CHAPTER VIII.
A FACE IN THE CROWD.
Vansittart spent five weeks at Merewood, hunting a good deal, dining with some of his neighbours once a week or so, and occasionally entertaining them at dinner or luncheon; tiring himself prodigiously with long rides to cover, or railway journeys before andafter the chase, and falling asleep of an evening by the drawing-room fire, lulled by the monotonous click of his mother’s knitting needles, or the flutter of the turning leaves as she read.
Those fireside evenings after the chase in January and February were delightful to Mrs. Vansittart. She rejoiced with an exceeding joy at having brought her son safe and sound out of the cave of the syren, having no suspicion of those serious thoughts of the syren which occupied his mind. There were half a dozen girls in the neighbourhood, two of them heiresses, any one of whom would be welcome to her as a daughter-in-law, for any one of whom she would have resigned her place in that household without a murmur, almost without a regret. But she shuddered at the idea of a girl brought up in a Bohemian fashion; a girl who had suffered all the disadvantages which poverty carries with it; the skimped education; the vulgarizing influence of petty household cares; a girl whose father never went to church. Such a girl would be unspeakably distasteful to her. If Eve Marchant were to reign at Merewood, Mrs. Vansittart’s grey hairs must go down in sorrow to the grave.
She rejoiced in her son’s company, and was even reconciled to the perils of the hunting field, since hunting occupied his days, and prevented his running after Eve Marchant. If he was unusually silent and thoughtful by the fireside, she ascribed silence and thoughtfulness to physical exhaustion. He was there, safe within her ken; and that was enough. She took infinite pains to bring the girls she liked about her, and in her son’s way, which was not easy, since Vansittart was far afield nearly every day. She would invite one of her favourites to a friendly dinner, escorted by a young brother, perhaps—a proceeding which bored her son infinitely, since instead of sleeping or brooding by the fire he must needs play billiards with the cub, or put himself out of the way to amuse the young lady.
He was very fond of music of a broad dramatic style—loved grand opera, from Gluck to Meyerbeer and Verdi; but he had no passion for Grieg or Rubinstein, as expounded, neatly, elegantly, with lady-like inexpressiveness, by his mother’s protégées; and it seemed to his ignorant ear that all his mother’s protégées played exactly the same pieces in precisely the same manner.
If perchance he spent an afternoon at home, he invariably found one of those selected vestals in morning-room or drawing-room when he went to five o’clock tea, that meal being one which his mother loved to share with him, and at which dutiful affection constrained his presence whenever he was on the premises. All the charm of that unconstrained half-hour of chat between mother and son was scared away by the presence of a young lady, albeit the most admirable of her sex. His mother’s favourites were very nice girls,every one of them, and only two out of the six were painfully religious. He liked them all well enough, in the beaten way of friendship; but the handsomest and most attractive of them left him cold as marble. He had gone beyond the season of easily kindled fires. He had passed the age at which a man falls in love once in six weeks. His heart was no longer touch-paper. A few months ago he had believed that he would spend his days as a bachelor, had calculated the manifold advantages of remaining single, with an estate which for a single man meant wealth, but which for a man with wife and family would only mean a modest competence.
He grew so weary at last of those social tea-drinkings and those eminently domestic evenings, that before the hunting season was over he suddenly announced his intention of going to London. It was an understood thing between his mother and himself that the house in Charles Street was always ready for him. The housekeeper left in charge had been his nurse, and administered to his comfort with unwearying devotion. She was an excellent cook, by force of native talent rather than by training and experience, and, with a housemaid under her, kept the house in exquisite order. These two women, with Vansittart’s valet, an Italian, able to turn his hand to anything, made up an efficient bachelor establishment.
To Charles Street, therefore, Vansittart repaired, in the Lenten month of March. He had been at some trouble to resist the inclination which would have taken him to Redwold Towers, rather than to London. It would have been so easy to offer himself to his sister for a week; and at Redwold it would have been so easy to see Eve Marchant; so difficult, perhaps, to avoid seeing her, since Lady Hartley, who was, above all things, cordial and impulsive, had told him in one of her letters that she had taken a fancy to Miss Marchant, and had invited her and one of the sisters to Redwold very often.
“As a wife for you, she is impossible,” wrote Maud Hartley. “Pray remember that, Jack. Mother and I are ambitious about your future. We want you to look high, to improve your position from that of a small country gentleman, to make your mark in the world. But, although quite impossible as your wife, as a human being Miss Marchant is charming, and I mean to do all I can in a neighbourly way to make things pleasanter for her. The father is shockingly neglectful, spends the greater part of his life in London; but that is perhaps an advantage for his daughters, for when he is at home Eve is a slave to him, has to worry about his dinners, and fetch and carry for him, and try to amuse the unamusable, as Madame de Maintenon said. I gather this not from any murmurings of Eve’s, but from the young sisters, who are appallingly outspoken.”
Vansittart had pledged himself to spend the Easter holidays at Redwold; so he resisted the promptings of inclination, and swore to himself that he would not try to see Eve Marchant before Easter. The interval would then have been long enough to test his feelings, to give him time for thought, before he took any fateful step, and perhaps to throw him in the way of hearing some more specific account of Colonel Marchant’s character and antecedents. There is no place, perhaps, in which it is more difficult to get a faithful description of a man than in thevillage where he lives. There, everything is exaggerated—his income, if he is rich; his debts, if he is poor; his vices, eccentricities, and shortcomings, in any case.
Although it was the Lenten season, and although the churches of London were filled with Lenten worshippers, the town looked bright and animated, and there were plenty of votaries in the temples of pleasure—theatres, picture galleries, concert halls—and plenty of snug little dinner-parties to which a man in Vansittart’s position was likely to be bidden. He had a wide circle of acquaintance, and was popular with men and women, accounted a clubbable man by the former, and an eligible parti by the latter. Even the women who had no matrimonial views for daughters, or sisters, or bosom friends, still affected Jack Vansittart’s society. He had plenty to say to them, was always cheery and cordial, and never seemed to think himself too good for the particular circle in which he found himself.
He was dining one evening en petit comité with an old college chum and his young wife; the husband a rising barrister; the wife an accomplished woman, and a marvellous manager, able to maintain a pretty little house in Mayfair on an income which a stupid woman would have found hardly enough for Notting Hill or Putney, and to give an appetizing dinner, daintily served, and unhackneyed as to menu, for the cost of the average housekeeper’s leg of mutton and trimmings.
While the cheery little meal was being discussed, a servant brought in a coroneted envelope for the hostess, which being opened, contained a box for Covent Garden, where there was an early season of Italian Opera.
“For to-night,” said Mrs. Pembroke. And then she read aloud from the letter, “‘I find at the last moment that I can’t use my box. Do go if you are free. The opera isFaust, with a new “Margherita.”’ That’s rather a pity,” sighed the lady, folding up the letter.
“Why a pity?” asked Vansittart. “Why shouldn’t you go? I dare say your box will hold me as well as Tom, so you need have no conscientious scruples on the ground of inhospitality.”
“Oh, there will be plenty of room. It is Lady Davenant’s box, on the grand tier. But Tom asked you for a quiet evening, a longtalk and smoke, and perhaps an adjournment to the Turf for a rubber. I’m afraid you’ll be dreadfully bored if I take you to the opera instead.”
“Pray don’t think so badly of me. If it were Wagner perhaps I might be less sure of myself. There are bits I enjoy in his operas, but I confess myself a tyro in that advanced school. Gounod’sFaustI adore. We shall be in time for the Kermess scene, and the new Gretchen. Pray let us be off.”
A cab was sent for, and the trio packed themselves into it, Mrs. Pembroke sparkling with pleasure. She was passionately fond of music, and she had been looking forward to a solitary evening by the drawing-room fire, while her husband and his friend sat smoking and prosing together in the barrister’s ground-floor den.
The house was thin, this premature opera season not having been a marked success. Lady Davenant’s box was near the proscenium, a spacious box, which would have accommodated six people as easily as three. Vansittart sat in the middle, between his host and hostess. Tom Pembroke, who was no music lover, dozed in the shadow of the curtain, agreeably lulled by melodies which were pleasant from their familiarity.
The cast was not strong, but the Margherita was very young, rather pretty, and sang well. Vansittart and Mrs. Pembroke were both interested.
It was near the close of the Kermess scene that the lady asked her companion, “Do you ever look at the chorus? Such poor old things, some of them! I can’t help thinking how weary they must be of singing the same music season after season, and tramping in and out of the same scenes—banquets where there is nothing to eat, too, and then going home to bread and cheese.”
“Yes, it must be a hard life,” assented Vansittart; “all the trouble of the show, and none of the glory.”
And then he took a sweeping survey of the gay crowd, peasants, soldiers, citizens, feasting and rejoicing in friendly German fashion under the open sky. Yes, Mrs. Pembroke was right; most of the chorus were middle-aged, some were elderly—withered old faces, dark skins which even bismuth could not transform to fairness. Italian eyes, dark and glowing, shone out of worn faces where all other beauty was lacking.
Suddenly among all those homely countenances he saw a young face, young and beautiful, a face that flashed upon him first with a rapid thrill of recognition, and then with an aspect that struck into his heart like a dagger, and when that sharp pang was over left a heaviness as of lead.
It was Fiordelisa’s face. He could not be mistaken. Nay, thefact was made certainty as he looked, for he saw that the girl recognized him. She was gazing upward to the spot where he sat; she was talking about him to the woman who stood next her, indicating him with too expressive gesticulation.
Was she telling that stolid listener that the man yonder had slain his fellow-creature in a tavern row; that he was a murderer? She would put it so, no doubt—she whose lover he had killed.
If she were saying this the stolid woman received the statement very placidly. She only nodded, and shrugged her shoulders, and then nodded again, while Fiordelisa talked to her more and more excitedly, with dramatic emphasis. Surely no woman would stand and shrug and nod as this woman shrugged and nodded, at a tale of murder.
Then Lisa looked up again at him, beaming with smiles, her dark eyes sparkling in the gaslight; and then her turn came to swell the chorus; and then the curtain fell, and he saw her no more.
It was as much as he could do to get through the interval before that curtain rose again. Tom Pembroke wanted him to go out for a stroll in the foyer, for a drink of some kind. “I would rather stay with Mrs. Pembroke,” he said, full of wild surmises, prepared for a mysterious knock at the box door, and the appearance of a policeman from over the way to take him in custody at Lisa’s instigation; prepared for anything tragic that might happen to him. What might not happen when the hot-blooded Southern nature was in question? What bounds would there be for the revengeful passion of such a girl as Fiordelisa, who had been robbed by his act of her lover and protector, her possible husband? She had talked of her Englishman’s promise of marriage with an air of innocent security, the remembrance of which smote him sharply, recalling her light-hearted gaiety at the restaurant and at the opera, her grief as she flung herself upon her lover’s corpse. And he, who had thought never to see her again, never even to know her fate, found himself face to face with her, recognized by her, having to answer to her and to society for the deed which he had done.
With these thoughts in his mind, with his ear strained for the knocking at the door, he had to talk small talk to Mrs. Pembroke, to counterfeit amusement at her criticism of the people in the stalls—the man with two strips of hair combed in streaks over a bald head, the woman with corpulent arms bared to the shoulder, the country cousins. He had to laugh at her little jokes, and even to attempt one or two smart sayings on his own account.
The knocking came, and he almost started out of his seat.
“It can’t be Tom,” said Mrs. Pembroke. “He never comes back until after the curtain is up, and sometimes not till the act is nearly over.”
Vansittart opened the box door, and a treble voice questioned, “Ices, sir?”
He made way for the young woman with the tray of ices, and insisted upon Mrs. Pembroke taking one of those parti-coloured slabs which have superseded the old-fashioned rose-pink strawberry ice. He sat down again, ashamed of his overstrained nerves, and looked at the great curtain, wondering whether in all that wide expanse there were any gimlet holes through which Fiordelisa’s ardent eyes might be watching him. The curtain rose, and the act began; but Vansittart had no longer any ear for the music he loved. His whole attention was concentrated upon the chorus singers. He watched and waited for their coming and going, searched out Lisa’s familiar figure amidst the throng that watched Valentine’s death-throes and Margherita’s despair. He singled her out again and again as the troupe moved about the spacious stage—now on one side, now on the other, in the foreground or the background, according to the exigencies of the scene. He watched the stage till the green curtain fell; and then he woke as from a dream, and began to wonder what he must do next. Something he must do assuredly, he told himself, as he helped Mrs. Pembroke with her wraps, and heard her chatter about the performance, which she denounced as second-rate, declaring further that she had been taken in by Lady Davenant’s gift of the box. Something he must do; first to ascertain what Fiordelisa’s intentions might be—whether she would denounce him to the police; next to make whatever atonement he could make to her for the loss of her lover. He was not going to run away this time, as he had done at Venice. He had been seen and recognized. He would be watched, no doubt as he left the theatre. This girl would make it her business to find out his name and residence. Even if he wanted to elude her, the thing would be impossible. He had been sitting there all the evening in a conspicuous box on the grand tier, and he had to get away from a sparsely filled theatre.
Again there was a knock at the box door. It came while he was putting on his overcoat, and before Mrs. Pembroke had begun to move off.
It was a boxkeeper this time, with a letter.
“For you, sir,” he said, handing it to Vansittart, after looking at the two men.
“An unaddressed envelope,” chirruped Mrs. Pembroke; “this savours of mystery.”
Vansittart put the letter into his pocket without a word. His most ardent desire at that moment was to get rid of the Pembrokes.
“Can I be of any use in fetching a cab?” he said in the hall.
“You can stop with my wife while I get one, if you don’t mind,” said Pembroke.
Happily there were plenty of cabs that night, and it was only the carriage people who had to wait. Mr. Pembroke came back for his wife in two or three minutes.
“I’ve got a four-wheeler,” he said. “You’ll come home with us for a smoke and a drink, won’t you, Van?”
“Not to-night, thanks; it’s late—and—and—I’ve some letters to write.”
“Good night, then. I’m afraid you’ve been bored.”
“On the contrary. I was never more interested in my life.”