"No answer," he said, and turned purposing to speak some word of mercy to wretched de Courcy Smyth. But the latter had slunk out at the open door, while Mr. Farge, in an ungovernable paroxysm of humour--levelled at the departing housemaid--effectually covered his retreat by cake-walking, with very high knee action, the length of the landing, playing appropriate dance-music, the while, upon an imaginary banjo in the shape of Worthington's new crook-handled walking stick.

For some time Dominic Iglesias heard shuffling, nerveless footsteps moving to and fro in the room overhead. Then Smyth threw himself heavily upon his bed. The wire-wove mattress creaked, and creaked again twice. Unbroken silence followed, and Iglesias breathed more easily, hoping the miserable being slept. For him, Iglesias, there was no sleep. His body was too tired. His mind too vividly and painfully awake. He lay down, it is true, since he did not care to remain in the dismantled sitting-room or occupy the chair in which de Courcy Smyth had sat. But, throughout the night, he stared at the darkness and heard the hours strike. At sunset the wind had dropped dead. In the small hours it began to rise, and before dawn to freshen, veering to another quarter. Softly at first, and then with richer diapason, the cedar tree greeted its mysterious comrade, singing of far-distant times and places, and of the permanence of nature as against the fitful evanescent life of man. That husky singing soothed Dominic Iglesias, and calmed him, a.s.suring him that in the hands of the Almighty are all things, small and great, past, present, and to come. There is neither haste, nor omission, nor accident, nor oversight in the divine plan; but that plan is large beyond the possibility of human intellect to grasp or comprehend, therefore humble faith is also highest wisdom.

As the dawn quickened into day Dominic drew aside the curtain and looked out. Behind the dark branches, where they cleared the housetops and met the open sky, thrown wide upward to the zenith, was the rose-scarlet of sunrise, holding, as it seemed to him, at once the splendour of battle and the peace of crowned achievement and--was it but a pretty conceit or a truth of happiest import?--the colour of certain flaring omnibus knifeboard bills and the colour of a certain woman's name.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

The narrow lane, running back at right angles to the great thoroughfare, was filled with blurred yellowish light and covered in with gloom, low-hanging and impenetrable. The high, blank buildings on either side of it looked like the perpendicular walls of a tunnel, the black roof they apparently supported being as solid and substantial as themselves. The effect thereby produced was suspect and prison-like, as of a s.p.a.ce walled in and closed from open air and day. Outside the stage entrance of the Twentieth Century Theatre a small crowd had collected and formed up in two parallel lines across the pavement to the curb, against which a smart single brougham and some half a dozen four-wheelers and hansoms were drawn up. The crowd, which gathered and broke only to gather again, was composed for the main part of persons of the better artisan cla.s.s, respectable, soberly habited, evidently awaiting the advent of relations employed within the theatre. There was also a sprinkling of showy young women, attended by undersized youths flashily dressed. On the fringes of it night-birds, male and female, of evil aspect, loitered, watchful of possible prey; while two or three gentlemen, correct, highly-civilised, stood smoking, each with the air of studied indifference which defies attempted recognition on the part of friend or foe.

And among these last Dominic Iglesias must be counted; though, in his case, indifference was not a.s.sumed but real. His surroundings were novel, it is true, and produced on him clear impressions both pictorial and moral; but those impressions were of his surroundings in and for themselves, rather than in any doubtfulness of their relation to himself.

For his mind was occupied with problems painful in character and difficult of solution; and to the said problems, heightening the emotional strain of them, his surroundings--the sense of feverish life, of all-encompa.s.sing restless humanity; the figures anxious, degraded, of questionable purpose or merely frivolous, which started into momentary distinctness; the sc.r.a.ps of conversation, caught in pa.s.sing, instinct with suggestion, squalid or pa.s.sionate; along with the ceaseless tramp of footsteps, and tumult of the great thoroughfare just now packed with the turn-out of neighbouring places of entertainment--supplied a background penetratingly appropriate.

For a good half-hour Mr. Iglesias stood there. At intervals the doors of the stage entrance swung open, causing a movement of interest and comment among the crowd. One by one hansoms and four-wheelers, obtaining fares, rattled away over the stones. Yet the Lady of the Windswept Dust tarried.

It grew late, and Iglesias greatly desired her coming, greatly desired to speak with her, and speaking to find approximate solution, at least, of some of the problems which lay so heavy upon his mind. Meanwhile, the crowd melted and vanished, leaving him alone in the blurred yellowish light beneath the low-hanging roof of impenetrable gloom, save for the haunting presence of some few of those terrible human birds of prey.

He was about to turn away also, not particularly relishing the remaining company, when, with a rush, Poppy was beside him, in stately garments of black velvet and glimmering tissue of silver; her head and shoulders draped with something of daring and magnificence, in her blue-purple jewelled dragon-embroidered scarf. She caught Iglesias' right hand in both of hers and held it a moment against her breast. And during that brief interval he registered the fact that, notwithstanding her beauty, the force of her personality and richness of her dress, she did not look out of place in this somewhat cut-throat alley, with the questionable sights and sounds of midnight London all about her; but vivid, exultant, true daughter of great cities, fearless manipulator of the very varied opportunities they offer, past-master, for joy and sorrow, in the curious arts they teach.

"Get into the brougham, dear man," she said, "and let me talk. There, put up the window on the traffic side. I have been in the liveliest worry about you. Had the house turned out of windows to find you--and gave things in general the deuce of a time.--The brougham's comfortable, isn't it? Fallowfeild's jobbed it for the winter for me.--All the same I played like an angel, out of pure desperation, thinking you might be ill. I made the audience cry big, big tears, bless 'em. And it wasn't the part--not a bit of it. It was you, just simply you.--And then I dawdled talking to Antony Hammond about some lines in the second act I want altered, so as to let myself down easy before digesting the disappointment of driving back to Bletchworth Mansions alone. I wanted so very badly to have you see me.

Beloved and most faithless of beings, why the mischief didn't you come?"

And Iglesias sitting beside her watching her joyous face, crowned by her dark hair, set in the gleaming folds of her jewelled scarf, as pa.s.sing lights revealed it clearly, or shifting left it in soft shadow, divined rather than actually seen, became sadly conscious that the problems which oppressed him were not only hard of solution but hard of statement likewise. It seemed heartless to propound them in this, her hour of success. Yet, unless he was deeply mistaken, the statement of them must tell for emanc.i.p.ation and relief in the end.

"The play has gone well, and you are happy?" he asked her.

"Gorgeously--I grant you I was a bit nervous as to whether during these years of--well--love in idleness, I had not lost touch with my art. But I haven't. I have only matured in mind and in method. I am not conceited, dear man, truly I am not; but I am neither too lazy nor too modest to use my brains. What I know I am not afraid to apply. I've very little theory, but a precious deal of practice--and that's the way to get on. Don't talk about your ideas--just use them for all you're worth.--But this is beside the mark. You're trying to head me off. Why didn't you come?"

"I would gladly have come," Iglesias answered. "My disappointment has been quite as great as yours."

"Bless your heart!" Poppy murmured under her breath.

"But it was impossible for me to come. I was detained until it was too late." He paused, uncertain how best to say that which had to be said.

"Oh! fiddle!" Poppy cried, with a lift of her head. "I stand first. You ought not to have let yourself be detained. After all, it's not every day someone you know blazes from a farthing dip into a star of the first magnitude. You might very well have crowded other things aside. I feel a trifle hurt, dear man, really I do."

"Believe me, no ordinary matter would have prevented my coming," Iglesias answered. To his relief the carriage just then turned into the comparative peace of Langham Place. It became possible to speak softly. "There was a death in the house last night," he went on, "that of a person with whom I have been rather closely a.s.sociated. He died under circ.u.mstances demanding investigations of a distressing character. No one save myself was qualified, or perhaps willing, to a.s.sume the responsibility of calling in the authorities."

Iglesias glanced at his companion, conscious that while he spoke her att.i.tude and humour had altered considerably. She was motionless. He saw her profile, dark against the square light of window-gla.s.s. Her mouth was slightly open, as with intensity of attention.

"Well--well--what then?" she said.

"The man had just suffered a heavy reverse. He had staked all his hopes, all his future, upon a single venture. It proved a failure. He could not accept the fact, and believed himself the victim of gross injustice and of organised conspiracy."

"Do you believe it, too?"

"No," Iglesias answered. "I have an immense pity for him, as who would not. Still, I am compelled to believe that failure came from within, rather than from without. He overrated his own powers."

Poppy held up her hand imperiously. "Wait half a minute," she said, in an oddly harsh voice. Leaning forward she put down the front gla.s.s and called to the coachman:--"Don't go to Bletchworth Mansions. Drive on. Never mind where, so long as you keep to empty streets. Drive on and on--do you hear?--till I tell you to stop."

She put the window up again and settled herself back in her place, dragging the scarf from off her head and baring her throat. She looked full at Mr. Iglesias, her face showing ghostly white against the dark upholstery of the carriage. Her eyes were wide with question and with fear, which was also, in some strange way, hope.

"Now you can speak, dear friend," she said quite steadily. "I shall be glad to hear the whole of it, though it is an ugly story. The man was miserable, and he is dead, and the circ.u.mstances of his death point to--what--suicide?"

In reply Iglesias told her how that morning, the servants failing to get any response to their knocking, the upper part of the house being, moreover, pervaded by a sickening smell of gas, help had been called in; and, de Courcy Smyth's door being forced open, he had been found lying, fully clothed, stark and cold upon his bed, an empty phial of morphia and an empty gla.s.s on the table beside him, both gas-jets turned full on though not alight.

At the top of Portland Place the coachman took his way northwestward, first skirting the outer ring of Regent's Park and then making the gradually ascending slope of the Finchley Road. The detached houses on either side, standing back in their walled gardens, were mostly blind.

Only here and there, behind drawn curtains, a window glowed, telling of intimate drama gallant or mournful within. The wide grey pavements were deserted; the place arrestingly quiet, save for the occasional heavy tread of a pa.s.sing policeman on beat, and the rhythmical trot of the horse. And the Lady of the Windswept Dust was quiet likewise, looking straight before her, sitting stiffly upright, her hands clasped in her lap, the shifting lights and shadows playing queerly over her face and her bare neck, causing her to appear unsubstantial and indefinite as a figure in a dream.

Yet a strange energy possessed her and emanated from her, so that the atmosphere about her was electric, oppressive to Iglesias as with a brooding of storm. Her very quietness was agitating, weighed with meaning which challenged his imagination and even his powers of reticence and self-control. Opposite Swiss Cottage Station, where the main road forks, a string of market waggons--slouching, drowsy car-men, backed by a pale green wall of glistening cabbages, nodding above their slow-moving teams--pa.s.sed, with a jingle of bra.s.s-mounted harness and grind of wheels.

This roused Poppy, and the storm broke.

"Dominic," she said breathlessly, "do you at all know that you've just told me means to me?"

"I have never known positively until now; but it was impossible that I should not have entertained suspicions."

"Did he--you know who I mean--ever speak of me?"

"I think," Iglesias said, "he came very near doing so, more than once. But I put a stop to the conversation."

"You frightened him," Poppy rejoined. "I know one could do that. It was a last resource, a hateful one. Is there anything so difficult to forgive as being driven to be cruel? One was bound to be cruel in self-defence, or one would have been stifled, utterly degraded by self-contempt, bled to death not only in respect of money but of self-esteem."

She threw up her hands with a gesture at once fierce and despairing.

"Oh! the weak, the weak," she cried, "of how many crimes they are the authors! Crimes more particularly abominable when the weak one is the man, and woman--poor brute--is strong."

She settled herself sideways in the corner of the carriage, turning her face once more full upon her companion.

"Look here," she said, "I don't want to whitewash myself. What I've done I've done. I don't pretend it's pretty or innocent, or that I haven't jolly well got to pay the price of it--though I think a good deal has been paid by now. But it seems to me my real crime was in marrying him, rather than in leaving him. It was a crime against love--love, which alone, if you've any real sense of the inherent decencies of things, makes marriage otherwise than an outrage upon a woman's pride and her virtue. But, then, one doesn't know all that when one's barely out of one's teens. And, you see, like a fool I took the first comer out of bravado, just that people mightn't see how awfully hard hit I was by his people interfering and preventing my marrying the poor, dear boy who gave me this"--Poppy spread out the end of her dragon scarf--"I've told you about him.--Stage people are absurdly simple in some ways, you know. They live in such a world of pretences and fictions that they lose their sense of fact, or rather they never develop it. They're awfully easily taken in. Words go a tremendous long way with them. And de Courcy could talk. He was appallingly fluent, specially on the subject of himself. He made be believe he was rather wonderful, and I wanted to believe he was wonderful. I wanted to believe he was all the geniuses in creation rolled into one. All the more I wanted to believe it because I wasn't one sc.r.a.p in love with him."

Poppy beat with one hand almost roughly on Mr. Iglesias' arm.

"Do you see, do you see, do you see?" she repeated. "Do you understand?

I want you so badly to understand."

And he answered her gently and gravely: "Do not be afraid, dear friend. I see with your eyes. I feel with your heart. As far as one human being can enter into and share the experience of another, I do understand."

"But the nuisance is," she went on, the corners of her mouth taking a wicked twist, "you know so very much more about a man after you've married him. Other people are inclined to forget that sometimes. Consuming egoism is hideous at close quarters. It comes out in a thousand ways, in mean little tyrannies and absurd jealousies which would never have entered into one's head.--I don't want to go into all that. It's better forgot.--Only they piled up and up, till the shadow of them shut out the sunshine; and I got so bored, so madly and intolerably bored. You see, I had tried to believe in him at first. In self-defence I had done so, and stood by him, and done my very best to put him through. But when I began to understand that there was nothing to stand by or put through, that his talent was not talent at all, but merely a vain man's longing to possess talent--well, the situation became pretty bad. I tried to be civil. I tried to hold my tongue, indeed I did. But to be bullied and grumbled at, and expected to work, so as to give him leisure and means for the development of gifts which didn't exist--it wasn't good enough."

Poppy put up her hands and pushed the ma.s.ses of her hair from her forehead. And all the while the shifting lights and shadows played over her white face and bare neck, and the horse trotted on, past closed shops and curtained windows, farther out of London and into the night.

"He didn't do anything which the world calls vicious," she continued presently. A great dreariness had come into the tones of her voice. "He was faithful to me, as the world counts faithfulness, simply because he didn't care for women--except for philandering with sentimental sillies who thought him an unappreciated eighth wonder of the world, and pawed over and pitied him. La! La! The mere thought of it makes me sick! But he was too much in love with himself to be capable of even an animal pa.s.sion for anybody else. And he made a great point of his virtue. I heard a lot about it--oh! a lot!"

For a minute or two Poppy sat silent. Then she turned to Mr. Iglesias, smiling, as those smile who refuse submission to some cruel pain.

"I wasn't born bad, dear man," she said, "and I held out longer than most women in my profession would, where morals are easy and it's lightly come and lightly go in respect of lovers and love. But one fine day I packed up my traps and cleared out. He'd been whining for years, and some little thing he said or did--I really forget exactly what--raised Cain in me, and I thought I'd jolly well give him something to whine about. I knew perfectly well he wouldn't divorce me. He wanted me too much, at the end of a string, to torment, and to get money from when times were bad. Not that I cared for a divorce. I consider it the clumsiest invention out for setting wrongs right. I have too great a respect for marriage, which ought, if it means anything, to mean motherhood and children, and a clean, wholesome start in life for the second generation. When a woman breaks away and crosses the lines, she only makes bad worse, in my opinion, by the hypocritical respectability of a marriage while her husband is still alive. Let's be honest sinners any way, if sin we must."