All London was placarded with that American play.
It ran through the streets in big letters on the omnibuses; it walked in tilting lines in the gutter; it stared out from all the hoardings with the wide smile of its principal actress ... Adelaide Fish.
And it was the gaudy poster that startled Susan out of the unhappy listlessness that had fallen on her. Facing her suddenly it arrested her wandering step.
Adelaide Fish.... Had the world stood still after all, and was it this morning that she had had a letter...?
"Hideously inartistic," said one passer-by to another.
"Still she's handsome. I've seen her. One of these big women——"
Yes, it was inartistic. Reds and blues and greens in vivid splashes, and the name writ large. A marvellous jump from the bankrupt shifts of the Tragedy Company to this smiling elevation. And Barnaby was still ignorant. He had not been warned.
She thought of him now. The passionate shame that had caught her up like a flame sweeping all before it had died out. She felt only a kind of wonder at herself, looking back. It was inevitable. The impossible situation could only have ended so.... But in the background all the while was the woman.
She tried to shake off the lassitude of despair. Why had she burned the letter? She had been going to tell Barnaby, although the writer had forbidden her to share its contents with him. It would have been simpler to let him—but no, she could never have put that letter into his hands. Hard enough to look him in the face and tell him what she could repeat;—that the woman who was his wife, the one in whose likeness she had been masquerading, had written, and was in England. But before she had spoken Julia had intervened and the waters of bitterness had closed over her head.
Barnaby must not be left in the dark. She had a wild and sudden longing to do something for him still; one last service. She could find out from this woman what were her intentions towards him and if it were a threat or a promise that had lurked in that ambiguous letter.
She must ask somebody where she was. For the first time she realized her surroundings, the roar of the traffic, the restless street.
*****
Outside the theatre an interminable train of people, wedged tightly, endured with their faces turned towards the gallery stair; another line, reaching far down the pavement and less good-humoured, guarded the entrance to the pit. The lights falling on their faces threw up a singular likeness in expression, a kind of touch-me-not attitude that defied their physical juxtaposition. Squeezed like herrings, their pained endurance was heightened by the universal lack of a smile. And the lines were haunted by a street musician strumming his lamentable tune.
As Susan went up the dark entry she was pursued by unfriendly glances, the quick suspicion that she was a late comer who must be turned back ignominiously in her base attempt to push in at the head of the line. As she vanished inside the stage door there was an interested murmur; here and there a man unbent and asked his neighbour which of them she was. Then there was a click and the crowd went surging forward. The doors were open.
Miss Fish was in her dressing-room.
Like one in a dream the girl was breathing that familiar atmosphere of the theatre. It seemed to shut off for ever all that was yesterday. She stumbled into a little room violently scented, full of blinding light. And a woman swung round and seized her hands.
"There you are!" she said. "I can't kiss you—my face is sticky. I've sent away my dresser. Wait till I shut that door!"
She made a dash and secured it, then pushed Susan into a chair.
"I'll have to make up while I talk," she said. "Go on; go on. I'm mad with curiosity! I am dying to hear it all."
"I had your letter," said Susan.
Adelaide laughed. Her warm voice had a note of banter.
"I didn't know but you had waxed fat like Jeshurun," she said. "Wasn't it he that kicked?—So I wrote that letter. I had to see you. You burnt it? You didn't tell him?"
"He does not know you are here," said Susan. "He has been ill." Her heart was beating painfully hard; the air in this close little room was suffocating her. It was not air....
"Yes?" said Adelaide. "That's how I know about you. My dear, don't tell me! I picked up a picture paper and saw a piece about him and his accident, and his devoted American wife!—I'd so often wondered what became of you. It's tremendous!"
There was admiration in her gaze as she turned unwillingly from her visitor to the glass, smearing her chin as she talked. "I did hear of him being alive," she said. "I saw that in one of our papers, 'English Gentleman Comes Back from the Grave' and so on. Iwasscared when I thought of you. They said what a joy it was to his wife and his mother, and I thought they had been too hasty. But there was never a word more, though I watched the paper. I decided he must have walked into the offices here and said—'I do not desire you to mention this'—I'd heard it was done sometimes by the upper classes. But—!"
Again her face expressed unqualified admiration. "You must have had a nerve," she said, "you poor kitten!"
The girl sprang up, her mouth proud, her eyes imploring.
"Adelaide," she said, "you were good to me once, you—you tried to help me. Won't you believe me when I tell you I am nothing to him? It was all acting, all acting from beginning to end. Never real, never what you said in your letter. I was only staying in his house playing—that—part till I could disappear without scandal."
"What?" said the woman bluntly. "Has he never said to you—'If I can free myself of the other I'll marry you?'"
"Oh, never; never!"
"Then," said Adelaide, "it's not for your sake his lawyers are getting busy, trying to find what they call flaws, trying to break his marriage? They can try.... You didn't know?"
She turned on the girl with a suddenness that took her unawares; read her face.
"He's not playing you fair!" she cried.
It was remarkable, just then, how she resembled Julia. Half dressed as she was, half made-up, her eyes darkened, and scorn on her carmined lip.
"I'll give you a hold over him," she said. "I'll stand by you. Wasn't it all my doing? Who's that knocking?—You can't come in."
Good-nature was back as she turned from the interruption. She smiled indulgently, as one who was hoarding a gift.
"I wouldn't lift a finger for him," she said. "But I'm silly over you. I'll tell you. And you can go back to him and make your bargain."
The girl shut her lips hard. She must listen;—for Barnaby's sake she must listen. The shamed colour ebbed in her cheek.
"I'm not mad, or bad,—at least not to speak of," said Adelaide, "but I'm careless.... Oh, I'll give you your Englishman, child; you needn't look so stricken! I once had a kind of a romance myself. When I was a young thing like you I married myself to a shabby little poet. But I grew tired of him muttering verses and dreaming things upside down; and we had a divorce, and I ran and left him and went on the stage. And all the while that little man kept on writing; and when he'd used up all his poetry, and all the dead kings and queens, he woke up and wrote a play."
A queer pride, not unmixed with tenderness, came into her voice at that.
"What do you think?" she said. "Nothing would move him but that they should find me out and give me the star part. 'I have had her in my mind all these years,' he said, 'and it is she. No one but she shall play it.'—All these years that I had forgotten him, he was building me a ladder—."
She laughed abruptly, banishing sentiment.
"I've done all the talking," she said, "and I must, while you sit there dumb with your big eyes asking me if it's to be the dagger or the bowl. D'you remember when I was Queen Eleanor, and you were the Rosamond, and the boys nearly shouted the roof down, begging you not to drink? Ah, those times, they were funny. I've shot up since, like a rocket into the sky."
Time was running out. Somewhere in the distance there was a blare of music. She had finished making up, and she must let in her dresser.
"Listen to me," she said. "His people haven't the clues to connect a Phemie Watson they never heard of with Adelaide Fish. You'll have the start of them. Make your terms; make your terms before James and I go to housekeeping again.... I daresay he'd never find it out for himself. About that divorce—it was never fixed. The lawyer wanted to go duck-shooting, and I was gone, and James,—why, they're unbusiness-like, these poets!—he says he had always hugged an inextinguishable spark——"
She paused, looking impatiently at her listener, who was so silent.
"Don't you understand?" she said. "I'm no more Mrs. John Barnabas Hill than you are. If you're wise you'll make him marry you to-morrow."
*****
Susan did not know which way to turn when she was in the street. It seemed much darker; it seemed as if she were lost.
She walked blindly on and on. The people were ghosts that were streaming by; their faces that gleamed and passed did not lighten her terrible loneliness. A straw in that human river, she was afraid.
There was a post-office on the other side of the street. She almost ran to it, unconscious of the swift perils of the crossing.
For she must write to Barnaby, and the thought of communicating with him, poignant as it was, had a strange touch of comfort. The bare office became a harbour.
They gave her a letter card, and she wrote at the counter, with the scratching office pen. That was why it was so ill written. It was ridiculous how such a trifle hurt her. Was it not the first and last time she would ever write to him, and did it matter how badly, since it was to tell him that there was no bar between him and Julia? ...
He would be glad to have it....
She held it fast an instant before letting it fall into the yawning slit. She liked holding it in her hand, because it was a link between her and all that lay behind that curtain of loneliness; because it was going to him. In a little while he would touch it, would wonder, perhaps, at the unknown hand, hat poor scribble—! She dropped it in and it went like her own life into the dark.
For awhile she hurried, fighting her choking terror of the emptiness that was left. Why was it worse now than it used to be? She had been in strange cities, she had been friendless.... And somewhere behind in the glitter that mocked the darkness there was still one person who would help her, if she asked help; who would be kind to her lavishly, without understanding. She did not ask herself why it was impossible to turn in her rudderless flight and appeal to the woman from whom she had tried to guard her heart. There was a gulf between her and Adelaide. Little by little the fear driving her seemed to fail, and all other emotions grew indistinct, crushed by an infinite weight of fatigue. At last she could not think, could not suffer. She only wanted to go to sleep.
*****
It was a frost in Leicestershire. There would be no hunting.
That first irrelevant thought struck Susan as she felt the sharpness of the air breathing in on her face. The narrow window above her head had been propped a little way open with a hair-brush, and the curtain that divided her bed from the next was agitated; she had a neighbour who was astir.
With her eyes shut the girl imagined the grass frozen white, and the branches silver; heard the rapping trot of a string of hunters exercising in the long road beneath the park.
But this was not Leicestershire; it was London, and she was lying in a narrow bed in a small square attic. At the foot stood a washing stand, with a jug and basin, at the head a chest of drawers. There was not room for a chair.
Was it last night she had followed a stranger bearing a candle up flights and flights of uncarpeted wooden stairs? The weariness of that pilgrimage obliterated her stupefied sense of relief when the kind, worn woman had consented to take her in, her absurd inclination to sink down on the chair in the passage and fall asleep. She had thought she would never, never cease climbing stairs.
She remembered now.
Lady Henrietta had asked her once, when she and Barnaby had run up for the day to London, to call on an old governess who was ill. "In a sort of lodging-house," she had said. "One of these places where women live in hutches and eat in the basement." And the dreariness of it had haunted her. Somehow she had found her way there again. The old governess was gone, but the manageress recalled her face. They would not have taken her in without luggage at an hotel.
With that came the recollection that she was penniless. The few chance shillings that she had with her she had spent on her railway ticket. She remembered thinking of that in the train;—she remembered finding Lady Henrietta's battered brooch that she had pinned in her dress to take to the jeweller,—and the diamond star that was the one thing she had to sell. Ah, that was between her and destitution. She started up. What had she done with it? She had been too utterly weary to think or care.
The draught was beating the dingy dividing curtain that swung on its iron rod; it bulged like a sail over the top of the chest of drawers, sweeping it clear; and it parted, giving a glimpse of a girl beyond with the star in her hands. She started.
"I was just putting it back," she said. "The curtain knocked it off on my side. How it sparkles!"
Susan stretched out her fingers, a little too eagerly.
"You needn't be so sharp," said the girl, disconcerted. "I could buy heaps like it for a shilling apiece at a shop in the Edgware Road," and she threw it back carelessly, and began to whistle to show she was not abashed.
She had a plain, good-humoured, impudent face and dusty hair. On her arms she wore a pair of black stockings with the feet cut off, fastened by safety pins to her under bodice. She was tying her petticoat.
"I want to sell this," said Susan. In her loneliness she was loth to offend a stranger.—"But I hope I shall get more than a shilling for it."
"I'll give you three," said the girl, and then was all at once smitten with awe. "I say—you don't mean to say it's real?"
Her off-hand manner became subdued; she looked curiously but respectfully at Susan.
"You came here unexpectedly, didn't you?" she said. "Did you know you had slept all Sunday? Mrs. White said you were dead tired, and that you were a lady. I'll lend you my brush, if you like;—and a bit of soap."
Susan smiled at this proof of confidence.
"I'll shut the window, shall I?" the girl went on, letting it slam as she withdrew the hair-brush. "I was airing my bed. I always make it before I go down because I'm anæmic, and I've no breath to run up all these flights of stairs after breakfast.—If you want to be private you can pull the curtain."
That was the one thing she would not willingly do for her; with her own hands shut out the view of one so mysterious.
The other sleepers were stirring behind their enshrouding folds, like hidden moths preparing to burst from the chrysalis. In one quarter after another the heavy breathing was cut short by an awaking sigh. One or two emerged with their jugs and padded barefoot to the hot-water tap on the landing.
"I'll get you a jugful, shall I?" said Susan's friend, and having installed herself as mistress of the ceremonies, returned to the subject of the star.
"Mind you don't try a pawnbroker," she said. "If you take my advice you'll walk into the swaggerest shop in Bond Street, where they are used to ladies."
"Why?" asked Susan.
The girl assumed a great air of worldly wisdom, cocking her head on one side like a London sparrow.
"Oh," she said, "theywon't be so likely to lose their heads over you, and perhaps ask you how you got it."
She had not considered that. Her dismayed look gratified the girl, who at once adopted the manner of a protector.
"You'll be all right," she said. "They'll know the difference in the Bond Street shops. It wouldn't do in the City."
*****
She had been in a jeweller's shop with Barnaby once, and it was in Bond Street. If she could find it ... the girl's suggestion had made her nervous; she would have more courage in going where she had been with him. Would they eye her askance even there? Would they make difficulties, ask questions? The thought harassed her.
She lingered a minute outside the shop, when she had found it; gazing into the glittering window, so preoccupied with her errand that it never entered her head that there might be anyone who would recognize her among the idle people that were abroad. Defending herself by a haughty carriage she took a long breath and went inside.
"How are you?"
She started as violently as if she had been a thief. She had never expected to meet this man again; and there he was, holding her limp hand in his.
"I saw you over the way," he said, "and plunged in here to catch you and ask about Barnaby. How is he getting on?"
At first she thought it must be in merciless irony he was speaking, and plucked up a spirit to defy him. He had glanced from her face to the counter; he was a witness of her singular transaction. She felt his glance burn her. What was he thinking of it?
"Oh, he is getting on very well," she said recklessly.
"Is he up here with you?" said Rackham. Was it possible that he did not know?—She gasped.
"No," she stammered. And now he looked at her more strangely. She was gathering up the price of her star and turning to leave the shop. They had made no demur; they had given her more than she dared to expect....
"Which way are you going?" said Rackham.
"Your way isn't mine," she said.
He was keeping at her side; she could not outstrip his strides with her flying little steps.
"But I want to talk to you," he said boldly. "You were a little beside yourself, weren't you, at our last meeting? I've not seen you since Barnaby's accident.... You blamed me for it, didn't you? My dear girl, if I had wanted to murder him I wouldn't have been so clumsy.—What are you doing in London all by yourself?"
That last question came suddenly, just when his bantering speech had roused her, and put her off her guard. He was watching her face; and it blanched.
"What's the trouble?" he said. "Confound—!"
He had cannoned into another man, whose approaching figure he had not marked. It was Kilgour, in London clothes, who blocked the way, with a growl for Rackham and a friendly hand-grip for Susan.
"Who's the man charging?" he grumbled. "Though you can't see daylight through me, still I'm not a bullfinch. Come along, Mrs. Barnaby; you are just the person I want. I've been praying my gods for a sympathetic eye. Come and look at my masterpiece in the window."
His large presence was a safeguard. She could have clung to him.
"Half Leicestershire is in Bond Street in a frost," he said. "I knew I'd run across somebody. I've been up myself since Friday. But what is Barnaby doing in town? What do the doctors say?"
What a fool she had been not to have dreaded this. Half Leicestershire in Bond Street! And she had fled to London, the great, engulfing city—! She could have laughed wildly at herself, at her childish want of precaution, her romantic imprudence in haunting places where she had been with him, where it was so likely that she would meet his acquaintances. But what would he think of her when he heard that she had been seen....?
Mechanically she walked on a few paces. Rackham was still at her right hand; he would not be shaken off. And Kilgour was talking in his loud, kind, friendly voice; taking it for granted that Barnaby and she were in town together. He did not guess that she was a runaway.
"It came to me in a vision on the top of Burrough Hill," he said. "Rain and mist and the setting sun.... A kind of greyish-black gauziness with a stripe of crimson. There! What do you think of that?"
With a grandiloquent gesture he pointed out a diminutive grey and black turban throned in solitary majesty in the middle of a shop-window. His shop; his personal achievement. A quaint pride sat on his good red face, roughened by wind and weather. It was somewhat akin to the pride great men feel in doing little things. The big successes in life are too overweighting; they oppress a man with the memory of his struggle, the long strain, the effort,—the troubling secret of how he has fallen short. Kilgour might have swelled with pride over greater matters, but when he thought of them he was humble.... He wagged a delighted forefinger at his creation, boasting.
"There isn't much of it," said Rackham.
Susan was between the two men; she felt like a caught bird that dared not flutter, and she had still a frantic desire to laugh.
"That's it," said Kilgour. "No feminine exaggeration. It's all idea and no trimming, instead of all trimmings and no idea. And as light as a feather. I tried it on myself."
Shewaslaughing; not at the absurd image his speech called up, not at the picture of this bluff sportsman gravely regarding himself in a mirror, balancing his insecure idea on his close-cropped head;—but at the tragic absurdity of her own position. How little they knew, these men!
"Good-bye," she said. "I—I am in a hurry."
"Just wait a minute," said Kilgour. "There's another point in its favour. If you are in a hurry you can clap it on hind-before. Wait a bit and let me illustrate what I mean. Two or three doors up. You know this place? It's my rivalJane. Now, impartially, let's pick these hats to pieces."
But she interrupted his scientific disparagement rather wildly. She had not known how much she liked him, Barnaby's friend who might have talked to her of him if she had dared to loiter just for the sake of hearing his name spoken now and then.... She held out her hand to him wistfully.
"Good-bye, Lord Kilgour," she said hurriedly. "Good-bye!"
He squeezed the little hand kindly, not uttering his surprise till she had vanished from his ken.
"Bolted into the very shop!" he said. "How like a woman. Next time I meet her she'll have one of these monstrosities on her head."
He nodded carelessly at Rackham, to whom Susan had bidden no farewell, and strolled on, hailing his acquaintances, looking in the shops. Turning into Piccadilly he saw a face he knew coming towards him in a hansom, and raised his stick.
"Thought it was you," he said. "You don't look very fit to be out. What do you mean by it? I told your wife you had no business racketing in London."
The hansom had stopped. Barnaby was leaning out, staring at him.
"What did you say?" he asked. There was an incredulous eagerness in his voice.
"Eh?" said Kilgour, struck by his looks, and sorry. "Barnaby, old chap, you ought to be in bed. What's up? You haven't come to town to consult any fancy doctors? No complications, are there? It's generally when a fellow is mending that they crop up."
"No, it's not doctors," said Barnaby. "Look here, Kilgour——"
"Seems to me," said Kilgour, "as if you had been roped in by Christian Science. Don't you know what a battered-looking ghost you are?"
"I'm all right," said Barnaby impatiently. "Just answer me, Kilgour. What did you mean by saying you told my wife——?"
"I wasn't meddling," said Kilgour sagely, "I was offering a rational opinion——"
"Oh, stop fooling!" said Barnaby. "Do you mean you saw her?"
The other man was puzzled by the urgent note in his voice. Then he laughed.
"Missed her have you?" he said. "Oh, yes, you fractious invalid,—I saw her."
"When?"
There was no mistaking it. Barnaby was in earnest. For the second time Kilgour had a twinge, an uncomfortable recollection of a brown leather arm-chair in Wimpole Street and long white fingers handling one or two queer little scientific dodges that pried into hidden things. Once he had had to go with a friend. It had turned him sick, that minute or two of waiting in dead silence to hear the verdict.... Had Barnaby been there? ... He shook off the unwelcome fancy. If he knew anything of that girl she would not let Barnaby go into a lions' den without her.
"Half an hour ago," he said. "With your cousin in attendance. I met them coming out of What's-his-name's,—that jeweller's shop in Bond Street."
"What?" said Barnaby. He looked like a man whose wits were staggering under a mortal blow. Then his mouth set hard, in a fighting line.
"Bond Street," he called up the trap to the driver, and the hansom dashed jingling on. Kilgour was left marvelling on the kerb.
"By Jove!" he said to himself, proceeding to cool his perturbation in the peaceable atmosphere of his club, and stoutly refusing, though troubled in mind, to draw the inevitable conclusion.
Susan hardly knew how she reached the dreary place that was her refuge. Meeting Rackham had shaken her. An unaccountable restlessness took possession of her as she thought of him; she felt him pursuing her; she had an impulse to run and run until she was hidden from the penetrating intentness of his regard. In the shop whither she had fled she had tried to argue with herself, but it had been useless. The relief with which she had found herself for the moment free from him taught her too much.
She had glanced desperately backwards. He was not walking on with Kilgour.... What did she want; what excuse had she for staying till he was gone? She must buy something. Clothes for travelling;—was she not going to America?—and she had nothing, not even a handkerchief.
The suggestion steadied her. How soon could she sail? She must find out at once; must engage her passage.—They had nothing but hats in here, but an assistant directed her to another shop upstairs.
Recklessly,—since the prices here were extravagant prices for one who had only a handful of sovereigns between her and want,—she made purchases. It seemed to quiet her silly agitation, to restore to her something of her despairing calm.
But when she issued into the street again panic ruled her. She could not breathe freely until she was far from this dangerous neighbourhood, until at last she was shut inside the gloomy house in a side street, that barred out imaginary pursuers with the massive security of its blistered door.
But she must go out again; she must discover how quickly she could sail:—perhaps she was missing an opportunity.
The girl who had talked to her in the morning came in and brushed against her as she passed in the dim hall.
"Oh, it's you!" she said, stopping. "How dark it is in the passage! I wish they'd light the gas. How did you get on? I found something else of yours up there. It didn't look worth much, but it's no good leaving things about, and there isn't a key in your chest of drawers."
As she spoke she held out something.
"They've been talking about you," she went on, "saying things about you turning up at night without a bag or anything. They can't understand you calling yourself Miss and wearing a wedding ring. I told them it would be worse if you called yourself Mrs. and didn't.—You'll have to get some things, won't you?"
She looked inquisitively at Susan, who had sunk on to the hard wooden chair in the hall, unable to face the stairs. But the mysterious stranger was hardly attending to what she said, amounting as it did to a declaration that she had found a supporter. Lady Henrietta's unlucky brooch, that she had inadvertently taken with her, was just then a precious thing. She remembered how Barnaby had laughed at his mother, while she persisted in telling its history, and how she had vainly tried once or twice to throw it away, but had given up.
"I know it's bewitched," she had said.
"It is always bringing me small misfortunes, but I have an uncanny feeling that I mustn't part with it. Besides, I can't. It has fallen in the fire, and been left in a railway carriage, and had all kinds of mischances, but it has always come back to me. It's attached to me for ever and ever. I don't know what would break the spell."
Susan smiled a little as she gazed at that bit of dinted silver. Fate had made an end of the superstition. Surely she might keep it, valueless in itself, for the sake of the woman she would never see again. Its unluckiness did not matter....
"Yes," she said vaguely. "I must go and get some things."
What had the girl been saying? There was a kind of sympathy in her face.
"Would you come with me?" she asked, yielding to her instinctive need of companionship. She could not go out alone....
"Rather!" said the girl.
They set out, an ill-matched couple, flotsam that had drifted together, and would as casually drift apart. The Londoner led the way confidently, but surprised at Susan's first errand, the shipping office. It heightened her interest, and she listened closely to the stranger's eager inquiries. No, there was no room on the next boat sailing. She could have a berth in the following steamer if she liked, only three days later. But was there no boat to-morrow?—Oh, yes, but no cabin accommodation. The traveller did not care. She would go steerage.
"You're in a dreadful hurry to sail, aren't you?" said the Londoner, to whom the trip represented a tremendous voyage.
Yes, she was in a hurry.
"And you keep so close to me; you turn your head sometimes as if you thought we were followed. What are you afraid of?"
Susan tried to smile, but the truth was too near her lips.
"A man," she said nervously, with her thoughts on Rackham.
The other seemed to understand. She did not ask any more questions, but was kind and useful, advising her, helping her, reminding her that she must buy a trunk. Till they turned the last corner, and were within a few yards of the Rabbit Warren, as this old inhabitant called the house; then she hung back a little, glancing right and left.
"You're not quite yourself, are you?" she said, consideringly. Her eyes had the brightened gleam of one plunging alive into a serial tale, one of these in which lords and ladies behave strangely and the typewriting girl rules the tempest. As she put her key in the latch she looked round again. But there were no untoward appearances dogging them in the distance. There was a disappointing emptiness in the street.
The gas was lit in the hall at last, accentuating its gloom. The rather dismal illumination fell on a mahogany table under the stair where stood a row of candlesticks, each bearing a different length of candle and a slip of paper.
Susan's ally paused to examine them, reading out the names scribbled on the slips. It was the custom for those who were to be out late to leave their candles in the hall, and the last one in, finding a solitary candlestick left downstairs, knew that it was her business to chain the door.
"Miss Shanklin, Miss Friend, Miss Mitchell—" read out the inquisitor. "Mitchell is burnt down into the socket; she reads in bed. She'll set us on fire one night.—Miss Robinson—that's me, but I've changed my mind:—Miss Grahame—"
Susan made no sign. Then she remembered.—That was her name again.
"Oh, yes," she said, "is that mine?"
The other girl nodded to herself.
"Well," she said. "It's been brought down by mistake. Better take it up with you; they don't turn the gas off till ten."
She watched Susan go wearily up the long flights, and then ran swiftly along the passage and called down to the basement. The boy who opened the door to strangers and carried coals answered her call out of the black gulf of the kitchen stair;—his eyes glittering, like a demon invisible in the dark.
"What are you ladies wanting now?" he asked in an injured voice—"You can't have 'em!"
"Gerald," said the girl mysteriously, "come up. Higher;—higher! If anybody calls here asking for a lady, darkish, with grey eyes, and middling tall,—never mind what name he says—! Don't breathe a word of it, but fetch me."
"Doesn't sound like you," said Gerald, but grinned, diving backwards into his native gloom.
Miss Robinson turned from the basement stairs and began her long journey to the top of the house. No, wild horses would not drag her out that night. Did they always write down a traveller's address at the shipping office? Supposing it were her lot to draw two sundered hearts together?
The Rabbit Warren was a depressing house. As the day waned its dreariness increased; it grew fuller of tired women whose search for work had been useless, and who came trudging in with the twilight to join the rest who had been listening all day with straining ears for the postman, while they studied ceaselessly the advertisement sheets in the daily paper.
It was chiefly the incapable, the discouraged, those who had fallen out of the ranks through ill health, or were losing their hold because they were not any longer young, who drifted into this harbour. They were all in a manner waifs, and they had nothing to hope for but that they might die in harness.
Susan sat with her cheek on her hand, withdrawn a little, in the dingy sitting room. She was unconscious of the whispering interest she excited; she did not hear the subdued discussion that raged around her. But the atmosphere of the house weighed on her, charged as it was with failure. It was robbing her of courage.
How strange it was to look back; almost unbearable. How hard it was to look forward. She was to sail to-morrow ... she must be brave....
The girl who had struck up a casual alliance with her sat amidst the others, ripping the ragged binding off a skirt. Her sallow face was less heavy than usual, her eyes alight.
She had glanced up quickly as Susan came in, and had begun to hum a tune, snipping fast. It had been impossible to resist the temptation to crystallise wandering speculation and focus the general attention for awhile on herself by a few dark hints and thereupon thrilling silence. The rest fell with a pathetic eagerness on the brief distraction that lightened their dreary lives. They had outlived their own little histories; no excitement touched any of them but the recurrent terror of wanting bread.
All at once Miss Robinson laid down her scissors and listened intently to something she heard without.
"Is that coals?" said one, huddling near the fire, in a hushed voice, as who should say—Might the Gods relent?—But no full scuttle bumped the panels as Gerald put in his head.
"Wanted," he said, and grinned.
Miss Robinson gave one gasp, half in fright, half triumphant, and fled out of the room, shutting the door with care.
Then, for a moment, cowardice nearly quenched her long-unslaked thirst for drama. Visions of herself as mediatrix, restoring a runaway wife to her frantic husband, were upset by fearful misgivings in which she saw herself figuring, not in the gilded realm of the serial page, but in lurid paragraphs on the other side of the paper. Paragraphs in which someone heard pistol-shots....
In the dim passage she clutched at Gerald.
"What is he like?" she whispered.
"A regular toff," said Gerald in an awed voice. "Asked for a Miss Grant. None of that name here.—Slight, dark lady.—And then I twigged that he was your party. I've seen his picture once in theNews of the World; they snapped him, held up by the police in his motor. How did you get to know 'im, Miss Robinson? He's a lord."
"Oh!" she said. This was indeed a sensation. This would last her all her life!—
*****
Barnaby had had no luck in Bond Street.
He sat forward in his hansom, leaning out, gripping the front, ready to dash it open. It did not matter to him how many fools were about, how many frivolous idiots, men and women, stopped short in their idle progress and stared at him. Down Old Bond Street, along New Bond Street, right to the end he went, raking the narrow thoroughfare with a searching gaze. The shop signs mocked him. Milliners, jewellers, palmists, druggists, picture-sellers: a fantastic jumble. She might be anywhere, within two or three yards of him, and he not know it. She might have just gone in at that door yonder that was closing. She might be just coming out.
Half an hour ago. One chance in a hundred.... More likely she was miles off, whizzing in one of these cursed taxis—!
Well, he could hunt down Rackham. He would drive to that old barrack of his in Marylebone. No,—that was let or shut up or something. Where the devil did he go when he was in town?
It was late in the afternoon before he ran him down. He had been heard of, or seen, in most of his ordinary haunts. One man had come across him in a saddler's shop, another had passed him ten minutes ago in the Haymarket. And at last Barnaby found him coming out of his tailors'. He stopped the hansom.
"Get in," he said.
"Hullo!" said Rackham, staring at him. "What's wrong with you?" But he obeyed mechanically, and the hansom started off. "What d'you mean by kidnapping a fellow like this? Where on earth are we going?"
"I've told him to drive to my hotel," said Barnaby curtly. There was a controlled fury in his voice.
"But why the deuce——"
"I'm not going to have a row in a cab."
"Whew!" said Rackham, twisting round and regarding the grim outline of his cousin's profile, his stubbornly closed mouth. Unless Barnaby were stark mad there was something serious in the wind, something he could not trust himself to utter without losing his hold on himself.
It was not far to the hotel. Barnaby got out stiffly and Rackham followed.
"I hope you've got a nurse on the premises," he said,—"or a keeper."
"We'll go to my room," said Barnaby, in the same deadly quiet voice. Up there he closed the door and turned round on Rackham like one who had got to the end of his tether.
"Now!" he said. "Damn you, what have you done with my wife?"
"What?" said Rackham. He had not expected that charge.
"You know where she is," said Barnaby. "Don't lie to me. You were with her in Bond Street——"
So that was it.
"How should I know if you don't?" said Rackham. "Do you mean she's gone?"
His eagerness was unmistakable. It was worth a torrent of empty protestation. The two men looked each other straight in the eyes.
The likeness between them came out then, when they were roused. Something in the angry set of the jaw, something in their expression; a recklessness, a hard blue stare.
Barnaby had dropped his stick. He could stand up without its support. For the time he had borrowed strength of passion.
"You don't know?" he said, and took a long breath.
"I don't," said Rackham. "There's no occasion to fight me, if that's what you brought me here for. I saw her; I spoke to her;—but I was fool enough not to understand. I supposed she was up in town for the day, buying rubbish. I never doubted she was going back.—I thought you were still on your sick-bed and she was looking after you—"
He checked himself abruptly in the burst of angry candour that his surprise evoked.
"You needn't look so damnably glad—" he broke out, "because I've shown myself a simpleton, not a villain. Look here, Barnaby, I've answered your question. I'll ask you to tell me one thing. She's gone, and you have lost her. What do you mean to do?"
"Search London from end to end," said Barnaby, "till I find her."
"That's how we stand, is it?" said Rackham. "You're not wise enough to let her go?"
He spoke more slowly, recovering from his astonishment. There was a light in his eye, and into his voice had come a ring of exultation. He had got over his first vexation, his rage at his own stupid failure to guess the great good news.
"What right have you to say that?" cried Barnaby.
"For the matter of that," said Rackham, "what rights have you?"
The shot told. For a minute they looked again fixedly at each other.
"You had my answer," said Barnaby, "when I spoke of her as my wife."
"You stick to that then?" said Rackham. "Though she has found it unsupportable, though she's gone—you still hold to that pretence? What's the good? You don't care a straw for the girl. Oh, I've seen you together; I know the terms you were on.—It's sheer obstinacy makes you play the dog-in-the-manger——"
"Take care," said Barnaby, breathing hard.
"Let's drop that humbug," said Rackham. "I'mno gossip.—But I've had an inkling from the first. I've guessed all along that it was a plant of your mother's.—Infernally inconvenient of you to turn up and spoil it—! But I held my tongue. Nobody else had any idea of how the land lay but Julia.—There's a devilish instinct sometimes in a jealous woman—"
He laughed shortly. Something in Barnaby's look amused him.
"What? She's been reproaching you, has she, after all?" he said. "Well, I did you one service there. If I hadn't kept her quiet, she'd have shrieked it all out on the house-tops on the night of the Melton Ball. You owe me something for that, Barnaby. There 'ud always have been a few who wouldn't have put her down as a raving lunatic. Mind, I didn't muzzle her for your sake—I did that for Susan. I wasn't going to stand by and see that woman hounding 'em on—!"
"Have you done?" said Barnaby. He had got back some measure of self-control.
"I'm done if you are reasonable," said Rackham. "Why not own up and tell me what you can, and let me look for her. I swear I'll find her—but not for you."
Barnaby took one step towards him, and he stood back quickly, smiling at his own involuntary precaution. He could afford to smile, to stave off a scuffle that would summon all the rabble in the hotel.
"Steady!" he said. "Don't try to kill me. It would be a waste of time for both of us. I'm not afraid of you, Barnaby, but I have something else to do,—now,—than to stop rowing up here with you. I'd better warn you—"
Barnaby was struggling to hold himself in. Susan had still to be found, and she would want his protection. Rackham was right there, damn him; he must not lose his head.
"And I warnyou," he said. "I'll find my wife without your help. Do you hear what I say?—my wife, Rackham. I don't care what story you have got hold of. Understand that. She belongs to me."
"And yet she's gone," said Rackham.
Somebody was knocking at the door, but so discreetly that neither of the two men heard. Rackham, turning to go, had halted to fling back his taunting word. And the other man had no answer. His own storming haste had undone him.
"You can't get over that, can you?" said Rackham. "It knocks the bottom out of your doggedness. If she doesn't choose to carry it on you can do nothing."
"I can take care of her," said Barnaby. His voice sounded hoarse.
"No, you can't," said Rackham, with a sudden fierceness that matched his own. "That will be my business."
"Yours?" said Barnaby, and his look was dangerous. He advanced on the other man with a clenching hand.
"Because," said Rackham, "if she's not your wife:—and she's not; she's nothing to you—I shall make her mine."
In the short silence that fell between them the knocking became insistent.
"Better let them in," said Rackham, "I'm going."
Barnaby pulled himself together and turned the key. His locking the door had been an instinctive action. And Rackham passed out, ignoring the insignificant person waiting on the threshold, who met Barnaby's look of blank interrogation with an apologetic reminder of his own orders. He had said if a message came it was to be brought up at once. And a message it was;—from the shipping office.
*****
Rackham swung out of the place like a conqueror. The knowledge that Susan had run away was to him the knowledge that he had won.
He never doubted that he would find her, and inspiration helped him, as it will the man whose blood runs quicker under the stimulus of his belief in his luck. What was the shop she had flown into to escape him and Kilgour, and the embarrassment of their ignorant questions? He had stayed long enough outside to know it again, waiting till he had no excuse for loitering any longer. She must have made purchases. He went straight there.
How simple it was, with luck on his side, to call in and say that a lady who had been that morning was afraid she had forgotten to leave her name and address.... This was no big emporium, but a little exclusive shop where it was possible to describe a customer's appearance with a chance of finding it remembered by saleswomen who recognized his standing and were sympathetically amused. In the hat-shop they directed him upstairs, and there he found an equal appreciation of his attitude of comical despair, as he tried helplessly to run through a list of feminine furbelows that the careless lady was supposed to have ordered to be sent home. How should a man succeed?—Smiling they reassured him. They recollected the lady perfectly from his description, and she had made no mistake in that establishment; the parcel was already packed and waiting to be despatched. To satisfy him an assistant was bidden to read out the address on the label, and as she glanced up at him, expecting him to verify it, Rackham checked himself just in time. For the name she slurred over was strange to him.
Why, he had thought of that,—since naturally the runaway was no longer masquerading as his cousin's wife;—and yet he had been about to deny that it was she. What had it sounded like? Grant, or Grand?—And was it indeed Susan, or a stranger? He had no means of knowing; the only thing possible was to go blindly forward, trusting in his luck and fixing that address in his head.
"Yes, yes, that's all right," he acknowledged, and laughed good-naturedly at the apparent futility of his mission as he sauntered out of the shop.
*****
It was Miss Robinson's mysterious signal that cleared the room. One by one, like startled shadows, its denizens flitted thence, and left Rackham alone with Susan.
They hung over the stairs, buzzing like bees in the semi-darkness, thrilled by an interest that was vaguely heightened by alarm. At intervals they hushed each other into silence, listening with bated breath lest anything might transpire, and watching with a kind of fascination the crack of light that issued from the door of the sitting room. Only Miss Robinson herself went whispering, whispering on.
"Poor little girl!" said Rackham.
There was triumph and pity and a threatening kindness in his voice. His reckless personality seemed to fill the room that had been so suddenly deserted.
She had risen to her feet with a gasp at his entrance. A wave of panic swept over her head and left her slightly trembling;—because she had had no warning.
"How did you come here?" she said.
"Oh," he said, smiling down upon her. "I prevailed on a drab young woman who seems to have constituted herself your guardian to bring me in. I wasn't going to risk your giving me the slip as you did this morning. You wouldn't have seen me if I'd sent in a ceremonious message."
"No," she said, "I would not."
"I knew that," said Rackham. "The same pride that kept you from telling me the truth would have hidden you from me. You'd have had me turned from the door.—But the drab romancer was a great ally, though I've had to agree with most of her wild surmises.—I'll make you forgive me later."
He laughed under his breath.
"She asked me," he said, "if I was your husband."
"You—you—! Did you let her think——" cried Susan in a choking voice, fighting against a strange sense of the inevitable that his look inspired.
"Oh, she had been thinking hard," he said. "A runaway stranger, calling herself Miss—Grahame, was it?—I got it wrong—and wearing a wedding ring. What more likely—? I had the part thrust on me directly I showed my face."
He dropped the half-jesting air that had masked his excitement, and came nearer. She shivered a little at his approach.
"Daren't you trust me, Susan?" he said. "I'm not a Pharisee.—Why, I guessed it from the beginning. Don't you remember how I asked you to let me help you if you wanted a friend?—And all the while I was watching. Do you think I can't guess how Barnaby drove his bargain, careless of you, trading on your helplessness in the shock of his return? What did he care that it was hard on you, so long as it suited his selfish purpose?"
"He was good to me," she said. It was no use denying anything any more.
"Are you grateful to him—still?" said Rackham.
She turned away her face.
Something in her attitude kindled in him that instinct of protection that had from the first struggled in his soul with admiration. Had he not felt a consuming rage that it had not been his to battle for her, to turn round on Barnaby and his world, all pointing the finger of scorn at her for a cheat?—He would have liked them to do their worst, would have liked to defy them.... Well, that occasion was his at last.
Barnaby had nearly fooled him. The extraordinary course he had taken had at first made Rackham curse himself for an imaginative ass. But he had been right. His time had come.... And Barnaby was defeated.
"Well," he said, "that's ended. I'll take care of you now, I'll take you out of this. Look at me! There's nothing between us now, no fictitious barrier, no mistaken idea of loyalty to a man who took advantage of your false step to make you play his own foolish game. You made a gallant show. It almost deceived me, once or twice, almost made me believe you liked him.... Never mind that. Like a brave girl you've freed yourself from that intolerable position. And I'm here, Susan, where I always was, at your feet."
She lifted her head; a little, sad, desperate face upturned.
"Why must you insult me?" she said. "Is it because I am all alone?"
"I'm asking you to marry me," said Rackham.
She stared at him for a minute. His pursuit of her was not all selfish: there was an impatient fondness in his reckless face.
"I—?" she said faintly. "A woman of whom you know nothing but that she came among you as an impostor? You cannot mean what you say, Lord Rackham."
He broke in on her protestation roughly.
"Do you think I mind tattle?" he said. "Let their tongues wag. We'll hold up our heads and flout 'em. I'll leave it to Barnaby to find a way out of his muddle.—Lord, how it will puzzle them,—how they'll jabber when they see our marriage advertised in theMorning Post—!"
He was taking her assent for granted, arrogant in the heat of his headlong moment. Perhaps it did not strike him as possible that she would refuse. What woman in her plight would not lean gladly on the rescuer who came to offer her his kingdom? Perhaps he was blinded by his confidence in his luck.
"I—can't marry you!" she said.
Rackham did not fall back. He laughed indulgently. Was she troubled because of the world's opinion?
"Dear, silly child," he said. "Don't be frightened. I'll make them treat you properly. I'll make them swallow their amazement; and they shall be kind to you."
Yes, this man loved her. That was why she was afraid of him. She was not used to being loved like that. She had never learned to see in it help, instead of danger....
"I can't marry you," she repeated, but her breath came fast.
"Oh, but you must!" he said. "Fate is on my side. What kind of a struggle can you make against me all by yourself? I've found you, Susan, and I'll never let you go.... There's nothing too outrageous for me to undertake, and nothing on earth to stop me.—Your hands are trembling."
He bent to seize them in his, brushing aside her mute defiance with his violent tenderness, as determined as Fate itself. Just for a minute she felt very tired in spirit, very weak to resist him. It was so strange, although it was terrible, to be loved. Why should any man care so deeply as to stand between her and the emptiness of the world? Might she not, if she submitted, find the strange worship sweet?
She did not know she was wavering until she understood his smile, and with that her heart was smitten by a fugitive likeness, a trick of manner, reminding her of another man. Uselessly, poignantly, memory stabbed her. She flung out these trembling hands.
"No!" she panted. The thought of it was unbearable. "I can't—I can't!"
He was taken aback by the vehemence of her cry. For a moment he did not speak, looking at her queerly. His laugh was angry.
"I've a great mind to bundle you into a cab and carry you off," he said. "Oh, they'd let me!—I've only to tell these people that you are my wife and a little mad. My tale would sound more probable than yours."
She was not sure that he was not in earnest. Panic-stricken she shook off his hold on her arm, meaning to pass him and reach the door. Why?—To make a futile bid for sympathy in this house of strangers?—
Who was it that had turned the handle and was coming in? Her gaze was unbelieving; she could neither breathe nor stir till the suffocating leap of her heart assured her that it was true. For it was Barnaby himself who was standing in the doorway, just as he had stood on that night when she had seen him first. Only the look in his eyes was changed.
The same faintness overcame her that had stricken her down that night. She did not know whose arms had caught her as she was falling ... falling.... But she was afraid of nothing, though all was darkness.
"Your race, Barnaby," said Rackham.