The July sun shone slantwise into the ugly, almost sordid-looking
bedroom where Ivy Lexton, still only half dressed, had just begun
making up her lovely face in front of a tarnished, dust-powdered
toilet-glass.
It was nine o’clock in the morning; an hour ago she had had her cup of
tea and--mindful of her figure--the hard biscuit which was the only
thing she allowed herself by way of breakfast. Her husband, hopelessly
idle, easy-natured, well-bred Jervis Lexton, was still fast asleep in
the little back bedroom his wife called his dressing-room, but which
was their box-room and general “glory-hole.”
Everything that had been of any real value there had gradually
disappeared in the last few weeks, for Ivy and Jervis Lexton, to use
their own rueful expression, were indeed stony-broke.
Yet they had started their married life, six years before, with a
capital of sixty-eight thousand pounds. Now they were almost
penniless. Indeed, what Ivy called to herself with greater truth than
was usual “her little all,” that is, a pound note, and twelve
shillings and sixpence in silver, lay on the stained, discoloured
mahogany dressing-table before which she was now standing.
How amazed would her still large circle of friends and acquaintances
have been had they learnt how desperate and how hopeless was her own
and her husband’s financial position. Yesterday she had even tried to
sell two charming frocks brought back for her by a good-natured friend
from Paris. But she had only been offered a few shillings for the two,
so she had brought them home again.
And now, as her eyes fell on the pound note and tiny heap of silver,
they filled with angry tears. How she loathed these sordid, hateful
lodgings! What a terrible, even a terrifying thing, it was to have
fallen so low as to have to live here, in two shabby, ill-kept
bedrooms, where there wasn’t even a hanging cupboard for her pretty
clothes, and where the drawers of the painted deal chest of drawers
would neither shut nor open.
The Lextons had come there for two reasons. One, a stupid reason,
because their landlady was the widow of a man who had been employed as
a lad in the stables of Jervis Lexton’s father. A better reason was
that, owing to there being no bathroom in the house, the rooms were
amazingly, fantastically cheap. The Lextons had already been camping
here, as Ivy’s husband put it, for some months, but they rarely gave
any of their friends their address. Jervis still belonged to a famous
club to which some of his rich men acquaintances would have given much
to belong; and Ivy had a guinea subscription to a small bridge club
from which her letters were forwarded each day.
There came a knock at the bedroom door. It was a funny, fumbling
knock, and she knew it for that of the landlady’s little boy.
Flinging a pale pink lace-trimmed wrapper round her, “Come in,” she
called out sharply.
The child came in, holding in his grubby hand two letters.
She took them from him, and quickly glanced at the envelopes. The one,
inscribed in a firm masculine handwriting to her present, Pimlico,
address, she put down on the dressing-table unopened. She knew, or
thought she knew, so well what it contained.
There had been a time, not so very long ago, when Ivy Lexton’s
beautiful eyes would have shone at the sight of that handwriting. A
time when she would have torn that envelope open at once, so that her
senses could absorb with delight the ardent protestations of love
written on the large plain sheet of paper that envelope contained.
But she no longer felt “like that” towards her daily correspondent,
Roger Gretorex. Also she was going to see him this morning in the
hope, nay, the certainty, that he would help to tide over this horrid
moment of difficulty, by giving her whatever money he could put his
hands on.
Gretorex was of a very different stamp from the men who had up to now
fallen in love with her. He worshipped her with all his heart and
soul, while yet conscious that he was now doing what, before he had
been tempted, he would have unhesitatingly condemned in another man.
As to that, and other matters of less moment, he was what Ivy Lexton
felt to be ludicrously old-fashioned, and she had soon become weary of
him, and satiated with the jealous devotion he lavished on her.
Also, Roger Gretorex was poor; not poor as Ivy’s husband had become,
largely through his own fault and hers, but through that of his
father, a great Sussex squire, who had gambled and muddled away his
only son’s inheritance. That was why Gretorex was a doctor, and not
what the woman he loved would have liked him to be, an idle young man
of means.
The other envelope was addressed in a woman’s flowing hand, and it had
been sent on from Ivy’s bridge club.
The writer of the many sheets this thick, cream-laid envelope
contained was named Rose Arundell. She was a well-to-do, generous,
rather foolish young widow, who had taken a great fancy to lovely Mrs.
Jervis Lexton. Mrs. Arundell had been, nay, was, a most useful friend,
and a look of dismay shadowed Ivy Lexton’s face as she read on and on,
till she reached the end of the long letter.
_Wednesday afternoon._
Ivy, darling, I have the most _astounding_ news to tell you!
I’ll begin at the beginning. Besides, I can’t help thinking--for I
know you’re rather worried just now, poor dear--that it may be of help
to _you_. D’you remember my telling you last time we met at that
tiresome fête where we couldn’t see each other for a moment alone,
that I’d had a _wonderful_ adventure? That I’d been to a
fortune-teller? Her name is Mrs. Thrawn. She lives at No. 1 Ranelagh
Reach on the Embankment. Her fee is a pound--and I feel inclined to
send her a thousand pounds when I think of what she has done for me!
I don’t mind telling you _now_ that I was on the point of taking that
silly boy, Ronny. No one knows but myself how _horribly_ lonely I’ve
been. Well, I thought I’d go and see this Mrs. Thrawn and hear what
she’d got to say; for, after all, I didn’t _love_ Ronny, and I always
had a dreadful suspicion it was my _money_ he liked, rather than _me_.
Well, my dear, I went off _trembling_. But I can’t tell you how
wonderful she was! She described Ronny and _warned me_ against him.
Then she said that an extraordinary change was coming over my life,
and that if I would only be patient and _wait_, everything I had most
longed for would come to pass. She was most awfully kind--_really_
kind. She said that if I was sensible and did what she said--I mean
_refuse_ Ronny--I should take a long journey very soon to a place that
she, Mrs. Thrawn, knew well and loved; and that I should be very,
_very_ happy there. That place was India, as I knew, for the woman who
first told me about Mrs. Thrawn said she was the widow of a
_missionary_!
And then, oh, Ivy, what do you think happened? I wonder if you
remember all I told you about the soldier who was my first love? The
man whom my mother would not let me marry and who did so splendidly in
the war? He’s home on leave from India, where he has a _splendid_
appointment. We ran across one another in the street, and I asked him
to come and see me. You can guess the rest!
His leave is up _by the end of next week_. We shall be married very
quietly on Thursday, and sail for _India on Friday_.
I’m in a whirl, as you can imagine. I’d love to have _you_ at my
wedding, darling, for you really _are_ my dearest friend. But _he_
doesn’t want anyone there who didn’t know us both in the _old_ days,
before the war. He hasn’t a bean, but, thank God, I’ve _plenty_ for us
both!
Your _devoted_
Rose.
Ivy Lexton put the long letter she had just read down on the
dressing-table. Then she took up the other, still unopened, envelope,
and stuffed it into her bag. After all she could read the letter it
contained in the omnibus, on her way to see Roger Gretorex. He had
taken over for a friend a slum practice in Westminster, and he lived
in what Ivy called a horrid little street named Ferry Place.
She turned again towards the looking-glass, and began once more making
up her face at the point where she had been interrupted. She was so
used to the process that she worked quickly, mechanically, though
taking a great deal of intelligent care, far more care than did most
of her young married women friends.
With regard to everything that concerned herself, Ivy Lexton was
quick, uncannily shrewd, and instinctively clever. She knew how to
exploit to the very best advantage her exceptional physical beauty,
her natural charm of manner, and, above all, her extraordinary allure
for men.
And yet, so unsuspicious is human nature in that stratum of the
financially, easy, agreeably self-absorbed, and pleasure-loving world
in which Ivy played a not unimportant part, that all the men, and many
of the women, who came across her in that world, would have told you
that Ivy Lexton was “a dear little thing,” “a regular sport,” “a good
plucked one,” and “a splendid wife to that rotter Lexton.”
When she had finished what was always to her an interesting and
pleasant task, she stood still, and did nothing, for a moment. She
longed to get away from this hateful room and this horrible house, yet
Roger Gretorex would not be free of his poorer patients for quite a
long while. This was the more tiresome as she always went into his
tiny mid-Victorian house by the back way, through the surgery, which
gave into a blind alley.
Suddenly her eyes fell on “her little all.” Why shouldn’t she take
that pound note, and call on Rose Arundell’s wonderful fortune-teller
on her way to Ferry Place? After all, she, too, might have an
unexpected bit of luck waiting for her round the corner.
She slipped on a cool pale-pink cotton frock given her by that same
generous friend who was now, to her regret, going out of her life.
Then she jammed a little brown straw hat on her fair, naturally wavy,
shingled head, and, tiptoeing down the carpetless stairs, she hurried
through the dirty hall into the sunshiny street.
Ranelagh Reach consisted of a row of six early nineteenth-century
houses on that part of the Embankment which forms a link between
Westminster and Chelsea. Two of the houses had evidently been taken
over lately by well-to-do people, for they had been repainted, and
their window-boxes were now filled with ivy-leaved geraniums. The four
other houses were shabby-looking and dilapidated, and it was in one of
these that there dwelt the woman who had taken as her professional
name that of Janet Thrawn. The blinds of No. 1 were down, the brown
paint on the front door had peeled, and the steps had evidently not
been “done” for days. Everything looked so poverty-stricken that Ivy
felt surprised when a very neat and capable-looking maid opened the
door in answer to her pull at the old-fashioned bell. She had expected
to see a slatternly little girl.
“I’ve come to see Mrs. Thrawn; Mrs. Arundell sent me.”
“I’m not sure that Mrs. Thrawn can see you, miss, unless you’ve made
an appointment. But please come in, while I go and see.”
The inside of the little house was in its way as much of a surprise as
the maid; it was very different from what the outside would have led
the visitor to expect. There was a fine Persian rug on the floor of
the narrow hall, and plenty of light came in from a window half-way up
the staircase. Affixed to the red walls were plaster casts of hands,
forming a curious, uncanny kind of decoration.
After the maid had gone upstairs Ivy Lexton felt a sudden impulse “to
cut and run.” A pound note meant a great deal to her just now. But as
she was turning towards the front door, the woman came down the steep
stairs of the old house.
“Mrs. Thrawn will see you,” she said. Then she turned and preceded the
visitor up the staircase.
As they reached the landing the maid murmured:
“Mrs. Thrawn won’t be a moment.”
Ivy Lexton looked round her nervously. There were evidently two rooms
on this floor--the front room, of which the blinds were down, and a
back room, of which the door was masked by a heavy embroidered green
silk curtain. On the patch of wall which formed the third side of the
landing was a dark oil painting, bearing on its tarnished gold frame
the inscription in black letters, “The Witch.” The subject was that of
a white-haired woman being burnt alive, while an evil-looking crowd
gloated over the hideous sight.
There came the tinkle of a bell.
“Mrs. Thrawn will see you now,” said the woman shortly, drawing back
the curtain to show a door already ajar.
“Come in!” called a full, resonant voice.
Feeling excited and curious, for this was the first time she had ever
been to a fortune-teller, Ivy brushed past the maid.
Then she felt a pang of disappointment. The room before her was so
very ordinary--just an old-fashioned back drawing-room, containing one
or two good pieces of furniture, while on the chimney-piece stood a
row of silver-gilt Indian ornaments.
Even the soothsayer, the obvious owner of this room, impressed her
client as being almost commonplace. At any rate there was nothing
mysterious or romantic about her appearance. She was a tall,
powerful-looking woman, nearer sixty than fifty. Her grey hair was cut
short, and she was clad in an old-fashioned tea-gown, of bright blue
cashmere, which fell from her neck to her feet in heavy folds.
The most remarkable feature of Mrs. Thrawn’s face was her eyes. They
were light hazel, luminous, compelling eyes, and as Ivy Lexton
advanced rather timidly towards her they became dilated, as if with a
sudden shock of gripping, overwhelming surprise.
Yet nothing could have appeared at once more simple and more
attractive than this lovely girl who wanted to take a peep into the
future. Ivy Lexton looked almost a child in her flesh-coloured cotton
frock and the simple pull-on brown hat which framed her exquisite
little face.
Making a determined effort over herself, Mrs. Thrawn withdrew her
astonished and, indeed, affrighted, glance from her visitor, and said
coldly, “I cannot give you long this morning, for I have an
appointment”--she looked at her wrist-watch--“in twenty minutes. I
suppose you know my fee is a pound, paid in advance?”
Ivy felt a touch of resentment. Only twenty minutes for a whole pound?
Yet she was beginning to feel the compelling power of the woman, and
so, slowly, she took the one-pound note that remained to her out of
her bag.
Mrs. Thrawn slipped the note into one of the patch pockets of her
gown, and motioned her visitor to a low stool, while she sat down,
herself, in a big arm-chair opposite. For a moment Ivy felt as she had
felt when as a little girl she was going to be scolded.
“We will begin with your hands. No! Not like that. Your left hand
first, please, and the back to start with.”
As she took Ivy’s hand in her cool firm grasp Mrs. Thrawn said
quietly, “I need not tell you that you have amazing powers of--well,
keeping your own counsel, when it suits you to do so.”
Then she turned the hand she held over, and taking a small lens out of
the pocket where now lay Ivy’s one-pound note, she closely scrutinised
the lines criss-crossing the rosy palm.
“You’ve the most extraordinary fate-line that I’ve ever seen--and
that’s saying a very great deal,” she observed.
“What I want to know,” began Ivy eagerly, “is----”
“Whether there is going to be any change for the better in your life?”
The fortune-teller waited a moment, and, lifting her head, she gave
her client a long measuring look. “Yes, there is going to be a great
change in your life. But as to whether it will be for the better or
for the worse----?”
Mrs. Thrawn hesitated for what seemed to the other a long time. But at
last she exclaimed, “From your point of view I should say ‘for the
better,’ for I see money, a great deal of money, coming your way.”
Ivy turned crimson, so great were her surprise and joy.
“Will it be soon?” she asked eagerly.
“Very soon--in a few hours from now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Mrs. Thrawn lifted her great head, and again she looked at her visitor
fixedly.
“May I speak plainly? Will you try not to be offended at what I’m
going to say?”
“Nothing you say could offend me,” cried Ivy in her prettiest manner.
“You don’t know how happy you’ve made me!”
“I do know. But, though I don’t suppose you will ever believe it,
money is not everything, Mrs.----”
“--Lexton.”
The name slipped out. After all, why shouldn’t she tell Mrs. Thrawn
her name? Yet she was sorry she had done so a few moments later, for
the fortune-teller, leaning forward, exclaimed harshly:
“Now for the powder after the jam! I sense that you are engaged in an
illicit love affair fraught to you, and to others also, with frightful
danger.”
Once more Ivy’s face crimsoned under her clever make-up, but this time
with fear and dismay. Her eyes fell before the other woman’s hard
scrutiny.
“Wrong is, of course, a matter of conscience, and I know you think you
have nothing to be ashamed of. But you are leading a fine soul astray,
and evil influences are gathering round you.”
“I know that I’ve done wrong,” faltered Ivy, frightened and perplexed
by Mrs. Thrawn’s manner, rather than by her warning.
The other said sharply, “You know nothing of the sort! You’ve not got
what I call a conscience, Mrs. Lexton. But a conscience nowadays is a
very old-fashioned attribute. Many a young woman would hardly know
what to do with one if she had it!”
Ivy did not know what to answer, and felt sorry indeed that she had
let this censorious, disagreeable person know her name.
“For your own sake,” went on Mrs. Thrawn earnestly, “break with this
man who loves you. For one thing, ‘it’s well to be off with the old
love before you are on with the new.’”
“Then there is going to be another man in my life?” Ivy asked eagerly.
“I see a stranger coming into your life within a few hours from now.
Whether his valuable friendship for you endures will entirely depend
on yourself.”
Mrs. Thrawn got up from her chair.
“As we haven’t much time, I will now look into the crystal.”
She drew down the blind of the one window in the room, and, going
across to the writing-table, she took off it a heavy, round glass ball
which looked like, and might indeed have been sold for, a
paper-weight. Then, moving forward a small, low table, she put it
between herself and her visitor.
“Don’t speak,” she said quickly. “Try to empty your mind of all
thought.”
Bending her head, she gazed into the crystal, and what seemed to Ivy
Lexton a long time went by.
In reality, it might have been as long as two minutes before Mrs.
Thrawn began speaking again, this time in a quick, muffled voice.
“I see you both now, you and the dark young man on whom you will bring
unutterable misery and shame, and who will bring you distress and
disappointment, if you do not break with him now, to-day. The safe way
is still open to you, Mrs. Lexton, but soon it will be closed, and you
will find yourself in a prison of your own making, and trapped--trapped
like a rat in a sinking ship.”
Again there was a long, tense silence, and again Ivy began to feel
vaguely frightened.
The prediction of shame and misery to another meant very little, if
indeed anything, to her. But distress and disappointment to herself?
Ah! that was another thing altogether. Ivy very much disliked meeting
with even trifling disappointments.
Mrs. Thrawn looked up. All the brilliance had gone out of her curious,
luminous eyes.
“I fear you will not follow the better way,” she said slowly. “Indeed,
I sense that you are making up your mind not to follow it, unless the
doing so falls in with your other plans. I see this dark young man’s
destiny closely intertwined with your life. He will bear the scars you
are about to inflict on him to his grave, and that whether he lives
but a few months, or a long lifetime. You do not what you call love
him any more. But he loves you as you have never yet been loved, and
never will be.”
Her voice softened and became low and pitiful, for the girl who was
now gazing at her with a surprised, frightened expression on her
exquisite face looked too young to be what the soothsayer believed her
to be, that is, already doomed, unless she altered her whole way of
life, to suffer terrible things.
“As woman to woman, let me give you a word of advice, Mrs. Lexton. For
your own sake try to follow it.”
“I will!” cried Ivy sincerely.
“Do not be afraid of poverty----” And then, as she saw the other’s
instinctive recoil, “Poverty does not touch the likes of you with its
cold finger,” and Mrs. Thrawn gave an eerie laugh. “If you are wise,
if you do what is still open to you to do, you will have ups and
downs, but the ups will predominate, and there will always be some
man, even when you become what I should call an old woman, who will be
proud, yes, proud, to be your banker.”
“Do you see something nice coming for me soon in that glass ball?”
asked Ivy nervously.
She longed, secretly, to be told something more of the new man who was
coming into her life.
Mrs. Thrawn bent over the cloudy crystal. Then she muttered:
“The pictures are forming. They are coming thick and fast. And--but
no, I will not tell you what I see, for what I am seeing may not
concern you at all. It may concern the future of the woman who is now
on my doorstep----”
And, as she said the word “doorstep,” the old-fashioned house-bell
pealed through the house.
Mrs. Thrawn rose and put her crystal back on the writing-table. Then
she pulled up the blind.
“We’ve only a few moments left. But I’m going, for my own
satisfaction,” she interjected in a singular tone, “to tell your
fortune by the cards.”
As she spoke she took a pack of cards out of the drawer of her
writing-table, and sank down again into her chair.
“Now cut.”
After Ivy had obeyed, the soothsayer rapidly dealt out the cards. Then
she put down her finger on the queen of hearts.
“This card stands for you,” she dragged her finger along. “And here is
the king of diamonds, the man who is coming into your life, and who
will give you money, much money. Even so----” she shook her head, “you
will never be able to count on him as you can count on the man who is
still bound to you, and whom I bid you cast out of your life at
once--at once.”
She swept the cards together and rose from her chair.
“I saw trouble in your hand; I saw trouble in the crystal; I saw great
trouble in the cards. Yet, Mrs. Lexton, you are not a woman who
troubles trouble before trouble troubles you. Even so, unless you
follow my advice about your present lover, I see misfortune galloping
towards you like a riderless horse.”
“But you do still believe that I’m going to get a lot of money?” Ivy
asked pleadingly. “Did the cards tell you that also?”
“Yes, the cards told me that also.”
From outside the door came the sound of footsteps.
“One last word--one last warning. When you came into this room you
were not alone, Mrs. Lexton.”
Ivy stared at her. What could Mrs. Thrawn mean? Of course she had been
alone!
“You were accompanied, surrounded, by a huge mob of men and women,
invisible to you, but visible to me. Are you an actress?”
“I was an actress, for a little while, before I married,” said Ivy,
smiling. “And I’d love to go back on the stage, but only as a leading
lady, of course.”
“Given certain eventualities, you will become of great moment, of
absorbing interest, to hundreds of thousands of people. Men and women
will fight over you--the newspapers will record your every movement.”
Ivy smiled self-consciously. This last unexpected prediction gave her
a thrill of pleasurable excitement. What could it mean but a
triumphant return to the stage, of which she had been hitherto only a
humble and transient ornament?
“There is a woman already in your life--I see her now standing behind
you. She is a grey-haired, worn-looking old woman. If you fail to do
what I advise you to do, she will play an overwhelming part in your
destiny. Indeed it is she who may determine your fate.”
Then she turned, and taking a tiny silver-gilt bell off the
mantelpiece she rang it sharply.
The door opened, and the maid pulled aside the heavy curtain. There
was no stranger waiting on the landing. Ivy looked so surprised that
the woman smiled. “Mrs. Thrawn doesn’t like her clients to cross one
another. The lady who has just come in is waiting in the front room.”
As Mrs. Thrawn’s late visitor walked quickly down the Embankment
towards the place for which she was bound, she felt more really
light-hearted than she had felt for, oh! such a long time. Money
coming her way--and a new man in her life? That was all Ivy Lexton
really remembered of that curious interview. The warnings Mrs. Thrawn
had given her she put down to the soothsayer’s conventional outlook on
life.
As for the woman’s advice concerning Roger Gretorex, she ought to have
known, being a fortune-teller, that she, Ivy, had already made up her
mind to break with her secret lover. She could not, however, break
with him to-day, for two reasons. First, she was going to ask him for
a little money, and secondly, he was giving a theatre-party this
evening. She, Ivy, her friend Rose Arundell, and Jervis Lexton were to
be Gretorex’s guests, and he was taking them on, after the play, to
supper at the Savoy. That had been settled days ago.
Rose Arundell? She told herself vexedly that Rose would certainly
“chuck.” In fact it was plain that Rose had forgotten all about
to-night’s engagement, or she would have mentioned it in her letter.
They would be three instead of four. But perhaps, after all, that
didn’t really matter, for Jervis was quite fond of Roger.
There was, however, a fly, albeit a small fly, in the ointment. There
was no such person, there never had been, or, it seemed to her, could
be, in her life, as a worn-looking, grey-haired woman. This fact made
her feel a little doubtful, a little anxious, as to the truth of the
fortune-teller’s other predictions.