Vansittart, albeit slightly puzzled, readily acquiesced. When they drew rein at Mrs. Todd's cottage, it was settled that they were to use a box he had taken for the first night of a new play brought out by a manager who was an acquaintance of his, dining first at a restaurant Joan selected as being one not affected by their circle.

Joan entered the cottage and saw the dark old woman totter to meet her, eagerness in her trembling limbs and brilliant, searching eyes, with a feeling of sickly dismay. Last time she stood here Victor was alive; since then she had killed him! Involuntarily she gave a little moan of pain.

"My dearie, my lamb, what is it?" The aged nurse was terribly agitated as she caressed and tried to console the only creature she really loved on earth, who had sunk crouching at her feet. "Is it--come, tell Nana--you know I would die this minnit for you, lambie--tell me if that fellow is alive and annoying you in any way, for, as I sit here, if he is, I'll tell of him! I'll set the police upon him!"

"Don't," said Joan, chokingly, clasping her knees. For the first time she seemed to realize what she had done. "He is dead!"

"Thank G.o.d for that!" cried the old woman, in an access of fervour. "He is just, I will say that, if He's sent that blackguard to the only place he's fit for, instead of leaving him here to worry innocent folks as 'ud do their Maker credit if they was only let alone! And now you can be my Lady, and go to Court with as big a crown and as long a train as the best of the lot, d.u.c.h.esses and all! And you can bring little lords and ladies into the world to be brought up proper by head nurses and then send them to colleges, and make real gentlemen of 'em! The Lord knows what he is about! There ain't a G.o.d for nothin'!"

After the first thrill of something akin to horror at Mrs. Todd's grotesque rejoicing, Joan put aside her questioning as to "how the brute came to his end" by asking her if she would like to see Vansittart, and he, in his rapt adoration, eager to have to do with every detail of his beloved one's life, was only too ready to be curtsied to and congratulated and blest.

"She is a good old soul, darling, we must look after her," he feelingly said, as he waved farewell presently to the tall old crone watching them from her doorstep as they rode slowly up the road. "And now, where shall we go?"

After one of Joan's scampering rides they returned home, spent the afternoon in sweet talk in her boudoir, then Joan retired to dress--donning her plainest black evening frock and simplest ornaments--and he paid a flying visit to his house to dress also, returning to fetch her, as she had bidden him, in an ordinary hansom.

"I mean to enjoy myself to-night!" she gaily said. She insisted on feeling gay--insisted to herself. Presents were arriving in battalions, boxes of exquisite garments were delivered with a monotonous regularity.

She had chosen the restaurant they would dine at, she was also to select the menu. As they alighted at the door, a man, who was about to enter, halted, and smiled as he lifted his hat.

"Who is that?" she asked as they went in.

"A very clever fellow, the dramatic critic of the _Parthenon_," he returned. "I will introduce him to you."

CHAPTER x.x.x

As Joan went into the restaurant on Lord Vansittart's arm, she felt a subtle, exquisite sensation of leaving her troubled, garish, emotional life on the threshold, and stepping into another, new existence.

The vast circular building, with a dome where the electric lights already cast a warm glow upon the bright scene beneath, was dotted over with white tables surrounded by diners. Palms stood about it--a grove of moist, luscious water-plants of subtropical origin surrounded a rosewater fountain, that tinkled pleasantly in the centre.

"We had better go upstairs, I think," said Vansittart; and he led her up a broad staircase into a wide gallery surrounding the building, and chose a table next to the gilt bal.u.s.trade, where she might watch the crowd beneath.

"This is delightful," she said smiling, as a band began to play a selection from a favourite opera in a subdued yet fascinating style.

Then a waiter came up, obsequious, as with an instinct born of experience he detected a couple above the average of their ordinary patrons, and after a brief colloquy with him, Vansittart offered her the menu, and seated himself opposite to await her choice.

"It is difficult to think of eating with that music going on," she said, feeling as if in the enchanted atmosphere coa.r.s.e food was a vulgar item; and her selection was a slight one--oysters, chicken cutlets, iced pudding. Vansittart, possessed of an honest appet.i.te when dinner time came round, felt compelled to supplement it with an order on his own account. "You do not want me to be starved, I know," he gaily said, as the man departed on his errand.

The music played, the fountain's tinkle mingled with the hum of many voices, the footfalls, the clinking of gla.s.s and china. Then the dramatic critic and another man took the table a little on one side, near to them. Joan met an admiring glance from a pair of intelligent eyes. The oysters were fresh, and some clear soup Vansittart had ordered seemed to "pick her up" so much that she resolved to force herself to eat for the future.

"I shall fight the horrors of my life better if I do not fast," she told herself, immediately afterwards chiding herself almost angrily for recurring to her "dead miseries." With a certain desperation born of the discovery that she had not cast the skin of her experiences on the threshold, she set herself to court oblivion by plunging violently into present sensations. She laughed and talked, ate, drank champagne, and Vansittart, opposite, gazed at her with admiring beat.i.tude. Joan's lovely neck, alabaster white as it rose from her square-cut black dress, her delicately-tinted oval face with its perfect features, now brightened by her temporary gaiety, her great dark eyes, gleaming with subdued, if incandescent fire, her halo of golden hair--all were items in the general effect of radiant beauty. Vansittart hardly knew what she was talking about; he felt that the dreamy music discoursed by the little orchestra below was a fitting accompaniment to the melody of her delightful speaking voice, that was all. He was plunged in a perfect rhapsody of self-gratulation. And she? Her suspicions were as alert as ever. She saw he was in a "brown study," and, although his eyes looked dreamy ecstasy into hers, and a vague smile of as vague a content hovered about his lips, she would rather he lived outside himself. She herself was trying madly to live in externals--to stifle thought!

"What are you thinking about?" she asked, leaning forward.

"You!" he said pa.s.sionately. "How can I think about anything else with you there opposite me?"

"Hush, the waiter is listening," she said. But just at that moment the waiter was aroused by the dramatic critic and his friend rising and pushing back their chairs, and went forward to help them a.s.sume their light overcoats.

"Your friend is going, and you have not introduced him to me," said Joan.

"I will," said he, and, abruptly joining the departing men, he brought back the critic, in no wise reluctant.

"Mr. Clement Hunt--Miss Thorne, very soon to be Lady Vansittart," he said.

"May I offer my congratulations?" Mr. Hunt's face, if not handsome, was pleasant. His voice betrayed a past of public school and college. Joan instinctively liked him. After a little small talk and apologies on his part for haste--duty called him to be at his post at the raising of the curtain upon the new drama--he departed, volunteering to pay their box a visit between the acts.

"He is a capital good fellow, dearest," said Vansittart, asking her permission to smoke as the waiter brought their coffee. "But you must know that, for I would not otherwise have introduced him to you."

"He looks it," said Joan warmly.

"I suppose you know who that couple are?" asked Mr. Hunt, as he rejoined his friend.

"Lord Vansittart, wasn't it? What a beautiful girl! But if all is true they say, what an unfortunate creature!"

"Why, Vansittart is one of the best fellows I know!" exclaimed Clement Hunt; and he spent the next ten minutes in indignantly endeavouring to convince his friend that if club gossip were not invariably entirely false, in this case any rumour of a previous marriage on Vansittart's part was an absolute and odious fabrication.

Meanwhile, Vansittart had carefully cloaked his beloved in her quiet, if costly, theatre wrap, and, after royally tipping the waiter, had escorted her, followed by interested glances, down the stairs to the entrance. A hansom speedily conveyed them to the theatre. They were just settled in the box, Joan was glancing round the house through her opera gla.s.s, when the orchestra began the overture. At first, the music merely aroused a dormant, unpleasant, shamed sensation. Then, as it struck up a well-known air from "Carmen," she inwardly shrank, her whole being, heart included, indeed seemed to halt, as if paralyzed with reminiscent horror.

_It was the air Victor had whistled under her window at night when he was secretly courting her, and she had not heard it since._

What demon was persecuting her? Not only that air sent arrows of pain into her very soul, but the subsequent melodies drove them home to the core. It was as if a malignant fiend had picked out and strung together the favourite tunes the dead man had whistled and sung during the stolen meetings of their clandestine love affair, to clamour them in her ears when she was powerless to escape. To rush away before the curtain rose would be to betray some extraordinary emotion; yet she had to fight the desire to do so. It took her whole little strength to force herself to remain seated in the box and endure the consequent performance.

By the time the curtain rose she was the conqueror. She had held the lorgnette to her eyes, and pretended to scan the audience while that brief mental battle was raging, lest, removing it, her lover should notice her agitation. Fortunately, even as the curtain gave place to a woodland scene, the auditorium was darkened.

As the first act proceeded, she recovered herself a little. There was less of a dense black veil before her eyes, less surging in her ears.

She could hardly have told what the first dialogue between the second heroine and the first heroine--a certain Lady Chumleigh--was. The girl was sister to the heroine's husband, Sir Dyved Chumleigh, and appeared to cause discomfiture to her sister-in-law by some innocent teasing; at least, that was what Joan gathered from the lady's subsequent soliloquy.

"However, it doesn't much matter whether I understand the thing or not,"

she told herself. "It seems vapid and unreal in the extreme."

The thought had hardly flashed across her mind when a sensational episode in the play awakened the attention of the house. A slouching tramp, ragged, dirty, abandoned-looking, suddenly appeared from behind a tree, and addressed Lady Chumleigh as "My wife!"

Joan sat up and stared. Was it an awful nightmare? No! As the interview proceeded between the aristocratic lady and the miserable ex-criminal, the husband she had hoped was dead, and with him her past degradation and misery, Joan recognized that the stage play was not only real, and no bad dream, but the parallel of her own miserable story.

The unfortunate heroine had met and loved and been courted by Sir Dyved Chumleigh while trying to live down her secret past. And just when she seemed sure of present and future happiness, the wretch who had stolen her affection traded on it, and then having been imprisoned for fraud, perjury, and what not, had appeared in the flesh to blast her whole life.

The curtain descended upon a pa.s.sionate scene. The unhappy woman, after a spurt of useless defiance, fell on her knees to adjure, bribe, appeal to the man's baser nature, since he seemed to be in possession of no better feeling. He listened grimly. The outcome of the encounter was left to the next act.

"Dearest, it is upsetting you, I am afraid," said Vansittart, as the turned-up lights showed him Joan pale and gasping. "But don't think that villain will have it all his own way. I read a _resume_ of the plot, and she kills him before the curtain falls on the last act."

"What?" said Joan, gazing at him--very strangely, he thought. He was about to propose they should leave the theatre, when there was a knock at the box door, and Mr. Hunt came in.

"Well, how do you like it?" he asked pleasantly, accepting Vansittart's chair.

CHAPTER x.x.xI