The Final Curtain

by Gilbert, Morris

  “He’s fortunate to have a wife like you to take care of him.”

  The older woman gave her a quick look, an odd smile touching her thin lips. “Not everyone has said that,” she commented quietly. “I was just having a cup of tea. Come and join me before I leave.”

  The two women sat down at the kitchen table. When Lady Lockridge had poured Dani a cup of tea, she acknowledged, “No, I was not the wife whom most people wanted Adrian to have. He was at the top of his career, when we met, you know, and I was just a struggling young actress.” She sipped her tea, and a faraway look came into her eyes. “He could have married anybody, Danielle! He had everything—looks, talent, and presence!”

  “But he chose you?” Dani smiled.

  “Yes, he chose me.” Pride filled her eyes as she looked across the table. “Everyone said he was throwing himself away. His own family tried to talk him out of marrying me. But he did.” She had been fiddling with the bracelet on her left wrist. Now she held it up. “Have you noticed this, Danielle?” she asked.

  Dani looked. It was a woven gold chain with a single ornament suspended by a gold clasp, about the size of a bird’s egg. “That’s not a ruby!” she exclaimed. “It’s so large.”

  “No.” Lady Victoria smiled. “It’s a flask made out of glass.” Dani saw that it was a small flask, shaped like a jug, and with a tiny cork in the mouth. “It’s filled with red wine, Danielle,” she said fondly. Raising her eyes, she added, “Wine from our wedding supper. I’ve kept it all these years. And Adrian says that our love, like the wine, gets only better as the years go by!”

  “How sweet!” Dani exclaimed. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

  “My good-luck charm. Like all stage people, I’m terribly superstitious,” she admitted. “I’m never without it. We’ll share it on our golden wedding anniversary.”

  “You’ve been very happy.”

  “I think we would have been happier if Adrian had been something other than an actor.” Lady Lockridge spoke quietly. “It’s a hard, glittering world, my dear. I don’t think anyone ever walks away from it unscarred.”

  Dani sensed the pain beneath the words, and quickly turned the conversation. “I think this play will do great things for your careers.”

  “If we live through it,” Lady Lockridge remarked bitterly. Her face turned hard. “Let me show you where my husband’s medicine is.” She took Danielle to the door leading from the living room and peered in. “Why, you’re awake, Adrian!” she said cheerfully. “I’ve got a surprise for you. I have to go out for a while, and I’ve brought you some company.”

  Dani followed her into the large bedroom, where Sir Adrian lay in a double bed. His lined face lifted into a smile when he saw her. “Well, I must be getting old!” he said to his wife. “There was a time when you wouldn’t have left me alone with a lovely thing like this.”

  “I don’t trust you an inch, Adrian,” she teased, stooping down to kiss him. “However, I do trust Danielle.” She moved to pick up her coat. “He needs two of those blue pills at three o’clock. Don’t let him get out of bed.”

  “What a nuisance!” Sir Adrian snorted. “Nothing wrong with me that a good stiff drink won’t cure.”

  “You know what the doctor said,” Lady Lockridge chided him. “I’ll try not to be too long, Danielle,” she promised as she left.

  “Take your time,” Dani responded. She came to stand over the tall man lying in the bed. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well, Sir Adrian.”

  He threw the bedcover back and swung his feet to the floor. “Hand me that robe, will you, Danielle?” He put his hands back, and she helped him into the velour robe. “Thank you. Now, let’s go sit in the living room. I’m sick of this bedroom.”

  “All right.” The two of them went into the living room. “Let’s sit here where we can watch the city,” Sir Adrian suggested. “It’s a fine view, isn’t it?”

  They sat on the couch, talking about unimportant things. How pale he is! His skin is almost translucent, Dani observed. She had never thought of Sir Adrian Lockridge as an elderly man, perhaps because she had seen him in so many films as a young man. He was sixty-two, but one of her best friends—a shrimp fisherman named Henry Legrand—was ten years older, and remained lean and strong. The actor’s hand lay across the back of the couch, and Dani saw that it was thin and covered with liver spots—the wasted hand of a very old man, indeed.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

  “No, that would be very boring.” She smiled. “I want to hear about you—everything! Your whole life. I’m going to be telling my children someday that I spent the day with Sir Adrian Lockridge, and I don’t want to spend it telling how I got braces when I was ten.”

  He laughed and leaned back on the couch. He began to speak of his early days in show business, and she encouraged him from time to time. The time flew by. Once he had her get a book from the study and read to him. At the end of an hour, she remembered. “Oh, it’s time for your medicine. Let me get it.”

  She started to get up, but suddenly saw that his face was twisted in an expression of pure agony. “Sir Adrian! What is it?”

  He gasped, “Brown bottle—in medicine cabinet—get it!”

  She flew to the bathroom, found a large brown bottle of liquid, and rushed back. “This one?” He nodded and reached out his hand.

  “I’ll get a spoon,” she began, but he shook his head. Removing the cap, he lifted it to his lips and swallowed convulsively. Lowering the bottle, he sat there, biting his lower lip. Dani didn’t know what to do, but she saw that the medicine was evidently very powerful, for the strain left his face, and he took a deep breath.

  “Thank you, my dear,” he whispered. “I think I’ll lie down for a little while.”

  He got to his feet, and Dani walked with him. He seemed a little dizzy and leaned on her arm. She helped him out of his robe, and when he lay down, pulled the covers over him.

  “I’ll just sit here for a while,” she offered quietly.

  He nodded. They remained silent for what seemed a long time. His eyes were closed, and that particular frozen stillness about his face reminded Dani suddenly of the face of a dead man. It was an unpleasant thought, and she pressed her lips together, forcing it out of her mind. He’s much sicker than any of us thought, she decided. I don’t see how he can get through another performance.

  The silence ran on, and it was so deep that she was startled when he said, “Danielle?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t tell my wife about the spell.”

  “Of course not.” Dani realized that Lady Lockridge knew her husband better than he dreamed. “Have you been ill long?” she asked.

  “Not like this. I had a bypass three years ago, but I seem to have gotten over that.” His voice was thin, and she saw that his eyes were open, but he stared blankly at the ceiling. “For the past two months, I’ve been having some sort of stomach trouble.”

  “What does the doctor say?”

  “Oh, you know how those fellows are,” he complained. “I’ve been to half a score, and they all poke and probe, then give you a bottle of pills and say, ‘Here, old fellow, try this!’”

  “There are some very fine hospitals here in New York. You ought to have a complete physical.”

  He smiled slightly and turned his eyes to look at her. “You sound like Victoria,” he commented. “She’s been at me for weeks. And I finally gave in. Went to one of the best just a week ago. My word, I didn’t know there were so many things they could put a chap through! Medieval torture, that’s what it is!”

  “What did they say?”

  “Say? What they always say—we want to do more tests.”

  “Better mind your doctors.” Dani smiled at him. She pulled the cover closer around his chin, adding, “We couldn’t afford to lose you, Sir Adrian. You’re a national treasure!”

  She was surprised to see a tear glisten in his eye, and he moved his head from side to side. “You are a very c
omforting sort of person, Danielle.” He hesitated, before admitting, “I suppose we all have strange thoughts when we are ill. I’ve noticed that for the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking more of—well, of what comes after, you know?”

  “Everyone should think of that, Sir Adrian—sick or well.”

  “I suppose that is true, but life is so—so crowded!” His hands twisted together, and he stared at them. “When you’re a young man, fighting to get to the top, you don’t think it’ll ever end. All you concentrate on is winning the prize. When you do gain a little recognition, you have to fight to keep it. After that—” he broke off suddenly and lay there silently, his thoughts disturbing his brow.

  Dani said quietly, “The best time for a person to find God is when he’s a child. But most of us don’t do that. We get excited about the world, but the world never is quite the prize we think it is. We go around and around on the carousel, trying to grab the brass ring, but when we get it, we discover it isn’t what we really wanted at all.”

  He looked at her with a strange expression, as though he’d never really seen her. “You are a strange young woman!” he commented slowly. “They told me you were religious. I suppose that’s why you think of these things?”

  Dani thought about it, then pensively asserted, “I’ve always thought about God, even when I was a very little girl. I always thought that everyone did—think about God, that is. Didn’t you think about heaven and hell and those things when you were a child?”

  “You know, I really did!” he confessed with the shock of surprise in his voice. “It was a long time ago, of course, but I can remember quite clearly asking my father about those things—Who made me? Who is God? That sort of thing.” He fell silent, then added with a touch of sadness, “Too bad we let those things slide.”

  Dani sat there, feeling inadequate. She had heard so many sermons stressing the need for sharing faith in Christ, but somehow this time she could not find a way to begin. Once she had taken a five-day course, with books, instructions, step-by-step procedures, and so on. Dani had memorized the appropriate responses to all the questions that might come up. Then they had gone out to witness.

  But all her training could not have prepared her for this encounter with Sir Adrian. Others had told her of how they’d just met someone by chance, told him of Jesus and how He loved him, and then seen that person saved.

  Dani had felt a little bitter that such things never seemed to happen to her. Now, looking down at the sick man, she prayed, God, let me say the right thing! For a moment her thoughts swirled, and then a strange sense of peace came upon her, and she recognized that the Lord was present.

  “Sir Adrian,” she said quietly. “May I tell you about what Jesus Christ has meant in my life?”

  “Why—certainly!”

  Danielle began speaking of her life, how mixed up and confused she was as a child and later as a young woman. Not sparing herself, she spoke of the sin and rebellion that she’d fallen into. Once it would have been very hard to say such things, but in the quietness of the room, it was not difficult at all.

  “I was so mixed up—and the guilt was terrible,” she remembered. “Every night I prayed that I wouldn’t die and go to hell, but the next day I’d go out and do the same things again. It was like being trapped on a treadmill. I got so sick of life I thought of ending it.”

  “Why, you can’t have been such a terrible sinner, my dear!” Sir Adrian exclaimed.

  Dani shook her head ruefully. “We have a peculiar way of looking at sin, I’m afraid. We have a list, and some sins are terrible, others not so bad, and so on. But God doesn’t look at our wrongdoing like that. The second chapter of the book of James, the tenth verse, says, ‘For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.’ The Bible says that the fact that we are sinners grieves God—He is not cataloging our sins according to some sort of scale.”

  Sir Adrian lay there silently, then shook his head. “But—it hardly seems fair. Do you mean to say that a chap who’s led a fairly decent life, paid his bills, and been good to his family—that chap is no better off than a rotter who abuses children?”

  “It doesn’t sound fair on the surface, but God is doing a marvelous thing, Sir Adrian.” Dani’s eyes glowed as she spoke. Though she had no way of knowing it, she made an attractive and compelling picture to the sick man. “The world was lost to God when Adam sinned. He set out to win it back, to take that which was lost and make it all good and pure again. That’s what Romans five, verse twelve, is all about. It says, ‘Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.’ The whole world was lost,” she repeated. “But I like a verse that comes after that, Sir Adrian. It says, ‘. . . If through the offence of one, many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.’”

  He lay there silently. Finally he confessed, “I’m afraid I don’t get all that, Danielle. I was never very good at abstract thinking.”

  “It is complicated,” she replied. “Because it’s a cosmic thing, the struggle of good against evil in the cosmos. But I have to bring it down to the place where I can grasp it.” She leaned forward, and her face was intense. “The world had sinned; it was lost to God, for God cannot abide sin. So He bought it back from the devil.”

  “Bought it back? How in the world could He do that?”

  “You must have read about it, Sir Adrian. It’s in John three, verse sixteen: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’”

  “I remember that,” the sick man said quietly. “My father quoted it often. But—I’ve never understood why it should be. How can a man who died two thousand years ago do anything for me?”

  Dani began to explain the nature of the Incarnation in very simple terms. She had no Bible in her hands, but she quoted freely from the Scriptures, pausing from time to time to make a point clearer.

  “When I was apart from God,” she said finally, “I tried everything to please Him. I joined a church, sang in the choir. I lived as good a life as I could—but nothing worked.”

  She paused and sat there for so long, that Sir Adrian asked, “What did you do, Danielle?”

  “I finally realized that God didn’t require those things. Anyone can do them. What He really wanted was me. That’s what God really loves, Sir Adrian. In John three, verse sixteen, the thing He loves—the world—isn’t the planet we live on. He loves you! That’s the miracle of the Bible and of the cross, Sir Adrian, the fact that Jesus loves us!”

  He saw that tears had gathered in her eyes and reached out to take her hand. “My dear, I envy you!”

  She let the tears run down her cheeks unheeded. “There’s no need for that. I’m not special, nobody is. If you want Jesus Christ, you can know Him.”

  He stared at her. “You mean—now?”

  “Yes, right now. He asks you to do two things. The first is to repent—that means to turn from those things that are wrong.”

  “I’m a little old for that, I’m afraid.” Then he gave her a haunted look and added, “And I’ve not led a good life. I have done things that I—I could not even say aloud to you!”

  “You can’t shock God, and it’s not a matter of age,” she explained. “It’s a matter of turning loose. Just as when you and Lady Lockridge were married, you had to turn from all other women to her, didn’t you? Well, the turning from the things of this world is like that. I know you’ve never regretted losing other women, because you love her. It will be like that. You’ll have so much in the kingdom of God, you won’t regret the things you leave behind.”

  He lay there, thinking hard. “And the second thing?”

  “The second thing is also like a wedding, Sir Adrian. Remember when the minister asked you if you would have the bride? Well, Jesus is waiting for you to rece
ive Him. The Bible says, ‘Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.’”

  She saw that he was tremendously moved and asked softly, “Sir Adrian, would you do what I did when my life seemed hopeless? Would you just turn loose of the world and ask Jesus Christ to make you a new man?”

  He lay there so long that she was beginning to wonder if he was offended. Finally he slowly lifted one trembling hand and took hers. “I would like very much to do that,” he said.

  Dani took his hand, bowed her head, and began to pray. Once she paused and urged him to ask God’s forgiveness, and he did so, with all the simplicity of a child. Then they both were quiet, and she looked down to see tears running down his cheeks. As she pulled out a tissue from the box on the table and began to wipe them away, he whispered, “If I had only done this years ago!”

  She lifted the tissue, smiled at him, and spoke encouragingly: “You’ve come into the kingdom late, Sir Adrian—but Jesus said once that the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”

  Fifteen minutes later, when Lady Lockridge returned, she found them like that. As Dani rose, Victoria apologized, “I’m sorry to be so long.”

  Dani smiled. “It doesn’t matter. Call me any time.” She went over and put out her hand to Sir Adrian, then impulsively bent and kissed his brow. “God bless you,” she said, then left the room at once.

  “Did you have a good talk with Danielle?” Victoria asked.

  He pulled himself up to a sitting position, reached out his hand to her, and when she came to take it, he exclaimed, “I’ve something to tell you, Victoria—something quite wonderful. . . .”

  14

  Sir Adrian’s Finest Performance

  * * *

  The rodeo, Savage decided, was what the doctor ordered. Though not an avid fan himself, he got his money’s worth by watching Dani as the events in the arena unfolded. They had good seats in the Garden, and he smiled as the girl lost all inhibitions, yelling and clapping and booing along with the rest of the fans. Once he flinched, when a cowboy was thrown from the back of a huge, tawny Brahma bull, and insisted, “I wouldn’t do a stunt like that if they gave me the Washington Monument!”