I saw Dick Allport's thunderstruck surprise before he arose. I saw his
glance go from Standish to Leila with a questioning that overrode all
other possible emotion in him. Then I saw him look at Burton as if he
doubted his sanity. His voice, level as ever, rang sharply across the
other man's distraction.
"When did she die?" he asked him.
"Just now." He ran his hand over his hair, gazing at Dick as if Leila
and I were not there. "She--she killed herself down in the Hotel
Meynard."
"Why?" Leila's voice, hard with terror, snapped off the word.
"She--she--I don't know." He stared at his wife as if he had just become
conscious of her presence. The grayness in his face deepened, and his
lips grew livid. Like a man condemned to death, he stared at the world
he was losing.
"Who is Bessie Lowe?" Leila questioned. "And why have they called you to
tell of her?" Her eyes blazed with a fire that seemed about to singe
pretense from his soul.
His hand went to his throat, and I saw Leila whiten. Her hand, resting
on the piano, trembled, but her face held immobile, although I knew that
all the happiness of the rest of her life hung upon his answer. On what
Standish Burton would tell her depended the years to come. In that
moment I knew that she loved him even as I loved Dick, even as women
have always loved and will always love the men whom fate had marked for
their caring; and in a sudden flash of vision I knew, too, that Burton,
no matter what Bessie Lowe or any other girl had ever been to him,
worshiped his wife with an intensity of devotion that would make all his
days one long reparation for whatever wrong he might have done her. I
knew, though, that, if he had done the wrong, she would never again be
able to give him the eager love he desired, and I, too, an unwilling
spectator, waited on his words for his future, and Leila's; but his
voice did not make answer. It was Dick Allport who spoke.
"Bessie Lowe is a girl I used to care for," he said. "She is the girl
who sang at the Musicians' Club, the girl who spoke to you. She heard
that I was going to be married. She wanted me to come back to her. I
refused."
He was standing in the shadow, looking neither at Leila nor at me, but
at Standish Burton. Burton turned to him.
"Yes," he muttered thickly, "they told me to tell you. They knew you'd
be here."
"I see," said Leila. She looked at Standish and then at Dick Allport,
and there came into her eyes a queer, glazed stare that filmed their
brightness. "I am sorry that I asked questions, Mr. Allport, about
something that was nothing to me. Will you forgive me?"
"There is nothing to be forgiven," he said. He turned to her and smiled
a little. She tried to answer his smile, but a gasp came from her
instead.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, "so sorry for her!"
It was Standish's gaze that brought to me sudden realization that I,
too, had a part in the drama. Until I found his steady stare on me I had
felt apart from the play that he and Dick and Leila were going through,
but with his urgent glare I awoke into knowledge that the message he had
taken for Dick held for me the same significance that Leila had thought
it bore for her. Like a stab from a knife came the thought that this
girl--whoever she was--had, in her dying, done what she had not done in
life, taken Dick Allport from me. There went over me numbing waves of a
great sense of loss, bearing me out on an ocean of oblivion. Against
these I fought desperately to hold myself somewhere near the shore of
sensibility. As if I were beholding him from a great distance, I could
see Dick standing in the lamplight in front of Leila Burton.
Understanding of how dear he was to me, of how vitally part of me he had
grown in the years through which I had loved him--sometimes lightly,
sometimes stormily, but always faithfully--beaconed me inshore; and the
plank of faith in him, faith that held in itself something of forgiving
charity, floated out to succor my drowning soul. I moved across the room
while Standish Burton kept his unwinking gaze upon me, and Leila never
looked up from the piano. I had come beside Dick before he heard me.
He looked at me as if he had only just then remembered that I was there.
Into his eyes flashed a look of poignant remorse. He shrank back from me
a little as I touched his hand, and I turned to Leila, who had not
stirred from the place where she had listened to Standish's cry when he
took the fateful message. "We are going," I said, "to do what we
can--for her."
She moved then to look at me, and I saw that her eyes held not the
compassion I had feared, but a strange speculativeness, as if she
questioned what I knew rather than what I felt. Their contemplating
quiet somehow disturbed me more than had her husband's flashlight
scrutiny, and with eyes suddenly blinded and throat drawn tight with
terror I took my way beside Dick Allport out from the soft lights of the
Burtons' house into the darkness of the night.
Outside we paused a moment, waiting for a cab. For the first time since
he had told Leila of Bessie Lowe, Dick spoke to me. "I think," he said,
"that it would be just as well if you didn't come."
"I must," I told him, "It isn't curiosity. You understand that, don't
you? It is simply that this is the time for me to stand by you, if ever
I shall do it, Dick."
"I don't deserve it." There was a break in his voice. "But I shall try
to, my dear. I can't promise you much, but I can promise you that."
Down the brightness of Piccadilly into the fuller glow of Regent Street
we rode without speech. Somewhere below the Circus we turned aside and
went through dim cañons of houses that opened a way past the Museum and
let us into Bloomsbury. There in a wilderness of cheap hotels and
lodging-houses we found the Meynard.
A gas lamp was flaring in the hall when the porter admitted us. At a
desk set under the stairway a pale-faced clerk awaited us with staring
insolence that shifted to annoyance when Dick asked him if we might go
to Bessie Lowe's room. "No," he said, abruptly. "The officers won't let
any one in there. They've taken her to the undertaker's."
He gave us the location of the place with a scorn that sent us out in
haste. I, at least, felt a sense of relief that I did not have to go up
to the place where this unknown girl had thrown away the greatest gift.
As we walked through the poorly lighted streets toward the Tottenham
Court Road I felt for the first time a surge of that emotion that Leila
Burton had voiced, a pity for the dead girl. And yet, stealing a look at
Dick as he walked onward quietly, sadly, but with a dignity that lifted
him above the sordidness of the circumstances, I felt that I could not
blame him as I should. It was London, I thought, and life that had
tightened the rope on the girl.
Strangely I felt a lightness of relief in the realization that the
catastrophe having come, was not really as terrible as it had seemed
back there in Leila's room. It was an old story that many women had
conned, and since, after all, Dick Allport was yet young, and my own, I
condoned the sin for the sake of the sinner; and yet, even as I held the
thought close to my aching heart, I felt that I was somehow letting slip
from my shoulders the cross that had been laid upon them, the cross
that I should have borne, the burden of shame and sorrow for the wrong
that the man I loved had done to the girl who had died for love of him.
The place where she lay, a gruesome establishment set in behind that
highway of reeking cheapness, the Tottenham Court Road, was very quiet
when we entered. A black-garbed man came to meet us from a room in which
we saw two tall candles burning. Dick spoke to him sharply, asking if
any one had come to look after the dead girl.
"No one with authority," the man whined--"just a girl as lived with her
off and on."
He stood, rubbing his hands together as Dick went into hurried details
with him, and I went past them into the room where the candles burned.
For an instant, as I stood at the door, I had the desire to run away
from it all, but I pulled myself together and went over to the place
where lay the girl they had called Bessie Lowe.
I had drawn back the sheet and was standing looking down at the white
face when I heard a sob in the room. I replaced the covering and turned
to see in the corner the shadowy form of a woman whose eyes blazed at me
out of the dark. While I hesitated, wondering if this were the girl who
had lived occasionally with Bessie Lowe, she came closer, staring at me
with scornful hate. Miserably thin, wretchedly nervous as she was, she
had donned for the nonce a mantle of dignity that she seemed to be
trailing as she approached, glaring at me with furious resentment. "So
you thought as how you'd come here," she demanded of me, her crimsoned
face close to my own, "to see what she was like, to see what sort of a
girl had him before you took him away from her? Well, I'll tell you
something, and you can forget it or remember it, as you like. Bessie
Lowe was a good girl until she ran into him, and she'd have stayed good,
I tell you, if he'd let her alone. She was a fool, though, and she
thought that he'd marry her some day--and all the time he was only
waiting until you'd take him! You never think of our kind, do you, when
you're living out your lives, wondering if you care enough to marry the
men who're worshipping you while they're playing with us? Well, perhaps
it won't be anything to you, but, all the same, there's some kind of a
God, and if He's just He'll punish you when He punishes Standish
Burton!"
"But I--" I gasped. "Did you think that I--?"
"Aren't you his wife?" She came near to me, peering at me in the
flickering candle-light. "Aren't you Standish Burton's wife?"
"No," I said.
"Oh, well"--she shrugged--"you're her sort, and it'll come to the same
thing in the end."
She slouched back to the corner, all anger gone from her. Outside I
heard Dick's voice, low, decisive. Swiftly I followed the girl. "You
must tell me," I pleaded with her, "if she did it because of Standish
Burton."
"I thought everybody knew that," she said, "even his wife. What's it to
you, if you're not that?"
"Nothing," I replied, but I knew, as I stood where she kept vigil with
Bessie Lowe, that I lied. For I saw the truth in a lightning-flash; and
I knew, as I had not known when Dick perjured himself in Leila's
music-room, that I had come to the place of ultimate understanding, for
I realized that not a dead girl, but a living woman, had come between
us. Not Bessie Lowe, but Leila Burton, lifted the sword at the gateway
of my paradise.
With the poignancy of a poisoned arrow reality came to me. Because Dick
had loved Leila Burton he had laid his bond with me on the altar of his
chivalry. For her sake he had sacrificed me to the hurt to which
Standish would not sacrifice her. And the joke of it--the pity of it was
that she hadn't believed them! But because she was Burton's wife,
because it was too late for facing of the truth, she had pretended to
believe Dick; and she had known, she must have known, that he had lied
to her because he loved her.
The humiliation of that knowledge beat down on me, battering me with
such blows as I had not felt in my belief that Dick had not been true to
me in his affair with this poor girl. Her rivalry, living or dead, I
could have endured and overcome--for no Bessie Lowe could ever have won
from Dick, as she could never have given to him, that thing which was
mine. But against Leila Burton I could not stand, for she was of my
world, of my own people, and the crown a man would give to her was the
one he must take from me.
There in that shabby place I buried my idols. Not I, but a power beyond
me, held the stone on which was written commandment for me. By the light
of the candles above Bessie Lowe I knew that I should not marry Dick
Allport.
I found him waiting for me at the doorway. I think that he knew then
that the light of our guiding lantern had flickered out, but he said
nothing. We crossed the garishly bright road and went in silence through
quiet streets. Like children afraid of the dark we went through the
strange ways of the city, two lonely stragglers from the procession of
love, who, with our own dreams ended, saw clearer the world's wild
pursuit of the fleeing vision.
We had wandered back into our own land when, in front of the darkened
Oratory and almost under the shadow of Leila Burton's home, there came
to us through the soft darkness the ominous plea that heralds summer
into town. Out of the shadows an old woman, bent and shriveled, leaned
toward us. "Get yer lavender tonight," she pleaded. "'Tis the first of
the crop, m'lidy."
"That means--" Dick Allport began as I paused to buy.
I fastened the sprigs at my belt, then looked up at the distant stars,
since I could not yet bear to look at him. "It means the end of the
season," I said, "when the lavender comes to London."