placed in Mrs. Fortescue’s hands. She recognized her own reports, and also a curious scrawl on a crumpled and discolored piece of paper, which also she promptly recognized. It was a “screw” that had held three cents’ worth of snuff, and she had seen it in Mrs. Filley’s hand just about the time that dear old lady was passing away. She read it now for the first time:

“Why did I let you go on?” repeated Mr. Filley. “Well, you’ve got to have the whole duplicity, I see.” He went back to the drawer and took out another object. It was a faded photograph of a young lady with her hair done up in a net, and with a hat like a soap-dish standing straight up on her head.

“Twenty-five years ago,” said Mr. Filley, “boy; three dollars a week in an architect’s office; spent two-fifty of them, two weeks running, for flowers for that young lady when she played her first engagement in New Haven. Walked there. Paid the other fifty cents to get into the theatre. Lived on apples the rest of the week. Every boy does it. Never forgets it. Place always remains soft.”

And, as Mrs. Fortescue sat and looked long and earnestly at the picture, a soft color came into her face that was born rather of memory than of her love for acting; and yet it wonderfully simulated youth and fresh beauty and a young joy in life.