Chapter 45
"The Alpine Club must have protested," Sylvia mocked. "Avalanches are not expected in March."
"He's probably motoring with his mother," Lily explained.
The next day a letter arrived from Hector.
HOTEL SUPERBE, AIX-LES-BAINS.
MY DEAR LILY,--I do not know how to express myself. You have known always the great difficulties of my position opposite to my mother.
She has found that I owe to marry myself, and I have demanded the hand of Mademoiselle Arpenteur-Legage. I dare not ask your pardon, but I have written to make an arrangement for you, and from now please use the apartment which has for me memories the most sacred.
It is useless to fight against circ.u.mstances.
HECTOR.
"I think he might have used mourning paper," Sylvia said. "They always have plenty at health resorts."
"Don't be so unkind, Sylvia," Lily cried. "How can you be so unkind, when you see that my heart is broken?" She burst into tears.
In a moment Sylvia was on her knees beside her.
"Lily, my dearest Lily, you did not really love him? Oh no, my dear, not really. If you really loved him, I'll go now to Aix myself and arrange matters over the head of his stuffy old mother. But you didn't really love him. You're simply upset at the breaking of a habit. Oh, my dear, you couldn't really have loved him!"
"He sha'n't marry this girl," Lily declared, standing up in a rage.
"I'll go to Aix-les-Bains myself and I'll see this Mademoiselle." She s.n.a.t.c.hed the letter from the floor to read the odious name of her rival.
"I'll send her all his letters. You mightn't want to read them, but she'll want to read them. She'll read every word. She'll read how, when he was thinking of proposing to her, he was calling me his angel, his life, his soul, how he was--Oh, she'll read every word, and I'll send them to her by registered post, and then I'll know she gets them. How dare a Frenchman treat an English girl like that? How dare he? How dare he? French people think English girls have no pa.s.sion. They think we're cold. Are we cold? We may not like being kissed all the time like French girls, but we're not cold. Oh, I feel I could kill him!"
Sylvia interrupted her rage.
"My dear, if all this fire and fury is because you're disappointed at not being married, twist him for fifty thousand francs, buy a silver casket, put his letters inside, and send them to him for a wedding-present with your good wishes. But if you love him, darling Lily, let me go and tell him the truth; if I think he's not worth it, then come away with me and be lonely with me somewhere. My beautiful thing, I can't promise you a coral island, but you shall have all my heart if you will."
"Love him?" echoed Lily. "I hate him. I despise him after this, but why should he marry her?"
"If you feel like that about him, I should have thought the best way to punish him would be to let the marriage proceed; to punish him further you've only to refuse yourself to him when he's married, for I'm quite sure that within six months he'll be writing to say what a mistake he made, how cold his wife is, and how much he longs to come back to you, _la jolie maitresse de sa jeunesse, le souvenir du bon temps jadis_, and so on with the sentimental eternities of reconstructed pa.s.sion."
"Live with him after he's married?" Lily exclaimed. "Why, I've never even kissed a married man! I should never forgive myself."
"You don't love him at all, do you?" Sylvia asked, pressing her hands down on Lily's shoulders and forcing her to look straight at her.
"Laugh, my dear, laugh! Hurrah! you can't pretend you care a bit about him. Fifty thousand francs and freedom! And just when I was getting bored with Paris."
"It's all very well for you, Sylvia," Lily said, resentfully, as she tried to shake off Sylvia's exuberance. "You don't want to be married. I do. I really looked forward to marrying Michael."
Sylvia's face hardened.
"Oh, I know you blame me entirely for that," she continued. "But it wasn't my fault, really. It was bad luck. It's no good pretending I wasn't fond of Claude. I was, and when I met him--"
"Look here, don't let's live that episode over again in discussion,"
Sylvia said. "It belongs to the past, and I've always had a great objection to body-s.n.a.t.c.hing."
"What I was going to explain," Lily went on, "was that Michael put the idea of marriage into my head. Then being always with Hector, I got used to being with somebody. I was always treated like a married woman when we went to the seaside or on motoring
"And now," Sylvia said, with a laugh, "to all the other riddles that torment my poor brain I must add you."
Hector Ozanne tried to stanch Lily's wounded ideals with a generous compress of notes; he succeeded.
"After all," she admitted, tw.a.n.ging the elastic round the bundle. "I'm not so badly off."
"We must buy that silver casket for the letters," Sylvia said. "His wedding-day draws near. I think I shall dress up like the Ancient Mariner and give them to him myself."
"How much will a silver casket cost?" Lily asked.
Sylvia roughly estimated.
"It seems a good deal," said Lily, thoughtfully. "I think I shall just send them to him in a cardboard box. I finished those chocolates after dinner. Yes, that will do quite well. After all, he treated me very badly and to get his letters back safely will be quite a good-enough present. What could he do with a silver casket? He'd probably use it for visiting-cards."
That evening Sylvia, greatly content to have Lily to herself, again took her to the Cafe de la Chouette.
Her agent, who was drinking in a corner, came across to speak to her.
"Brazil?" she repeated, doubtfully.
"Thirty francs for three songs and you can go home at twelve. It isn't as if you had to sit drinking champagne and dancing all night."
Sylvia looked at Lily.
"Would you like a voyage?"
"We might as well go."
The contract was arranged.
CHAPTER XI
One of the habits that Sylvia had acquired on tour in France was card-playing; perhaps she inherited her skill from Henry, for she was a very good player. The game on the voyage was poker. Before they were through the Straits of Gibraltar Sylvia had lost five hundred francs; she borrowed five hundred francs from Lily and set herself to win them back. The sea became very rough in the Atlantic; all the pa.s.sengers were seasick. The other four poker-players, who were theatrical folk, wanted to stop, but Sylvia would not hear of it; she was much too anxious about her five hundred francs to feel seasick. She lost Lily's first five hundred francs and borrowed five hundred more. Lily began to feel less seasick now, and she watched the struggle with a personal interest. The other players, with the hope that Sylvia's bad luck would hold, were so deeply concentrated upon maintaining their advantage that they too forgot to be seasick. The s.h.i.+p rolled, but the poker-players only left the card-room for meals in the deserted saloon. Sylvia began to win again. Blue skies and calmer weather appeared; the other poker-players had no excuse for not continuing, especially now that it was possible to play on deck. Sylvia had won back all she had lost and two hundred francs besides when the s.h.i.+p entered the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.
"I think I should like gambling," Lily said, "if only one didn't have to shuffle and cut all the time."
The place where Sylvia was engaged to sing was one of those centers of aggregated amus.e.m.e.nt that exist all over the world without any particular characteristic to distinguish one from another, like the dinners in what are known as first-cla.s.s hotels on the Continent.
Everything here was more expensive than in Europe; even the roulette-boards had zero and double zero to help the bank. The tradition of Brazil for supplying gold and diamonds to the world had bred a familiarity with the external signs of wealth that expressed itself in overjeweled men and women, whose display one forgave more easily on account of the natural splendor of the scene with which they had to compete.
Lily, with the unerring bad taste that nearly always is to be found in sensuous and indolent women, to whom the obvious makes the quickest and easiest appeal, admired the flas.h.i.+ng stones and stars and fireflies with an energy that astonished Sylvia, notwithstanding the novel glimpse she had been given of Lily's character in the affair with Hector Ozanne. The climate was hot, but a sea breeze freshened the city after sunset; the enforced day-long inactivity, with the luxurious cool baths and competent negresses who attended upon her lightest movement, satisfied Lily's conception of existence, and when they drove along the margin of the bay before dinner her only complaint was that she could not coruscate like other women in the carriages they pa.s.sed.
With the money they had in hand Sylvia felt justified in avoiding a _pension d'artistes_, and they had taken a flat together. This meant that when Sylvia went to work at the cabaret, Lily, unless she came with her, was left alone, which did not at all suit her. Sylvia therefore suggested that she should accept an engagement to dance at midnight, with the stipulation that she should not be compelled to stay until 3 A.M. unless she wanted to, and that by foregoing any salary she should not be expected to drink gooseberry wine at 8,000 reis a bottle, on which she would receive a commission of 1,000 reis. The management knew what a charm the tall, fair English girl would exercise over the swart Brazilians, and was glad enough to engage her at her own terms. Sylvia had not counted upon Lily's enjoying the cabaret life so much. The heat was affecting her much more than Lily, and she began to complain of the long hours of what for her was a so false gaiety. Nothing, however, would persuade Lily to go home before three o'clock at the earliest, and Sylvia, on whom a great la.s.situde and indifference had settled, used to wait for her, sitting alone while Lily danced the _machiche_.
One night, when Sylvia had sung two of her songs with such a sense of hopeless depression weighing her down that the applause which followed each of them seemed to her a mockery, she had a sudden vertigo from which she pulled herself together with a conviction that nothing would induce her to sing the third song. She went on the scene, seated herself at the piano, and to the astonishment and discomfort of the audience and her fellow-players, half chanted, half recited one of the eccentric Englishman's poems about a body in the morgue. Such a performance in such a place created consternation, but in the silence that followed Sylvia fainted. When she came to herself she was back in her own bedroom, with a Brazilian doctor jabbering and mouthing over her symptoms. Presently she was taken to a clinic and, when she was well enough to know what had happened, she learned that she had yellow fever, but that the crisis had pa.s.sed. At first Lily came to see her every day, but when convalescence was further advanced she gave up coming, which worried Sylvia intensely and hampered her progress. She insisted that something terrible had happened to Lily and worked herself up into such a state that the doctor feared a relapse. She was too weak to walk; realizing at last that the only way of escaping from the clinic would be to get well, she fought against her apprehensions for Lily's safety and after a fortnight of repressed torments was allowed out. When Sylvia reached the flat she was met by the grinning negresses, who told her that Lily had gone to live elsewhere and let her understand that it was with a man.
Sylvia was not nearly well enough to reappear at the cabaret, but she went down that evening and was told by the other girls that Lily was at the tables. They were duly shocked at Sylvia's altered appearance, congratulated her upon having been lucky enough to escape the necessity of shaving her head, and expressed their regrets at not knowing in which clinic she had been staying so that they might have brought her the news of their world. Sylvia lacked the energy to resent their hypocrisy and went to look for Lily, whom she found blazing with jewels at one of the roulette-tables.