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
_gene_ 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.