CHAPTER XXIII.
Annie woke the next morning with a dull, uncomfortable sense of having received a great blow which quite counterbalanced the ecstasy of her first stage-success. She reasoned with herself over this feeling, but could not argue it away. She had indeed suffered two shocks yesterday—the news of George’s ruin and the threatened sale of the Grange in the morning, and the letter which announced her husband’s departure at night. But the first was an event which had long been impending, and George himself could scarcely be more unhappy, now the crash had come, than he had been during those long months when he had felt that ruin was hanging over him; and, as for the last, a week ago there had been no event she had so much dreaded as the possible appearance of her husband in London. It could not be that she was so weak-minded as to have changed in a week from dreading her husband’s presence to desiring it. Certainly Harry had been most surprisingly nice, good-tempered, and kind, quite different from the bear he used to be at the Grange; she had caught herself turning to him for an opinion now and then, led away by the authority he had somehow assumed in his manner toward her; and his replies on such occasions had shown less imbecility than her former contempt for his ignorance had led her to expect. But then this state of things could not have gone on much longer in any case; such a very new phase as Harry’s angelic patience would surely never have lasted more than another day or two, and the reaction would probably have brought on a terrible fit of savagery.
“Yet I wish he had stayed till then,” she thought, regretfully. “He did not seem to have grown tired of being nice to me, and he was so very sweet while it lasted. I don’t think I was ever happier than I was last week, in spite of the fatigue and anxiety of rehearsals. I wonder where he is? I dare say I should be very much disgusted if I knew. After a week of no society but mine, I should think he must be pining for some grooms or coachmen to talk to. Very likely he is enjoying himself in some stable at this minute.”
But she little thought how shrewd a guess she had made.
In a wistful and restless state of mind she went back to the apartments in which her husband had found her. What few friends she had began to find her out in the course of the next few days, and to call upon her and insist upon her coming to see them and receive congratulations upon her success in “Nathalie.”
This recognition of her talent was very pleasant; but it just missed being the supreme joy she had expected it to be; and, in searching for the reason of this slight disappointment, it occurred to her that there was one person who ought to have hastened forward with the rest of her acquaintance to offer her the natural matter-of-course homage of a few complimentary words upon the hit she had made in the new piece. This person was Aubrey Cooke.
She had not seen him since that unlucky meeting with her husband; and, though, in the few bright busy days she had passed with Harry, she had had little time for unpleasant reflections of any kind, she had by no means forgotten the friend whose visits and amusing talk had been the one compensation for the dullness of her home-life in London before Harry’s inopportune appearance.
Why did he not come to see her again, and give her an opportunity of explaining her silence concerning her marriage? He had let fall no word, since the day of her arrival in town, when she had laughed off his sentiment, to let her think that it mattered to him whether she was under any engagement or not. Was he irretrievably offended? If he felt wounded by her want of confidence, was it not her duty to seek him out herself and offer some apology, rather than lose a friend by proud silence?
Annie felt so entirely heart-free that no further scruple about Harry’s jealousy deterred her from taking such a step. Since her husband disapproved of it, she would tell Aubrey herself that she must not receive him so often; and, now that her other friends and acquaintances were flocking round her, she felt that she was not so entirely dependent upon him for companionship. So she wrote a note to him, as she had often done before, asking him to meet her at the “Stores,” and help her with her shopping. She did not expect an answer, for these little civilly entreating notes he always took as commands, and she knew he would look upon it as an appointment. So, when she arrived at the “Stores” the next day, she was not at all surprised, or in any way agitated to find him there waiting for her.
But she had been but very few minutes in his society before she noticed that there was a change in his manner toward her. She had been much relieved to see that, when they first met, there was no offended dignity in his manner, no coldness in his tone; but now she began to perceive that there was even unnecessary tenderness in his voice when he spoke to her, and that he drew her hand through his arm with a gentle pressure which he had never attempted before, and when he asked her to have some strawberries, he called her “darling.” The next moment he saw that he had gone too far, and turned off his unlucky speech very cleverly; but Annie felt frightened, and, while he gave her no further loophole for offense, she was constrained in her manner and dismissed him as soon as she could.
She knew what she had done, that the discovery of her deceit about her marriage had changed Aubrey Cooke’s estimate of her, and that he had received this last note, written, as he must have found out, after the departure of her husband, in a very different spirit from the frankcamaraderiewith which he had responded to her former appeals to him to come and help her with her marketing. She knew that she had deserved this severe wound to her self-respect, and she went home miserable and ashamed.
But this difficulty was not yet over. At the theater a beautiful bouquet was brought to her with a note—a lover-like note—from Aubrey. She tore up the note, and gave the flowers to the dresser. But on the following night she received another bouquet, another note; and on the third night, this attention having been again repeated, she got a little teased by one of her fellow-actors, who knew Aubrey and had seen other bouquets of his and other notes.
She went home mad with shame and anger, and wrote Aubrey a curt note, asking him to call upon her; and when the next day the time she had appointed came and she heard his well-known tread upon the stairs, she felt that her whole frame was shaking violently, and that she would have hard work to receive him with calmness.
But he was experienced in flirtation as well as in love, and he had far too much tact not to know that her summons had been dictated by some feeling which was not affection. She was obliged to take the hand he held out so humbly, and his deferential attitude somewhat disarmed her.
“I got your note only just in time, Mrs. Braithwaite: I was going down to Kirby Park to see some horses a friend of mine has in training there.”
“I am sorry if my note interfered with your day’s arrangements. You should have sent me a line to say you were engaged.”
“I am never engaged when you send for me. You must know that by this time.”
Annie raised her head haughtily, while he continued:
“It is more than eight months now since you told me I was the only person in the world you could depend upon, and I have never failed you yet.”
This allusion was embarrassing, and Annie could only murmur:
“You have always been very kind.”
“And you have put my kindness to some hard tests, haven’t you? You have snubbed me, you have confided in me—at least you appeared to do so: you have encouraged me to love you——”
“No, Mr. Cooke; I am quite innocent of any such intention.”
“Then your innocence served you better than any coquetry could have done, Mrs. Braithwaite. Having innocently encouraged me to love you, you innocently allowed me to tell you so, with only such vague suggestions of ‘an obstacle’ as served to make me more anxious to win you. When you mysteriously left the company, you had managed to leave me not altogether without hope; when I saw you again, here in town, you managed, without compromising yourself in any way, to make that hope stronger, and it was only when I met the ‘obstacle’ for the first time outside your door that I was allowed to discover that it had any real existence. If you had left me alone then,” continued Aubrey, in a lower voice, his agitation betraying itself, in spite of his efforts to repress it, in convulsive movements of his features and his hands, “I might at least have thought that you felt some shame at the way in which you had treated me; but you wrote me a little note just in the old way, as if the old relations between us were possible. I knew your husband was away again; it was easy for me to see by the way you met him that you hated him. I took your summons, when I at last knew the circumstances of your position, and of mine to you, as any man would have taken it. You had deceived your husband, you had deceived me; you were not the good, true woman I had thought you. Still, if you wanted me back, I cared enough about you still to come, but not on the old terms. That was impossible. You were rather reserved; I thought it a trick of coquetry, naturally enough. I sent you flowers and notes, such as I have sent to other women far less treacherous, but without any of your pretensions to immaculate conduct. To my surprise, you assume in return an attitude of the most rigid dignity and outraged propriety—you have sent for me to answer for my offenses against you. With far more reason I might summon you—if you were not a woman and therefore above laws of justice and humanity—to account for yours against me.”
Aubrey Cooke stood as erect as Harry himself could have done as he spoke, with feeling and with fire, these words to the woman before him.
She had indeed been innocent of the depth of the emotions she had stirred in this man with the expressionless face and hard voice. She had expected to have some difficulty in arguing him into recognizing the fact that her conduct toward him had been dictated by the best possible motives, and that any apparent injustice she had done him was the result of circumstances; but she had not imagined for an instant that he would turn upon her with reproaches so bitter and so well founded that she would be left without a word in answer. Yet it was so; and Annie bent her head for very shame as the torrent of his passionate words passed over her, and she felt that she was without a defense.
Then, seeing her so broken and crushed before him, she who had always held herself so proudly, Aubrey relented—for he loved her still—and, as he saw the tears falling slowly from her downcast eyes on to her clasped hands, he fell upon his knees beside her, and from the stern judge became once more the humble suppliant.
“Annie, Annie, never mind what I have said! I did not want to be harsh, only to let you know—what I ought to have kept from you, I suppose.”
“You said I was wicked,” sobbed Annie, woman-like, seizing the advantage which his remorse at having caused her tears gave her.
“Yes, I know—I was in a passion—I didn’t mean it, of course, Annie. You didn’t tell me you were married—because you thought it would hurt me, and you hated him, and wanted to forget his existence. Well, you were quite right; I could see at a glance that he was an ill-tempered brute, and that you were afraid of him.”
“He is not ill-tempered,” flashed out Annie, with sudden fire. “And all that I am afraid of is that he won’t come back to me, that some one will tell him that I am happy without him, and that he will console himself before I can let him know it is untrue.”
Aubrey was silent for some minutes. He detected in this speech the ring of genuine feeling; and anger and contempt for the woman before him, who seemed to him at that moment the incarnation of fickleness and deceit, overcame his love for her and raised him to his feet again.
“I have no doubt he will wake sooner or later to a sense of what a precious thing he is neglecting in your love!” said he, in a biting voice.
“Thank you,” returned Annie, brought to herself at once by this taunt. “I deserve every sneer you can cast at me; but you cannot make me regret that I have at last discovered the worth of a man who has suffered more at my hands than you have done without casting at me a single taunt.”
“I congratulate you. I feel—I feel quite happy in having served as a foil to such a perfect creature. I won’t take up any more of your time, Mrs. Braithwaite,” said he, rushing to the door and groping blindly for the handle, having forgotten his hat in his excitement.
“Don’t go away like that!” said Annie, following him and sobbing, meekly. “I have behaved very, very badly; it was all through my conceit in thinking I could not do anything wrong just because I did not mean to. Will you forgive me, Mr. Cooke?”
“No, I won’t—I can’t, Mrs. Braithwaite!”
“Do forgive me, Aubrey!”
He held out only one second longer, then took her little hands and kissed them again and again.
“You are the only woman who has ever treated me badly, and the only woman I shall ever care a straw about. It is always like that, I believe. Good-bye, Annie. I shall be married in a month, and dead in two, I expect. Good-bye.” And he tore a little rosebud from the bouquet near her throat, and was out of the room and out of the house before she could answer.
Her faults were punishing her bitterly now. She threw herself upon the sofa in an agony of remorse and wretchedness, feeling that she had behaved badly all round, that she was abandoned by every one, and that she had deserved every pang which could torment her. She had trifled with Aubrey, despised her husband, and now they both looked down upon her and treated her as she deserved.
When the first excess of her grief and humiliation was over, her thoughts all flowed into one channel, and the question which absorbed her was, would Harry ever come back to a wife for whom he must, in spite of his patience with her through that week at the end of which he had run away, entertain at heart so great a contempt? She was herself surprised at the persistency with which her thoughts returned to the husband whom she had so disliked and despised at the time when no self-reproach at the faults in her own conduct had risen to disturb the placid superiority she felt over him.
She had begun to fret herself into a fever of anxiety at the thought that she would never hear from him again, when, on her return home from a walk one afternoon, she was told by the servant that a lady and gentleman were in her sitting-room.
“They did not come together, ma’am. The lady came first, and presently the gentleman; and, when they heard you were out, they both said they would wait for you. So I showed them both up-stairs, ma’am.”
In the sitting-room Annie found Stephen, whom she had rightly guessed to be one of the visitors, and Muriel West, whom she certainly neither expected nor wished to see.
This lady, whose coarseness had in the very first days of their forced acquaintanceship on tour disgusted Annie, had nevertheless shown the latter so much good-natured kindness in many little ways, and notably when the younger actress was ill with neuralgia, that it was impossible for her not to receive the unwelcome guest with cordiality.
Miss West had dyed her hair a new color since their last meeting, but the dye was wearing off; her face was thin and ghastly, her gloves were in holes, her dress was more haphazard than ever, and her whole appearance suggestive of hard times and even of scanty fare. She greeted Annie with her old loud geniality.
“Ah, Miss Langton, you’re up, and I’m down! I hardly dared to come and call upon such a howling swell as you have become. You are not sorry to see an old friend though, I see.”
“I am very sorry to see you looking so ill, though,” said Annie, sincerely. “You used not to look like that in the country. You want change of air.”
“No, no, my dear; you’re wrong there. No actress wants change of air when once she’s got to London. It’s an engagement I want. I’ve been out for six weeks, and see no prospect of being in again. I don’t know whether you can help me; but I’ve come to ask your advice on one or two matters.”
“I will come in and see you presently, Annie,” said Stephen, going toward the door. “I have nothing much to say to you, and I came chiefly to see whether you had any commissions for me.”
“Yes, yes, I have! I have a letter for you to take, and I want to see you most particularly. Come back and have tea with me, will you?”
He promised to do so; and Annie, who was dying to hear all he had to tell her about her husband, was obliged reluctantly to let him go, and to listen instead to the long list of grievances and complaints against London managers and things in general which Miss West proceeded to entertain her with in language much stronger than was necessary.
Annie had noticed upon her first entrance that Stephen and Miss West were in animated converse, and that the former seemed very much engrossed by his companion. He now turned with eagerness to her again, and asked whether he should have the pleasure of meeting her on his return. But Annie did not invite Miss West to stay to tea. So he left, casting at the very last moment an ardent and expressive glance at the object of his evident admiration.
The two women had not been many minutes alone together before Annie discovered that the real object of her visitor was to discover whether her more prosperous fellow-artist could oblige her with a loan. Annie had some money to spare, and could not refuse, especially as she felt that fate had been capricious in giving her a good engagement and the chance she had pined for, while Miss West, who she felt was really the greater actress of the two, was out of work and restlessly longing for an opportunity of distinction, as she herself had so long been.
Miss West had not been gone more than a few minutes when Stephen returned, and Annie asked anxiously for news of Harry, which his cousin seemed chary of imparting to her.
“Can’t you tell me where he is and how he is, Stephen?” she asked impatiently.
“I can’t tell you where he is, because he is traveling about, and I don’t know myself where he is at this moment. But he is quite well, and I haven’t seen him in such good spirits for a long time.”
“Oh,” said Annie, her face falling involuntarily. “I am very glad to hear that! Does he—I suppose he doesn’t speak of coming to town?”
“Oh, dear, no! You know Harry hates town; he is not like the same man now he has got back into the country again, and to—”
Here Stephen pulled himself up short and Annie said quietly, with tightened lips:
“Go on, Stephen. Harry is happier now he has got back to—what?”
“Oh, I only meant the country air and the country people! You know he is a regular rustic, and Londoners don’t suit him.”
Annie gulped down the tears this unlucky speech brought to her eyes, and said, with forced cheerfulness:
“Yes, he is, of course, much happier in the country.”
“Of course,” admitted Stephen, guardedly. “He has sent you this letter.”
She tore it open. It was only a short note, very affectionate, but with no definite word concerning his own movements. A sudden impulse of angry pride seized her, and shame at the long letter she had prepared in exchange for this brief, hurriedly-written note. She took up the letter she was about to send, and, excusing herself to Stephen, went into the next room, tore it into shreds, and, hastily writing a note as short and as vague as her husband’s own, returned and gave that as her answer.
They were not long over tea, as Stephen seemed anxious to get away, and Annie herself was late for the theater. When he had gone, she dressed very quickly, and followed him out of the house in a few minutes. At the end of the second street she had to pass through, she saw Stephen and Miss West standing in earnest conversation. She had to pass them; but they were too much absorbed in what they were saying to notice her approach.
When she was near to them, she heard Stephen say bitterly:
“Of course you like Harry better than me, because he’s such a tall, straight, handsome fellow!”
“Handsome is that handsome does. I like him because he likes me. You tell him so, give him my love, and say he’ll see me before very long if he’s a good boy;” and Miss West, with a laugh and a roguish glance, hurried away; and Stephen, without turning round to see Annie, followed slowly in the same direction.
Annie walked on steadily, with the hot tears burning in her eyes.
This was what Harry’s desertion meant; and this coarse woman, whom she had just been assisting, was the enchantress who held his heart for the time.
“What an idiot I was to imagine for a moment that he was capable of lasting affection, and for his wife! I will never think about him again!”
But she thought about him all the way to the theater, and cried herself to sleep over her dislike of him and her contempt for him.