The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 20

"Well, he did say he wished we could go away somewhere all alone. How did you guess? How clever you are, Sylvia!" Lily exclaimed, opening wide her deep-blue eyes.

"My dear girl, when a man knows that it's impossible to be married either because he's married already or for any other reason, he always hymns a solitude for two. You never heard any man with serious intentions propose to live with his bride-elect in an Alpine hut or under a lonely palm. The man with serious intentions tries to reconcile his purse, not his person, with poetic aspirations. He's in a quandary between Hampstead and Kensington, not between mountain-tops and lagoons. I suppose he has also talked of a dream-child--a fairy miniature of his Lily?" Sylvia went on.

"We have talked about a baby," Lily admitted.

"The man with serious intentions talks about the aspect of the nursery and makes reluctant plans to yield, if compelled to, the room he had chosen for his study."

"You make fun of everything," Lily murmured, rather sulkily.

"But, my dear," Sylvia argued, "for me to be able to reproduce Hector's dream so accurately proves that I'm building to the type. I'll speculate further. I'm sure he has regretted the irregular union and vowed that, had he but known at first what an angel of purity you were, he would have died rather than propose it."

Lily sat silent, frowning. Presently she jumped up, and the sudden activity of movement brought home to Sylvia more than anything else the change in her.

"If you promise not to laugh, here are his letters," Lily said, flinging into Sylvia's lap a bundle tied up with ribbon.

"Letters!" Sylvia snapped. "Who cares about letters? The love-letters of a successful lover have no value. When he has something to write that he cannot say to your face, then I'll read his letter. All public blandishments shock me."

Hector was called away from Paris to go and stay with his mother at Aix-les-Bains; for a fortnight two letters arrived every day.

"The snow in Savoy will melt early this year," Sylvia mocked. "It's lucky he's not staying at St.-Moritz. Winter sports could never survive such a furnace."

Then followed a week's silence.

"The Alpine Club must have protested," Sylvia mocked. "Avalanches are not expected in March."

"He's probably motoring with his mother," Lily explained.

The next day a letter arrived from Hector.

HOTEL SUPERBE, AIX-LES-BAINS.

MY DEAR LILY,--I do not know how to express myself. You have known always the great difficulties of my position opposite to my mother. She has found that I owe to marry myself, and I have demanded the hand of Mademoiselle Arpenteur-Legage. I dare not ask your pardon, but I have written to make an arrangement for you, and from now please use the apartment which has for me memories the most sacred. It is useless to fight against circ.u.mstances.

HECTOR.

"I think he might have used mourning paper," Sylvia said. "They always have plenty at health resorts."

"Don't be so unkind, Sylvia," Lily cried. "How can you be so unkind, when you see that my heart is broken?" She burst into tears.

In a moment Sylvia was on her knees beside her.

"Lily, my dearest Lily, you did not really love him? Oh no, my dear, not really. If you really loved him, I'll go now to Aix myself and arrange matters over the head of his stuffy old mother. But you didn't really love him. You're simply upset at the breaking of a habit. Oh, my dear, you couldn't really have loved him!"

"He sha'n't marry this girl," Lily declared, standing up in a rage. "I'll go to Aix-les-Bains myself and I'll see this Mademoiselle." She s.n.a.t.c.hed the letter from the floor to read the odious name of her rival. "I'll send her all his letters. You mightn't want to read them, but she'll want to read them. She'll read every word. She'll read how, when he was thinking of proposing to her, he was calling me his angel, his life, his soul, how he was--Oh, she'll read every word, and I'll send them to her by registered post, and then I'll know she gets them. How dare a Frenchman treat an English girl like that? How dare he? How dare he? French people think English girls have no pa.s.sion. They think we're cold. Are we cold? We may not like being kissed all the time like French girls, but we're not cold. Oh, I feel I could kill him!"

Sylvia interrupted her rage.

"My dear, if all this fire and fury is because you're disappointed at not being married, twist him for fifty thousand francs, buy a silver casket, put his letters inside, and send them to him for a wedding-present with your good wishes. But if you love him, darling Lily, let me go and tell him the truth; if I think he's not worth it, then come away with me and be lonely with me somewhere. My beautiful thing, I can't promise you a coral island, but you shall have all my heart if you will."

"Love him?" echoed Lily. "I hate him. I despise him after this, but why should he marry her?"

"If you feel like that about him, I should have thought the best way to punish him would be to let the marriage proceed; to punish him further you've only to refuse yourself to him when he's married, for I'm quite sure that within six months he'll be writing to say what a mistake he made, how cold his wife is, and how much he longs to come back to you, la jolie maitresse de sa jeunesse, le souvenir du bon temps jadis, and so on with the sentimental eternities of reconstructed pa.s.sion."

"Live with him after he's married?" Lily exclaimed. "Why, I've never even kissed a married man! I should never forgive myself."

"You don't love him at all, do you?" Sylvia asked, pressing her hands down on Lily's shoulders and forcing her to look straight at her. "Laugh, my dear, laugh! Hurrah! you can't pretend you care a bit about him. Fifty thousand francs and freedom! And just when I was getting bored with Paris."

"It's all very well for you, Sylvia," Lily said, resentfully, as she tried to shake off Sylvia's exuberance. "You don't want to be married. I do. I really looked forward to marrying Michael."

Sylvia's face hardened.

"Oh, I know you blame me entirely for that," she continued. "But it wasn't my fault, really. It was bad luck. It's no good pretending I wasn't fond of Claude. I was, and when I met him--"

"Look here, don't let's live that episode over again in discussion," Sylvia said. "It belongs to the past, and I've always had a great objection to body-s.n.a.t.c.hing."

"What I was going to explain," Lily went on, "was that Michael put the idea of marriage into my head. Then being always with Hector, I got used to being with somebody. I was always treated like a married woman when we went to the seaside or on motoring tours. You always think that because I sit still and say nothing my mind's an absolute blank, but it isn't. I've been thinking for a long time about marriage. After all, there must be something in marriage, or so many people wouldn't get married. You married the wrong man, but I don't believe you'll ever find the right man. You're much, much, much too critical. I will get married."

"And now," Sylvia said, with a laugh, "to all the other riddles that torment my poor brain I must add you."

Hector Ozanne tried to stanch Lily's wounded ideals with a generous compress of notes; he succeeded.

"After all," she admitted, tw.a.n.ging the elastic round the bundle. "I'm not so badly off."

"We must buy that silver casket for the letters," Sylvia said. "His wedding-day draws near. I think I shall dress up like the Ancient Mariner and give them to him myself."

"How much will a silver casket cost?" Lily asked.

Sylvia roughly estimated.

"It seems a good deal," said Lily, thoughtfully. "I think I shall just send them to him in a cardboard box. I finished those chocolates after dinner. Yes, that will do quite well. After all, he treated me very badly and to get his letters back safely will be quite a good-enough present. What could he do with a silver casket? He'd probably use it for visiting-cards."

That evening Sylvia, greatly content to have Lily to herself, again took her to the Cafe de la Chouette.

Her agent, who was drinking in a corner, came across to speak to her.

"Brazil?" she repeated, doubtfully.

"Thirty francs for three songs and you can go home at twelve. It isn't as if you had to sit drinking champagne and dancing all night."

Sylvia looked at Lily.

"Would you like a voyage?"

"We might as well go."

The contract was arranged.

CHAPTER XI.

One of the habits that Sylvia had acquired on tour in France was card-playing; perhaps she inherited her skill from Henry, for she was a very good player. The game on the voyage was poker. Before they were through the Straits of Gibraltar Sylvia had lost five hundred francs; she borrowed five hundred francs from Lily and set herself to win them back. The sea became very rough in the Atlantic; all the pa.s.sengers were seasick. The other four poker-players, who were theatrical folk, wanted to stop, but Sylvia would not hear of it; she was much too anxious about her five hundred francs to feel seasick. She lost Lily's first five hundred francs and borrowed five hundred more. Lily began to feel less seasick now, and she watched the struggle with a personal interest. The other players, with the hope that Sylvia's bad luck would hold, were so deeply concentrated upon maintaining their advantage that they too forgot to be seasick. The ship rolled, but the poker-players only left the card-room for meals in the deserted saloon. Sylvia began to win again. Blue skies and calmer weather appeared; the other poker-players had no excuse for not continuing, especially now that it was possible to play on deck. Sylvia had won back all she had lost and two hundred francs besides when the ship entered the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.

"I think I should like gambling," Lily said, "if only one didn't have to shuffle and cut all the time."

The place where Sylvia was engaged to sing was one of those centers of aggregated amus.e.m.e.nt that exist all over the world without any particular characteristic to distinguish one from another, like the dinners in what are known as first-cla.s.s hotels on the Continent. Everything here was more expensive than in Europe; even the roulette-boards had zero and double zero to help the bank. The tradition of Brazil for supplying gold and diamonds to the world had bred a familiarity with the external signs of wealth that expressed itself in overjeweled men and women, whose display one forgave more easily on account of the natural splendor of the scene with which they had to compete.

Lily, with the unerring bad taste that nearly always is to be found in sensuous and indolent women, to whom the obvious makes the quickest and easiest appeal, admired the flashing stones and stars and fireflies with an energy that astonished Sylvia, notwithstanding the novel glimpse she had been given of Lily's character in the affair with Hector Ozanne. The climate was hot, but a sea breeze freshened the city after sunset; the enforced day-long inactivity, with the luxurious cool baths and competent negresses who attended upon her lightest movement, satisfied Lily's conception of existence, and when they drove along the margin of the bay before dinner her only complaint was that she could not coruscate like other women in the carriages they pa.s.sed.

With the money they had in hand Sylvia felt justified in avoiding a pension d'artistes, and they had taken a flat together. This meant that when Sylvia went to work at the cabaret, Lily, unless she came with her, was left alone, which did not at all suit her. Sylvia therefore suggested that she should accept an engagement to dance at midnight, with the stipulation that she should not be compelled to stay until 3 A.M. unless she wanted to, and that by foregoing any salary she should not be expected to drink gooseberry wine at 8,000 reis a bottle, on which she would receive a commission of 1,000 reis. The management knew what a charm the tall, fair English girl would exercise over the swart Brazilians, and was glad enough to engage her at her own terms. Sylvia had not counted upon Lily's enjoying the cabaret life so much. The heat was affecting her much more than Lily, and she began to complain of the long hours of what for her was a so false gaiety. Nothing, however, would persuade Lily to go home before three o'clock at the earliest, and Sylvia, on whom a great la.s.situde and indifference had settled, used to wait for her, sitting alone while Lily danced the machiche.

One night, when Sylvia had sung two of her songs with such a sense of hopeless depression weighing her down that the applause which followed each of them seemed to her a mockery, she had a sudden vertigo from which she pulled herself together with a conviction that nothing would induce her to sing the third song. She went on the scene, seated herself at the piano, and to the astonishment and discomfort of the audience and her fellow-players, half chanted, half recited one of the eccentric Englishman's poems about a body in the morgue. Such a performance in such a place created consternation, but in the silence that followed Sylvia fainted. When she came to herself she was back in her own bedroom, with a Brazilian doctor jabbering and mouthing over her symptoms. Presently she was taken to a clinic and, when she was well enough to know what had happened, she learned that she had yellow fever, but that the crisis had pa.s.sed. At first Lily came to see her every day, but when convalescence was further advanced she gave up coming, which worried Sylvia intensely and hampered her progress. She insisted that something terrible had happened to Lily and worked herself up into such a state that the doctor feared a relapse. She was too weak to walk; realizing at last that the only way of escaping from the clinic would be to get well, she fought against her apprehensions for Lily's safety and after a fortnight of repressed torments was allowed out. When Sylvia reached the flat she was met by the grinning negresses, who told her that Lily had gone to live elsewhere and let her understand that it was with a man.

Sylvia was not nearly well enough to reappear at the cabaret, but she went down that evening and was told by the other girls that Lily was at the tables. They were duly shocked at Sylvia's altered appearance, congratulated her upon having been lucky enough to escape the necessity of shaving her head, and expressed their regrets at not knowing in which clinic she had been staying so that they might have brought her the news of their world. Sylvia lacked the energy to resent their hypocrisy and went to look for Lily, whom she found blazing with jewels at one of the roulette-tables.

There was something so fantastic in Lily's appearance, thus bedecked, that Sylvia thought for a moment it was a feverish vision such as had haunted her brain at the beginning of the illness. Lily wore suspended from a fine chain round her neck a large diamond, one of those so-called blue diamonds of Brazil that in the moonlight seem like sapphires; her fingers flashed fire; a large brooch of rubies in the likeness of a b.u.t.terfly winked somberly from her black corsage.

Sylvia made her way through the press of gamblers and touched Lily's arm. So intent was she upon the tables that she brushed away the hand as if it had been a mosquito.

"Lily! Lily!" Sylvia called, sharply. "Where have you been? Where have you gone?"

At that moment the wheel stopped, and the croupier cried the number and the color in all their combinations. Sylvia was sure that he exchanged glances with Lily and that the gold piece upon the 33 on which he was paying had not been there before the wheel had stopped.

"Lily! Lily! Where have you been?" Sylvia called, again. Lily gathered in her winnings and turned round. It was curious how changed her eyes were; they seemed now merely like two more rich jewels that she was wearing.

"I'm sorry I've not been to see you," she said. "My dear, I've won nearly four thousand pounds."

"You have, have you?" Sylvia said. "Then the sooner you leave Brazil the better."

Lily threw a swift glance of alarm toward the croupier, a man of almost unnatural thinness, who, while he intoned the invitation to place the stakes, fixed his eyes upon her.

"I can't leave Brazil," she said, in a whisper. "I'm living with him."

"Living with a croupier?" Sylvia gasped.

"Hush! He belongs to quite a good family. He ruined himself. His name is Manuel Camacho. Don't talk to me any more, Sylvia. Go away. He's madly jealous. He wants to marry me."

"Like Hector, I suppose," Sylvia scoffed.

"Not a bit like Hector. He brings a priest every morning and says he'll kill me and himself and the priest, too, if I don't marry him. But I want to make more money, and then I will marry him. I must. I'm afraid of what he'll do if I refuse. Go away from me, Sylvia, go away. There'll be a fearful scene to-night if you will go on talking to me. Last night a man threw a flower into our carriage when we were driving home, and Manuel jumped out and beat him insensible with his cane. Go away."

Sylvia demanded where she was living, but Lily would not tell her, because she was afraid of what her lover might do.

"He doesn't even let me look out of the window. If I look out of the window he tears his clothes with rage and digs his finger-nails into the palms of his hands. He's very violent. Sometimes he shoots at the chandelier."

Sylvia began to laugh. There was something ridiculous in the notion of Lily's leading this kind of lion-tamer's existence. Suddenly the croupier with an angry movement swept a pile of money from the table.

"Go away, Sylvia, go away. I know he'll break out in a moment. That was meant for a warning."

Sylvia understood that it was hopeless to persist for the moment, and she made her way back to the cabaret. The girls were eager to know what she thought of Lily's protector.

"Elle a de la veine, tu sais, la pet.i.te Lili. Elle l'a pris comme ca, et il l'aime a la folie. Et elle gagne! mon Dieu, comme elle gagne! Tout va pour elle. Tu sais, elle a des brillants merveilleux. ca fait riche, tu sais. Y'a pas de chic, mais il est jaloux! Il se porte comme un fou. ca me raserait, tu sais, etre collee avec un homme pareil. Pourtant, elle est busineuse, la pet.i.te Lili! Elle ne lui donne pas un rond. Y'a pas de dos vert. Ah, non, elle est la vraie anglaise sans blague. Et le mec, dis, n'est-ce pas qu'il est maigre comme tout? On dirait un squelette."

With all their depreciation of the croupier, it seemed to Sylvia that most of the girls would have been well pleased to change places with Lily. But how was she herself to regard the affair? During those long days of illness, when she had lain hour after hour with her thoughts, to what a failure her life had seemed to be turning, and what a haphazard, harborless course hers had seemed to be. Now she must perhaps jettison the little cargo she carried, or would it be fairer to say that she must decide whether she should disembark it? It was absurd to pretend that Michael would have viewed with anything but dismay the surrender of Lily to such a one as that croupier, and if she made that surrender, she would be violating his trust that counted for so much in her aimless career. Yet was she not attributing to Michael the sentiment he felt before Lily's betrayal of him? He had only demanded of Sylvia that she should prevent Lily from drifting downward along the dull road of undistinguished ruin. If this fantastic Brazilian wished to marry her, why should he not do so? Then she herself should be alone indeed and, unless a miracle happened, should be lost in the eternal whirl of vagabonds to and fro across the face of the earth.

"They say one must expect to be depressed after yellow fever," Sylvia rea.s.sured herself. "Perhaps this mood won't last, but, oh, the endlessness of it all! How even one's brush and comb seem weighed down by an interminable melancholy. As I look round me I can see nothing that doesn't strike me as hopelessly, drearily, appallingly superfluous. The very soap in its china dish looks wistful. How pathetic the life of a piece of soap is, when one stops to contemplate it. A slow and steady diminution. Oh, I must do something to shake off this intolerable heaviness!"

The simplest and most direct path to energy and action seemed to be an attempt to interview Camacho, and the following evening Sylvia tried to make Lily divulge her address; but she begged not to be disturbed, and Sylvia, seeing that she was utterly absorbed by the play, had to leave her.

"Either I am getting flaccid beyond belief," she said to herself, "or Lily has acquired an equally incredible determination. I think it's the latter. It just shows what pa.s.sion will do even for a Lily. All her life she has remained unmoved, until roulette reveals itself to her and she finds out what she was intended for. Of course I must leave her to her fierce skeleton; he represents the corollary to the pa.s.sion. Queer thing, the way she always wins. I'm sure they're cheating, somehow, the two of them. There's the final link. They'll go away presently to Europe, and Lily will enjoy the sweetest respectability that exists--the one that is founded on early indiscretion and dishonesty--a paradise preceded by the fall."

Sylvia waited by the entrance to the roulette-room on the next night until play was finished, watched Lily come out with Camacho, and saw them get into a carriage and drive away immediately. None of the attendants or the other croupiers knew where Camacho lived, or, if they knew, they refused to tell Sylvia. On the fourth evening, therefore, she waited in a carriage by the entrance and ordered her driver to follow the one in which Lily was. She found that Camacho's apartments were not so far from her own; the next morning she waited at the corner of the street until she saw him come out; then she rang the bell. The negress who opened the door shook her head at the notion of letting Sylvia enter, but the waiting in the sun had irritated her and she pushed past and ran up-stairs. The negress had left the upper door open, and Sylvia was able to enter the flat. Lily was in bed, playing with her jewels as if they were toys.

"Sylvia!" she cried, in alarm. "He'll kill you if he finds you here. He's gone to fetch the priest. They'll be back in a moment. Go away."

Sylvia said she insisted on speaking to Camacho; she had some good advice to give him.

"But he's particularly jealous of you. The first evening you spoke to me ... look!" Lily pointed to the ceiling, which was marked like a die with five holes. "He did that when he came home to show what he would do to you."

"Rubbish!" said Sylvia. "He'll be like a lamb when we meet. If he hadn't fired at the ceiling I should have felt much more alarmed for the safety of my head."

"But, Sylvia," Lily entreated. "You don't know what he's like. Once, when he thought a man nudged me, he came home and tore all the towels to pieces with his teeth. The servant nearly cried when she saw the room in the morning. It was simply covered with bits of towel, and he swallowed one piece and nearly choked. You don't know what he's like. I can manage him, but n.o.body else could."

Here was a new Lily indeed, who dared to claim that she could manage somebody of whom Sylvia must be afraid. She challenged Lily to say when she had ever known her to flinch from an encounter with a man.

"But, my dear, Manuel isn't English. When he's in one of those rages he's not like a human being at all. You can't soothe him by arguing with him. You have to calm him without talking."

"What do you use? A red-hot poker?"

Lily became agitated at Sylvia's obstinacy, and, regardless of her jewels, which tinkled down into a heap on the floor, she jumped out of bed and implored her not to stay.

"I want to know one or two things before I go," Sylvia said, and was conscious of taking advantage of Lily's alarm to make her speak the truth, owing to the lack of time for the invention of lies.

"Do you love this man?"

"Yes, in a way I do."

"You could be happy married to him?"

"Yes, when I've won five thousand pounds."

"He cheats for you?"