Читать книгу A Woman Martyr - Alice Mangold Diehl - Страница 8

The Duke's valet prattled on until the second and third liqueurs had solaced his being. Then Victor glanced darkly at the clock.

"Let us go," he roughly said.

The softspoken Naz only thought that the delightful fluid which warmed and comforted his gentle self had had a reverse effect upon his old friend, so-following him gently as Mercier stalked gloomily into the theatre and up to the dress circle, which was well-packed with honest citizens and their wives in their ordinary habit as they lived-he returned to his seat by Julie, and left him to his own devices.

The third act was over. In the fourth Mercier's so-called "sister" had plenty to do. She was a peccant wife, revisiting home in disguise, and seeking her husband's pardon. It was a pathetic scene, when she sought her husband and discovered herself. Throwing off her disguise-she was got up as an old woman-she emerged sweet, fascinating, in a white dress, with her black hair in Magdalen-like confusion, and sinking at his feet, alternately implored and adored with such passion and intensity that tears rolled down the feminine auditors' cheeks, and the house literally rose to her.

"And all that passion is mine, to take or leave as I please," was Victor's saturnine comment, as he leant back in his seat with folded arms and frowned darkly at the stage. He well knew that his amorous dalliance with his step-father's daughter, when he had had nothing more to his taste to dally with, had succeeded in inspiring her with so violent a devotion to him that, if he had not pitied, he might have come to loathe her. When she was a mere pretty, stupid schoolgirl, going to and fro to her middle-class girls' school, satchel in hand, he had had but little patience with her absorption in him and his career. But now that he saw her on the stage, beautiful with an undeniable beauty, full of grace and spontaneity, and possessed of that power which passion gives, he thrilled with mingled desire and satisfaction.

Strange ideas rose up in his mind-ideas of a subtle revenge upon Joan-of intense and vivid gratification to himself.

"Joan will be my wife-my bondslave, to be dealt with how I please, and when I please; and as long as I kiss and caress her no one dare interfere, if I choose that she shall spend almost her life in my arms with my lips on hers," he grimly told himself. "But-Vera loves me-and if I am Vera's lover while I am Joan's uxorious husband, Joan's pride will not allow her to accuse me, even if she suspects! And how her proud, snobbish soul will hate my giving her half my love-as an Eastern potentate gives it to his appointed spouse, while his real devotion is his favourites'!"

The idea gave him a peculiar and indescribable pleasure. It seemed, indeed, to restore his equilibrium. As the curtain fell, he left the auditorium and made his way round to the stage door, as he had promised Vera to do.

"I wish to see Miss Anerley-which is her dressing-room?" he asked, when, after cautiously traversing a dark, unsavoury alley, he had pushed open the swing door, had entered a dimly-lit corridor where a sickly gas flame was flaring in the draught in its wire cage, and met a man coming towards him.

"You are her brother? Come this way, please." The good-natured acting-manager of the touring company, an eager little man in shabby evening dress, escorted Victor along a passage to a door on which "Miss Vera Anerley" was pasted, and knocked.

"It's your brother, Miss Anerley," he called out.

"Thanks! Wait one moment, Victor, will you?" cried a pretty, girlish voice.

"All right." Victor paced the narrow, damp-smelling corridor, hearing the thumps and shouts from the stage, intermingled with a murmur of melodramatic music now and then from the orchestra-making way occasionally for a stage carpenter in shirt-sleeves, or an actor hurrying from his dressing room-until Vera looked out. "I am so sorry to have kept you-come in," she said caressingly, and she pulled him gently in and closed the door.

"Tell me, how do you like me?" she eagerly cried, clasping his hand with both hers. There was no reserve between these two-if, indeed, propinquity had not established complete freedom from what Victor termed gêne long ago-and she gazed up into his face with eyes transparent, shining, darkly blue as sapphires, eyes so brilliant that in admiring them he hardly noticed the coarse red and white grease paint which thickly coated her delicate skin, or the bistre rings around those beautiful orbs. "Victor! Speak! If you are not satisfied, I shall chuck the profession-dearly as I love my work, I couldn't stand it!"

"Silly child!" He patted her hand, and looked round for a seat. There were two broken chairs in the large, bare, cellar-like "dressing-room," with its high window shrouded by a torn and dirty red curtain and its dresser-like table with looking-glasses the worse for wear under the flaring gas jets. But he shook his head at them. "I'll sit here," he said, perching himself on one of the big dress-baskets under the pegs hung with feminine garments. "By George! what a room for a future Lady Macbeth to dress in, to be sure! My dear, don't gasp! That's your style, tragedy, melodrama, bloodcurdling! You're a damned passionate little witch, that's what you are-and I expected as much."

She gave him a rapturous glance as she drew a deep sigh of relief and satisfaction, and sank in a graceful, unstudied attitude upon one of the crippled Windsor chairs; and he dryly lighted a cigarette, and gazed critically at her. She was very fair! Small, with an oval face under glossy masses of dark silken hair; slight and graceful, with a child's hands and feet, and a tiny waist; yet the shoulders rising from her blue ball-dress with its gaudy wreaths of pink flowers were softly rounded-and the contour of neck and bust he considered "simply perfect." He ground his teeth and spat viciously on the blackened boards-there were only pieces of old carpeting here and there-as he remembered his wife-and her supposed lover, "Lord Vansittart." "What a cursed shame!" he thought. "They wallow in wealth-and I and this child-bah! there is something to be said for anarchy, after all!"

"You look-well, I feel I should like to kiss you," he grimly said.

She blushed under her paint. Since her woman's love had waxed so strong, all the former boy-and-girl intimacy went for nothing-she was shy of him.

"If you did you would spoil my 'make-up' and would get a dab or two of paint on your nose," she said, with slight embarrassment. It was just that coy fear of him in the abandonment of her passionate love which fired Victor Mercier when he was near her. Fierce though his mingled desire of, and hatred for, Joan had been, and still was, she had never thrilled him, stirred his whole nature, as this girl, the companion of his youth, had the power to do.

"You mean to say that is greasepaint on your shoulders?" he said, rising. He crossed the room, and, although she laughingly expostulated, he bent and kissed them-then lifted her chin and kissed her throat.

"Are you angry?" he said mockingly, gazing down into her eyes with an intent, triumphant expression.

"You know-very well-I could not be angry-with you!" she murmured, lifting them, dewy with tenderness, with fervour, to his.

Victor started, and stepped suddenly away. The door was flung open, and a young woman dressed in nurse's costume rushed in.

"Vera, what are you about? You'll keep the stage waiting! I beg your pardon, I'm sure," she exclaimed.

Vera sprang up, and with a glance in a glass and a wild pat of her hair, ran off. The young woman turned to him.

"It was a near go that time; but I think she's saved it," she said, somewhat dryly. "You're her brother-in-law, or step-brother, or whatever it is, ain't you? She's been all on wires to-night because you were in front! She's a good sort, is Vera! We all cottoned to her when she got the post. But the stage-manager's got a grudge against her, and that's why I ran off to get her on in time. He'd have fined her as soon as look at her! You see he's taken a fancy to her, and she won't have anything to say to him. I tell her she's a fool for her pains-he's a young fellow with plenty of brains, and his people have loads of money. But there! She won't hear of it! I hope you're pleased with us, Mr., Mr. – a'Court? You are? That's a good job!"

Victor Mercier left Vera's colleague a few minutes later with the understanding that he would wait for his "sister" at the stage door. When Vera came out into the dark alley he met her, drew her hand under his arm, and marching her out into the thoroughfare hailed the first hansom he met.

"Get in!" he commanded. Then he gave the address to the driver.