Barnaby Part 34

"I'll see the man myself," she said; "it must be some ridiculous blunder."

She was a long time downstairs. When she came back she was bewildered and indignant.

"They tell me," she said, "that Julia Kelly has been; that she saw Susan before she went out----"

"She came up here," said Barnaby.

"So the servants tell me," she said. "I can hardly believe it--! And the man says that Susan made him drive her straight to the station. He heard her ask when there was a train to London. There is no message--"

Anger was struggling in her voice with apprehension. She looked suspiciously at her son.

"Barnaby--" she said emphatically, "if this is Julia's doing--I'll never forgive either of you!"

He had got on his feet, and stood uncertainly, as if measuring his strength. The look on his face struck her into silence.

"Don't couple me with Julia," he said, setting his teeth. The sweat was glistening like dew on his forehead. "Poor little girl ... poor little girl.... So she's gone. Why, what's the matter with me? What an incapable fool I am!--How am I to go and find her if I can't--walk--straight across a room--?"

CHAPTER XII

All London was placarded with that American play.

It ran through the streets in big letters on the omnibuses; it walked in tilting lines in the gutter; it stared out from all the h.o.a.rdings with the wide smile of its princ.i.p.al actress ... Adelaide Fish.

And it was the gaudy poster that startled Susan out of the unhappy listlessness that had fallen on her. Facing her suddenly it arrested her wandering step.

Adelaide Fish.... Had the world stood still after all, and was it this morning that she had had a letter...?

"Hideously inartistic," said one pa.s.ser-by to another.

"Still she's handsome. I've seen her. One of these big women----"

Yes, it was inartistic. Reds and blues and greens in vivid splashes, and the name writ large. A marvellous jump from the bankrupt shifts of the Tragedy Company to this smiling elevation. And Barnaby was still ignorant. He had not been warned.

She thought of him now. The pa.s.sionate shame that had caught her up like a flame sweeping all before it had died out. She felt only a kind of wonder at herself, looking back. It was inevitable. The impossible situation could only have ended so.... But in the background all the while was the woman.

She tried to shake off the la.s.situde of despair. Why had she burned the letter? She had been going to tell Barnaby, although the writer had forbidden her to share its contents with him. It would have been simpler to let him--but no, she could never have put that letter into his hands. Hard enough to look him in the face and tell him what she could repeat;--that the woman who was his wife, the one in whose likeness she had been masquerading, had written, and was in England.

But before she had spoken Julia had intervened and the waters of bitterness had closed over her head.

Barnaby must not be left in the dark. She had a wild and sudden longing to do something for him still; one last service. She could find out from this woman what were her intentions towards him and if it were a threat or a promise that had lurked in that ambiguous letter.

She must ask somebody where she was. For the first time she realized her surroundings, the roar of the traffic, the restless street.

Outside the theatre an interminable train of people, wedged tightly, endured with their faces turned towards the gallery stair; another line, reaching far down the pavement and less good-humoured, guarded the entrance to the pit. The lights falling on their faces threw up a singular likeness in expression, a kind of touch-me-not att.i.tude that defied their physical juxtaposition. Squeezed like herrings, their pained endurance was heightened by the universal lack of a smile. And the lines were haunted by a street musician strumming his lamentable tune.

As Susan went up the dark entry she was pursued by unfriendly glances, the quick suspicion that she was a late comer who must be turned back ignominiously in her base attempt to push in at the head of the line.

As she vanished inside the stage door there was an interested murmur; here and there a man unbent and asked his neighbour which of them she was. Then there was a click and the crowd went surging forward. The doors were open.

Miss Fish was in her dressing-room.

Like one in a dream the girl was breathing that familiar atmosphere of the theatre. It seemed to shut off for ever all that was yesterday.

She stumbled into a little room violently scented, full of blinding light. And a woman swung round and seized her hands.

"There you are!" she said. "I can't kiss you--my face is sticky. I've sent away my dresser. Wait till I shut that door!"

She made a dash and secured it, then pushed Susan into a chair.

"I'll have to make up while I talk," she said. "Go on; go on. I'm mad with curiosity! I am dying to hear it all."

"I had your letter," said Susan.

Adelaide laughed. Her warm voice had a note of banter.

"I didn't know but you had waxed fat like Jeshurun," she said. "Wasn't it he that kicked?--So I wrote that letter. I had to see you. You burnt it? You didn't tell him?"

"He does not know you are here," said Susan. "He has been ill." Her heart was beating painfully hard; the air in this close little room was suffocating her. It was not air....

"Yes?" said Adelaide. "That's how I know about you. My dear, don't tell me! I picked up a picture paper and saw a piece about him and his accident, and his devoted American wife!--I'd so often wondered what became of you. It's tremendous!"

There was admiration in her gaze as she turned unwillingly from her visitor to the gla.s.s, smearing her chin as she talked. "I did hear of him being alive," she said. "I saw that in one of our papers, 'English Gentleman Comes Back from the Grave' and so on. I _was_ scared when I thought of you. They said what a joy it was to his wife and his mother, and I thought they had been too hasty. But there was never a word more, though I watched the paper. I decided he must have walked into the offices here and said--'I do not desire you to mention this'--I'd heard it was done sometimes by the upper cla.s.ses. But--!"

Again her face expressed unqualified admiration. "You must have had a nerve," she said, "you poor kitten!"

The girl sprang up, her mouth proud, her eyes imploring.

"Adelaide," she said, "you were good to me once, you--you tried to help me. Won't you believe me when I tell you I am nothing to him? It was all acting, all acting from beginning to end. Never real, never what you said in your letter. I was only staying in his house playing--that--part till I could disappear without scandal."

"What?" said the woman bluntly. "Has he never said to you--'If I can free myself of the other I'll marry you?'"

"Oh, never; never!"

"Then," said Adelaide, "it's not for your sake his lawyers are getting busy, trying to find what they call flaws, trying to break his marriage? They can try.... You didn't know?"

She turned on the girl with a suddenness that took her unawares; read her face.

"He's not playing you fair!" she cried.

It was remarkable, just then, how she resembled Julia. Half dressed as she was, half made-up, her eyes darkened, and scorn on her carmined lip.

"I'll give you a hold over him," she said. "I'll stand by you. Wasn't it all my doing? Who's that knocking?--You can't come in."

Good-nature was back as she turned from the interruption. She smiled indulgently, as one who was h.o.a.rding a gift.

"I wouldn't lift a finger for him," she said. "But I'm silly over you.