CHAPTER XII.
Gerald Gibson had not gone many yards further down the street, after seeing the meeting between Miss Langton and Colonel Richardson, when he was overtaken by a fellow-actor, Aubrey Cooke.
“Did you see who little Langton was talking to?”
“Some friend of hers, I suppose. I didn’t notice.”
“It was Frank Richardson, the man there was all that scandal about a few years ago—Lord Berwick’s wife—don’t you remember?”
“Well?”
“Well, I’m sorry he has got hold of little Langton, that is all.”
“You are sorry without cause, then. Miss Langton is a long way above his level. She can’t refuse to speak to him, for he knew her people well years ago.”
With unerring certainty Gerald Gibson had jumped to this conclusion. The other looked surprised.
“Oh, you know all about it, then? You are the favorite one for whom Miss Prim opens her lips. Well, I really am glad to hear it, for she is the flag I always hold out when old ladies tell me there are no virtuous women on the stage; and, if she were to go I don’t know where on earth I should look for another.”
“You are too cynical, Cooke.”
“Don’t shy long words at me. If I deserve them it is because I was led away to a meeting of the Society for the Mutual Improvement of the Clerical and Dramatic Professions this afternoon. Capital institution—the parsons looked happy and the pro.’s looked good. But that can’t last. Good-night.”
Aubrey Cooke was not at his best with Gibson; the two men had too little in common. But he was a clever fellow. He had a plain, silly face, a bitter tongue, and a manner which found favor with most women. He adored women. Those, however, he worshiped the most deferentially would scarcely have approved of the manner in which he spoke of them among other men in their absence, for there was a strong dash of young Paris in his adoration. He was too shrewd to make many mistakes; and no man knew better the exact tone in which to address any particular woman of his large and varied acquaintance. He bore Miss Langton no ill-will for repeated unmerited snubs; the caprices of women are infinite, prettier and less prim women abounded, and he could revenge himself so easily by an epigram—not a slanderous one, but none the less cutting—in the dressing-room.
When Annie first recognized Colonel Richardson as he crossed the road toward her, her impulse was to walk on; but anxiety to hear something about the family at the Elms changed her intention, and she stopped, shook hands with him, and allowed him to walk down the street with her.
“I knew you the moment you came on,” said he. “It was a happy thought to go on the stage; I admire your courage.”
“I don’t think it was courage that sent me on; and at present I have had no reason to congratulate myself on my attempt, I assure you. Did Mrs. Falconer know me?”
“No. She did not care for the piece, and was not paying much attention to it. She does not know you are on the stage, for she told me she thought you had become a governess somewhere. You have done better than that.”
“Yes. And the rest of the Braithwaites? Have you seen any of them since your return?”
“No; but Mrs. Falconer gives a very bad account of some of them.”
“What does she say? Tell me quickly, please.”
“It seems there have been quarrels among the brothers lately, about money matters, I believe. Sir George and Harry are the chief disputants, and Mrs. Falconer never knows what the next news about them may be. But I am paining you——”
“No, no; I want to hear everything. Will you tell me all you know about my husband? Is he well? Is he no steadier?”
“I believe he is well now; but he was ill some months ago.”
“Ill. What was the matter with him?”
Colonel Richardson hesitated.
“You know his habits are rather irregular, and he had ridden too much and excited himself too much, and I believe he was ill from the effects of overexcitement. But why do you wish to know these things? You are happily spared the wrangles and disturbances of that unlucky household now. You have the interest of your own career to occupy your mind; it is much better for you not to concern yourself any more with the doings of that barbaric crew.”
“Don’t say that. Every word you say makes me reproach myself more. I am not heartless, though I see now how selfish it was of me to sneak away as I did. You will hardly believe that I thought I was doing what was best for my husband as well as myself. I thought he was too young to be burdened with a wife. We did not suit each other; I seemed to irritate him to worse brutality; we were spoiling each other’s lives and our own.”
“You were quite right to come away. He would only have crushed your life out by his coarse cruelty before now, if you had stayed with him. How could you, with your sensitive feelings and cultivated tastes, bear with that uncouth boor? I used to wonder at your patience with him when I first knew you in town with him.”
“I was wrong, though,” said Annie, gravely. “If I thought I could do him any good I would go back now.”
“I beg you not to do anything so rash,” said Colonel Richardson, hastily. “Your husband is worse than an uncouth lad now; he is a coarse, savage-tempered man. Lilian—Mrs. Falconer—his own sister, is afraid of him; and you know she is not meek-spirited.”
“What does he say of me? Does he never speak about me? Do you know?”
“The last time his sister saw him he told her that, if he ever met his wife again—and he used language which neither she nor I could repeat to you—he would ‘crush the beauty out of the face that made a fool of him.’ Forgive my repeating his words to you; I think they will be the best warning I can give you to keep out of his reach.”
Annie sighed.
“You don’t make me afraid of him; you only make me pity him as I would a fierce hound who had been unwisely treated. If Harry were to crush my face, as he said, in a fit of passion, it would be the one thing which would make him treat me tenderly ever afterward.”
Colonel Richardson looked surprised.
“You almost make me bold enough to wonder——”
“Why I left him? I suppose my strongest reason really was that he was unbearable to me. His tenderness was odious as his anger, and worse than his neglect. I should dislike him more than ever now; but I should know how to treat him more wisely.”
Colonel Richardson understood women too well to say more on that subject. He turned the conversation.
“Mrs. Falconer expects her brother William next week,” he said. “Shall I bring him to the theater and see if he knows you?”
Annie caught eagerly at the idea of seeing her favorite William again. She had nothing to fear from his knowing where she was, and she was anxious to find out whether he was growing into a less worthless man than his brothers. He was now eighteen. She was anxious, too, to learn whether he still retained the affectionate remembrance of her. So her last words to Colonel Richardson were a repetition of her injunction to bring him to the theater without any warning that he would see her. She did not doubt that he would know her, especially as he was the one member of the family who knew she was on the stage.
The season was nearly over now, and night after night she scanned the audience anxiously in the hope of seeing those two faces she knew; but it was not until the very last night of all that, as she came on to the stage, she saw a tall young man in the stalls half rise from his seat, with the exclamation, just loud enough for her to hear—“Annie!”
At the end of the street William met her, and could hardly be restrained from embracing her, regardless of appearances. He was broader, manlier in figure; but in his manner to her he was exactly the same as before. She was thankful to see that he did not look dissipated, and he hastened to assure her that he had observed all her commands, that he read a great deal and “quite liked it.” He had not lived much at Elms, having passed most of his time with his uncle, his mother’s brother, in Ireland.
“And, Annie, I’m not going to lead an idle life. I’m going to be a soldier.”
“Well, that is the next thing to it.”
“No disrespect to the army, I beg, madam. It is very hard work to get in at all nowadays. No Braithwaite ever had to study so much before as I shall have to do to pass the exams. I’m sure to be ‘plucked’ the first time, of course, and very likely the second. I must get through the third time, you know, or else it will be all up with me.”
“You must get through the first time,” said Annie indignantly. “If you don’t, I will never speak to you again.”
“Oh, yes, you will. If I don’t pass, you will have to console me, and, if I do pass, you will congratulate me. Oh, Annie, I wish I had been old enough to marry you, or that you had married George, so that you might come back to the Elms again.” No suggestion that she should go back to Harry, however. Annie looked up at him quickly.
“How is Harry? He is not anxious for my return, I suppose?”
“Oh, to think of your being his wife is intolerable! He is not worthy to look at you. Sometimes he is sorry, in a maudlin sort of way, that he can’t see you, and complains that you have deserted him, and that you are the only woman he ever cared about. But that is all nonsense, and he says it only when he is drunk. He drinks worse than Wilfred. And a few months ago——Well, never mind that! You mustn’t trouble your head any more about him.”
Annie listened in silence, her heart aching with remorse. She knew well enough now that she had done irretrievable wrong in leaving her husband, whom at least she could, at the entire sacrifice of herself, have kept from this. But it was too late now, she told herself. If she returned to him now unbidden, with the feeling of repulsion toward him a thousand-fold stronger than ever, she could not expect a welcome, she could not even repress the disgust she felt.
She told William that she was going to leave town and travel with a theatrical company, to gain experience in better parts than she could hope to play in London yet. He walked all the way home with her, and, looking at her gravely as he stood saying the last words to her, he complained that she was thin and pale.
“Do you know, Annie, you are so much altered I should hardly have known you. You have lost all your pretty color, and your eyes are not half so bright as they used to be. It is all that beast Harry, making you have to work for your living!” he broke out, passionately. “He deserves to be kicked!”
“Come, be reasonable, William; that is not Harry’s fault. Women must expect to ‘go off’ in looks, you know, as they grow older.”
“But you are not old. That is nonsense.”
“I am two-and-twenty. When you last saw me, I was not nineteen.”
“Well, you ought not to have changed so much in less than three years. Never mind,” added he affectionately, seeing that his words seemed to depress his sister-in-law—“I love you just as much as ever; and you will soon get back your color when you get out of London and forget all about Harry again.”
And he kissed her and bade her good-bye most unwillingly; for the following morning he had to go back to the Elms, to see George about the expenses of a “coach” to cram him for the examination he would have to go through.
Annie went up-stairs to her rooms—she could afford to have a sitting-room now—feeling ashamed of the pain his remarks upon her looks had given her. It was a fact she had known for a long time now, that her beauty had fallen off, so that there were barely traces of it left. A thin, brown face, without a tinge of pink in the cheeks, and with scarcely more than a tinge in the lips, eyes from which the brightness of hope and joy had gone, and a weary, worn expression, were what less than three years of lonely work and disappointment had left of her youthful prettiness. No woman, and especially an actress, can suffer the sense of lost beauty to be suddenly brought home to her without a pang, and Annie’s vanity was strong enough to make her cry at William’s evident regret.
“Perhaps Harry himself would not know me,” she thought to herself, “and would be disgusted if I were pointed out to him as his wife.”
So she cried herself to sleep.
When William arrived at the Elms next day, he was even less inclined than usual to meet his brother Harry on friendly terms. For he looked upon the latter as being the cause of Annie’s exile—so he chose to consider her voluntary flight—and therefore as the cause also of all her struggles and the terrible alteration in her looks. So the lad avoided his brother as much as he could until dinnertime, when there was no help for their coming in contact with each other, as their places were set side by side. An unlucky accident brought the name of the half-forgotten wife into the conversation. Wilfred rallied his youngest brother, who had not been at the Elms for some time, upon being “so confoundedly abstemious.”
“One would think little Annie were still here reading you sermons across the table with her pretty eyes,” said he.
The blood rushed to the lad’s face, for Harry uttered an oath at the mention of his wife.
“I wish we had never frightened the dear little thing away,” Wilfred went on, in a maudlin manner. “She was our little bit of righteousness. It made me take to bad courses, her going away did.”
This was not a happy speech, and it was followed by a minute’s silence on the part of all three of his brothers; Stephen was not there.
“Why don’t you hunt her up, Harry?” went on Wilfred, who either wished to irritate his brother or had less tact than usual. “I wouldn’t let my wife leave me in the lurch, if I had one, and go tramping about all over the world, amusing herself without me.”
“She may go to the deuce for what I care, if she isn’t gone already!” burst out Harry.
William clinched his fists and tried to keep still. The injured husband went on:
“A little, sly, vagabond governess, glad enough to entrap a gentleman into marrying her, and then cutting away and bringing disgrace upon his name!”
“Disgrace!” cried William, turning with flashing eyes upon his brother. “As if any wife could disgrace you! As if Annie, who was a thousand times too good for you to black her shoes, could have any worse disgrace than to be your wife!”
“You hold your tongue, you young cub!” said his brother, doggedly. “I say she didn’t deserve a decent husband.”
“Well, she didn’t get one”—this from Wilfred.
“She didn’t deserve a decent husband, and she couldn’t be expected to stay in a respectable house.”
“What respectable house?”—Wilfred again.
Harry went on without noticing the interruptions.
“It was natural that her vagrant instincts should get the better of her again, and she should take the first chance of going off on the tramp.”
“You infernal liar!” shouted William, too much excited to be careful. “She is no more a tramp than you are. And, as for her ‘vagrant instincts,’ you stupid ass, they have led her into much better society than she would ever have got into with you at her heels!”
All the others were startled, and William checked himself as he was going to say more. Harry brought a rough hand down on his shoulder.
“So you are in the secret, are you? Come now, out with it; where is she?”
“Out of your reach, luckily for her.”
“Yes, but you are not, unluckily for you!” said Harry, thickly, rising to his feet and standing threateningly over his brother, not heeding Sir George’s voice crying, “Sit down!”
“Now, then, where is she?”
William thrust away his chair and faced his tipsy brother steadily.
“I would not help to put her in your power again by telling you where to find her, even if I knew, if you were to tear me to pieces!”
He stepped aside quickly to avoid the lunge Harry made at him, and left the room.
“Bravo, young un!” said Wilfred.
The baronet afterward tried gentler and subtler means to find out Annie’s hiding-place from the lad; but William kept the secret safely.
Meanwhile, the fugitive wife was preparing for a new experience. She had, as she had told William, resolved upon leaving London for awhile, hoping that practice in the country might mature her talent and enable her at the end of a few months to take a higher position than she could aspire to at present. She knew very well that, once out of London, it would be by no means easy to get back; but the feeling that she was advancing no further, and could not hope to advance further without more experience, prevailed over every other; and she thought herself fortunate in getting an engagement, in a traveling company, just about to start on tour, to play second parts in old comedy. It was not going to what are considered the best towns in a theatrical sense; but it was a good company, and Annie had heard that one of the actors of the theater she had just left would be in it too.
She had heard Gerald Gibson speak of going into the country, and had come at once to the conclusion that he must be the actor alluded to; she was very glad of this, for he was one of her favorites.
When, however, she got on to the stage of the theater which had been engaged for their rehearsals, which was as dark as most stages are in the day-time, she saw no face she knew among the people assembled there, except that of the manager who had engaged her.
“I thought you said I should meet one of my late companions,” she remarked to him when he shook hands with her.
“Yes, Mr. Cooke is here somewhere,” he answered.
“Oh, Mr. Cooke!” she echoed, in a tone of evident disappointment.
Now Aubrey was standing in the shadow only a few feet away from her. He was always particularly quiet when he was not remarkably noisy, and, having nobody to talk to at the moment, he had been still as a statue, and had heard every word of this short colloquy, and noticed the tone of Miss Langton’s exclamation: and he was nettled by it. For he had made up his mind that she was decidedly the most attractive of the ladies of the company, and had resolved to pay her the compliment of devoting his attention to her during the tour.
But, after this unconsciously administered rebuff, he had to resort to the other alternative—of basking in the more easily won smiles of the leading lady, Miss Muriel West. All that Annie could see of this lady in the dim light on the stage was that she was very handsome, with great, winning, velvety brown eyes shaded by long, black lashes, and that she was very badly dressed, apparently in odds and ends from her stage wardrobe.
They were rehearsing “She Stoops to Conquer,” and Miss West played Miss Hardcastle, while Annie herself was Miss Neville. Annie discovered in the course of the morning that Miss West had a sweet, rich voice and a kindly manner, an unrefined accent, and a rather heavy touch in comedy. During the succeeding rehearsals she further discovered that Miss West was good-humored and amusing, and that she already exerted a strong fascination over most of the men of the company; Aubrey Cooke, foremost as usual where a charming woman was concerned, being absent from her side only when he was wanted on the stage for his part of Tony Lumpkin.
The rest of the women were uninteresting. There was a common but clever girl of about her own age who played old women; she called herself “Lola Montrose,” but did not look like it, and was dressed in clothes which would have been neat and appropriate if she had not tried to “smarten herself up a bit” with large bunches of cheap but brilliant artificial flowers. And there was a well-born and well-educated girl who had gone on the stage against the wishes of her friends, and who stayed on it against the wishes of the audience; she played chamber-maids; but, though she could make witty speeches of her own off the stage, she always failed to extract the wit from any speech she had to make on it. And there was also a curiously incapable girl who was the manager’s niece.
On the day of the last rehearsal, before the tour began, Aubrey Cooke followed Annie to a corner of the stage, where she was standing quietly, as usual, rather apart from the rest.
“I beg your pardon,” said he shyly—Aubrey was very shy sometimes—“I hope you won’t think what I am going to say impertinent; but I couldn’t help overhearing part of your conversation with Miss West this morning about—about your living together.”
“Oh, yes! She was suggesting that we should lodge together, as it is so much cheaper than living apart. And she knows all about touring, and I know nothing at all about it. I thought it was very kind of her.”
“She meant to be kind, I have no doubt,” mumbled Aubrey. “But I don’t think arrangements of that sort ever answer, unless people know all about one another; and, if you have not settled anything, I would strongly advise you to try lodging for a week by yourself first; and then, of course, after that you would know all about everybody, and be able to make arrangements with any lady you liked. I hope you will forgive my interference; I could not help seeing that, as you say, you know nothing at all about touring yet.”
Annie had scarcely time to thank him for his advice before he had raised his hat and left her. Aubrey Cooke was a gentleman, and, in spite of her apparent prejudice against him, he felt sympathy with the forlorn little lady. When Annie left the theater that morning, Miss West was coming out at the same time, and for the first time Annie saw her complexion by daylight; and the force of Aubrey Cooke’s advice struck Miss Langton at once, for the pink and white and black of the leading lady’s beauty showed a difference of tastes between them which was more than skin-deep.