Ainslee's Magazine/The Brightener/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
I did all I could to help make dinner a lively meal, and with iced Pommery of a particularly good year as my aid-de-camp, superficially, at least, I succeeded. But whenever there was an instant's lull in the conversation I felt that every one was asking himself or herself, “Where is the coffin?”
The plan had been to have a little moonlight fox-trotting and jazzing on deck, but with that black thing hidden somewhere on board, we confined ourselves to more bridge and star gazing, according to taste. I, as professional brightener, nobly kept Mr. Pollen out of everybody's way by annexing him for a stroll. This deserved the name of a double brightening act, for I brightened the lives of his fellow guests by saving them from him, and I brightened his by encouraging him to talk of well-connected people.
“Who was she before she married Lord Thingumbob?” or, “Yes, she was a Miss So-and-so, a cousin of the Duke of Dinkum,” might have been heard issuing sapiently from our lips had any one been mentally destitute enough to eavesdrop. But I had my reward. Dear little Shelagh and Roger Fane seemed to have cheered each other. I left them standing together, elbows on the rail, as they had been before the affair of the afternoon. The moonlight was shining full upon Shelagh's bright hair and frail white face as she looked up, eager-eyed, at Roger, and he looked—at least, his back looked—as if there was nobody on land or sea except one girl.
Having lured Mr. Pollen to make a fourth at a bridge table where the players were too polite to kill him, I ventured to vanish. There being no one on board with whom I wished to flirt, my one desire after two hard hours of brightening was to curl up in my cabin with a nice book. I quite looked forward to the moment for shutting myself cozily in, for the cabin was a delicious pink-and-white nest, the biggest on board, as a tribute to my princesshood.
Hardly had I opened the door, however, when the bubble of my dream broke. A very odd and repellent odor greeted me and seemed almost to push me back across the threshold. I held my ground, however, and sniffed with curiosity and disgust.
Somebody had been at my perfume, my expensive pet perfume made specially for me in Rome—one drop exquisite; two, oppressive—and must have spilled it. But, worse than that, the heavy fragrance was mingled with a horrid reek of stale brandy.
Anger flashed up in me like a match set to guncotton. Some impertinent person had sneaked into my stateroom and played a stupid practical joke. Or, if not that, one of the pleasantly trim, immaculate women—a cross between the stewardess and ladies'-maid type—engaged to hook up our frocks and make up our cabins, was secretly a confirmed rotter!
I switched on the light, shut the door smartly without locking it, and flung a furious glance around. The creature had actually dared to place a brandy bottle conspicuously upon my dressing table, among gold-handled brushes and silver-gilt boxes; and as a crowning impertinence had left a common-looking tumbler beside the bottle, a quarter full of strong-smelling brown stuff. Close by lay my lovely crystal flask of “Campagna Violets,” quite empty. I could get no more, and it had cost three pounds! I could hardly breathe in the room. Oh, evidently a stewardess must have gone stark mad, or else some practical joker had waited until the stewardesses were in bed to play the coup.
As I thought this, my eyes as well as my nostrils warned me of something strange about my pleasant quarters. The rose-colored silk curtains which, when I went to dinner, had been gracefully looped back at the head and foot of my pretty white-and-pink bed—a real bed, not a mere berth—were now closely drawn with a secretive air. This made me imagine that it was a practical joke I had to deal with, and my fancy flew to all sorts of weird surprises, any one of which I might find hidden behind the draperies.
I hope and trust that I have a sense of humor, and I can laugh at a jest against myself as well as any woman, perhaps better than most. But to-night I was in no mood to laugh at any kind of jest, and I wondered how anybody on board had possessed the heart, not to mention the cheek, to perpetrate one after the shock we had all experienced. Besides, I couldn't think of a person likely to play a trick on me. Certainly my host wouldn't. Shelagh, my best and most intimate friend, was far too gentle and sensitive-minded for anything of the kind. And none of the other guests were of the noisy, bounding sort who will take liberties even with quite distant acquaintances for fun.
All this ran through my mind quickly as a cinema cut on the screen, and it wasn't until I'd mentally passed in review the character of all my fellow guests that I summoned courage to pull back the curtains which hid the bed. When I did do it, I gave them a quick jerk which slipped them sharply along the rod as far as they would go. And then I saw the last thing in the world I could possible have pictured.
A woman, fully dressed, was stretched out on the pink silk coverlet, lying fast asleep, her head deep sunk in the embroidered down pillow, her face turned to me as I looked.
It was all I could do to keep back a cry, for this was no woman I had seen on board, not even a drunken or sleepwalking stewardess. Yet her face was not strange to me. That was the most horrible, the most mysterious part! There was no mistake. The face was one impossible to forget. And as I stared at it, almost believing that I dreamed, another scene rose between my eyes and the dainty little cabin of the Naiad.
It also was a scene in a dream. I knew it was a dream, but it was dreadful and torturingly vivid. I was a prisoner on a submarine, in war time, and signals from my own old home, Courtenaye Abbey, flashed into my face. They flashed so brightly that they set me on fire. I wakened from the nightmare with a start. A strong light dazzled my eyes and, blazing into my face, lit up another face as well. Just for an instant I saw it; then the electric ray that revealed it died into dead darkness. But on my retina was photographed the face, in a pale, illumined circle.
A second sufficed to bring back to my brain this old dream and the waking reality which followed that night at the Abbey, the night Shelagh and I called “the spook night.” For here, in my cabin on the yacht Naiad, and on the crushed pillow of my bed, was that face.
As I realized this, without benefit of any doubt, a faint sickness swept over me. It was partly horror of the past, partly physical disgust of the brandy reek, hanging low like an unseen canopy over the bed, and partly cold fear of a terrifying presence.
There she lay, sunk in drugged and drunken sleep, the woman of mystery in whose existence no one but Shelagh and I had ever quite believed—the woman who had visited us in our sleep that night at the Abbey and who, almost certainly, had fired the Abbey, hoping that we and the Barlows might suffocate in our beds.
The face was just the same as it had been then, “beautiful and hideous, like Medusa.” Only now it was older and, though still beautiful, somehow it looked ravaged. The hair still glowed with the vivid auburn color which I had thought unreal looking, but now it was tumbled and unkempt. Loose locks strayed over the dainty pillows, and at the bottom of the bed, pushed tightly against the footboard by a pair of untidy, high-heeled shoes, was a dusty black toque, half covered with a thick motor veil of gray chiffon. There was a gray cloak there, too, in a tumbled mass on the pink coverlet, and a pair of soiled gloves. Everything about the sleeper was sordid, dirty, and repulsive, a shuddering contrast to the exquisite freshness of the bed and room—everything, that is, except the face. Its half-wrecked beauty was still supreme, and even in the ruin drink or drugs had wrought, it still forced admiration.
“A stowaway here in my cabin on board Roger Fane's yacht!” I said the words slowly in my mind, not with my tongue. Not a sound, not the faintest whisper, passed my lips. Yet suddenly the long, dark lashes on the bruised-looking lids began to quiver. It was as if my thought had shaken the woman by the shoulder and roused what was left of her soul.
1 should have liked to dash out of the room and, with a shriek, bring every one on board to my room. But I did not. I stood quite still and concentrated my gaze, as before, on those trembling blue eyelids. Something inside me seemed to say, “Don't be a coward, Elizabeth Courtenaye!” It was exactly like grandmother's voice. I had a conviction that she wanted me to see this thing through as a Courtenaye ought to, shirking no responsibility and solving the whole mystery of past and present without bleating for help!
The fringed lids parted, shut, quivered again, and flashed wide open. A pair of pale eyes stared into mine—wicked eyes, cruel eyes, green as a cat's, Like a cat, too, she gathered herself together as if for a spring. Her muscles rippled and jerked. She sat up, and, in chilled surprise, I thought I saw recognition in her gaze.