Chapter 62
Mrs. Lebus was one of those women whose tongues are always hunting, like eager terriers. With evident reluctance she postponed the chase of an artful morsel that had taken refuge in some difficult country at the back of her mouth, and faced the problem of admitting Sylvia to the sick man's room.
"You a relative?" she asked.
Sylvia shook her head.
"Perhaps you've come about his remittance. He told me he was expecting a hundred dollars any time. You staying in Sulphurville?"
Sylvia understood that the apparent disinclination to admit her was only due to unsatisfied curiosity and that there was not necessarily any suspicion of her motives. At this moment something particularly delicious ran across the path of Mrs. Lebus's tongue, and Sylvia took advantage of the brief pause during which it was devoured, to penetrate into the lobby, where a melancholy citizen in a frock-coat and a straw hat was testing the point of a nib upon his thumb, whether with the intention of offering it to Mrs. Lebus to pick her teeth or of writing a letter was uncertain.
"Oh, Scipio!" said Mrs. Lebus. She p.r.o.nounced it "Skipio."
"Wal?"
"She wants to see Mr. Madden."
"Sure."
The landlady turned to Sylvia.
"Mr. Lebus don't have no objections. Julie, take Miss--What did you say your name was?"
Sylvia saw no reason against falling into what Mrs. Lebus evidently considered was a skilfully laid trap, and told her.
"Scarlett," Mr. Lebus repeated. "We don't possess that name in Sulphurville. Yes, ma'am, that name's noo to Sulphurville."
"Sakes alive, Scipio, are you going to keep Miss Scarlett hanging around all day whiles you gossip about Sulphurville?" his wife asked. Aware of her husband's enthusiasm for his native place, she may have foreseen a dissertation upon its wonders unless she were ruthless.
"Julie'll take you up to his apartment. And don't you forget to knock before you open the door, Julie."
On the way up-stairs in the wake of the servant, Sylvia wondered how she should explain her intrusion to a stranger, even though he were an Englishman. She had so firmly decided to herself it was Arthur that she could not make any plans for meeting anybody else. Julie was quite ready to open the door of the bedroom and let Sylvia enter unannounced; she was surprised by being requested to go in first and ask the gentleman if he could receive Miss Scarlett. However, she yielded to foreign eccentricity, and a moment later ushered Sylvia in.
It was Arthur Madden; and Sylvia, from a mixture of penitence for the way she treated him at Colonial Terrace, of self-congratulation for being so sure beforehand that it was he, and from swift compa.s.sion for his illness and loneliness, ran across the room and greeted him with a kiss.
"How on earth did you get into this horrible hole?" Arthur asked.
"My dear, I knew it was you when I heard your name." Breathlessly she poured out the story of how she had found him.
"But you'd made up your mind to play the Good Samaritan to whoever it was--you never guessed for a moment at first that it was me."
She forgave him the faint petulance because he was ill, and also because it brought back to her with a new vividness long bygone jealousies, restoring a little more of herself as she once was, nearly thirteen years ago. How little he had changed outwardly, and much of what change there was might be put down to his illness.
"Arthur, do you remember Maria?" she asked.
He smiled. "He died only about two years ago. He lived with my mother after I went on the stage."
Sylvia wondered to him why they had never met all these years. She had known so many people on the stage, but then, of course, she had been a good deal out of England. What had made Arthur go on the stage first? He had never talked of it in the old days.
"I used always to be keen on music."
Sylvia whistled the melody that introduced them to each other, and he smiled again.
"My mother still plays that sometimes, and I've often thought of you when she does. She lives at Dulwich
They talked for a while of Hampstead and laughed over the escape.
"You were a most extraordinary kid," he told her. "Because, after all, I was seventeen at the time--older than you. Good Lord! I'm thirty now, and you must be twenty-eight!"
To Sylvia it was much more incredible that he should be thirty; he seemed so much younger than she, lying here in this frowsy room, or was it that she felt so much older than he?
"But how on earth _did_ you get stranded in this place?" she asked.
"I was touring with a concert party. The last few years I've practically given up the stage proper. I don't know why, really, for I was doing quite decently, but concert-work was more amusing, somehow. One wasn't so much at the beck and call of managers."
Sylvia knew, by the careful way in which he was giving his reasons for abandoning the stage, that he had not yet produced the real reason. It might have been baffled ambition or it might have been a woman.
"Well, we came to Sulphurville," said Arthur. He hesitated for a moment.
Obviously there had been a woman. "We came to Sulphurville," he went on, "and played at the hotel you're playing at now--a rotten hole," he added, with retrospective bitterness. "I don't know how it was, but I suppose I got keen on the gambling--anyway, I had a row with the other people in the show, and when they left I refused to go with them. I stayed behind and got keen on the gambling."
"It was after the row that you took to roulette?" Sylvia asked.
"Well, as a matter if fact, I had a row with a girl. She treated me rather badly, and I stayed on. I lost a good deal of money. Well, it wasn't a very large sum, as a matter of fact, but it was all I had, and then I fell ill. I caught cold and I was worried over things. I cabled to my mother for some money, but there's been no reply. I'm afraid she's had difficulty in raising it. She quarreled with my father's people when I went on the stage. d.a.m.ned narrow-minded set of yokels. Furious because I wouldn't take up farming. How I hate narrow-minded people!" And with an invalid's fretful intolerance he went on grumbling at the ineradicable characteristics of an English family four thousand miles away.
"Of course something may have happened to my mother," he added. "You may be sure that if anything had those beasts would never take the trouble to write and tell me. It would be a pleasure to them if they could annoy me in any way."
A swift criticism of Arthur's att.i.tude toward the possibility of his mother's death rose to Sylvia's mind, but she repressed it, pleading with herself to excuse him because he was ill and overstrained. She was positively determined to see henceforth nothing but good in people, and in her anxiety to confirm herself in this resolve she was ready not merely to exaggerate everything in Arthur's favor, but even to twist any failure on his side into actual merit. Thus when she hastened to put her own resources at his disposal, and found him quite ready to accept without protest her help, she choked back the comparison with Jack Airdale's att.i.tude in similar circ.u.mstances, and was quite angry with herself, saying how much more naturally Arthur had received her good-will and how splendid it was to find such simplicity and sincerity.
"I'll nurse you till you're quite well, and then why shouldn't we take an engagement together somewhere?"
Arthur became enthusiastic over this suggestion.
"You've not heard me sing yet. My throat's still too weak, but you'll be surprised, Sylvia."
"I haven't got anything but a very deep voice," she told him. "But I can usually make an impression."
"Can you? Of course, where I've always been held back is by lack of money. I've never been able to afford to buy good songs."
Arthur began to sketch out for himself a most radiant future, and as he talked Sylvia thought again how incredible it was that he should be older than herself. Yet was not this youthful enthusiasm exactly what she required? It was just the capacity of Arthur's for thinking he had a future that was going to make life tremendously worth while for her, tremendously interesting--oh, it was impossible not to believe in the decrees of fate, when at the very moment of her greatest longing to be needed by somebody she had met Arthur again. She could be everything to him, tend him through his illness, provide him with money to rid himself of the charity of Mrs. Lebus and the druggist, help him in his career, and watch over his fidelity to his ambition. She remembered how, years ago at Hampstead, his mother had watched over him; she could recall every detail of the room and see Mrs. Madden interrupt one of her long sonatas to be sure Arthur was not sitting in a draught. And it had been she who had heedlessly lured him away from that tender mother.
There was poetic justice in this opportunity of reparation now accorded to her. To be sure, it had been nothing but a childish escapade--reparation was too strong a word; but there was something so neat about this encounter years afterward in a place like Sulphurville.
How pale he was, which, nevertheless, made him more romantic to look at; how thin and white his hands were! She took one of them in her own boy's hands, as so many people had called them, and clasped it with the affection that one gives to small helpless things, to children and kittens, an affection that is half grat.i.tude because one feels good-will rising like a sweet fountain from the depth of one's being, the freshness of which playing upon the spirit is so dear, that no words are enough to bless the wand that made the stream gush forth.
"I shall come and see you all day," said Sylvia. "But I think I ought not to break my contract at the Plutonian."
"Oh, you'll come and live here," Arthur begged. "You've no idea how horrible it is. There was a c.o.c.kroach in the soup last night, and of course there are bugs. For goodness' sake, Sylvia, don't give me hope and then dash it away from me. I tell you I've had a h.e.l.l of a time in this cursed hole. Listen to the bed; it sounds as if it would collapse at any moment. And the bugs have got on my nerves to such a pitch that I spend the whole time looking at spots on the ceiling and fancying they've moved. It's so hot, too; everything's rotted with heat. You mustn't desert me. You must come and stay here with me."
"Why shouldn't you move up to the Plutonian?" Sylvia suggested. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll get one of the doctors to come and look at you, and if he thinks it's possible you shall move up there at once.
Poor boy, it really is too ghastly here."
Arthur was nearly weeping with self-pity.