Anna the Adventuress Part 33

"You will have some tea?" she asked.

Annabel ignored both the chair and the invitation. She was looking about her, and her face was dark with anger. The little room was fragrant with flowers, Anna herself bright, and with all the evidences of well being. Annabel was conscious then of the slow anger which had been burning within her since the night of her visit to the "Unusual." Her voice trembled with suppressed pa.s.sion.

"I have come for an explanation," she said. "You are an impostor. How dare you use my name and sing my songs?"

Anna looked at her sister in blank amazement.

"Annabel!" she exclaimed. "Why, what is the matter with you? What do you mean?"

Annabel laughed scornfully.

"Oh, you know," she said. "Don't be a hypocrite. You are not 'Alcide.'

You have no right to call yourself 'Alcide.' You used to declare that you hated the name. You used to beg me for hours at a time to give it all up, never to go near the 'Amba.s.sador's' again. And yet the moment I am safely out of the way you are content to dress yourself in my rags, to go and get yourself popular and admired and successful, all on my reputation."

"Annabel! Annabel!"

Annabel stamped her foot. Her tone was hoa.r.s.e with pa.s.sion.

"Oh, you can act!" she cried. "You can look as innocent and shocked as you please. I want to know who sent you those."

She pointed with shaking fingers to a great bunch of dark red carnations, thrust carelessly into a deep china bowl, to which the card was still attached. Anna followed her finger, and looked back into her sister's face.

"They were sent to me by Mr. Nigel Ennison, Annabel. How on earth does it concern you?"

Annabel laughed hardly.

"Concern me!" she repeated fiercely. "You are not content then with stealing from me my name. You would steal from me then the only man I ever cared a snap of the fingers about. They are not your flowers.

They are mine! They were sent to 'Alcide' not to you."

Anna rose to her feet. At last she was roused. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes bright.

"Annabel," she said, "you are my sister, or I would bid you take the flowers if you care for them, and leave the room. But behind these things which you have said to me there must be others of which I know nothing. You speak as one injured--as though I had been the one to take your name--as though you had been the one to make sacrifices. In your heart you know very well that this is absurd. It is you who took my name, not I yours. It is I who took the burden of your misdeeds upon my shoulders that you might become Lady Ferringhall. It is I who am persecuted by the man who calls himself your husband."

Annabel shivered a little and looked around her.

"He does not come here," she exclaimed, quickly.

"He spends hours of every day on the pavement below," Anna answered calmly. "I have been bearing this--for your sake. Shall I send him to Sir John?"

Annabel was white to the lips, but her anger was not yet spent.

"It was your own fault," she exclaimed. "He would never have found you out if you had not personated me."

"On the contrary," Anna whispered quietly, "we met in a small boarding-house where I was stopping."

"You have not told me yet," Annabel said, "how it is that you have dared to personate me. To call yourself 'Alcide'! Your hair, your gestures, your voice, all mine! Oh, how dared you do it?"

"You must not forget," Anna said calmly, "that it is necessary for me also--to live. I arrived here with something less than five pounds in my pocket. My reception at West Kensington you know of. I was the black sheep, I was hurried out of the way. You did not complain then that I personated you--no, nor when Sir John came to me in Paris, and for your sake I lied."

"You did not----"

"Wait, Annabel! When I arrived in London I went to live in the cheapest place I could find. I set myself to find employment. I offered myself as a clerk, as a milliner, as a shop girl. I would even have taken a place as waitress in a tea shop. I walked London till the soles of my shoes were worn through, and my toes were blistered. I ate only enough to keep body and soul together."

"There was no need for such heroism," Annabel said coldly. "You had only to ask----"

"Do you think," Anna interrupted, with a note of pa.s.sion trembling also in her tone, "that I would have taken alms from Sir John, the man to whom I had lied for your sake. It was not possible. I went at last when I had barely a shilling in my purse to a dramatic agent. By chance I went to one who had known you in Paris."

"Well!"

"He greeted me effusively. He offered me at once an engagement. I told him that I was not 'Alcide.' He only laughed. He had seen the announcement of your marriage in the papers, and he imagined that I simply wanted to remain unknown because of your husband's puritanism.

I sang to him, and he was satisfied. I did not appear, I have never announced myself as 'Alcide.' It was the Press who forced the ident.i.ty upon me."

"They were my posters," Annabel said. "The ones Cariolus did for me."

"The posters at least," Anna answered quietly, "I have some claim to.

You know very well that you took from my easel David Courtlaw's study of me, and sent it to Cariolus. You denied it at the time--but unfortunately I have proof. Mr. Courtlaw found the study in Cariolus'

studio."

Annabel laughed hardly.

"What did it matter?" she cried. "We are, or rather we were, so much alike then that the portrait of either of us would have done for the other. It saved me the bother of being studied."

"It convinced Mr. Earles that I was 'Alcide,'" Anna remarked quietly.

"We will convince him now to the contrary," Annabel answered.

Anna looked at her, startled.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Annabel set her teeth hard, and turned fiercely towards Anna.

"It means that I have had enough of this slavery," she declared. "My husband and all his friends are fools, and the life they lead is impossible for me. It takes too many years to climb even a step in the social ladder. I've had enough of it. I want my freedom."

"You mean to say," Anna said slowly, "that you are going to leave your husband?"

"Yes."

"You are willing to give up your position, your beautiful houses, your carriages and milliner's accounts to come back to Bohemianism?"

"Why not?" Annabel declared. "I am sick of it. It is dull--deadly dull."

"And what about this man--Mr. Montague Hill?"

Annabel put her hand suddenly to her throat and steadied herself with the back of a chair. She looked stealthily at Anna.

"You have succeeded a little too well in your personation," she said bitterly, "to get rid very easily of Mr. Montague Hill. You are a great deal more like what I was a few months ago than I am now."