by Anne Nesbet
And just as she pulled back the blotting paper to give Darleen a glimpse — it was a work of art in its own right, that will, with such beautiful old-fashioned handwriting that Darleen clasped her hands together in awe — just as the will appeared, Madame Blaché came smoothly sailing back into the room.
“But what have you there, my girls?” she asked.
Now, Darleen had had a trying day, with more than the ordinary number of bumps, shocks, and spills. And yet, in this moment of crisis, a brilliant idea came leaping into her mind. It seemed brilliant, at any rate, as it appeared, just as a pebble plucked from a stream looks opalescent and glorious before its coat of liquid evaporates into the air.
“Madame Blaché!” she said. “Please say you’ll help us!”
“But what is the problem, dear child?” said Madame Blaché, and then she added, “Apart, of course, from the criminals who have undertaken such vicious attacks on Matchless Photoplay — and there, I think, I am not the one who can help you.”
“Well, you see,” said Darleen (very conscious of having to make the words string themselves convincingly together as they spilled forth), “poor Bella Mae — Miss Goodwin here — is in awful danger. Because of this!”
And Darleen held up the paper that Victorine had just unwrapped.
“It’s a very important document! It’s a will, and not just any will, but the will of the late Mrs. Berryman. Have you heard of Mrs. Hugo Berryman? Of the Berryman fortune?”
“I do believe I have heard the name,” said Madame Blaché.
“Well, she died, and some very wicked people have been trying to take advantage of her poor granddaughter, Victorine Berryman, which would have shocked her, I’m sure, because — in all the papers they always said it — Mrs. Berryman loved her granddaughter, Victorine, more than all the world. And would have wanted her protected from wicked people.”
Darleen took a deep breath to fuel her last run of words, and Madame Blaché leaned forward.
“I’m sure you must be right in these things you say,” said Madame Blaché. “But how do you know so much about Madame Berryman?”
Oh, dear! Darleen could only press gamely forward, hoping something would come to her in her moment of need, like a handhold on a rocky cliff.
“Because . . .” she said. (No handholds anywhere; no rescuing ropes.) “Umm . . . because . . .”
“Because, madame,” said Victorine, and Darleen realized only too late that that tremor in Victorine’s voice meant that the truth was bubbling up in her. Indeed, the truth was already spilling right out into the air. “Mrs. Berryman was my own dear Grandmama.”
“Aha!” said Madame Blaché. “So are we to presume, Miss Bella Mae Goodwin, that you are some sort of cousine of that poor Miss Berryman, so sadly missing?”
“Oh, a cousin!” said Darleen. What a clever idea that was!
But Victorine shook her head. The truth-telling habit was clearly flaring up strong in her right now, and Victorine on fire with the truth was harder to navigate than an escaped balloon: no emergency valves anywhere.
“No, no, madame,” Victorine said now. “I use Bella Mae Goodwin as my stage name, although all those names are actually my own — Bella Mae, you know, and Goodwin. But Victorine Berryman is what I am generally called. That’s who I am: Victorine Berryman.”
Darleen felt a very strong urge to hide her face in her hands, but she did not. Victorine and the inconvenient truth! Now what would happen?
What happened was that Madame Blaché inclined her head politely.
“Mademoiselle Victorine Berryman,” she said. “I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance finally.”
“But you mustn’t tell anyone who she is!” said Darleen. “She’s in terrible danger.”
“Really?” said Madame Blaché.
“Oh, yes,” said Darleen. “There are kidnappers after her! Awful kidnappers, the kind that throw people into the river to drown when they don’t get the money they want. And meanwhile, those Brownstones who are her very distant cousins seem to be wicked people, too, so greedy they won’t even pay any ransom, and it’s pretty likely all of these people would do anything — anything! — to prevent this will from falling into the proper hands!”
“Darleen! My goodness!” said Victorine under her breath. “You make it all sound so dramatic!”
“But it’s all true as true,” said Darleen. Victorine had to admit that it was.
“Ah! And which hands would those be?” asked Madame Blaché. “The proper hands, I mean, for this will that you have brought me.”
“The hands of Mr. Ridge, the attorney. He was Mrs. Berryman’s adviser, though she did think him . . . um . . .”
“Somewhat unreliable, unfortunately,” said Victorine. “And rather weak.”
“But if the will itself told him the right thing to do —” said Darleen.
“He would probably do it,” said Victorine.
“But since we don’t know whether he’s entirely to be trusted, it seems reckless to march into his office and put the will — and dear Victorine — into his unreliable hands, doesn’t it?” Darleen folded her own hands beseechingly. “It would be so much better, so much surer, if we marched in with someone he cannot bully or ignore. Someone like you, Madame Blaché!”
There was a long pause while Madame Blaché’s face tried to make up its mind what sort of expression it wanted to adopt: horrified or skeptical, or perhaps something else entirely.
“My children,” she said finally. “Explain to me: Where did you come across this will? And how do you know that it is truly the work of the late Mrs. Hugo Berryman? And that is but one problem with this fantastical scheme of yours.”
“Don’t people keep their wills in their houses sometimes?” said Darleen. “Don’t they probably put them in drawers near their beds when they are very ill? And Victorine was living in her Grandmama’s house right up until she was kidnapped, you know, so —”
“Darleen!” said Victorine. “Never mind all of that, Madame Blaché. What I can say is that this will is in precisely the same hand as the original. The handwriting will prove that the same person wrote them both.”
“How remarkable,” said Madame Blaché.
“Well, the main point is that that’s true,” said Darleen out of sheer loyalty to Victorine. “It is in the same hand as the original will. And the spirit of it is true as true. Mrs. Berryman would have been so upset to think that some distant relatives with wicked intentions would be trying to misuse her own poor Victorine.”
“Aha,” said Madame Blaché. “But there is one additional difficulty here, my dear girls. According to the morning’s newspaper, you, Miss Victorine Berryman are, hélas, almost certainly no more. They fear the kidnappers may have drowned you in the Hudson River! How does that change your story, dear brave girls?”
“Not at all, since the truth is that here I am,” said Victorine, standing very tall. “And I’m not drowned yet, thanks to our dear Darleen. She rescued me from those awful kidnappers. Why, she had us climb down the side of a building! I mean, technically speaking, over to a fire escape, and then down.”
“Brava!” said Madame Blaché to Darleen. Then she took Victorine’s hand. “You have been in danger, it seems. But do you truly think that getting this will you have found into the hands of your grandmother’s lawyer will help?”
“I hope so,” said Victorine.
“And you will be able to provide this lawyer, this Mr. Ridge, with some formal proof, dear girl, that you are in fact the Miss Berryman in question? I understand that the lawyers here in America are very enthusiastic about proofs and evidences.”
“Oh, I have a great deal of proof, of course!” said Victorine, and then Darleen could see her face falling just a bit as she no doubt remembered that she had recently been kidnapped and actually had nothing but a pocket knife to tell the world who she was. “That is to say, I know where I can find it — proof that I am who I am.”
“Excellent,” said M
adame Blaché. “Then let me take this will and think things over.”
Darleen must have twitched a little, because Madame Blaché looked right at her with sparks of laughter in her eyes.
“Oh, you can trust me! But listen, I will take a photograph, and then we will have a lovely facsimile as a kind of insurance, and you can keep the original in your hands.”
And so she did just that. She had a camera set up in the corner of the room, and she propped the will up on an easel and made a photographic image of it, just like that.
“I will develop it this evening, you see. I have my own little darkroom in the cellar, as one does. And then, later this week, let us see what I can do to be of help to you, Miss Berryman, dear friend of the brave daughter of Loveliest Luna, who taught me to dream so long ago.”
Then a rumbly roar came up the road, and they all looked out the front window together.
“The Matchless people are arriving now, it seems,” said Madame Blaché.
The motorcar had found the balloon.
“Did she really just say ‘Loveliest Luna’?” said Victorine into Darleen’s ear as Madame Blaché went to the door to greet the rescuers. “But what did she mean by that? Wasn’t Loveliest Luna your —”
“Oh, Victorine, yes!” said Dar. “Oh, you can’t even imagine everything that has happened. It’s amazing. It’s —”
She didn’t have time to find the words to describe how her world had just blossomed, however, because Madame Blaché was already hurrying back from the door.
“Go on out to them if you are feeling adequately restored, Miss Darling — and if you are confident you can keep yourselves out of the reach of any kidnappers or murderers, because they do sound dangerous, and I would be very sad to have our new friendship cut tragically short.”
“We’re quite expert at hiding,” said Victorine, and Darleen added, “We’ll be careful. Don’t worry!”
And then they thanked Madame Blaché most sincerely for all of her help and kindness and shook her hand.
As the girls left, Madame Blaché bent her head to them one last time and whispered, “If I may give you a word of advice, dear girls: next time you find an old will, you might wait until the ink is thoroughly dry before you take it out into the world to be shown to people.”
Right in the middle of the hands-and-doorknobs shots the next day (the close-in images of little things that lend trustworthiness and visual variety to any photoplay), Aunt Shirley came stomping up to the set in a lather.
“Darleen Darling!” she said, just at the very moment Uncle Dan was about to start cranking his camera again, and Uncle Charlie turned to her and said pretty much what he always said when his sister came roaring onto the scene during filming.
“Dear Shirley!” he said. “We are smack dab in the middle of something, please! Can this wait?”
But he was (most unusually for Uncle Charlie) smiling as he said it, and Uncle Dan turned away from the camera and said, “Good to have you back, Shirl!” which was a long-winded sentence indeed, coming from Uncle Dan. “And Bill, too.”
It was true: Darleen’s Papa had finally made his way (a bit creakily) back to the studio that morning. That brought general relief to Matchless. The laboratory part of the building felt wrong somehow without Bill Darling around. And without Aunt Shirley’s strong and steady hand, the Matchless studios always felt like a motorcar taking a turn at too great a speed for safety.
“OUT FOR TWO DAYS, AND EVERYTHING FALLS TO PIECES?” Aunt Shirley was saying at top volume. “Darleen, I need a word with you!”
“Shirley! Been too quiet around here without you,” said Uncle Charlie. “But our Darleen is — Oh, never mind. Go see what the trouble is, Darleen.”
From Aunt Shirley’s face, anyone could see that she was not about to wait patiently for her word with Darleen.
“Mmm-hmm, good luck,” said Uncle Dan, as Darleen slipped past the camera and toward the human onslaught that was Aunt Shirley.
“Darleen Darling!” said Aunt Shirley as she drew near. “I have had three telephone calls in short order that make me wonder what on earth you’ve been getting up to! Please explain!”
Darleen tried hard to look like she was willing to explain if at all possible, while being reasonably certain she might not be able to explain a thing, since that was more or less the general theme of her life these days: inexplicability.
“Telephone calls?” she said.
Aunt Shirley governed the Matchless Photoplay telephone. It lived in her business office, which was shut up and locked whenever Aunt Shirley was not on the premises.
“Telephone calls about you,” said Aunt Shirley. “Indeed, yes. Let’s take them in order, shall we, Darleen? First of all, I receive a telephone call from someone who declines to give a name, but who is, to judge from his voice alone, unsavory. This person says that I should tell Darleen Darling, ‘that actress gal,’ that she can’t get away with ‘hiding what ain’t hers’ and then says that if the stolen goods, as he puts it, are not returned entirely pronto, Darleen Darling’s darling father and the whole studio will be beaten to a pulp and sent up in flames, too, mark his words. I tell him I’ll be reporting his nonsense to the police and cut the connection. Thievery, Darleen? I must say that’s a bit unexpected!”
“But I didn’t —”
Aunt Shirley waved all words from Darleen away.
“That’s not all!” she said. “One moment later, the telephone clamors again. This time — oh, coincidence! — it’s the police. The police, Darleen! And who do they ask about? YOU! ‘So sorry to trouble you,’ they say, ‘but we’ve had a very serious accusation come in regarding people closely tied to your Matchless studios. Did the studio really arrange a kidnapping at the Strand Theatre?’ they ask. ‘Because these are serious crimes and no laughing matter, and if this anonymous letter proves correct, and that Darleen Darling of yours is found guilty of kidnapping —’”
“What!” said Darleen.
“To my credit,” said Aunt Shirley, “I did not say what came first to my lips, which was ‘Darleen, in trouble again?’ I said there must surely be some mistake here, since Darleen Darling is a child of twelve, and the only kidnapping we arranged was a purely theatrical performance. Policeman was unmoved: ‘Well, we work with the information we’re given,’ says he, ‘and that’s what I have, and it doesn’t look good for Matchless studios, does it, to be the front for a criminal operation, leading to the disappearance and possible murder of a young member of High Society.’ ‘CRIMINAL OPERATION’! ‘POSSIBLE MURDER’! Darleen!”
Oh, she was in full eruption mode now.
“How did you manage it, Darleen? Turning a simple publicity gag into a world-class disaster? No — quiet, quiet, I’m not done yet. Because then, Darleen, there came a third telephone call, and this one was perhaps the most disturbing of the lot. Do you know who was on the line, asking to speak to Miss Darleen Darling?”
Darleen looked blankly at her aunt.
“Madame Alice Guy Blaché! The director of the Solax Company! Now, why would she be contacting her rival, Matchless studios, you might ask, and asking to speak to one of our star performers here?”
Darleen, no longer experiencing inner blankness, had to work hard to keep her reactions muted and, so to speak, offscreen.
She wanted to say, But Madame Blaché once peeked into a kinetoscope and saw my mother dancing, and her life was never the same again! But of course she knew she must not say any such thing.
“What did she say?” she asked, even though it was hard to get her voice to behave properly.
“Yes. What did she say? Well, you might ask that! She said, in that smooth Frenchified parlay-voo of hers, that she was calling to see if she could borrow Miss Darling tomorrow, since she and Miss Darling have come to some sort of ‘business arrangement’ that requires, apparently, a joint trip to see a lawyer-type person in New York City! Explain me this, Darleen Darling! Because this, if you ask me, is going several steps too far.�
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Darleen gulped.
“It’s not what you think, Aunt Shirley,” she said.
“Oh, excellent,” said Aunt Shirley in a voice that implied that this was the very exact opposite of excellent in every way. “That’s good to hear. Because, frankly, I don’t even know what I think at this point. Our Darleen, a thief and a kidnapper, that’s bad enough, but willing to skip out on Matchless entirely? That is simply too much. We have raised you up from babyhood — we are not just your studio, Darleen, we are your family. Does family mean nothing to you anymore? What could Darleen Darling possibly have to do with Solax? Oh, those French businesspeople! Too clever by half! I hear Mr. Blaché doesn’t quite trust that clever, clever wife of his. Maybe that’s why he went and started that Blaché Features business. Maybe that’s why he went to the Poconos last year for two weeks on his own.”
(Aunt Shirley was an enthusiastic reader of the gossip columns in Moving Picture World.)
“And now his wife comes trying to poach one of us Darlings! But Darleen, why? Are you so discontented with your treatment here, with starring in an adventure serial under your own name, with all the care and attention we’ve given you over all these years? Well! That Madame Blaché put me right in a state, I’ll tell you! I told her I would consult with your father, Mr. Bill Darling, and I hope my voice froze her heart into an icicle when it reached her over the wires, I do.”
At least here was something Darleen could deny outright.
“Aunt Shirley!” she said. “I would never run away from Matchless! How could you think that? It’s not photoplay business that Madame Blaché wants to help me out with. It’s something else.”
“Something else what?” said Aunt Shirley. Aunt Shirley was relentless; that was how she got so many things done. But sometimes that blunt relentlessness could make a person feel rather pummeled. “‘Something else’ of a criminal operation sort of ilk?”
“Something else — that isn’t my secret to tell.”
“You are a child,” said Aunt Shirley plainly. “You aren’t allowed to have secrets.”
