A few moments later there was a knock at the door, and a man in a long overcoat and brown kid gloves, carrying a silk hat in his fat hand entered.
"Excuse me," he said, "I presume this is Miss Hahlström?"
"Yes. I am Miss Hahlström."
"My name is Lilienfeld—manager of the Cosmopolitan Theatre." He handed Frederick his card, which announced that he was also manager of a variety theatre and impresario in general. "I obtained your address from Mr. Stoss, the armless marksman, you know. I heard you had had some unpleasantness with Webster and Forster, and I said to myself, I must go and call on the daughter of a good old friend of mine. I knew both your father and mother." Mr. Lilienfeld, in tactfully subdued tones, wound up his rather lengthy address with delicate expressions of sympathy and his personal sorrow at Hahlström's death.
Ingigerd being helpless as a child in business matters, Frederick had taken it upon himself to represent her, and he used the pause in the impresario's speech to put in a word. The man's personality was by no means displeasing to him, and his presence for several reasons was highly welcome.
"Owing to the state of her health, Miss Hahlström was unable until now to appear in public. I as her physician am responsible for her refusal to dance, but Webster and Forster used such rough methods of coercion both through intermediaries and through the mail that Miss Hahlström of her own accord decided in no circumstances to dance under their management."
"Never!" explained Ingigerd. "Absolutely never."
"Besides," Frederick continued, "their terms are miserable. We have received letters offering three and four times as much."
"Exactly what was to be expected," declared Lilienfeld. "Pardon me if I give you a bit of advice. In the first place, be perfectly easy in your mind about Webster and Forster's attempts to intimidate you. For various reasons the contract with Mr. Hahlström is legally invalid. It so happens that I have pretty accurate information regarding the terms of the divorce between your father and mother. They themselves told me, and what is more, my brother was counsel for your father. Your mother was made your legal guardian. Your father had no right to make a contract for you. You ran away. You went with your father because you were devoted to him body and soul and the relation between you and your mother may not have been quite so pleasant. I do not hesitate to say you acted wisely, very wisely. Your father's training has made a great artist of you."
"Thank you," Ingigerd laughed, at the mere memory of her training involuntarily protesting against her artistic education. "For hours at a time, while he sat in a chair comfortably smoking his meerschaum, I had to dance for him without a stitch of clothing on and perform all sorts of contortions and acrobatic feats on a rug. In the afternoon he would play the piano and I would have to go through the same thing all over again."
"Your father was a positive marvel as a trainer. He put two or three international stars on their dancing legs, if you will permit the expression. He was the dancing master of two worlds and"—the impresario laughed significantly—"many other interesting things besides. But to stick to the matter in hand—if you want, your contract with Webster and Forster is null and void." He paused for an instant and began again, this time addressing himself more to Frederick. "I do not deny that I am a business man—always within the limits of gentlemanliness—and I should like to ask you a question, Doctor von Kammacher. Is it your intention to let Miss Hahlström dance at all again, or have you and she decided that she is to retire to private life?"
"Oh, no," said Ingigerd very decidedly.
Frederick felt something like cold iron enter his soul. He seemed to himself to be a sword-swallower unable immediately to extract the steel from his body.
"No, we have not," he, too, said, "though I for my part should like Miss Hahlström to give up the stage because she has a delicate constitution. But she maintains she needs the sensation of it. And when I see the offers she receives, I do not know whether I have the right to persuade her against her will."
"Don't, Doctor von Kammacher, don't!" cried Mr. Lilienfeld. "Miss Hahlström, Doctor von Kammacher, let me take up the cudgels for you against Webster and Forster—bloodsuckers, I tell you—and they've insulted the lady, besides. I assure you, they are the source of a lot of vile rumours about her."
"Mention names," said Frederick, turning white. "I shall have no difficulty, I fancy, in finding a second, and I hope the same code of honour holds for gentlemen here as in Europe."
"Tush—tush!" The impresario lifted his fat hands in pacification, and it seemed to Frederick as if the business man's round head, set low between his shoulders, were trying to make signs to him, as if he were winking his eyes furtively and were suppressing a broad smile, unexpectedly upsetting his business zeal and gravity. "You make entirely too much of it." He looked Frederick straight in the face in a peculiar way with a significant expression in his large round eyes. Then he continued: "For an engagement of twenty evenings in cities to be decided upon, I offer you one hundred and fifty dollars more per evening than anybody else has yet offered you, the engagement to begin inside of four days. If you are agreed, we can go to the lawyer this minute."
Within less than half an hour Frederick and Ingigerd were standing in a huge elevator, which was to take them to the fifth floor of a New York City office building. Ingigerd was the only woman in the elevator, and it pleased her that for her sake the nineteen gentlemen in the car held their hats in their hands.
"If you have never before seen such a thing," Lilienfeld said to Frederick, "the offices of a big American lawyer will astonish you. This is a law firm, two partners, Brown and Samuelson; but Brown's a nincompoop and Samuelson is the whole thing."
The offices of the famous New York lawyer, Samuelson, were partitioned off with wood and ground glass from an immense hall, a writing factory, in which there was a horde of assistants working typewriters. Samuelson made the impression of a man of nearly forty. He was not very tall, had a bad, pallid complexion, and wore a short, pointed beard. The clothes of this man, whose share of the firm's income was estimated at three hundred thousand dollars a year, though of the correct cut, were by no means new; in fact, they were rather shabby, and his entire appearance suggested that he was scarcely a model of American cleanliness. He spoke in a very low, thick voice, as if suffering from a sore throat.
Within less than fifteen minutes, the contract between Lilienfeld and Ingigerd had been concluded, a contract, which owing to the fact that Ingigerd was a minor, was no more valid than the contract with Webster and Forster. Samuelson showed that he was informed of all the details of the case of Hahlström vs. Webster and Forster. When the question of their demands arose, he merely smiled with an air of great disdain and said:
"We will quietly lie low and let them make the advance."
When Ingigerd and Frederick were sitting alone together in a closed cab on the way home, he put his arms about her passionately.
"If you dance on the stage, Ingigerd, I'll go out of my mind. I feel as if you and I and our love would be exposed in the pillory. If it were I instead of you, it would not be half so hard to stand."
The poor young scholar began again to pour out before the little vampire all the anguish he had been suffering, this time with hot kisses and embraces.
"I am a drowning man. If you do not hold your hand out to me I shall sink forever. You are stronger than I am. You can save me. The world is nothing to me. What I lost is nothing, was nothing and will always be nothing to me, if only I can exchange it for you. Come with me, and you shall be all in all to me, the one thing of significance in my life."
"You are not weak," the girl whispered with a dying-away look in her eyes. She breathed heavily, her narrow lips parted, and that fatal, seductive smile spread over her languishing face, like a mask.
"Take me! Run away with me!"
For a time they were silent as the cab rolled along easily on its rubber tires.
"They can wait a long while for you, Ingigerd," Frederick at length said. "To-morrow we shall be with Peter Schmidt in Meriden."
But she laughed. Yes, she laughed at him, and Frederick clearly saw he had melted her body, not her soul; or a soul was a thing this girl did not possess.
The cab came to a halt in front of the club-house. Frederick seemed to have lost his speech. Without saying a word, he escorted Ingigerd to the door, pressed her hand, and returned to the cab. He chose a place at random, and called to the coachman to drive him there.