In an interlude of difficulty to beggar all believing, response to Lucinda's forbearance all at once swept like a great wind over those treacherous emotional shallows, kicking up their still unsettled dregs of hysteria, storming in wild squalls of gratitude, remorse and shame, driving shoreward that frail, crank pleasure-craft which was the soul of Nelly Marquis, leaving it at the last stranded in a slough of self-pity and abasement, where it rested in maudlin wreckage, weeping, lamenting, calling out upon its shabby gods for that they had forsaken it.
Early in this scene Lucinda made shift to get the woman, half-leading, half-dragging her, into the bedchamber where the seizure might spend itself unheard by passers in the public corridor. But for a tedious while after she had persuaded her to lie down she made no headway toward stemming her transports; and sitting on the side of the bed, suffering Nelly to cling to her hands, seeking to pacify her whenever in a lull she could make words tell, learned enough from her maunderings to sicken one with the very thought of love.
As if what had been had left her in need of this last disenchantment!...
Sheer persistence in the end proved tranquillizing, the woman ceased to toss and writhe continually, her communications became more lucid. But she wouldn't hear of being left alone for a nap, she wouldn't release Lucinda's hands, she wouldn't heed suggestions that it might perhaps be well for her to get up and change to the clothing which Lucinda had provided. Time enough for that, she argued, when Mr. Druce had been and gone. Maybe Lynn hadn't been as much hurt as Lucinda believed. If he hadn't, he could be depended upon to move heaven and earth to save his fair name in the esteem of picture fans from the odium that must attach to it should the news get out that he had been shot up by a discarded wife. Anyway, they couldn't tell anything for certain till Mr. Druce had kept his promise to report the surgeon's verdict.
Besides, if it came to the worst, if it turned out that Nelly would have to cut and run for it, the later the hour at which she left the hotel the better, the fewer people there would be about to see her go....
It had been agreed that it would never do for Lucinda to ask for the key to the side door. But if she chose to stroll out through the lobby, accompanied by a young woman well cloaked, the chances were that the latter would pass unquestioned as some friend who had dropped in to spend the evening with her.
"But are you quite sure you feel strong and well enough to drive the car yourself?" Lucinda misdoubted for perhaps the hundredth time, though for the first openly.
The woman on the bed gave her hand a small jerk of petulance. "Don't you worry your head about me, Mrs. Druce," she insisted. "I'll be all right. I can drive any make of car there is, and I know all the roads out of Los Angeles like a book. Why, when me and Lynn was living together, we didn't hardly ever have any use for a chauffeur."
"Where will you go, then?"
"Up North, I guess, by the Coastal Highway. I can make Santa Barbara by morning easy. But I don't know, maybe I might go right through to Frisco. That's where I want to get, you know. It ought to be easy to lie low in a town like Frisco. Anyhow, wherever I decide, I'll shoot you a wire first thing, telling you where I left the car. I only wish I didn't have to take it, somehow it don't seem right. But there! maybe I won't have to.... And unless I do, there wouldn't be any sense in my leaving all my clothes here and everything, would there? What time is it now? A person would think Mr. Druce wouldn't be much longer, wouldn't they? I suppose you wouldn't want to call up Lynn's house and ask...."
"I'd rather not."
"I kind of thought you'd feel like that about it. It would look too much like worrying about Lynn, wouldn't it?" Lucinda made no reply, and after a moment of dumb staring at the ceiling a shadow of complacency modified Nelly's fretful look. "I guess it's all over with Lynn now, as far as you're concerned, isn't it?"
"Yes," Lucinda said with the slowness that spells restraint—"as far as I'm concerned, it's all over."
"I'm awfully sorry," the girl asserted, her voice in turn carrying the colour of complacency—"I mean, sorry for you. You must've been awfully stuck on Lynn."
"Yes...." To offset a choke in her voice Lucinda added with a hard laugh: "Awfully!"
"It's terrible to have to give up a man like Lynn.... Don'tIknow!"
Lucinda bluntly changed the subject. "What will you do now?" she asked—"I mean, after this blows over. Will you go on with your picture work in the East?"
"I don't know.... I guess not.... Nobody's likely to give me another chance.... Lynn isn't going to be able to keep the truth from leaking out inside the business, of course; and he's terribly popular, his friends will take good care I don't get another job. I guess I've gone and fixed it for myself in the picture business, all right, no matter what.... Unless, of course, I might maybe change my name or something."
"But this picture my husband is making: he won't be able to go on with it with you out of the cast, I presume."
Nelly laughed outright. "I guess that won't worry Mr. Druce a terrible lot. You don't suppose he cares two whoops what happens to that picture now, do you?"
"Why not? Why did he start making it, unless?..."
"Why don't you know, Mrs. Druce? I'd 've thought you'd 've been wise to that dodge all along. All Mr. Druce went into the film business for was to be near you."'
"You believe that?"
"Why!"—the girl laughed again—"it's just as plain as paint to anybody in the know; I mean, anybody that knows you two are married but living separate on account of some row or something. All Mr. Druce cares about pictures a person could put in their eye and never know it. He just wanted a good excuse to be near you and take care of you in case anything ... like tonight ... or if he thought you was beginning to take Lynn too seriously or anything.... Anyway, that's how I figured it from the very first. He had it doped it would cramp Lynn's style to see me around the studio all the time, and maybe make him break it off with you. And so did I. Only I guess neither of us guessed how hard Lynn had fallen for you."
"You haven't told me how my husband happened to engage you."
"Well, he just went after me and wouldn't take no for an answer. He's like that, you know. Of course, I don't know what the trouble was between you two, but I don't see how you ever stood out against a man like him, Mrs. Druce."
"Where were you when he found you?"
"Back home. You see, after Lynn gave me that hundred ... and what happened ... I was afraid to stay in Hollywood, I didn't know what else he might do to me. And besides, I simply couldn't stand seeing you stepping out with him all the time, it made me simply wild. So I went right back to Findlay."
"Findlay?"
"The place in Ohio where my people live."
"And that's where Mr. Druce found you?"
"I'd only just got back when a man came to town, Mr. Roberts he said his name was, and said he'd got me a swell offer to go back to the Coast and act for a new company just starting. I kind of thought there was something fishy about it, because I never was much in pictures; and why should they send somebody all the way to Findlay to get me when they could 've got plenty just as good right here in Hollywood? Anyhow, I was afraid of Lynn, so I said nothing doing. Next I knew, Mr. Druce himself come to see me and said I'd got to go back to Hollywood with him and make pictures and I could write my own contract. Of course, as soon's I heard his name, I tumbled to what it was all about; and I thought if you got to seeing a lot of your husband you'd give Lynn the air ... chuck him, I mean ... and maybe ... Ah!Idon't know...."
She was quiet for a moment, in wide-eyed, wondering abstraction. "Somehow I never got over being crazy about Lynn, you know," she said in a quieter tone than she had yet used—"not even when he treated me meanest."
In this pensive mood she mused on: "You know, sometimes I think it's all wrong the way women, like you and me, take everything a man wants to hand out to us, just to hold him. They keep telling you it's the only way; but the way it looks to me, it hardly ever works ... I mean, unless the man's crazy about you, like Mr. Druce....
"Of course, I know it isn't any of my business, Mrs. Druce, but I haven't got any hard feelings towards you on account of Lynn and all, not any more, and I'm perfectly sincere when I sayIthink you'll be making one big mistake if you don't make it up with Mr. Druce as soon's ever you can now...."
The house telephone came to Lucinda's rescue: Mr. Druce was calling, if Miss Lee would be kind enough to overlook the lateness of the hour....
Lucinda promised to get rid of Bel as soon as she could, and in return exacted the girl's promise to rest quietly and not worry. Then she shut herself out into the sitting-room, and had almost immediately to answer the door.
Bel's light motor-coat hung from his shoulders with empty sleeves, by which device he was able to make no parade of the fact that his right arm was in a sling. His features were drawn and grey, his speech slow with weariness, but his eyes keen, steady and (Lucinda made sure, looking sharply) wholly unsentimental; while his greeting, characteristically abrupt—"Still up, eh?"—was accompanied by ironical recognition of her unchanged evening costume.
"I waited up for you," Lucinda replied sufficiently to both words and look. "How's your arm?"
"Nothing to brag about, but no worse than I thought. A bit stiff and sore, that's all."
"You look fearfully tired, Bel. Won't you sit down?"
Irony again tinged his flying smile. "No, thanks. Won't stay but a minute. I promised, so here I am. But I'm dog-tired, and as soon as I've turned in my report, I'll cut along."
"Well?..."
"He's got one chance in a thousand to pull through. Say what you like about that young woman—she can shoot. Only one shot went wrong, merely smashed his shoulder. One of the others just missed his heart, the third drilled through his lungs. Wouldn't give a great deal for all the show he's got."
Grim watchfulness was rewarded by her slight start, a swift darkening of Lucinda's eyes, but no flinching, after an instant a slow nod, nothing more. "Nothing to say?" Bellamy demanded in pitiless humour.
"Thank you for letting me know."
"And that's all?"
"Was there something you expected me to say, Bel? Sorry to disappoint you...."
"Well: you knew the fellow better than I——"
"If it interests you, you may as well know now what I didn't—not before tonight."
"You didn't know Summerlad was married——?"
"If another man dared ask me that question, I think even you would resent it."
"Perhaps. Daresay it's the husband's astigmatic point of view. However, I didn't mean to be offensive."
"Do you seriously ask me to believe that, Bel?"
"Damn it, Linda! you always did have the faculty of putting me in the wrong."
"Isn't it more true that you haven't yet mastered the faculty of always putting yourself in the right?"
"Perhaps we'd better let it go at that. One thing's certain, I'm none too happy in my efforts to express myself tonight. Daresay I'd better clear out before I make things worse...." Nevertheless he delayed. "That girl ... she got away. Not a trace...."
"Are they—is anybody looking——?"
"The police have got that job in hand. I had rather a time with them, you know. They didn't fancy my story at all, at first, couldn't see why the devil I had let Nelly escape. The circumstance that she'd shot me in the arm didn't seem to carry any weight; in fact, I gathered they didn't put it beyond me to shoot myself in the right arm to divert suspicion. Only one thing saved me: Nelly had thoughtfully lost her handbag outside the window, with an extra clip of cartridges in it."
"She must have meant to make sure.... I mean, it wasn't an affair of impulse, then?"
"Oh, she'd had in mind what she meant to do for a long time. I don't know how long, but she let a hint fall the other night, when she'd had a bit more drink than she needed, and I spent the best part of the evening trying to talk her out of it. She fobbed me off with a half-promise in the end; but I wasn't satisfied. And tonight, when she wasn't on hand to keep a dinner appointment, and one of the bellhops told me he'd seen her boarding a trolley for Beverly Hills.... Well: my chauffeur says we broke all existing records, getting out to Summerlad's. Why we weren't arrested neither of us knows. Lucky...."
Bel's words trailed off into a thoughtful mumble, he seemed momentarily lost in study of the rug on which he stood, then roused and put his hand to the door-knob.
"If it matters," he announced—"possibly you'd care to know—we've telegraphed Summerlad's people in his home town, Terre Haute——his mother and sister. The family name appears to be Slade. We thought he ought to have them with him...."
"'We'?"
"Zinn and I."
"You told Mr. Zinn?"
"Called him up first thing. Naturally. Nobody had a better right to know what had happened, holding Summerlad under contract as he does. He came right out, calling himself bad names for being in the picture business, and took charge. It was mostly thanks to him I was able to get away as soon as I did."
"Does he know the full story, Bel?"
"All that matters. But your part's still a dead secret between the four of us—including my chauffeur and Summerlad's Jap. I think those two have been well enough paid.... It remains to get hold of your man and make him forget he drove you out there for dinner and didn't bring you home. If you'll give me his address...."
"Perhaps I can attend to that better than you, Bel; without making it necessary to explain how you happen to be interested, I mean."
"You won't forget? This affair will be all over town before morning."
"I'll call Ben up at his home as soon as you've gone."
"Very well, then. I presume that brings us to good-night."
"But Bel...." Bellamy reclosed the door and turned back with weary patience. "About that poor girl...."
He looked startled. "That sounds like pity."
"Can one think of her in any other spirit? Have you any notion what will happen to her?"
"Nothing's going to happen to her—if I can find her before the police do."
"You don't mean you'd help her get away, Bel?"
"If it takes every dollar I've got in the world. Do you realize what it means if she's caught and put on trial—either for murder or attempted murder, as it turns out—in a case that's going to get the publicity this is bound to? Do you imagine it will be possible then to keep your name out of it? She's bound to tell her story in self-defense; and inasmuch as she's good-looking enough to be acquitted on one pretext or another, in all probability, the chances are in another six months she'll be starring in a film based on a re-hash of this pretty little affair."
"Then you will help me? I can count on you, Bel?"
"Help you?"
"Help get her away."
Bellamy started excitedly. "Mean to say you know where Nelly is?"
"She's here, Bel. She came straight to me, half-mad with anxiety on your account. It seems she's grateful to you for kindness——"
"And you didn't throw her out?" Bel interrupted, staring.
"She made me understand.... And she was so bewildered, so terrified.... I couldn't blame her, Bel; and I couldn't have put her out in any event."
"In there?" Bellamy nodded toward the bedchamber and, receiving a nod in reply, strode quickly to the door and threw it open.
The room was a pocket of darkness and, when the lights had been turned on, proved to be tenantless.
The nightly breeze from the hills was bellying the curtains at one of the windows that opened on the street. Lucinda ran to it and leaned out.
No sign of the car that by her order had been left standing before the side door, nearly an hour since....
Lucinda slept that night—and that she slept at all crossed her presentiment—but fitfully, in spells of profound and wasting lethargy broken by wretched watches of half-waking dread under the dominion of the incubus that agonized her dreams, that phantasm of the land-bird lost, spending its slender strength against the cruel vasts of night and sea and storm....
Toward morning exhaustion claimed her absolutely, sponging out every care, and for some hours her slumbers were unbroken. But she woke up as it were against her will, heavy of heart and without sense of having rested.
Sluggish resentment crawled in her mind, that she should feel so worn and old whose first moments after sleep were as a rule her happiest, when she would lie serene, luxuriating in whole refreshment and with normal optimism very like a child's looking forward to the day, making plans to fill in with small pleasures every hour that wasn't to be devoted to her work.
There was still the feel of immaturity in the day, the chilly souvenir of night which so frequently renders the mornings of Southern California sickly, before the sun finds strength enough to burn away the high fog that, like a thief in the dark, is wont to steal in after sundown from the sea.
What, then, had awakened her so far in advance of the customary hour?
Something hideous and hateful skulking like a torpid snake in the shadows beyond the threshold of consciousness, some foul shape that she instinctively shrank from calling up....
The bedside clock struck nine, and Lucinda started up in a flutter excited by the thought that she would yet another time be late and so afford fresh reason for dissension with her director ... then sank back to her pillow, cringing from memories that came trooping in the wake of the reminder that she was to know no more of Barry Nolan in her life....
No more of Nolan, no more of Nelly, no more of Lynn ... no more of Love....
With a convulsive movement she flung over in the bed and lay almost prone, her face snuggled into bare arms whose pure lustre lent fire to the crimson that glowed in a lunette of cheek, the one ear visible, even in her neck's sleek loveliness.
Things that Nelly had told her, resting on that very bed, plain tales of the life that Lynn by preference had led, related in the flat and toneless accents of emotional prostration, therefore the more likely to be free from overstatement; things Lynn himself had owned inadvertently or injudiciously at the urge of vanity craving greater prestige in her sight; things that she knew of her own experience with the man, little circumstances of their association that had threatened its harmony, things she hadn't liked and wilfully had been blind to, denied, or disbelieved: all swam up from the deeps of memory to float like scum upon the surface of her consciousness.
Lonely and restless, starving for affection and all too eager to snatch at shadow and proclaim it substance, self-dedicated victim of a ready-made infatuation....
And she had called that Love!
What dishonor, what humiliation, what reproach!
What an escape! and at what cost!... a cost not yet all paid, and which if she would she might not pay alone, but must see others pay in part for her, Nelly and Lynn perhaps with their lives, Bel too in his way, in another way Zinn ... all called upon to lay down things they held dear that she might have her lesson, that she might learn Love is never lightly to be won, no, nor put by, either....
In the room adjoining she could hear her maid quietly moving about, tidying up, with presently a chirrup of the telephone, then a guarded mumble as the woman answered.
She was hanging up when Lucinda, dragging on a négligé, flung open the communicating door.
The maid said Mr. Zinn had called up, and gaped to see Lucinda's glance grow dull and the spirit of her entrance pass abruptly into apathy.
Sinking wearily against the door-frame, she desired to know what Zinn had wanted.
"He asked if you was up yet, ma'm, and when I told him no, he said it didn't matter, would I kindly take the message, he couldn't keep his date with you to look at the rushes today, and maybe not tomorrow, he'd give you a ring 'safternoon and let you know."
"Very well," Lucinda said without interest.... "I'll have my bath, please."
Waiting for the water to be drawn, she wandered to a window. The high fog still held the day against the sun, a dense, cold pall of grey, as flat as a metal plate, closing out the blue, closing in an atmosphere lifeless and bleak.
She thought of Lynn fighting for his life, perhaps losing, perhaps already still in defeat.
And Nelly ... at whose fate one could only guess....
She recalled that bright hour of sunset, so clear and warm, through which she had motored in gladness toward his arms whom she had called her beloved, that hour in the dread light of this so weirdly unreal, so inconceivably remote; and the old, embittered plaint of Abdu-el-Yezdi found a melancholy echo in her heart:
"Strange that Life's Registrar should callThat day a day, this day a day." ...
"Strange that Life's Registrar should callThat day a day, this day a day." ...
Bel came in about ten, by that many sleepless, active, anxious hours more jaded than when she had seen him last. Road-dust powdered his face and hands and lay caked in the folds of his coat, and he carried the arm in the sling with more open confession of acute distress. Lucinda herself opened for him, and he met her eyes with a short nod.
"You've found her, Bel? Where?"
He glanced round the room, caught sight of the maid through the open door to the bedchamber, and indicated her with a brusque jerk of his head.
Lucinda called the woman. "You've had no breakfast?" she added.
"No time. Been on the road all night. Just got in."
"Let me order you something...."
"Well ... I would be glad of a cup of coffee—nothing else, thanks."
Lucinda sent the maid on the errand, and as soon as they were alone gave intuition voice: "Bel: something has happened to her? she's dead?"
With a weary nod, Bel dropped into a chair. "We got as far as Santa Barbara without picking up a sign," he said. "It was getting daylight then, and I made up my mind we'd taken the wrong road, that Nelly had lied or changed her mind about the way she meant to go. But she hadn't. When we turned back we found her ... what had been her...."
He bent forward with his sound elbow on his knee, covering his eyes as if to hide their reminiscent horror.
"There had been an accident?"
"She ran your car off the road at a turn and over a low cliff to a rocky beach. Must have been killed instantly. If so, it was a mercy, for nobody had noticed the wreck till a few minutes before we turned up. I happened to catch sight of the crowd on the beach and made my chauffeur stop...."
He didn't look up, and neither spoke again till the maid returned. Then Lucinda made another pretext to get rid of her for another while, apparently to her considerable annoyance.
"How much does she know?" Bellamy asked, as the woman took herself off with an aggrieved flounce.
"There's been nothing for her to know, Bel," Lucinda returned without resentment.
"I didn't mean ... I was merely wondering if she knew where you were expecting to dine last night. She must have helped you dress."
"I don't recall saying...."
"Better give her a good present and make her understand a tight mouth pays."
"Very well."
Bel sipped his coffee, frowning. "Heard anything from your friends the Lontaines this morning?"
"Not yet. Fanny will call up, of course, or come round to see me as soon as she hears."
"Risky to wait. Better get hold of her at once, let her hear about this business first of all from you, and tell her she's got to protect you if she has to lie like Sapphira."
"But surely we can count on Fanny's discretion!"
"Can we?" Bel's grin was skeptical. "I'm not so sure. Nolan knew last night you'd been due at Summerlad's for dinner. Told Zinn he had his information from Mrs. Lontaine."
"Barry Nolan! I don't understand...."
"Only know what Nolan told Zinn. Stopped in at the studio just now, saw Zinn for a few minutes.... By the way"—Bel's manner was studiously casual—"it may interest you to know, the latest reports say Summerlad's holding his own."
"I am glad," Lucinda said simply. And Bel's eyes wavered under her level regard, lightly charged as it was with contempt. "You were telling me about Nolan...."
"Zinn says he telephoned all over Los Angeles last night trying to locate Nolan—because he and Summerlad had always been so close—but had no luck till about three this morning, when Nolan got home and found Zinn's message waiting for him. Then he hurried over to the bungalow—with at least three sheets in the wind, according to Zinn—and the first question he asked was where you'd been when the shooting took place. Zinn swore you hadn't been there, and the Jap backed him up nobly.... But there you are, if you're asking for proof that your friend Fanny tells everything she knows."
Lucinda coloured resentfully. "I am sure," she insisted, "Fanny never dreamed of hurting me when she told Mr. Nolan—whatever it was she did tell him. But it's easy enough to find out...."
She took up the telephone, but had to wait, receiver at ear, several minutes before the Lontaine's number answered. Then a voice with a drowsy sound, like a tired and husky imitation of Fanny's: "Yes? Hello! who is it?" And when Lucinda made herself known a brief stammer prefaced a shift to honeyed accents: "Oh! is it you, Cindy darling? Heavens! what time is it?"
Lucinda named the hour, heard Fanny give a smothered exclamation, and added: "Did I wake you up?"
"I was simply dead to the world when the telephone rang," Fanny declared with an equivocal giggle. "The poor dear eyes are hardly open even now."
"I'm so sorry, dear. I supposed of course.... Is Harry there?"
The reply came readily and without suggestion of uncertainty: "Why, no, darling: he isn't."
"Are you sure?"
"Quite——"
"I mean," Lucinda persisted, in some perplexity, "if you've just waked up, you've hardly had time to find out."
"Oh!" Fanny interrupted herself with an uneasy laugh. "Oh, but I know he isn't! I ... he ... I mean to say, darling, Harry must have gone out quite early. I mean ... O dear!" An audible yawn and then an apologetic noise. "I'm simply drugged with sleepiness, Cindy. What I'm trying to say is, I was awake when Harry left the house, but went to sleep again. Have you tried the studio? If he isn't there, I'm sure I haven't the remotest notion where he can be." Then with a quite unmistakable accent of apprehension: "Why, darling? is something the matter?"
"I'll explain when I see you," Lucinda temporized—"if you wouldn't mind running round to the hotel when you've had your breakfast."
"Mind, darling! I'll simply fly into my clothes, be there in no time at all."
The meditative expression with which Lucinda put the telephone aside drew from Bellamy the direct question: What had Fanny said?
"It wasn't what she said, it was the funny, embarrassed way she said it. As a general thing, Fanny's as transparently candid as—as a plate of glass."
Bellamy made a doubting mouth. "You're pretty thick, you two," he supposed—"you tell her everything?"
Irritation in a gust shook Lucinda till her voice shook in sympathy.
"Really, Bel! you seem fairly possessed by desire to believe my life out here full of things an honest woman would want to hide."
"No," Bellamy dissented slowly. "But I do seriously believe—in fact, know—you haven't always been altogether discreet, you've done things here, without a moment's thought, you'd have hesitated a long time before committing yourself to at home."
"You forget this is now my home. What Fifth Avenue holds inconvenable isn't anything to bother about on Sunset Boulevard."
"Well ... if life has taught me anything, Linda, it is that it never does to trust too much to the good will of one's friends. We're all too exclusively creatures of selfishness: self always comes before the claims others may have or impose on us. It pleases us no end to believe our friends so devoted that they'd put our interests before their own; but when the test comes, as a general thing, we find out we've been self-deluded."
"How funny, Bel:youphilosophizing!"
"That isn't philosophy, it's common sense based on observation of the underside of human nature.... I'm not blaming you for clinging to your friends, or standing up for them, I'm only anxious you shan't suffer from finding them out."
"I fancy I know Fanny, at least," Lucinda retorted severely.
"You think you do. And I don't dispute your superior knowledge of every side of her but one, the side she shows only to the men she picks out to flirt with."
"For example, yourself."
"Exactly."
Lucinda openly enjoyed an instant of malicious amusement. "Do you really believe you're learning to see through women at last, Bel?"
"You'll admit I've served a long apprenticeship"—Bellamy gave a deprecating grunt—"enough to have learned something."
"And now you're warning me against the wiles of my best friend!"
"I'm warning you against all such adventurers.... Oh, yes! the Lontaines are just that, both of them. Chances are they haven't got a dollar between them they didn't get from you. Neither did Mrs. Fanny set her cap for me just to keep in practice, she gets enough of that in other quarters. No: she had another motive, and it wasn't any way altruistic."
"What was it, then?"
"Think I can leave that to your intelligence. I've never noticed you were—one might say—dense concerning the psychology of your sex, Linda."
Indignation threatened to find expression in a rush of tears, but Lucinda winked them back.
"I do wish you wouldn't try to make me angry with you——"
"I'm only trying to tell you, one can't afford to trust anybody in this world except those who have nothing to gain through cultivating one's friendship."
"—Just now, when I've so much to be grateful to you for, when you're doing—have done so much to save me from the consequences of my folly——"
"Ah! you realize that."
"Both my folly"—Lucinda nodded gravely—"and all you're doing to repair it. So this once I won't resent your calling my friends adventurers."
Bel chuckled as he got up. "Because you know in your heart that's what they are, neither more nor less.... Think I'll be getting along now. I want sleep badly, and I must stop in at the studio first and have a word with Lontaine, if he's there. And then I need Nolan's address."
"You're going to see him. Do you think that wise?"
"I won't permit him to spread gossip about your being with Summerlad last night."
"Do you think he'll admit your right to dictate?"
"I don't imagine it will be news to him that you're my wife, if that's what you mean. Your friend the actor seems to have been tolerably busy crowing about his conquest of Mrs. Bellamy Druce—always, of course, in strictest confidence. Zinn knew all about you before I appeared on the scene. And Nolan was Summerlad's bosom pal...."
The thrust told shrewdly, rewarding Bel with a fugitive moment of sardonic satisfaction. Then the courage with which Lucinda took punishment exacted his admiration.
"But I'm afraid," she said quietly, "you won't have much success with Nolan, even if he does recognize your right to interfere."
"How so?"
"He has too little reason to feel well-disposed toward me."
"On account of your quarrel with him yesterday...."
"I didn't know you knew."
"Who in Hollywood doesn't, do you suppose?" Bel snorted. "Gossip travels like grass fire, out here. I heard five different versions yesterday, myself, before your cameraman told mine what I imagine was the approximate truth."
"Then I presume you know, as well, about my new arrangement, with Mr. Zinn taking over the production?"
"Yes?"
The single syllable of assent carried the rising inflexion of enquiry as well. Lucinda mildly curious, replied that she had merely been wondering....
"Well, I'm wondering, too," Bel countered, eyeing her intently. "Of course you understand that arrangement's not necessarily to be considered binding till you've signed up."
"We shook hands on it," said Lucinda: "I gave Mr. Zinn my word. Why?"
"Oh, nothing; unless what's happened since has had some effect on your attitude, I mean, made your bargain with Zinn seem less desirable. In that case, of course, I'll be glad to use whatever influence I may have with him...."
The tensing of her body betrayed the temper in which Lucinda met his suggestion. "What you really mean is: Have I changed my mind about continuing in pictures, because of this dreadful accident to Lynn?"
Bel's eyes and mouth tightened. "It's not an unnatural supposition, that you may have concluded you've had enough."
"Enough, Bel?"
"Of both...."
"That can't be anything but calculated impertinence!"
"Call it what you like. Nothing I could say would convince you to the contrary. Does it matter?"
"Then your suggestion doesn't deserve my notice."
"In that event"—Bel smiled in a knowing fashion difficult to tolerate—"I've got my answer, plain enough: you're bent on going on."
"Have you any objection?"
"If I thought my views had any weight with you I might be tempted to tell you."
"You'd waste your time—if you think I don't know what you'd say."
His brows circumflexed a mocking: "So?"
"You want me to give it up."
"Well"—he stressed a shrug—"one would think you'd seen enough of this sort of thing to satisfy even your curiosity."
"You think I had no other motive?"
"Plus gratification of your vanity—the inevitable factor in every human equation."
"You don't believe my work means anything to me for its own sake?"
"Are you asking me to believeyouconsider this a life worth while? Or that any success it may purchase is worth the sacrifice?"
"What sacrifice, pray?"
"Of the woman you might yet be, if you'd give up this nonsense."
"I think you must mean the woman I might have been before your conduct killed her in me!"
Bel made a wry face as he stooped to pick up his motor-coat. "This conversation is degenerating into a wrangle in which I have the traditional chance a snowball has in the place where motion-pictures were spawned. A husband, even a deserted one, is always in the wrong.... Mind lending me a hand, Linda? Can't quite manage this with one arm."
At once angrily and gently Lucinda draped the motor-coat over his shoulders. "Generalizing on the hardships of husbands," she suggested sweetly, "is hardly an excuse for making it your specialty to be always in the wrong."
"I feel that, you know." Bel replied with lips that twitched—"feel it like everything.... I'm to understand, then, my wishes mean nothing to you?"
Lucinda gave a little, silent laugh, and in silence for a moment gazed on Bellamy, her eyes unreadable. Nor was there the hostility he had expected in the tone in which she asked: "Have you any reason to advance, why your wishes should influence me?"
"If you know of none, Linda—no."
"I know of nothing that counterweighs the persecution you've been subjecting me to, ever since you found out where I was hiding from you—persecution that ended last night in a tragedy. I can't forget that, if you hadn't bribed that unfortunate girl to come back——"
"If I hadn't!" Bel interrupted—"and God knows I regret what came of that as bitterly as anybody!—if I hadn't brought Nelly back here, you might still be playing fast and loose with Summerlad's ambition to make you his mistress. Got anything to say to that? You know now, at least, he never intended anything else. And yet, if looks could kill, you'd strike me dead where I stand for having presumed to be as wise in advance as you've been made by the event! And because I made the mistake of trying to stage-manage things so you would presently find out for yourself what a rotter you were throwing yourself away on, instead of chancing your deeper hatred by telling you outright what every other soul in Hollywood knew—running the risk of seeing you go straight to his arms to prove your indifference to me—because of that error of judgment you'll see me damned before you'll give up a mode of life for which you're about as well fitted as—as I am for that of the Kingdom of Heaven!"
"You forget, what I don't, Bel," Lucinda said slowly, "that it was you who made the mode of life with which I was content impossible for me. If this life I've taken up here is in some sense a makeshift, it's all I've got to take the place of all I had. And now you'd rob me even of it! And one thing more you forget: If I should give in to your wishes and leave Hollywood today, I would only be doing what you say you want to prevent, confessing by flight that my only real interest in my picture work was my greater interest in Lynn Summerlad. For that reason alone—and not, as you believe, to spite you—I've got to and I'm going to go on to the end of this present production at least. After that ... I don't know...."
Discountenanced, "I hadn't thought of that," Bel owned squarely. "You may be right...."
"I am; but even if I weren't, it wouldn't be any use your trying to force me to forego my chance at a career in pictures just to get rid of you. Believe me, Bel, it's no good. Give it up, give up this producing blind—I know it's only a blind—and go back where you belong. And leave me to do my best with what I have—with what you've left of my happiness. And remember you have my faithful promise to set you free as soon as the courts will grant me a divorce."
"That's your last word, Linda?"
"My last word to you, Bel—I hope."
He hesitated, the muscles of his face working beneath its day-old stubble; and for a moment, reading truly or mistakenly the look in his eyes, from which all anger had died out, Lucinda was in deadly fear lest he were on the verge of making one last appeal in another key, one which she was, in that time of emotions, ill-prepared to deal with.
Then flinging out his hand in the salute of the vanquished, Bel bowed and, whirling on a heel, left her—left Lucinda for once at a loss, intuition inextricably hobbled by a mat of doubts.
For how long she was never quite sure Lucinda remained rooted in that moment, unseeing gaze steadfast to that door whose closing had been synchronous with the opening of another upon her understanding, to let in light, a revelation blinding and arrestive, upon the mirk of her distraction—that failure of self-confidence and determination which had come with realization, for the first time in her history, of inability to read her own heart and mind and guide her steps by such self-knowledge.
Thus posed she was found when Fanny, weary of knocking and getting no response, without more ceremony drifted in, a vision fair of impudent innocence in dainty organdie, the ravages of "oversleeping" perceptible in dim blue stains beneath eyes the more alluring for such underscoring; and with a start and a cry of solicitude perhaps a thought theatrical, convincing enough for all that, dropped parasol and handbag and ran to strain Lucinda tenderly to her bosom of an adolescent.
"You poor, dear darling!" she cooed—"no wonder you sounded so troubled over the telephone—and so sad! I couldn't imagine ... Why didn't you tell me?"
"How did you hear?" Lucinda evaded, gently extricating herself to disguise distaste for the sickly-sweet fragrance of Fanny's breath. "Who told you?"
"The papers, dearest: haven't you seen them?" Lucinda fell back a step, clasping her hands in sharp dismay: she had never once thought of the newspapers. "Screaming headlines on every page: one would think Lynn, poor dear! was the President of the United States lying at point of death from an assassin's bullet.... But what a frightful experience for you!"
"It was a shock," Lucinda assented in a murmur. Without conscious volition she found herself moving away to a window, as if to hide her emotion. "When I heard...." In private amazement she heard her voice break; and touching a handkerchief to her lips, said no more.
"Heard! but you were there, weren't you, when it happened?"
Still acting as if in deference to an authority outside herself, Lucinda, without withdrawing her gaze from the street—now basking in the calm gold of the belated sun—deliberately shook her head.
"When I found you and Harry weren't coming," she said—"I mean, when Lynn told me what you had telephoned, I came away. I thought it best, everything considered."
"Oh, how fortunate!"
But there was in that exclamation an undertone of disbelief clear enough to untrusting ears. And of a sudden Lucinda, while continuing to view with astonishment her duplicity, all unpremeditated as it had been, no more regretted it.
"Fortunate?" she breathed. "I don't know ... perhaps...."
Now too thoroughly enmeshed in tissue of involuntary falsehoods to extricate herself without confession, she collected her wits to deal with Fanny's breathlessly vollied questions; and found curious gratification in matching the texture of fact with strand after strand of fabrication, till at length the stuff of lies was woven in with and not to be distinguished from that of the truth. Mixed with which feeling was a sort of dull and angry wonder at herself, that she should be doing something so foreign to her every instinct, lying with such shameless artistry to the one true friend she had saved from the shipwreck of her old life—and this at the behest of the man who alone had been responsible for that disaster.
She had no more than reached home (she told Fanny) after refusing to stop at the bungalow for dinner alone with Summerlad, when Bel telephoned to tell her what had happened. Suspicious of Nelly's temper for days, Bel, upon her failure to keep a dinner engagement with him, had traced her to Beverly Hills, arriving just too late, if in time to be shot in the arm by Nelly when he tried to prevent her escape.
Determined to see Summerlad—not as yet comprehending the whole truth concerning his relationship to Nelly—Lucinda had instructed her chauffeur to leave her car at the side door of the Hollywood; meaning to drive secretly to Beverly Hills. But this she couldn't do till Bel kept his promise to call and give her all details. It was while they were talking that the car had disappeared. Bel had promptly reported the theft to the police, and that morning had called to tell Lucinda how sharp work had trailed it north along the Coastal Highway to the scene of Nelly's death.... Accident or suicide, who could say?...
At the same time Bel had begged her to make sure of Fanny's silence in respect of the aborted dinner party. It was unnecessary that Lucinda's name should be dragged into the case in any way, if it were she could hardly hope to come through with her incognita intact. She felt that she owed Bel that much consideration; it wasn't his fault she was still his wife. Not that she herself had any wish to court publicity in connection with the affair....
"But of course, darling! you know you can depend on me."
"I know; but I had to be sure. You see, you told Mr. Nolan last night I was due at the bungalow for dinner."
"But Cindy!" Fanny's wide eyes were a child's for candour—"that was before I knew there was any reason ... Mr. Nolan called up about nine, said he wanted to talk to Harry; and when I told him Harry was away on business (that was a lie—tell you presently) he guessed that Harry had come here to see you, and said he'd try to get in touch with him here. So I told him I believed you were dining out with Lynn; we'd all been invited, but Harry found he couldn't make it, at the last moment, so we begged off. That's how it happened."
"I fancied it was something like that," Lucinda commented, unsuspiciously enough but in a thoughtful tone open to misconstruction by an inquiet conscience.
"But surely you don't doubt my word, Cindy!"
"Why should I, dear?" Lucinda asked, smiling; and pausing in her restless, aimless circling of the room she dropped an affectionate hand on Fanny's shoulder. "What a silly notion!"
Fanny cuddled the hand to her cheek. "Forgive me, dear: I don't know why I said that. I suppose it's because I'm as much upset about my own affairs as you are about yours, Cindy—most of all about this shocking business, of course, and so sorry for you, dear——"
"Don't be sorry for me." Lucinda's fingers tightened on Fanny's. "Be glad I've learned a good lesson and had a fortunate escape. I ought to be glad the hurt's no worse...."
"Poor darling! you were fearfully fond of Lynn, weren't you?"
"Was I? I've been wondering. In love with Lynn, or just in love with Love: which? I'm afraid the shock of it all is too new for me to be sure as yet, but.... Oh, I'm sorry for Lynn, of course! but only as one would be for any acquaintance who was in pain and at death's door. But in the light of what I know now, of how Lynn lied to me, and how shamefully he treated that poor creature he married, it seems impossible I could ever have been in love, actually in love with such a man.... In love with being loved, yes, I'm afraid I shall never get better of that weakness; and so absurdly conscious that Lynn Summerlad, the great lover, had chosen me, I never stopped to consider him in comparison with other men. But I don't think I was in love with Lynn.... Or am I sincere? is what I'm saying just sophistry to salve my poor, sore vanity?"
She laughed consciously, then in swift variation of mood added a pensive, wistful note: "Fanny: Bel loves me...."
The countenance turned up to hers was quick with mirth: Fanny started to speak, gurgled rapturously, and broke down in laughter so infectious that Lucinda could not but respond, if ruefully.
"You great goose! if that's news to you, it's news to no one else."
"It is to me." Lucinda sobered. "Daresay I might have guessed if I'd been a wiser woman, but I wasn't, not till just now, when Bel was going away, after a wretched little squabble. Then something, I'm sure I don't know what...."
"I could have told you long ago, sweetest; in fact, I was only awaiting the right moment. I've been sounding Bel out, you may have noticed. There isn't anything one can teach him about flirting, Cindy, all the same there's only one woman in the world Bel can see."
"I'm sure of that," Lucinda agreed ... "just now."
"Cindy!" Fanny insisted, tugging at her hand—"tell me something—"
"Very well, dear. No: I shan't give Bel another chance. I'm not in love with him at all, and I dare not run the risk of falling in love with him again, I daren't risk going mad with happiness, as I should if what once was could be again ... and then having to live through all the misery of breaking with him another time."
"But surely—if he promised faithfully——"
"The promises men make to win us, Fanny, are not the sort that they know how to keep. It's always what they can't have they want most. Give them all they ask today, and tonight they'll lie awake longing for the things they've forsworn. The only woman who could hold Bel to his good behaviour would be one who could keep him guessing. I'm not that woman, I can't pretend, with me it's all or nothing—always!"
"Poor lamb!" Fanny drew her down to sit on the arm of the chair and nestled her frivolous, fair head upon Lucinda's bosom. "You have such desperate troubles, I'm ashamed to tell you my own...."
"Your own, Fanny?"
"We're both in the same boat, Cindy," Fanny lamented—"two lorn women this very day as ever was! Harry has left me ... flat!"
"Fanny!" Lucinda caught the girl's face between tender hands and looked incredulously into its swimming eyes. "You're not joking?"
"Divvle the joke's in me the day," Fanny declared between gulps, dabbling her tears with a handkerchief. "I didn't want to tell you, when you had so much else to worry you, but I'm afraid you've got to know. Because, you see, you're mixed up in it, too."
"I! what do you mean?"
"Well, Harry and I haven't been happy together for ever so long. Love with us you know, was rather a flash in the pan. Last night we had a scene, I mean another scene—forget the serial number. When I went home I found him trying to drink himself to death. He was half out of his head, and wouldn't tell me why. But I had a suspicion and wormed it out of him finally: he's been speculating with the company's money, your money, Cindy; and, now, with Zinn taking over the production, his shortage is sure to be found out. I couldn't make him say how much it was, but there's no question, it will run into a good sum. Well: I promised to intercede with you, and managed to quiet him down and get him to bed. Next thing I knew he was in the bathroom, trying to cut his throat. Then I hid his razors and let him go back to his whiskey, hoping he'd drink himself asleep. And presently he did. At least, he seemed to. So I went to bed—about three this morning, that was—worn out. When you called up, Cindy, I fibbed to you: I'd been awake about half an hour, howling like a lost child because I knew that Harry had deserted me at last."
"But how did you know—? Did he leave a note?"
"No, dear—that's how I knew. He didn't leave me a note or much of anything else except my clothes; everything that was portable and easy to turn into money he'd taken, all my jewels, everything. So you see, dear"—the face of an unworldly child quivered with a pitifully sad smile—"I'm not only an embezzler's wife, I'm a pauper—and a friendless pauper unless you keep on being my friend!"
The woebegone voice died away in sobs, and with a broken cry of compassion Lucinda gathered that unhappy little body into her arms.
The finding of Nelly's body crushed beneath the wreckage of a motor-car on the beach some fifty miles north of Los Angeles, gave the story of the Summerlad shooting an extended lease of twenty-four hours only on front-page space in the newspapers. In none of these was the ownership of the car called in question; in which circumstance Lucinda thought to detect the influential hand of "Mr. Bellamy Druce of New York," finding further support for this surmise in the fact that even Bel's name came in for astonishingly occasional mention, considering his active part in the aftermath of the affair, and especially considering the civic zeal ordinarily displayed by the local press in playing up the presence in "the Queen City of the Sunny Southland" of personages of social or financial consequence in the East.
Then, since the death of the unhappy woman had defeated all hope of lurid court proceeding, and rendered piquant exploitation of "wild life inside the movie colony" an open invitation to actions for criminal libel as soon as Summerlad got well enough to reckon damages to his reputation, the cause célèbre went into quick eclipse. The newspapers of the third morning carried brief notices inconspicuously placed to the effect that Summerlad was reported out of danger, though his complete recovery promised to be a matter of many weeks, and that the body of his wife was being shipped East to her parents. And the affair was never mentioned more.
Lucinda spent the best part of that day (and a good part of the next two as well) in the projection-room with Zinn and Wallace Day, her new director, sitting in judgment on thirty-six reels of film, the accumulated sum of Nolan's fumbling with about two-thirds of a picture.
Not that such extravagance was anything extraordinary under prevailing methods of production. It remains to this day quite in order for a director to photograph between fifty and sixty-thousand feet of scenes on celluloid, only forty-five hundred feet of which will ever be revealed to the public. The ordinary photoplay, Lucinda learned, runs to not more than six reels, or six-thousand feet of film, approximately one-fourth of which is devoted to reading matter, leaving forty-five hundred feet or less to carry on the story in terms of pictorial action.
The more than seven miles of photography which constituted Nolan's legacy to his successor would consequently require boiling down to about one-twelfth its length to make room for the third of the picture which he had left undirected.
This monumental feat of waste had been achieved by means of photographing every scene, even the simplest, in inordinate length, over and over again, and from every conceivable angle, much of the time with three cameras in simultaneous operation, and by making provision to break up each scene with close-ups of the principal players heaving their chests and mugging intimately at audiences as yet undreaming of their treat in store.
Thus it came to pass that Lucinda, who had at first welcomed the prospect of the seclusion which the projection-room was to afford her, the freedom which those blank black walls would insure from consciousness of fleering eyes and tongues over-ready to whisper evil concerning her relations with the wounded man—Lucinda, long before a fourth part of the rough footage had been unreeled for her inspection, began to find inexpressibly tiresome the sight of her shadow-self mincing and simpering through endless repetitions of business with which she was already conversant to satiety, and with all her heart wished herself back again in the uncompromising glare of the Kliegs, where at least, though onlookers might mock and mouth lies, she would have work to do that would help her to forget.
As it was, though her eyes were constant to the screen, her attention was forever flagging, her thoughts harking back along old trails where heartaches haunted....
The lively disputes between Zinn and Day which from time to time interrupted the procession of the scenes, as those two debated ways and means to cut and eliminate and avoid retaking, contributed little to the relief of her afflicted spirit. Hourly its burden of boredom grew more nearly insufferable, toleration of it more seemingly insane.
The business as a whole seemed so stupid, so puerile, so hopelessly inconsequential.
Pictures! her very soul sickened at the sound of the word. As if motion-pictures mattered, or whether they were good or bad, inanely done or cleverly. People went to see them anyway, paid money to sit goggling at them, and incomprehensibly dispersed without tearing down the theatres which had taken such cheap advantage of their confidence!
All this bickering about "saving" a production whose asininity one esteemed beyond repair as long as one lacked the moral courage to touch a match to its interminable footage of footless photography!
If it hadn't been for that last quarrel with Bellamy, if it were not for seeming to give in to his wishes and thus giving him more encouragement to tamper with her concerns, Lucinda before the end of that first day in the projection-room would have cried off her agreement with Zinn, abandoned the production then and there, pocketed her loss without murmur, and let the looks of it go hang.
But still the secret springs of vanity were subtly at work. For her own sake, she insisted, for the sake of her pride, false pride though it might prove in the end, she couldn't draw back at this juncture, she had to go on and, if it were in her so to do, make good her claims to consideration as one who had shown at least a certain promise of value to the screen.
So though she shuddered to contemplate the weeks to come, she steeled heart and soul to see her picture through to the very end.
Young Mr. Day on improved acquaintance appeared to be an amiable and modest person with a fair grasp of the rudiments of his calling; and presently surprised Lucinda by proving himself the "clever kid" that Zinn had asserted he was; immolating himself with the three-dozen reels in the cutting-room for forty-eight hours, at the end of which period he emerged with an eight-reel edition of Nolan's unfinished opus which, when still further abbreviated and publicly shown, ultimately drove its author half-mad with chagrin.
Upon Zinn, however, the effect of this accomplishment was to dispel altogether the gloom in which he had been plunged ever since the attempted assassination of his most profitable star had halted for an indefinite term a costly production within a few days of its completion.
Even Lucinda plucked up heart, began to cherish regenerated hopes....
To the weariness of those days wasted in waiting for camera-work to begin again, the visit of Harford Willis came as a welcome interlude, notwithstanding the effort required to show him an undiscouraged countenance and, at the same time, the tale of losses sustained through the mismanagement and knavery of Lontaine.
On the other hand, the gentleman of early vintage knew nothing of the Summerlad chapters; and it did Lucinda good to hear him growl and scold about anything as relatively inconsiderable as the lunacy of throwing money away—"like water!"—and then refusing to set the machinery of the law in motion to apprehend and punish Lontaine. But nothing he found to say shook her determination not to make an example of the defaulter at the expense of his wife.
"The poor child's been made miserable enough by her marriage," Lucinda declared. "And now Lontaine's deserted her she's got nobody left but her people, who were opposed to Harry from the first and were, I haven't the faintest doubt, to a considerable extent responsible for making her life with him the wretched muddle it turned out. If they'd treated Harry half-way decently, when treating him harshly couldn't change the fact that he was Fanny's husband, if they'd interested themselves to give him a chance to make a comfortable living for himself and her, it's more than likely he would never have dreamed of doing anything wrong. Now his troubles have driven him to it, I'm not going to add to Fanny's by bringing him back to the notice of her family branded a thief. Let things alone and they may make up their differences with her...."
"Such magnanimity is costing you a pretty penny," Willis suggested mildly.
"It isn't anything of the sort," Lucinda pointed out with some heat. "Putting Harry Lontaine in a penitentiary won't put back in my pocketbook one cent of the money he made away with. In fact, to do nothing about him is the only inexpensive way to deal with his affairs....
"Besides," she added with a shy, sly twinkle, "whatever this experience has cost me in money, it's taught me something I would never have learned in any other way, something I badly needed to be taught, too."
"And that is——?" Willis prompted.
"Shan't tell you. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to admit all it's taught me, even to myself."
With this she left Willis to his vain surmises, confident that he would aim the shrewdest of them wide of the mark.
Otherwise, she found irritating the open gratification with which Willis took note of Bellamy's neighbourhood and drew an easy inference. But he had the wisdom to refrain from mentioning the possibility he foresaw of such propinquity; and Lucinda was generous enough to imitate this reticence and spare Willis the pain of hopes disabused.
He went his way at length not, everything considered, dissatisfied with the way events, as he read them, were shaping social salvation for the young woman in whom he took an interest so genially paternal.
And Lucinda took leave of him with dewy eyes ... her one true friend....
Now she had nobody left but Fanny; and she was coming daily to repose less faith in Fanny's loyalty.
She was feeling very sorry for herself, and very lonely, and when most in need of friendly companionship—that is to say, when she wasn't busy at the studio—Fanny was seldom at her call. Fanny had given up the bungalow and moved to a residential hotel on the outskirts of the Wiltshire district, whose accommodations she claimed were cheaper than the Hollywood's; pointing out that she hadn't anything now but the wage she earned by playing in Lucinda's picture, which wouldn't last much longer, and that she had to acquaint herself with the uses of economy. Furthermore she knew several picture players who made the Wiltshire hotel their home, and they were nice to her, always asking her out to dinner and the movies, or somewhere. It helped her hold her head up, she said, helped her to carry on.
She employed the slang phrase in its late British sense. Lucinda wondered if the significance of its older American usage were not perhaps more applicable to this instance. The duration of Fanny's love-life with Lontaine had been too brief to keep her faithful to his memory.
Deep in Lucinda's subconsciousness an incidental recollection turned in its sleep. Somewhere, sometime, she had heard that Barry Nolan had a bungalow down Wiltshire way. Or hadn't she?
At all events, he had: the address listed opposite his name in the telephone directory proved that.
After a time she ceased to suggest the little dinners and drives and minor distractions which would have interfered with Fanny's social commitments. And her loneliness grew more and more wearisome. Times were to come when she would almost have welcomed even the sight of Bel. But then he was away.
A week from the night of their rencontre in Summerlad's bungalow, Bellamy called—first telephoning to ask if he might—to tell Lucinda he was leaving for New York the next morning. Zinn would take charge of his producing interests during his absence. He couldn't say just how long that might be. He had several matters on his mind that he wanted to arrange before returning. If he could be of any service to Lucinda in the East, he would be glad....
She thanked him quietly, said there was nothing she could think of.
Bel was glad to state his belief that the Summerlad business had blown over without her name being even privately whispered as in any way involved. He fancied she would hear nothing more of it. If she did, if anything unpleasant happened or threatened, she knew where a telegram would reach him, and upon receipt of it he would drop everything and hurry back.
Lucinda thanked him again, gravely, professing an entire lack of apprehensiveness. If anything did happen, however, she promised not to trouble him; she'd manage somehow to fight her own battles after this; it was high time she learned to do it, who had a lifetime of independent action to look forward to and was unconscious of holding any lien on Bellamy's time or consideration.
"It isn't that," he stammered—"I mean to say, I wish you wouldn't look at it that way. You punished me more cruelly than you knew; but I deserved it all, and I've no complaint to make and hold no grudge. In fact—the truth is—I've got a lot to be grateful to you for, Linda; you cured me of my two greatest vices, and whatever the future may hold for me one thing is sure: I won't go to smash on account of either wine or women. And so, though I quite understand what your feeling toward me is, and how useless it would be to ask you to forget, I'll always be glad if anything I can do will serve in part payment of my debt. It would make me very happy now if I could go away believing that in any time of trouble you would turn to me as to, at least, a friend."
"I understand, Bel, and I'm most appreciative, but"—Lucinda smiled with a shadow of sadness—"it wouldn't do, what you suggest. I hear what you say, I know what you have in mind, and—it would never do. After what has been, there could be no friendship in true sense between you and me; we're neither of us people whom half-measures would content. And since we are as we are, since with us it must be all or nothing...."
She made an end by rising in a manner he couldn't misinterpret.
"It must be nothing?" he implored, holding her hand.
Behind the mask of her composure Lucinda was absurdly agitated and, on that account, a little angry. She refused to admit she had any excuse for feeling upset; she had the upper hand with Bel and meant to hold it, she had nothing imaginable to fear; yet she was horribly afraid he might see....
"Good-bye, Bel," she said, with not unkind decision but decision unmistakable for all that. "And good luck. But ... please never come back...."
That night she sobbed herself awake from dreams of dear days dead, and lay for hours hating the cheerless comfort of hotel rooms, missing poignantly the intimacy of her home and the sense of security she had known nowhere else. Would she ever find such another haven for her drifting soul?
It wasn't that she was in any way hindered from settling down wherever she liked and surrounding herself with possessions. But could any place where love was not be fairly termed a home?
In the morning she rose with a heart as heavy as any she had ever known to address herself to the daily grind—to term which deadly were but to cheapen the detrition of morale resulting from its wear upon the soul.
Yet she had to be fair, she couldn't pretend she had any right to whimper; she was having her own way, getting precisely what she had all along been asking for; and viewed at a purely material angle, her affairs were as prosperous as heart could wish. The new director was living up to and even beyond all Zinn's claims, his revision of the continuity for the sequences remaining to be taken had been as adept as his editing of those thirty-six reels of pictorial farrago, and he was handling the crowded scenes on the supper-club set and the more intimate dramatic passages staged in the living-room with equal competence and the ease of one conscious of but not self-conscious about thorough mastery of his craft.
In this new association the low spirits lifted which latterly had oppressed the mercurial cameraman; Iturbide chirked up amazingly and made it plain that he looked upon Mr. Day as a man, a brother, and an artistic peer.
Between Wallace Day and Lucinda there was no friction, and under his sympathetic guidance she felt she was doing better work than she had ever hoped to do.
Only Zinn, though he observed with every indication of pleased approval the rapid strides the production was making, was known to wag a head weighted with foreboding and utter dismal croaks.
"He's a wonder," he said one day to Lucinda, while they stood aside watching Day rehearse a scene in which she happened to have no part—"a holy wonder and no kidding. Every so often in the fillum business a miracle man happens like that. But they never last. It can't be done. Stands to reason. What chanst they got? If women don't get 'em the big-head does, and if they happen to get by with both them drags they run into studio jealousy waiting round the corner with a blackjack. What's that the feller says about self-preservation being the first law of nature? Well, if you don't believe he spoke a mouthful, you want to watch what he said work out in the picture business. Any time they see a bird coming along that's got something on the rest of the gang, they just naturally knock him on the head and save their jobs."