A Mummer's Wife Part 17

'Oh, do you think so? I could listen to that music for ever.'

'It is pretty, isn't it? I'm so glad you liked it. I told you the waltz was lovely.'

'Lovely! I should think so. I shall never forget it.'

She lost her habitual shyness in her enthusiasm, and sang the first bars with her face raised towards her lover's; then, gaining courage from his look of astonishment and pleasure, she gave all the modulations with her full voice.

'By Jove! you've a deuced nice soprano, and a devilish good ear too. 'Pon my soul, you sing that waltz as well as Beaumont.'

'Oh, d.i.c.k, you mustn't laugh at me.'

'I swear I'm not laughing. Sing it again; n.o.body's listening.'

They were standing in the shade of a large warehouse; the line of slates making a crescent of the full moon, and amid the reverberating yards and brickways Kate's voice sounded as penetrating and direct as a flute. The exquisite accuracy of her ear enabled her to give each note its just value.

d.i.c.k was astonished, and he said when she had finished:

'I really don't want to flatter you, but with a little teaching you would sing far better than Beaumont. Your ear is perfect; it's the production of the voice that wants looking to;' and he talked to her of the different tunes, listening to what she had to say, and encouraging her to recall the music she had heard. He would beg her to repeat a phrase after him; he taught her how to emphasize the rhythm, and was anxious that she should learn the legend of Madame Angot.

'Now,' said d.i.c.k, 'I'll sing the symphony, and we'll go through it with all the effects--one, two, three, four, ta ra ta ta ta ta ta.'

But as Kate attacked the first bar it was taken up by three or four male voices, the owners of which, judging by the sound, could not be more than forty or fifty yards away.

'Here's Montgomery, Joe Mortimer, and all that lot. I wouldn't be caught here with you for anything.'

'By going up this pa.s.sage we can get home in two minutes.'

'Can we? Well, let's cut; but no, they're too close on us. Do you go, dear; I'll remain and tell them it was a lady singing out of that window. Here, take my latchkey. Off you go.'

Without another word Kate fled down the alley, and d.i.c.k was left to explain whatever he pleased concerning the mythical lady whom he declared he had been serenading.

When Kate arrived home that night she lay awake for hours, tossing restlessly, her brain whirling with tunes and parts of tunes. The conspirators' chorus, the waltz song, the legend, and a dozen disconnected fragments of the opera all sang together in her ears, and in her insomnia she continued to take singing lessons from d.i.c.k. She was certain that he loved her, and the enchantment of her belief murmured in her ears all night long; and when she met Hender next morning, the desire to speak of d.i.c.k burnt her like a great thirst, and it was not until Hender left her to go to the theatre that she began to realize in all its direct brutality the fact that on the morrow she would have to bid him goodbye, perhaps for ever.

Her husband wheezed on the sofa, her mother-in-law read the Bible, sitting bolt upright in the armchair, and the shaded lamp covered the table with light, and fearing she might be provoked into shrieks or some violent manifestation of temper, she went to bed as early as she could. But there her torments became still more intolerable. All sorts of ideas and hallucinations, magnified and distorted, filled her brain, rendered astonishingly clear by the effects of insomnia. She saw over again the murders she had read of in her novels, and her imagination supplied details the author had not dreamed of. The elopements, with all their paraphernalia of moonlight and roses, came back to her.... But if she were never to see him again--if it were her fate to lie beside her husband always, to the end of her life! She buried her head in the pillows in the hopes of shutting out the sound of his snores.

At last she felt him moving, and a moment afterwards she heard him say, 'There's Mr. Lennox at the door; he can't get in. Do go down and open it for him.'

'Why don't you go yourself?' she answered, starting up into a sitting position.

'How am I to go? You don't want me to catch my death at the front door?'

Ralph replied angrily.

Kate did not answer, but quickly tying a petticoat about her, and wrapping herself in her dressing-gown, she went downstairs. It was quite dark, and she had to feel her way along the pa.s.sage. But at last she found and pulled back the latch, and when the white gleam of moonlight entered she retreated timidly behind the door.

'I'm so sorry,' said d.i.c.k, trying to see who the concealed figure was, 'but I forgot my latchkey.'

'It doesn't matter,' said Kate.

'Oh, it's you, dear. I've been trying to get home all day to see you, but couldn't. Why didn't you come down to the theatre?'

'You know that I can't do as I like.'

'Well, never mind; don't be cross; give me a kiss.'

Kate shrunk back, but d.i.c.k took her in his arms. 'You were in bed, then?'

he said, chuckling.

'Yes, but you must let me go.'

'I should like never to let you go again.'

'But you're leaving to-morrow.'

'Not unless you wish me to, dear.'

Kate did not stop to consider the impossibility of his fulfilling his promise, and, her heart beating, she went upstairs. On the first landing he stopped her, and laying his hand on her arm, said, 'And would you really be very glad if I were to stay with you?'

'You know I would, d.i.c.k.'

They could not see each other, and after a long silence she said, 'We mustn't stop here talking. Mrs. Ede sleeps, you know, in the room at the back of the workroom, and she might hear us.'

'Then come into the sitting-room,' said d.i.c.k, taking her hands and drawing her towards him.

'I cannot.'

'I love you better than anyone in the world.'

'No, no; why should you love me?'

'Let us prove our love one to the other,' he murmured, and frightened, but at the same time delighted by the words, she allowed him to draw her into his room.

'My husband will miss me,' she said as the door closed, but she could think no more of him; he was forgotten in a sudden delirium of the senses; and for what seemed to him like half an hour Ralph waited, asking himself what his wife could be doing all that time, thinking that perhaps it was not Lennox after all, but some rambling vagrant who had knocked at the door, and that he had better go down and rescue his wife. He would have done so had he not been afraid of a sudden draught, and while wondering what was happening he dozed away, to be awakened a few minutes afterwards by voices on the landing.

'Let me go, d.i.c.k, let me go; my husband will miss me.' She pa.s.sed away from him and entered her husband's room, and Ralph said: 'Well, who was it?'

'Mr. Lennox,' she answered.

'Our lodger,' Ralph murmured, and fell asleep again.

X

'Is this the stage entrance?'

'Yes, ma'am; you see, during the performance the real stage-door is used as a pit entrance, and we pa.s.s under the stage.'

This explanation was given after a swaggering att.i.tude had been a.s.sumed, and a knowing wink, the countersign for 'Now I'm going to do something for your amus.e.m.e.nt,' had been bestowed on his pals. The speaker, a rough man with a beard and a fez cap, became the prominent figure of a group loitering before a square hole with an earthward descent, cut in the wall of the Hanley Theatre.