The Cinema Murder Part 27

"It all seemed too amazing. For a time I couldn't speak coherently. Then I remember thinking that whatever happened, whatever price I had to pay, I must stand upon the stage of that theatre and win. My lips were quite dry. His great voice seemed to have faded into a whisper.

"'Your offer?' I repeated.

"'Yourself,' he answered gruffly."

There was a silence which seemed to Philip interminable. All the magic of the place had pa.s.sed away, its music seemed no longer to be singing happiness into his heart. Then at last he realised that she was waiting for him to speak.

"He wanted--to marry you?" he faltered.

"He had a wife already."

Splash! John was throwing stones into the lake, a pastime of which he was getting a little tired. A huge thrush was thinking about commencing to build his nest, and in the meantime sat upon a fallen log across the way and sang about it. A little tree-climbing bird ran round and round the trunk of the nearest elm, staring at them, every time he appeared, with his tiny black eyes. A squirrel, almost overhead, who had long since come to the conclusion that they were harmless, decided now that they had the queerest manners of any two young people he had ever watched from his leafy throne, and finally abandoned his position. Elizabeth had been staring down the road ever since the last words had pa.s.sed her lips. She turned at last and looked at her companion. He was once more the refugee, the half-starved man flying from horrors greater even than he had known.

She began to tremble.

"Philip!" she cried. "Say anything, but speak to me!"

Like a flash he seemed to pa.s.s from his own, almost the hermit's way of looking out upon life from the old-fashioned standpoint of his inherent puritanism, into a closer sympathy with those others, the men and women of the world into which he had so lately entered, the men and women who had welcomed him so warm-heartedly, human beings all of them, who lived and loved with glad hearts and much kindliness. The contrast was absurd, the story itself suddenly so reasonable. No other woman on tour would have kept Sylva.n.u.s Power waiting for three years. Only Elizabeth could have done that. It was such a human little problem. People didn't live in the clouds. He wasn't fit for the clouds himself. Nevertheless, when he tried to speak his throat was hard and dry, and at the second attempt he began instead to laugh. She gripped his arm.

"Philip!" she exclaimed. "Be reasonable! Say what you like, but look and behave like a human being. Don't make that noise!" she almost shrieked.

He stopped at once.

"Forgive me," he begged humbly. "I can't help it. I seem to be playing hide and seek with myself. You haven't finished the story yet--if there is anything more to tell me."

She drew herself up. She spoke absolutely without faltering.

"I accepted Sylva.n.u.s Power's terms," she went on. "He placed large sums of money in Fink's hands to run the theatre. There was a wonderful opening. You were not interested then or you might have heard of it. I produced a new play of Clyde Fitch's. It was a great triumph. The house was packed. Sylva.n.u.s Power sat in his box. It was to be his night.

Through it all I fought like a woman in a nightmare. I didn't know what it meant. I knew hundreds of women who had done in a small way what I was prepared to do magnificently. In all my acquaintance I think that I scarcely knew one who would have refused to do what I was doing. And all the time I was in a state of fierce revolt. I had moments when my life's ambitions, when New York itself, the Mecca of my dreams, and that marvellous theatre, with its marble and silk, seemed suddenly to dwindle to a miserable, contemptible little doll's house. And then again I played, and I felt my soul as I played, and the old dreams swept over me, and I said that it wasn't anything to do with personal vanity that made me crave for the big gifts of success; that it was my art, and that I must find myself in my art or die."

The blood was flowing in his veins again. She was coming back to him. He was ashamed--he with his giant load of sin! His voice trembled with tenderness.

"Go on," he begged.

"I think that the reason I played that night as though I were inspired was because of the great pa.s.sionate craving at my heart for forgetfulness, to shut out the memory of that man who sat almost gloomily alone in his box, waiting. And then, after it was all over, the wonder and the glory of it, he appeared suddenly in my dressing-room, elbowing his way through excited journalists, kicking bouquets of flowers from his path. We stood for a moment face to face. He came nearer. I shrank away. I was terrified! He looked at me in cold surprise.

"'Three minutes,' he exclaimed, 'to say good-by. I'm off to China. Stick at it. You've done well for a start, but remember a New York audience wants holding. Choose your plays carefully. Trust Fink.'

"'You're going away?' I almost shrieked.

"He glanced at his watch, leaned over, and kissed me on the forehead.

"'I'll barely make that boat,' he muttered, and rushed out."...

Philip was breathless. The strange, untold pa.s.sion of the whole thing was coming to him in waves of wonderful suggestion.

"Finish!" he cried impatiently. "Finish!"

"That is the end," she said. "I played for two years and a half, with scarcely a pause. Then I came to Europe for a rest and travelled back with you on the _Elletania_. Last night I saw Sylva.n.u.s Power again for the first time. Don't speak. My story is in two halves. That is the first. The second is just one question. That will come before we reach home...John!" she called.

The man approached promptly--he was quite weary of throwing stones.

"Take us somewhere to lunch," his mistress directed, "and get back to New York at six o'clock."

CHAPTER VIII

It was not until they were crossing Brooklyn Bridge, on their way into the city, that she asked him that question. They crawled along, one of an interminable, tangled line of vehicles of all sorts and conditions, the trains rattling overhead, and endless streams of earnest people pa.s.sing along the footway. Below them, the evening sunlight flashed upon the murky waters, glittered from the windows of the tall buildings, and shone a little mercilessly upon the unlovely purlieus of the great human hive.

The wind had turned cool, and Elizabeth, with a little shiver, had drawn her furs around her neck. All through the day, during the luncheon in an unpretentious little inn, and the leisurely homeward drive, she had been once more entirely herself, pleasant and sympathetic, ignoring absolutely the intangible barrier which had grown up between them, soon to be thrown down for ever or to remain for all time.

"We left our heroine," she said, "at an interesting crisis in her career.

I am waiting to hear from you--what would you have done in her place?"

He answered her at once, and he spoke from the lesser heights. He was fiercely jealous.

"It is not a reasonable question," he declared. "I am not a woman. I am just a man who has led an unusually narrow and cramped life until these last few months."

"That is scarcely fair," she objected. "You profess to have loved--to love still, I hope. That in itself makes a man of any one. Then you, too, have sinned. You, too, are one of those who have yielded to pa.s.sion of a sort. Therefore, your judgment ought to be the better worth having."

He winced as though he had been struck, and looked at her with eyes momentarily wild. He felt that the deliberate cruelty of her words was of intent, an instinct of her brain, defying for the moment her heart.

"I don't know," he faltered. "I won't answer your question. I can't. You see, the love you speak of is my love for you. You ask me to ignore that--I, who am clinging on to life by one rope."

"You are like all men," she sighed. "We do not blame you for it--perhaps we love you the more--but when a great crisis comes you think only of yourselves. You disappoint me a little, Philip. I fancied that you might have thought a little of me, something of Sylva.n.u.s Power."

"I haven't your sympathy for other people," he declared hoa.r.s.ely.

"No," she a.s.sented, "sympathy is the one thing a man lacks. It isn't your fault, Philip. You are to be pitied for it. And, after all, it is a woman's gift, isn't it?"

There followed then a silence which seemed interminable. It was not until they were nearing the theatre that he suddenly spoke with a pa.s.sion which startled her.

"Tell me," he insisted, "last night? I can't help asking. I was in h.e.l.l!"

He told himself afterwards that there couldn't be any possible way of reconciling cruelty so cold-blooded with all that he knew of Elizabeth.

She behaved as though his question had fallen upon deaf ears. The car had stopped before the entrance to the theatre. She stepped out even before he could a.s.sist her, hurried across the pavement and looked back at him for one moment only before she plunged into the dark pa.s.sage. She nodded, and there was an utterly meaningless smile upon her lips.

"Good-by!" she said. "Do you mind telling John he needn't wait for me?"

Then she disappeared. He stood motionless upon the pavement, a little dazed. Two or three people jostled against him. A policeman glanced at him curiously. A lady with very yellow hair winked in his face. Philip pulled himself together and simultaneously felt a touch upon his elbow.

He glanced into the face of the girl who had accosted him, and for a moment he scarcely recognised her.

"Wish you'd remember you're in New York and not one of your own sleepy old towns," Miss Grimes remarked brusquely. "You'll have a policeman say you're drunk, in a minute, if you stand there letting people shove you around."

He fell into step by her side, and they walked slowly along. Martha was plainly dressed, but she was wearing new clothes, new shoes, and a new hat.

"Don't stare at me as though you never saw me out of a garret before,"

she went on, a little sharply. "Your friend Miss Dalstan is a lady who understands things. When I arrived at the theatre this morning I found that it was to be a permanent job all right, and there was a little advance for me waiting in an envelope. That fat old Mr. Fink began to cough and look at my clothes, so I got one in first. 'This is for me to make myself look smart enough for your theatre, I suppose?' I said.

'Give me an hour off, and I'll do it.' So he grinned, and here I am. Done a good day's work, too, copying the parts of your play for a road company, and answering letters. What's wrong with you?"