Harry Lontaine got home at a late hour for one who had it in mind to bathe, dress, and put in appearance for an eight o'clock dinner several miles away. So was the tempo of his gait unhurried as he left the blue-and-white car waiting at the curb and passed up the straight-ruled sidewalk of cement between the tutelary orange trees of the bungalow he rented furnished. And on its miniature veranda he delayed for several minutes, motionless, with his face lifted thoughtfully, even a shade wistfully to the sky in which the afterglow of sunset pulsed like dreams of youth reviewed across the desert years of middle-age....
Other than this shy colour of regret, however, nothing of the trend of his thoughts, nothing of their nature, escaped the eyes, steel-blue and dense, in that lean, hard mould of features, never more self-contained, never more British than in this moment.
And presently he roused, but without change of countenance, and went on into the combination living and dining-room to which the best part of the dwelling was given over.
Here, where the dusk held close and still, Lontaine, when he had made a light, wasted no more time than was required for a stop at the buffet to treat himself to a considerably stiffer drink of pseudo-Scotch than the law allowed, or—seeing that the law allowed none at all—his superficial necessities seemed to call for.
Before the door which gave upon the more private quarters of the house, however, he hung for some time in seeming reluctance to proceed, a suspicion of strained attentiveness in his deliberation. From beyond came never a sound. Eventually he pushed the door open.
Immediately he saw Fanny. Bathed in a great glare, she sat in her dressing-room facing a long mirror of three panels; decked out en grande toilette, wearing every jewel she possessed, groomed to the finest nuance of perfection; a brilliant and strangely immobile figurine of modern femininity, with bobbed hair like burnished brass, milk-white bosom and arms rising out of a calyx of peach-blow taffeta, jewels stung to iridescent life by that fierce wash of light.
As if hypnotized by so much bright loveliness, she continued steadfastly to gaze upon her reflected self; even when she heard Lontaine at the door and the mirror placed him behind her in the doorway, she did not move by so much as a trembling eyelash. Only when he spoke, her lips parted in answer, though still she neither turned nor ceased to contemplate the vision in the glass; as if this last were something precious but tricksy, something that might incontinently vanish forever from her ken did she but for a single instant turn her eyes away.
In a voice that strained without success to sound easy and natural, Lontaine said: "Ah, Fanny! dressed already, eh? Must be later than I thought."
"It's past half-past," Fanny replied without expression.
Lontaine glanced nervously at the back of his wrist. "Right you are. Never dreamed time was getting away from me like that."
"You have been ... busy, yes?" his wife enquired with a distinctly satiric accent.
"Rather. Gassing with Zinn, you know——"
"To be sure." The satiric inflexion was now more marked. "The life-saver."
"Not a bad name for him, that." Lontaine chuckled with, however, an unconvincing brevity. "Daresay Linda looks on the little beast in that light, at all events. Had a thousand details to discuss with him ... ah ... naturally."
"Naturally." Fanny's tone had become again illegible.
"That's what—ah—delayed me. Have to rush for it now—what?—or Summerlad'll be vexed."
"You really think so? With Cindy there to console him?"
"Something in that, no doubt. Still"—Lontaine made as if to go to his own room, but lingered—"it's hardly the thing to be so much behind time. See here, old girl: you're all dressed.... I say! but you've laid it on a bit thick tonight, haven't you?"
"Don't you like the way I look, Harry?"
"Never more ravishing in all your life——"
"That's good."
"Good? Afraid I don't follow. What's got into you tonight, Fanny? You've rigged yourself out for the opera instead of a simple little dinner...."
"I wanted something to remember myself by," Fanny mysteriously informed the mirror to which her attention continued constant.
"What do you mean by that?" Lontaine paused for answer, but Fanny was dumb. He essayed another short, confused laugh. "You know, Fan, sometimes you think of the damnedest things to say."
"Yes: don't I?"
He recognized one of her mulishly enigmatic moods.
"Mean to say," he harked back—"since you're quite ready—what's the matter with your cutting along and explaining I'll be delayed a bit? Tell them not to wait dinner for me...."
"And you?" The movement of enameled lips was imperceptible.
"I'll be along later, of course, as soon as I've dressed. You can send the car back for me. Why not?"
"Why not?"
But Lontaine took this inscrutable echo for assent, and with a grunt of relief disappeared into his dressing-room. A series of clicks sounded as he turned on lights. Still the woman seated before the mirror didn't move. But her interest centered no longer upon what she saw; though she did not avert her eyes from the glowing figure painted in those still, shallow depths, all her attention now was concentrated in another faculty: she was listening.
She heard Lontaine moving about, chair-legs scrape a hardwood floor, the snap of the bathroom light. A pause followed, then a clashing noise of bottles and toilet articles impatiently shifted upon their glass shelf. After that, Lontaine's returning footsteps. Then he reappeared in the doorway.
"Hello! Thought you were going on ahead."
"Presently," Fanny replied in brittle accents. "Plenty of time. Something the matter?"
"Can't find my razors."
"No." At last the woman broke her pose: her counterfeit in the glass nodded gravely to the man behind her. "No," she iterated—and he had the flying thought that her voice had never vibrated so sweetly—"and you won't find them, either, Harry. They're in a safe place, it's no good your hunting for them."
"What!" Lontaine advanced one single, sudden stride. "What's that for?"
"I thought it might save trouble. You see, Harry, I haven't forgotten that hideous scene we had in London, last time you decided it was all up with you, there wasn't anything to do but cut your throat. I didn't see any sense in going through all that again."
After a full minute of silence Lontaine uttered heavily: "I see you've guessed...."
"There have been so many of these crises in our life together, Harry, I ought to know the signs—don't you think?"
The man stumbled to a chair, and bent a louring countenance over hands savagely laced. "What else can I do?" he muttered. "I'm in a hole there's no other way out of...."
"There are steamers every so often from San Francisco, for Honolulu, China, Japan, the South Seas...."
"No use. They'd get me by wireless if they ever allowed me to go aboard. Zinn ... I'm sure that Jew devil suspects ... insists on getting at the books first thing tomorrow."
"How much have you got into Cindy for?"
Lontaine said stupidly: "Eh? What's that?"
"How much have you ... borrowed, Harry?"
"Fifty thou—perhaps a bit more."
Following another little silence, Fanny gave a curt laugh, left her chair and, standing at the dressing-table, began slowly to strip off her jewels, her sunburst brooch, her flexible bracelets, the pearls that had been her mother's, all her rings, even that slender hoop of platinum and diamonds which she had never removed since the day of her marriage.
"Stocks?" she enquired quietly. Lontaine replied with a dour nod and grunt. "Somebody's sure-fire tip, of course, some 'deal' that couldn't lose...." He grunted again. "Never learn anything from experience, do you, Harry? I've often wondered about the kink in your mind that makes you such a giddy come-on, eager to risk everything, even your honour, on the gossip of stock-market touts no better than yourself.... Ah, well! it can't be helped, I suppose. You are what you are—and in my way, God knows, I'm no better. It's all been a ghastly failure, hasn't it, Harry? If I'd been a stronger woman, I might have made it another story for you; if you'd been more of a man, you might even have saved me...." Lontaine lifted his hand sharply, but his eyes wavered and fell under her level, ironic stare. "But it's no good crying now, nothing can change our natures at this late day."
She crossed to him and paused, looking down not unkindly at his bowed head and shoulders.
"I don't love you, Harry, and you don't love me. It's funny to think we ever did—isn't it? All the same, we've been through the rough together so often, I presume it's only natural I should be fond of you in this funny, twisted fashion. I don't want you to go away thinking I blame you...."
"Go away?" Lontaine groaned. "Where can I go, they wouldn't find me? I'd rather be dead than a convict!"
"Don't worry: I'll soon talk Cindy round, persuade her not to be too hard on you. She's fond of me, poor dear! and won't find out I'm as rotten as you are till you're at a safe distance. Here...." She bent over and poured that coruscating wealth of jewelry into the cup of Lontaine's hands. "These ought to see you a long way...."
"What!" Lontaine jumped up, staring in daze at the treasure in the hands that instinctively reached out to Fanny, offering to give back her gift. But she stepped away and stood with hands behind her, shaking her head so vigorously that the glistening short locks stood out like a brazen nimbus. "But, you, Fanny—what will you—?"
"Never fear for me, Harry." She fixed his puzzled eyes with a smile of profoundly ironical significance. "I'll get along...."
"But these ... every blessed trinket you own!..."
"I'll get others."
His jaw dropped. She continued to posture lightly before him, an exquisitely fragile and pretty shape of youth deathless and audacious, a dainty spirit of mockery temptingly incarnate, diabolically sage, diabolically sure of the potency of her time-old lures.... What she had urged was true enough, too true; idle to let scruples on her account work his undoing. Let her alone and she'd get along, no fear, she'd get other jewels when she wanted them, just as she'd said, she'd go far.... At heart as wanton as he was weak....
He felt a creeping tide of blood begin to scorch his face, and avoided the cynical challenge of her eyes.
"If you're content," he mumbled ... "daresay there's nothing more to be said."
She nodded gayly, repeating the word "Nothing!" in a flute-like note of mirth. Hanging his head, he began wretchedly to stuff the plunder into his pockets, muttering half to himself: "What a pity! If only I could have had a bit of luck; if only we could have hit it off——!"
"If you hurry," she reminded him, "you can catch the night train for San Francisco, you can just about make it."
"Well...." He glanced uneasily at her, and again was conscious of the heat in his cheeks. "So it comes to this at last ... eh? ... good-bye!"
"Good-bye," she repeated, amiably casual.
"I daresay...." He gave a dubious chuckle. "Daresay it's stupid but, well, the usual thing, you know...."
"Usual thing?" she parroted, with faintly knitted brows.
"To kiss good-bye."
"You'll miss your train."
He developed a moment of desperately sincere emotion: "Fan! you've been a perfect brick to me, a perfect brick. I feel like a dog, leaving you like this."
"Oh!" she said, as one indulges a persistent child—"if you really want to kiss me, Harry, go ahead."
Nevertheless she turned her mouth aside, his lips brushed only her powdered cheek. Then she stepped back to her mirror and with a puff made good her imperceptible damage done by the caress. The glass showed Lontaine's shadow slinking out. She heard him blunder through the living-room, the slam of the screen-door. And her hand fumbled, the powder-puff dropped unheeded, mist drifted across her vision, she gasped a breathless "Damn!" Tears meant a wrecked make-up....
Though there was need enough for haste if he were to carry out the plan she had made for him, Lontaine dragged slowly down the walk, with a hang-dog air, the hands in his pockets fingering the price of the last sorry shreds of his self-respect. In the darkness the flesh of his face still burned with fire of shame....
Beside the car he halted and rested with a hand on the door for so long a time that the chauffeur grew inquisitive.
"Where to, Mr. Lontaine?"
"No, by God!" Lontaine blurted into the man's astonished face, and whirling about, strode hastily back to the bungalow.
As he drew near he could hear Fanny's voice. She was at the telephone in the living-room, calling a number he didn't catch; Summerlad's no doubt. One had forgotten all about that wretched dinner. Then the connection was established, and he paused with foot lifted to the lower-most of the veranda steps. It couldn't be possible Fan was talking to Summerlad, in that voice whose tenderness called back old times....
"Hello? Is it you, dear? Fanny.... First chance I've had.... Poor darling! I've been aching to see you all day and tell you how I sympathized.... Yes, any time you please, as soon as you like.... No: he won't mind, he ... I mean, I'm all alone. Besides, we had a little talk tonight, came to an understanding. He won't be in our way after this, ever again, Barry dear...."
Something amused her, peals of musical laughter hunted Lontaine down the walk. "Union Pacific Station!" he cried, throwing himself into the car. "Drive like hell!"
That sunset whose reluctant waning Lontaine was presently to watch from the bungalow veranda was still a glory in the sky when Lucinda motored to Beverly Hills. The heavens in the west had opened out like a many-petalled rose of radiant promise, whose reflected glow deepened the warm carnation of her face and found response in the slow fire that burned in dreaming eyes. Those whose chance it was to view so much mortal loveliness in too fleeting glimpses all envied its possessor, women her lot, men her lover's.
The soft air of evening, already tempered with an earnest of the coolth to come, was sweet to taste with parted lips. Upon the perfect highroad the car swung and swooped and swerved like a swallow, through a countryside lapped in perennial Spring. She thought: This blessed land! and thought herself thrice-blessed to be at once in it, in love, and in the fairest flower of her years.
Odd, how completely that compact with Zinn, which the clasp of their hands had sealed so lately, had done away with every form of fear and discontent. Vanity had a deal to do with that, no doubt, self-esteem purring with conviction that Zinn would never have offered to invest one lonely dollar in the picture had not his appraisement of Lucinda's work on the screen approved the risk. Zinn smelt profits in the wind; that much was manifest; which meant that success was assured to Linda Lee. The loss of half the little fortune she had sunk in the production was a mean price to pay for knowledge that failure could now reward her hopes only through some frown of fortune unanticipated by one of the canniest of those sure-thing gamblers whom the American cinema acclaims its financial genii.
Best of all, this new association spelled an end to all that meaningless and inexcusable procrastination from which the work had suffered whenever Nolan felt over-worked or harkened to the call of the continuous crap game, an institution of the studio that had its permanent habitat behind one of the stages. Zinn was notoriously scant of patience with delays that meant money thrown away; and, he had assured Lucinda (after striking his bargain) no reason existed within his knowledge why another fortnight shouldn't see the last scenes of her production shot. Much admittedly depended on how little or much of Nolan's work might seem to need retaking, when the three of them, Lucinda, Zinn and the new director, sat in judgment on the rushes in rough assemblage. But Zinn didn't believe they would find many instances of incompetent or indifferent direction so flagrant that they couldn't be cured in the cutting-room.... It's surprising what a cunning pair of shears and a neat subtitle or two can do for a scene that, as originally photographed, is good for nothing but insomnia or to bring on sclerosis of the sense of humour.
Nolan had left to the direction of his successor only the sequences in two sets. Lucinda made out a mental timetable: a week for the supper club scenes, less time than that for the living-room; another week for possible retakes, one more in which to cut and assemble the finished picture. In a month at most she ought to be able to call herself once more a free woman and bid farewell to Hollywood till the courts had made that boast a statement of consummated fact.
A single month! Such a little time when the journey's end was well in sight, a little time to wait for life to yield up all its riches. It was harder, truly, to be patient till this lesser journey should duly come to its appointed end in lovers' meeting. The car was a snail, minutes sluggards, the beauty of the land a bore to one bitterly jealous of every second which heed for speed laws stole from the half-hour she had schemed to have alone with Lynn before the Lontaines were to be expected. She had so much happiness to share with her beloved, so much to tell, everything that had happened since morning, a busy chapter of studio history of which he could know nothing, since he had not revisited the studio since leaving it for work on location that morning.
It seemed a churlish chance indeed that ordained a reception for her exclusively at the hands and glistening teeth of a semi-intelligible Jap, who, when he had uttered assorted fragments of English to the general sense that Mister was having his foot treated by an osteopath at the moment but would soon be disengaged, smirked himself into an indeterminate background and left Lucinda to make the best of this minor disappointment.
Resolutely denying this last, she put off her wrap, made herself at home, and sought but somehow failed to distill a compensating thrill from the reflection that she would ere long be called upon to make herself at home here for good and all. 'Ere long' meaning, of course, after Reno ... And why not? The house was excellently planned, amply big for two; no reason why Lynn need move unless he really wanted to. Only ... the eye of the prospective chatelaine took on a critical cast ... some details would want a bit of readjustment, the all too patent stamp of the interior decorator's damned good taste would require obliteration before one would care to call the premises one's very own. The present scheme, for example, lacked anything in the nature of a study, wherein one might lounge and read and accumulate quantities of books; according to Lucinda's notion, the real nucleus of a home for civilized people. Lynn, poor dear! worked so hard, he had little time to give to reading; a moan it was his wont to make whenever Lucinda gave their talks a literary turn. The few volumes of his collection stood in sadly broken ranks on a rack of shelves in an alcove that adjoined the living-room, a sort of glory-hole furnished with odds and ends of sham Oriental junk which Lynn called his "den" and Fanny had rechristened "the vamp room."
Curiosity concerning Lynn's tastes, when he did find time to read, moved Lucinda to con the straggling squad of titles. Novels led in number, naturally, works of fiction old and new, in general such trash as furnishes the cinema with most of its plot material. In addition, a subscription set of De Maupassant with several volumes missing, another of O. Henry, Wells'The Outline of History(uncut), theCollected Verseof Rudyard Kipling, six copies of the same edition of "Who's Who on the Screen", Laurence Hope'sIndian Love Lyricsin an exceptionally beautiful binding....
With a chuckle Lucinda took possession of this last: Lynnwouldhave Laurence Hope!... Evidently a gift copy. When she opened the book at its fly-leaf, a slip of printed paper fluttered out. Without pausing to read the inscription, Lucinda retrieved the clipping: a half-tone from one of the motion-picture monthlies, a view of the bungalow grounds, with the house in the distance, and in the foreground Lynn and a young woman arm-in-arm, laughing at the camera....
The evening had grown quite dark when a crisp rattle of the telephone startled Lucinda into renewed contact with her surroundings. She found herself in the recess of one of the living-room windows that looked out over the lawn. The book was in her hand. Behind her a door opened, releasing upon the gloom a gush of golden light. Without moving she watched Summerlad, in a dressing-gown hastily thrown on over dress-shirt and trousers, hobble over to the telephone and conduct one end of a short conversation of which her wits made no sense whatever. He hung up, and peered blindly round the room.
"Linda, darling?" he called. "What's the big idea, sitting all alone in the dark?" At the same time he switched on wall-sconces and, blinking, saw her. "Just our luck!" he grumbled, trying to sound disconsolate. "What do you think, sweetheart? Fanny says they can't come tonight; Harry's laid up, got a sick headache or something, and she doesn't think she ought to leave him. I wonder if you'd mind dining here with me alone, this once. I can't very well go out with this foot. Eh? What do you think?"
Lucinda made no sound. His eyes narrowed as he perceived the abnormal absence of colour in her face, the dark dilation of her unwavering eyes. Limping, he approached.
"What's the matter, Linda? Not cross with me, are you? Hadn't any idea you'd be so early; and today I gave my foot another nasty wrench, out on location, and had to call Cheney in to fix it up. He's just left, and I was starting to dress.... What?"
An entreating hand silenced him. All in a breath Lucinda said: "Those things don't matter, Lynn. Why didn't you ever tell me you were married?"
Summerlad said "Damnation!" half under his breath and moved nearer, till another flutter of her hand stopped him. "That wise husband of yours!" he exploded then, vindictively. "I suppose he's been spilling all he knows!"
"Did Bel know? Yes: I presume he must have. But you're mistaken, he didn't tell me. It was this...."
Summerlad frowned, at a loss to identify the volume in her extended hand.
"I found it, Lynn, quite by accident, while I was waiting. Hope'sIndian Love Lyrics. Don't you remember?... See, it's inscribed: 'To my Lynn, on the first anniversary of our marriage, with all my heart, Nelly.' And then this picture of you two, published just after you came here to live.... Oh, Lynn!whydid you lie to me about that poor girl?"
For a moment Summerlad gnawed his underlip without attempting to reply. Then with a sign of despair he retreated to one end of the club-lounge, against which he rested, to ease his foot. He said something in an angry mumble, as Lucinda followed into the room.
"You might have told me, Lynn...."
"I didn't want you to know."
"You must have known I'd find out, sooner or later."
"I thought I could keep it from you until...."
"Till when? Till what?" He growled, inarticulate with vexation. "To let me go on thinking ... making such a fool of myself!... Since you don't live together, why aren't you divorced?"
"How do you know I'm not?"
"Because you told me that lying story about her. But you've lied to me so much and so long, no doubt you think it unreasonable of me now to expect you to remember everything.... Anyway, if you'd been divorced, you wouldn't have hesitated to own it. Why aren't you?"
"She refuses to divorce me."
"Why?"
"How do I know? I suppose she's still stuck on me, in her way—hopes to get me back some time."
"But what prevents you——?"
"Nelly said if I tried to divorce her she'd fight back, and she knows...."
He didn't finish, but shut his teeth on a blundering tongue and looked more than ever guilty. But Lucinda was in a pitiless temper.
"About you? You mean—about you and other women?"
"Hang it all! I've never pretended to be a saint, have I, Linda?"
"No wonder the poor thing hated the sight of me!... Oh, how could you have been so unkind!"
"If you'd only give me a show to explain...."
Her lip curled: "Explain!"
"I've been doing my best," Summerlad argued resentfully. "When I saw how it was going to be with you and me, and found out Nelly'd come back to Hollywood, I went to her and had things out—gave her some money and promised her more, on the strength of her promise to go back home and get a divorce on the dead quiet."
"And did you hope to keep that a secret from me?"
"My name isn't Summerlad, anymore than hers is Marquis—or yours Lee. I thought I'd.... I thought everything was going to be all right till she turned up again with your officious husband."
"You think Bel had something to do——"
"I think he hunted Nelly up, if you want to know, and induced her to come back here, in violation of her agreement."
"But Bel.... I don't quite see...."
"He wanted Nelly on the spot as a sort of club over my head. He hasn't given you up yet"—Summerlad laughed shortly—"not by a long sight."
"A club over your head? I don't understand."
"Not meaning to use it as long as we behaved ourselves."
"Behaved ourselves! Lynn!"
"Oh, forgive me! I didn't mean to say that."
Summerlad's look mirrored a real and poignant contrition as he saw her colouring with affronted sensibility, drawing back from him, momentarily slipping farther beyond his reach. "Linda!" he implored—"don't look at me that way. I can't help what your husband thinks, can I? I didn't ask him to come out here and be the pest he is, did I? After all, what have I done? I lied about Nelly—yes—but only to spare your feelings. I didn't want you to think people might be talking about you, stepping out with a married man. If you'd thought that, you'd have given me my walking papers and ... and I couldn't do without you, dear—I can't! The others never mattered much, they sort of came and went, mostly I didn't care which they did. But you're so different, you're so wonderful, everything a fellow dreams about. I've never known anybody like you, never will again. If I lost you I'd—I'd—I think I'd go out of my mind!"
And suddenly, before she could stir to escape, he caught her to him and held her fast.
"Linda, sweetheart; don't be angry with me. I've tried so hard to be good enough for you. And you—you've loved me, too! Don't let this rotten accident spoil everything for us. If you love me—and you know I love you—what does anything matter? What if we are both married? What difference need that make? Love can still be sweet...."
She made no show of opposition, only drew back her head to cheat his lips; but when she tried to brave his eyes, thinking to read therein his heart and mind, she winced from recognition of the hunger that informed them, hunger that she wittingly had whetted, hunger such as she herself had too often known of late, like warm wine running in one's veins....
But always ere now she had fortified and shriven her conscience with the belief that they were of one mind, it must and would be Reno first....
Now Reno no longer held forth any promise of salvation, of the law's sanction, the church's countenance. Even though she were to find there her own freedom, Lynn would still be bound. It wasn't in reason to hope that the woman who had rejected his money would listen to other arguments. Today and henceforward it must be all for love or ... nothing ... a break final and irreparable....
And for all the shock she had suffered, for all the wrong Lynn had done and the pain of which his ill-faith had been the cause, the love she had given the man still was dear, dangerously sweet and disarming. Already she was aware of anxiety to grasp at excuses for him, to comfort the ache in her heart with the thought that she was according charity to a dear transgressor, already she felt her strength to resist being sapped, flesh and spirit succumbing anew to the spell he knew too well how to weave.
She wrestled with a weakness stronger than all her strength. They couldn't go on like this.... Lynn hadn't said it, but they both knew it ... without going farther.... Even Reno couldn't save her now, only the instinct of self-preservation latent in her, not even that if she failed to find in herself the will to hear and be guided by its admonishments. It was make or break....
The scales hung long in trembling. They turned only when Summerlad unwisely, losing patience, sought to take by storm the lips she had not yet made up her mind to surrender, and thus aroused resistance till then dormant.
With an ease that in a queer, detached way she found surprising, she managed to break his embrace. Nevertheless the effort left her faint. She faltered to the fireplace and rested a hand on the mantel, her forehead upon the hand. Lynn followed, stood by her side, not touching her but keeping her enveloped in the lethargizing knowledge of his nearness, his strength, his passion. Over and over he murmured gently: "Linda, Linda, Linda...." Shaking from head to feet, she made a feeble sign of appeal. He disregarded this entirely, his arms again stole round her and would have drawn her to him but that, of a sudden, her mind caught at a straw of memory, she drew away, with a hand upon his bosom put him firmly from her, eyes that were melting none the less denying him, lips that were a-quiver with "Yes" resolutely pronouncing "No!"
"You are cruel...."
"No, Lynn. Wait. Tell me something.... You say she—your wife agreed to divorce you?"
"I made her promise," Summerlad asserted grimly.
"When was that? The day she disappeared? The day I found her lying senseless in her room?"
"I suppose so. Does it matter? Well, then—yes."
"You'd just left her when I found her?"
"I daresay—approximately."
"Tell me what you said to persuade her."
"See here: what is all this? What are you driving at?"
"I want to know.... Did you have much of a scene?"
"I'll say it was some stormy young session."
"Is that why you found it necessary to strike her?"
Summerlad started. "What! Strike her! What do you mean?"
But his eyes winced from hers.
"She—Nelly had a bruise on her cheek, that afternoon; and it wasn't an old bruise. Lynn: you struck her!"
"Perhaps. Maybe I did forget myself, I don't remember. What if I did? She asked for it, didn't she? Do you think I've got the patience of Job, to let her get away with insisting on standing between you and me? I'd have half-killed her if she'd stuck to her refusal to go back East!"
Realizing that his tongue was again running away with his discretion, he curbed it sharply, on the verge, perhaps, of admissions yet more damaging, and in panic essayed to win back lost ground.
"But what of that? It's ancient history, Linda."
She started back in repulsion, but he overtook her in the middle of the room and again crushed her to him.
"Linda, Linda! what do these things matter? I love you, dearest, you love me, nothing else matters, nothing can possibly matter but our need for each other. For God's sake be kind to me! forget——"
The fury of her antagonism found him unprepared. Once more his arms were empty. And this time when he started in pursuit, something he couldn't see struck him brutally in the chest and bodily threw him back. In the same instant he heard a heavy, crashing noise he couldn't account for. An inhuman sound. It shook the room, beat deafeningly upon one's ears. As if someone had overturned a heavy piece of furniture. Only, no one had. Certainly he hadn't, certainly Lucinda hadn't. She was flattened against the farther wall, watching him with a face of horror, blanched and gaping.
Enraged, he put forth all his strength to recover from that inexplicable blow. And instantly it was repeated. And again. Each time accompanied by that savage, crashing noise. Like thunder cut off short. And each time he reeled under the impact, and sickening pains shot through him, like knives white-hot. He felt himself sinking....
In expiring flashes of consciousness he saw Lucinda, still flat against the wall, staring not at him but at a French window nearby. Between its curtains a woman's arm was thrust, the hand grasping an automatic pistol with muzzle faintly fuming. There was a face of shadowed pallor dimly visible beyond the curtains, a face with wild, exultant eyes ... Nelly's....
To the woman pinned to the wall by shock—the shimmering frivolity of her evening gown, a flimsy, fluttery affair of silver tissue, lilac and blue, lending form and colour to the illusion of a bright butterfly impaled—the moments immediately following that murderous fusillade were a raving welter of horrors.
Between two heartbeats she saw Lynn, with a face as blank as paper, spinning, toppling, beating the air with aimless arms, pitching to the floor like something blasted, resting there in a sickening, inert crumple; and was keenly aware of the acrid reek of smokeless powder cutting, as acid cuts oil, the sensuous scent of the roses that dressed the room in her honour; and all the while was conscious of the pistol nosing in between the draperies like an animate thing of infinite malice, and the pallid oval of the face behind it, that seemed to float in the dark as might the mask of some mad ghost.
As the din of those three shots, beating from wall to wall, lost weight and volume, a thin shouting became audible from some point outside the house, and Nelly Marquis with the sweep of a fury broke through the hangings at the window, and pulled up with pistol levelled point-blank at Lucinda's breast.
Through the least of pauses, the merest fragment of a second, a time measureless in its lapse to one whose every function was frozen in paralysis of fear, a single thought persisted:Another instant and I shall be as Lynn.... Nelly's eyes were burning like black malignant opals in a countenance at once luminous and wan. Death's icy grin glimpsed in the play of light along that blunt blue barrel. Lucinda felt as one caught fast in the pitiless jaws of some tremendous vice whose pinch stilled the beating of her heart and arrested her labouring lungs.
Then abruptly through the window a dark body hurled and fastening upon the woman's back, swinging her aside, the pistol detonated with a bellow, the bullet plumped into the wall close by Lucinda's head.
She heard a voice crying out again and again: "Bel! Bel! Bel! ..."
Her own voice....
For an indeterminable time she hung in dread upon the issue of that swaying combat: while Bel clung to the woman's arm, muttering and panting in futile efforts to wrest her weapon away; while Nelly clawed, bit, kicked, pounded her free fist repeatedly into Bel's face, and wrenched madly at her captive wrist.
Of a sudden, from her hand a spiteful tongue of fire licked out at Bel, his right arm flailed back and fell useless, agony convulsed his features; and free, the woman bounded away and with the laugh of a maniac swung the pistol to bear upon his head.
Lucinda's faculties clicked together then as gears mesh when the motor has been idling; the call of the emergency met with response in the form of instant and direct action. Without knowing what she did, she flung herself upon Nelly's arm and bore it down. With deflected muzzle the pistol exploded for the last time. Dropping it, Nelly turned on Lucinda and dealt with her as might a madwoman. Impressions grew confused beyond assortment, of flopping wildly this way and that, of hot breath beating into her face, of her bare flesh suffering a rain of cruel blows; of elemental lusts to maim and kill awakening from lifelong slumber, in this moment of close grips with a warm, living, hating and hateful human body....
Thrown off without warning, how she couldn't guess, she felt herself reeling back, tripping, falling. Something struck the back of her head a stunning blow, and she knew flickering nausea while dense night like a moving cloud on every hand closed in upon her, and the world, in the likeness of a rainbow swirl streaked with fiery paths of sparks, guttered into blank nullity....
Nothingness absolute and still received her, harboured her for a space, spewed her back into life again.
Cold rain spattering cheeks and brows ... once more the heart-rending perfume of roses ... anguish incomparable racking her temples ... her heart a wild thing caged ... ammonia in strangling whiffs....
Choking and coughing she unclosed her eyes upon the vision of Bel's face. A hand holding a bottle of smelling salts dropped away from her nose. Bel saluted her reviving intelligence with an even growl: "Coming round, eh? About time. You'll do now, I guess. Try to pull yourself together. No time to lose."
She was on the floor, the bulk of the lounge between her and the spot where Summerlad had fallen; her shoulders propped against Bel's knee, her head resting in the crook of his arm. Summerlad's Jap boy was standing by with water in a silver vessel. At a nod from Bel he filled a glass and, bending over, set it to Lucinda's lips. While she was gulping thirstily, Bel said something she didn't catch; but as soon as she turned her head from the glass, the Japanese took it away and himself as well.
The living-room, with its softly lighted walls and draped black rectangles of windows open to the night, presented itself in a guise inexplicably unfamiliar. She felt as if she had been a long time away. In mystification, looking back to Bel, she asked: "I fainted, didn't I?"
He grunted: "You struck your head, when that hell-cat threw you—went out for ten minutes by the clock. How do you feel now?"
"My head aches...." She discovered that Bel was in his shirt-sleeves, with the cuff turned back above his right elbow, the forearm rudely bandaged with torn linen on which a deep stain was spreading. "But Bel—your arm——?"
"Hurts like hell, but that's the worst of it, thank God. Bullet ploughed through the underside from wrist to elbow, nearly. I'd be dead if you hadn't jumped for her."
"And I, if you hadn't come through the window when you did."
"If you're grateful for that—try to get up."
"But ... Lynn?"
Bel laughed shortly. "The excellent Mr. Summerlad's all right—I mean to say, still breathing. That's all we can tell till the surgeon gets here. I've telephoned. The fellow ought to show up any minute now. If you can manage to get a grip on yourself, I'd be glad to get you out of here first."
"I don't understand.... What became of—her?"
"Got away clean, worse luck!—ducked past me and through the window like a shot. I tried to follow but she gave me the slip in the dark.That'sall right: she won't trouble us again. She left her pistol behind—anyway, it was empty—and the police will pick her up before morning.... Now: how about getting up?"
"I'll try," Lucinda said meekly. "Please help me." But then, appreciating that she was in no way incapacitated, she got up unaided, and steadied herself with a hand on the back of the lounge.
Summerlad lay where he had fallen, on the far side of that piece of furniture. His face, upturned to the staring light, was like a thing of sculptured ivory, expressionless and bleached; the lips ajar, the whites of his eyes alone visible under the half-shut lids with their effeminate lashes. The shirt beneath the flowered dressing-gown was hideously blotted. He was so deathly still that terror took hold on Lucinda's heart and mind.
"You think.... O Bel! do you really think he will live?"
"No fear," Bel sneered. "He'll make a fool of many another woman before he's finished. Here: put this on, will you?"
He was proffering her wrap. Like an automaton Lucinda accepted it, but seemed to forget that the thing was meant for wear.
"Where's your car?"
"I told my driver to call up about ten——"
"I'll attend to that, then. My chauffeur will run you down to the hotel. I think he's to be trusted. Wish I felt as sure of that Jap."
"Sure of him?"
"Why do you suppose I'm hurrying you away? Do you want the papers to get hold of the fact you were keeping an assignation with this actor when his wife caught you and shot him?"
Lucinda flinched, faintly remonstrated: "Bel!"
"Well?" he demanded—"got anything to say to that?"
"You don't think ... nobody would dare...."
"What's the reason I don't think? Why wouldn't anybody dare? I presume you expect the world—this good, kind, charitable world we live in—to believe 'appearances are against you'!"
Affronted, she held her answer, seeing her husband as with eyes from which scales had newly dropped, as a man she barely knew, whose fleshy husk alone was familiar in her sight, but whose spirit was altogether strange: a man self-reliant and resolute, skeptical, cold and hard of temper, estranged and unforgiving; witness the contemptuous incredulity that animated his regard.
Smouldering indignation blazed, she threw back her head with eyes as cold as his, a mouth as hard.
"You are insolent," she pronounced slowly. "If you think—if you dare think what you hint—what is it to you whether I go or stay?"
"You forget you neglected to get rid of a husband before taking on with this busy lover ... who got precisely what was coming to him, if you want the truth for once!"
"Do I hear you setting yourself up to judge him, Bel?"
"Do you know anybody better qualified?"
"By what right——"
"The husband's right! Do you think I want every paper in the country linking your name—my wife's—with Lynn Summerlad's as his latest mistress, the woman who made his deserted wife so jealous she tried to murder him?"
Lucinda let her wrap fall. "If my relationship to Lynn is what you imply—then my place is here with him."
"Please yourself. But remember, the papers are going to make big capital out of this scandal in the movie colony. They've been itching for it for years, licking their chops with impatience, knowing it was bound to break some day.... Good God! what's got into you, Linda? How long do you imagine it'll be, after this affair gets into print, before the reporters will ferret out the fact that 'Linda Lee' is Mrs. Bellamy Druce? Do you want to go into a witness-box and testify against that demented creature when she's tried for murder? Do you want everybody who knows you—all your friends back home—to think what everybody in his sane mind has every right to think?"
"What you think...."
"What the devil do you care whatIthink? But if it comes to that, tell me this: If you aren't what people are going to say you are, what are you doing here, alone with Summerlad, in his own home, at night?"
"The Lontaines were coming to dinner, but——"
"'But'!" Bel snorted. "Oh, all right! I'll be a high-minded ass, if that'll satisfy you; I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, if that'll induce you to clear out of this before it's too late. But don't forget I'm the only one who will. His wife wouldn't—didn't. Neither will another living soul who knows you were here when this thing happened. Your only salvation now is to get back to the hotel and lie low; if you hear any rumours, be as much surprised as anybody; if you're asked any questions, know absolutely nothing. If you'll do that, and leave the rest to me, perhaps I can save you."
"You are too kind——"
"I'm not. Don't fool yourself. I'm thinking of nobody but Bellamy Druce. All I'm after is to save my name from being linked up with this rotten business. Think of yourself, as I'm thinking of myself, then. Think whether it's going to be worth the name you'll get, to have the satisfaction of this heroic gesture, this theatrical effect of sticking bravely by the side of your actor lover—so nobly wounded!—this man whose promiscuous amours have made his name a by-word even here, even in Hollywood!... But for the love of God, think quickly!"
He ceased upon a note of impatient admonishment, then, when Lucinda remained silent, changed his tone.
"I treated you badly enough, God knows! but you paid me out properly, you can afford to be magnanimous now. I've done nothing to deserve your active ill-will since you left me. And it isn't as if you could do Summerlad any good by staying. His fate's all up to the surgeons. And you can trust me to see that everything possible is done for him. I'll keep you posted, I'll come to the hotel tonight and tell you what the surgeon says."
He bent with painful effort and lifted her wrap. She took it without a word, swung it round her shoulders, turned and left the room.
Bellamy followed as far as the front door. His car was waiting on the drive, its motor running. The chauffeur, already instructed, held the tonneau door for Lucinda, closed it smartly, smartly climbed into place at the wheel. She looked back as they drew away. Bellamy stood en silhouette against the light, nursing his bandaged arm. A turn in the drive blocked out that picture, the car wheeled sharply into the public street, gathered speed. And Lucinda crouched down in her corner, chilled to her marrow by realization of the loneliness of her lot, from whom Life had stripped away even the forlorn company of her last, most dear illusion....
Amazing to learn, upon authority as sound as that of the clock in the hotel lobby, that the age of the evening was still something short of nine ... preposterous to credit that lapse of time so little could have wrought the transformation of life's kindly countenance at close of day to its present cast, so bleak, forbidding, and implacable....
Yet neither circumstance was a whit less certain or more disputable than the other. And that the hour was what it was, no earlier, no later, gave one good reason for thanksgiving. For now the miscellaneous dinner mob with its components of envious sharp eyes and ungenerous tongues had scattered on its various ways; while the cinemaniacs were not yet due to come trooping home from the neighbouring halls of their addiction. Only the elderlies remained in evidence, that element of the clientele which Fanny had styled the Grumpies in discrimination from the Gaddies; staid, smug bodies in black taffeta, old lace fichus and rocking-chairs, or stiff collars, shapeless trousers and blunt-nosed boots, devoted to solitaire, fancy-work, and gossip of the home-brewed brand that cheers but not inebriates; a species of migratory perennials to whom the cotton-wool climate of Southern California is a sort of gracious prelude to the grave; at once avidly intrigued by and as honestly innocent of that other Hollywood with whose lively denizens they rubbed shoulders daily, as of the other world and its press of equally unquiet souls.
Dotting the public rooms with little groups, engrossed in cards, knitting, and placid prattle, these took only casual account of the flying transit of that vision of elegance and youthful charm with evening wrap caught high about the pretty face. Such sightly shapes were too much a commonplace of their deliberate and self-sufficient days, and always passed in haste; as young blood does ever, irrationally enough, having so much time before it, so little patience....
So, though she knew them for a pack of greedy scandal scavengers, and conceived every eye among them to be regardful of her and all her shifts to deceive them spent for naught, not one who observed her guessed with what agitation she was a-quake, what unrelenting urgency whipped on her feet till they all but stumbled in their eagerness to find her sanctuary behind locked doors, where she might ease off at last the tension of self-control, pillow her sore and aching head, and give range to the pent tempest of emotions brewed by love thwarted and chagrined, faith confounded, dreams done shamefully to death....
Fleeting free of that gauntlet, she gave a sigh to find herself in the quiet corridor leading to her apartment. How good it was to think she would in another minute be alone, what an inspiration had been hers when, looking forward to an evening long drawn out, she had given her maid liberty till morning!
She passed the door through which she once had ventured to discover Nelly Marquis lying in a faint brought about by Lynn's cruelty.... And now what would become of that one? Whither had she turned in her flight? with what hope of asylum or immunity? A hapless creature beating blindly through the night, a land-bird swept to sea by an off-shore gale, questing what it might never hope to find....
Lucinda slipped into her sitting-room, turned the key, found the switchbox near the door, and in an abrupt blaze of illumination stood, startled beyond speech, face to face with the woman the riddle of whose fate had been riding her imagination.
One of Nelly's hands was planted flat against the wall; but this support helped not at all to abate the vicious racking of her body by nerves deranged. The other, a begrimed fist, was fumbling at her mouth. Those eyes whose haunted beauty had first laid claim to one's humanity were now—their blazing madness of a short hour since dispelled—black pools of pathos in a face whose chalkiness was runneled by tears and framed in hair like tarred rope unravelled. Her dress of hackneyed smartness was bedraggled, the skirt marked by knees that in some fall had ground into loam. The black satin slippers were pale with dust, and the openwork stockings, which boasted two great tears as well.
In that first flash of affrighted recognition, Lucinda started back to the door and fumbled for the key, but had yet to find it when the woman plunged down to grovel at her feet, catching at her knees, lifting up a face of torment, supplicating against teeth that chattered as if with an acute ague.
"O Mrs. Druce, Mrs. Druce! I'm all right now, I am, I swear I am! Forgive me, and for God's sake don't turn me out, don't call the police!"
Still frightened and mistrustful, Lucinda yet held her hand on the knob. "What do you want?" she asked in a voice that shook.
"Just to talk to you a minute.... Don't be afraid...."
"I'm not afraid," Lucinda lied. Nevertheless, in compassion and dawning reassurance, she stooped, freed her skirts from the clutching hands, and stepped back. "Get up," she said, watchful. "Tell me plainly what you want...."
The woman scrambled to her feet again, cringing and fawning. "I had to come," she protested. "I didn't know where else to go, I had to know. Mrs. Druce: please tell me, is he.... Did I hurt him bad?"
"Desperately," Lucinda replied, wondering at the reserve of fortitude which enabled her to speak with such composure. "Whether he'll live or not we don't know yet. He was unconscious when I left, before the doctor came."
"You left him that way? You didn't wait to find out! O my God!"
"Are you reproaching me?" Lucinda retorted in amazement—"as if it were I who shot your husband!"
"Myhusband!" Nelly shrilled. "It's yours I'm talking about, it's Mr. Druce. It's not knowing how bad I hurt him that's driving me crazy ... not meaning to harm even his little finger, I hope to die! I didn't hardly know who he was, that time while we was fighting...." She drove her knuckles against her mouth again and sunk teeth into them till pain helped her reassert self-control. "I didn't know what I was doing!" she mumbled between sobs——"I didn't know."
"Do you know now?"
"Oh, I do, I do! I'm all right now, honestly I am. I know what I've done and what—what I've got to pay for doing it. But I don't care!" She jerked up her chin, bravado fighting with fear in her eyes. "Lynn only got what was coming to him. I warned him often enough, time after time I told him how it was all bound to end if he kept on like he was doing; but he wouldn't listen, he'd just laugh and tell me what I could do if I didn't like his ways.... I don't mean I threatened him, Mrs. Druce. It wasn't like that. I don't believe I ever dreamed of striking back at him before today. I always thought it would be some other woman would do it, somebody that didn't love him like I did, and couldn't stand being treated like a dog, just because he got tired—I always thought somebody like that would make Lynn pay, I never thought I'd have the nerve. But today, all at once, I couldn't seem to stand it any longer.... And when I looked in at that window and saw you alone with him, and him holding you in his arms, even if you did try to make him quit.... But I'm not sorry! Lynn never treated any woman so mean, and I guess it was right his punishment should come from me. I ain't a bit sorry, I hope he dies.... Do you—do you think he will?"
To the implicit hope that thus gave vaunted impenitence the lie, Lucinda returned, in a low tone and against her wish, the one word, "Probably...." and saw the woman quail and writhe away, twisting her thin, graceful hands into each other till their knuckles shone dead white through the tortured skin.
"I don't care," she wailed—"I don't! And anyway, it wasn't about him, it was Mr. Druce I came here to find out about. I couldn't go away without knowing.... He's been such a prince to me, a regular prince, and I never meant him any harm. It just makes me sick to think...." She swung passionately back to Lucinda. "Won't you please,pleasetell me how bad he's hurt?"
"Not much—a flesh wound in the arm——"
"Thank God it wasn't worse!" Nelly drooped heavily against the wall, with a pathetic smile testifying to her relief of mind. "I'd never have forgiven myself, never...."
Profound fatigue seemed to be overcoming her. The quavering murmurs failed upon her lips, her eyes closed, her head sagged toward one shoulder.
"Are you in love with him, then?" Lucinda demanded inexorably. "Is Bel in love with you?"
Startled, Nelly stood away from the wall, with a hysterical note in the laugh that scorned this notion. "No, no, no, no!" she cried. "He isn't that sort. You ought to know he isn't. I don't know what the trouble was between you two, but I'll tell the world it wasn't on account of any other woman.... It wasn't as if Mr. Druce didn't have his chance, either; any time he'd wanted it he could have had it with me, anytime!"
"Yet you tell me you're not in love with him!"
"You don't have to be in love in the picture business...." The fugitive, twisted smile vanished away, the lustreless eyes stared into space. "Mostly it's better if you aren't. If you are, it's likely to turn out like it did with me and Lynn. If a girl wants to get on, she can't afford to care for anybody, only herself. It hasn't mattered much to me what happened, since Lynn.... But Mr. Druce never as much as held my hand."
"Wouldn't you tell me that anyway?"
"It's God's honest truth."
The statement was made without spirit, as one of simple, provable fact. And for all her memories of Bel's misconduct, Lucinda believed.
Wearily the woman began to pull about her shoulders a wrinkled, sleazy wrap.
"Guess I'd better be going," she said with eyes averted. "Thank you for being so kind. I'm glad Mr. Druce wasn't much hurt, and I wish you'd tell him I'm sorry for everything. I didn't mean to do it, but I just went crazy when I saw you and Lynn together, and him making love to you. I don't remember much about what happened, but I guess it must've been pretty awful for you, and I'm sorry."
Continuing to avoid Lucinda's eyes, she plucked at her cloak once more and moved toward the door; but faltered on finding that Lucinda stood in her way and didn't offer to budge. "I'd better go," she iterated uneasily.
"Where?"
"I don't know." Nelly wagged a head of desolate uncertainty. "There isn't any place I can think of now, they wouldn't find me. Only ... I'm sorry about Lynn, and I'm not going to suffer any more on his account unless I have to. So it's up to me to be on my way."
"Wait a minute, please." Remaining between the girl and the door, Lucinda pursued: "I want to know how you got in here. How did you get back to the hotel so quickly?"
"From Beverly Hills, you mean? Oh, I had luck and caught a trolley without having to wait. They make pretty good time, you know. And then, when I got here ... I wanted to go up to my room and get some money.... I was afraid to come in the front way, I thought maybe they'd telephoned or something, so I tried the side door. They don't lock that till about nine o'clock. And just as I came in, I noticed the chambermaid unlocking this door, and it come over me like a flash you'd probably be coming home pretty soon, and I was worried about Mr. Druce; so I slipped in while she was in your bedroom, and hid behind that chair there till she went out again."
"But what if they've locked the side door since? It must be after nine now. You won't be able to leave except by way of the office."
"I guess I'll have to take my chances...." She bent upon Lucinda a look of flickering defiance. "Anyhow, what do you care?"
"I don't like to think of your being caught."
"Why?"
"I don't know, unless it's because I think you've been punished enough already. You'd better wait and rest for a while, at least till the house quiets down. And perhaps we can think of some way.... Don't you think you'd better trust me?"
For another instant suspicious eyes searched Lucinda's, then with a half-nod the girl wilted into a chair. "All right," she acquiesced with the passivity of a child chastened by terror—"just's you say, Mrs. Druce. Only, I don't see why you're being so good to me."
Lucinda had no answer to that. Her motive was not more obscure to that muddled mind than to her own. Unless, of course, it had to do with that enduring image of the bird storm-beaten, weary of wing and bewildered by the dark, risking the debatable mercy of mankind in its stark necessity....
She stood pitiful, contemplating the creature who huddled in the chair, shivering, whimpering a little, gnawing her knuckles, with the dazed eyes of an animal hunted to its last gasp seeking to probe the fearful ambiguity of the future. A murderess by intention, whom the word of any moment might prove a murderess in fact.... And one couldn't condemn or reproach her, one couldn't shrink from her because of the crime that stained her hands, one couldn't even win one's own consent to send her out to chance the retribution she had invited.
Incomprehensible the alchemy of the human heart! Lucinda was making up her mind to help a sinner circumvent justice....
"Tell me something," she said, with no more preface: "You've been calling me Mrs. Druce. How did you learn that was my name? Did Mr. Druce tell you?"
Only the hand of the girl moved in a sign of dissent, and her lips to shape the words: "It was Lynn told me."
"Lynn!"
"Mr. Druce never said as much as a word about you. I don't believe he knows I know now. I thought he didn't want me to know, so I never let on; but of course I did know, all along."
"Lynn told you when——?"
"That time you found me on the floor, you know. I guess I ought to apologize for the way I treated you, but I was all upset, I hated you on account of what Lynn had told you about me and all."
"I don't think I blame you—now."
"You wouldn't 've, then, if you'd been through what I'd been through that afternoon.... Lynn didn't let me know he was coming, or send his name in or anything, he just walked in through the window while I was getting dressed to go out. He said I'd got to clear out, go back home, where I come from in the East. He said if I didn't I'd spoil everything for him, if you ever found out about me you wouldn't have any more to do with him, and then where'd be his chance of getting in with New York society people like you trained with. He took out a hundred dollars and put it on the bureau and said I'd got to take it and go home and he'd send me fifty dollars every week. I said I wouldn't, and he said I would if he had to ship me East on a stretcher. I forget what I said then, but I was pretty wild, I guess, and he hit me, and I don't remember anything after that, except waking up to find Lynn gone and you taking care of me."
She jumped in the chair, cried out shrilly, and clapped a hand over her heart when the telephone sounded a peremptory call. Lucinda, answering, heard the voice of her chauffeur: he had called up Mr. Summerlad's, somebody there had told him Miss Lee had gone home already and wouldn't want him again that night, and he wanted to make sure that was all right.
"Yes, Ben," Lucinda assented, "it's quite all right. I left that word for you, but ... just a minute ... I may change my mind."
"It'll be all right with me, Miss Lee, if you want to go out again."
"Yes, Ben, I know; and thank you. But if I decide to use the car again tonight, I'll drive it myself—alone, you understand. If you wouldn't mind bringing it to the side door of the hotel in about an hour and leaving it there.... No; don't wait for me, I may be delayed; just leave the car and go home. I'll take it to the garage when I'm through with it."
When Lucinda hung up she found Nelly slewed round in the chair and watching with darkly doubting eyes, to which she responded, with a slight smile: "That was inspiration. While Ben was talking, it occurred to me, the only possible way for you to escape would be in somebody's car. So I've arranged to let you steal mine. You can leave it wherever you think it safe to get aboard a train. You can drive, of course?" Nelly nodded. "Then if you'll come into my bedroom, you can lie down and rest while I find you a change of clothes. I'm afraid, if the police get a description of you dressed as you are, you wouldn't have much chance...."
Before she could surmise or move to defeat the girl's intention, Nelly had caught one of her hands and was weeping and slavering over it.
"You're so sweet and good to me!" she sobbed. "I can't make out what makes you so kind!"
"I think," Lucinda said, with gaze remote—"I thinkIam beginning to understand...."