A Woman Martyr. Alice Mangold Diehl
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 gêne 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.
CHAPTER IX
The hansom drove swiftly along through the muddy streets. Victor sat silently by his companion. His nature was strung up to its fullest tension. First had come the exasperating blow-the discovery that his jealous surmise had been right-the wife he called wife because of those few words spoken in a registrar's office, alone, loved another man-perhaps was even secretly his. Then had come the surprise of Vera's beauty-grace-talent-and the conviction of her great passion for himself.
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