"The Missionary and the Actress"
Mizpah ("The Lord Watch Between Me and Thee")
Written by MRS. OWEN BRONSON Produced by LEM B. PARKER
CAST
CHARLES KANE .
. . Al Ernest Garcia
JOHN VANCE, who has been qualified as a missionary, suffering from overwork,
is ordered by his physician to a quiet summer resort for rest and recuperation.
There also comes Aileen Calvert, an idol of a burlesque theater, the toast of the
so-called "bald-head row," likewise for the benefit of peace and change. Her antecedents are quite unknown, and she becomes interested in Vance, as a type of man
quite new to her arcana.
She adopts the role of the artless maiden and leads the guileless man a chase
for her own amusement. He becomes infatuated and she listens with quiet amusement to his talk of an ideal life in the service of the Master. On the day before
departing on his long trip to the foreign fields he tells her his love and places upon
her finger a ring, graven with the word "Mizpah." She is unwilling to disillusion
him and allows him to depart in the belief that she is herself an innocent and simple
soul, but she returns to the old life in the glare of the footlights and the fetid atmosphere of the burlesque stage.
The year passes quickly and Vance returns from abroad sooner than he expected.
By chance he sees her picture on a theater poster, learns her vocation, and eventually they come face to face. The shoe k and the disappointment is
too much for the man. Real love flashes over her wasted, vacuous
©life, but it is too late. He leaves her and sails away to the South Sea
to give the remainder of his life up to the care of the leper colony.
The woman is stricken with remorse, gives up her gay and feverish
career and devotes her time to the lowly in the city tenements. Eventually she contracts a malignant fever, and as the shadows darken
about her she sends him the ring he gave her with a message of real
love, as a memory of brighter days to sustain him in his work in the
far-away islands of the sea.
Al Ernest
Garcia
SELIG