Ainslee's Magazine/The Brightener/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
“Oh, you've come at last!” she rasped in a harsh, throaty voice roughened by drink. “I know you. I”
“And I know you!” I cut her short, to show that I was not cowed.
Sitting up in bed, hugging her knees, she started at my words so that the springs shook. Whatever it was she had meant to say, she forgot it for the moment and challenged me.
“That's a lie!” she snapped. “You don't know me. You don't know me yet; but you soon will!”
“I've known you since you came into my room at Courtenaye Abbey the night you tried to burn down the house,” I said. “You were spying then. Heaven knows all the harm you may have done. I don't know whom you're spying on now. But you can't frighten me again! The war's over, but I'll have you arrested for what you did when it was on.”
The woman scowled and laughed, a hateful combination that made her more Medusalike than ever. I really felt as if she might turn me to stone, but I wouldn't let her guess!
“Pooh!” she said, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “You won't want to arrest me when you hear who I am, Lady Shelagh Leigh!”
“Lady Shelagh Leigh!” It was on my lips to cry “I'm not Shelagh Leigh!” but I stopped in time. The less I let her find out about me, and the more I could find out about her before rousing the yacht, the better. I said not a word, but waited for her to go on, which she did in a few seconds,
“That makes you sit up, doesn't it?” she sneered. “That hits you where you live! Why did you think I chose your cabin? I didn't select it by chance. I confess I was taken back at your remembering me. I thought I hadn't given you time for much study of my features. But it doesn't matter. You can't do anything. I'll soon prove that! But I had a good look at you one night at your friend's old Devonshire rat trap. I knew who you both were. It was easy to find out! And the other day when I heard that Lady Shelagh Leigh was likely to marry Roger Fane, I said to myself, 'Gosh! One of the girls I saw at that darned old Abbey!'”
“Oh, you said that to yourself!” I echoed. And though my knees felt weak, I kept to my feet, because to stand towering above the shabby figure seemed to give me a moral as well as physical advantage. “How did you know, pray, which girl I was?”
“I knew, 'pray,'” she mocked, “because you've got the best room on this yacht. Roger'd be sure to give that to his best girl. Which is how I'm sure you're not Elizabeth Courtenaye.”
“How clever you are!” I said.
“Yes, I'm clever when I'm not a fool. Don't think, anyhow, that you can beat me in a battle of brains. I've come on board this boat to succeed, and I will succeed in one of two ways, I don't care a hang which. But nothing on God's earth can hold me back from one or the other, least of all, you. Why, you can ask any question you please, and I'll answer. I'll tell the truth, too, for the more I say and the more you're shocked, the more helpless you are—do you see?”
“No, I don't see.” I drew her on,
“Don't you guess yet who I am?”
“I've guessed what you were—a military spy.”
“That's ancient history. One must live and one must have money, plenty of money. I must! And I've had it. But it's gone from me, like most things. Now I must have more, a lot more, or else I must die. I don't care which. But others will care. I'll make them!”
Looking at her, I doubted if she had the power, though she must have had it in her lost days of gorgeous youth. 3ut again I remained silent. I saw that she was leading up to something in particular, and I let her go on.
“You're not much of a guesser,” she said, “so I'll introduce myself. Lady-who-thinks-she's-going-to-marry-Roger Fane, let me make known to you the lady who has married him—Mrs. Fane, née Linda Lehman. You're nothing in looks, by the by, to what I was at your age. Nothing!”
If my knees had been weak, they now felt as if struck with a mallet! She might be lying, but something within me was horribly sure that she spoke the truth. I never heard full details of Roger Fane's “tragedy,” but Mrs. Carstairs had dropped a few hints which, without asking questions, I'd patched together. I had gleaned that when still quite a boy he'd married an actress much older than himself, and that till her sudden and violent death after many years, eight or ten at least, his life had been a martyrdom. How the woman contrived to be alive instead of dead I couldn't see, but such things actually happened to people one didn't know! The worst of it was that I did know Roger Fane and liked him. Besides, [ loved Shelagh, whose happiness was bound up with Roger's. It seemed as if I couldn't bear to have those two torn apart by this cruel creature, this drunkard, this intruder! Yet what could I do?
At the moment I could think of nothing useful, because, if she were Roger's wife, her boast was justified; for his sake and Shelagh's she couldn't be handed over to the police to answer for any political crime I might prove against her, or even for trying to burn down the Abbey. Oh, this business was beyond what I bargained for when I engaged to “brighten” the trip on board the Naiad! Still, all the spirit in me rallied to work for Roger Fane, even to work out his salvation if that could be. And I was glad I'd let the woman believe I was Shelagh Leigh.
“Roger's wife died five years ago, just before the war began,” I said. “She was killed in a railway accident, an awful one, where she and a company of actors were all burned to death.”
The creature laughed hilariously.
“Have you never been to a movie show and seen how easy it is to die that way, to be dead to those you're tired of and alive in some other part of this old world where you think there's more fun to be got? It's been done on the screen lots of times—and off it, too. I was sick to death of Roger. I'd never have married a stick like him, always preaching, if I hadn't been down and out. When I met him it was in a beastly one-horse town where I was stranded. The show had chucked me, gone off and left the plantée la! I was sick—too big a dose of dope, if you want to know. But Roger didn't know, you can bet. Not then! I took jolly good care to toe the mark till he'd married me all right.”
She interrupted her narrative with a deep-drawn sigh. A few seconds later she went on:
“He was a sucker! I suppose he was twenty-two and over, but Peter Pan wasn't in it with him in some ways. He kept me off the stage and tried to keep me off everything else worth doing for five years. Then I left him, for my health and looks had come back in the dull time, and I got a fair part in a play just going on tour. There I met a man from my own country—oh, don't be encouraged to hope!—I never gave Roger any cause to divorce me, and even if I had, I'd have done it so he couldn't prove a thing!
“Well, this man had a scheme. He wanted me to go with him. I didn't quite see my way at first, though there was big money in it; so he left us before the accident. When I found myself alive and kicking after that, though, I saw my chance. I left a ring and a few little things that would identify me with a woman that was killed, and I lit out. It was in the dead of night, so luck was on my side for once. I wrote my friend, and it wasn't long before we were at work for his government. The Abbey affair was after he'd got out of England. He was a sailor, and before long was given command of a big new submarine. If it hadn't been for the row you and your friend kicked up, we might have brought off one of the big stunts of the war. But your darned petty police rooked the thing after I'd been hiding in your old rat warren for months, and everything was working just right. I wish to goodness the whole house had burned that time, and I did wish you'd burned with it! But I don't know if to-night isn't going to pay me and you just as well. There's a lot owing from you to me. I haven't told you all yet. My friend's submarine got caught the night the police squealed, and he went down with her. If I hadn't failed him with the signals, he might be alive now.”
“As you are so confidential, do tell me how you got into the Abbey and where you hid,” I flung at her.
She shook her dyed and tousled head.
“That's where I draw the line,” she said. “I've told you what I have to please myself, not you. You can't profit by a word I've said. That's where my fun comes in! If I told you about the Abbey, you might profit somehow, or your friend, the Courtenaye girl, would. And I want to punish her, too, for that night.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Perhaps you won't care to tell me, then, how you got on board the Naiad?”
“I don't mind telling you that,” she returned. “I went out of England after the Abbey affair; friends got me away, and I worked in New York till things got too hot. Then I came over as a reconstruction worker, got into France, and stopped there till the other day. I'd be there still, perhaps, if I hadn't picked up a weekly London rag that lives on gossip and seen a paragraph about a 'rumored engagement.' You can guess whose it was. And it called Roger—my Roger, mind you!—a 'millionaire.' He never was poor in my day. He'd made a lucky strike, before we met, with an invention. I said to myself, 'Linda, my girl, it would be tempting Providence to lie still, and let another woman share his luck.'
“So I started as soon as I could, but just missed him.
“If it hadn't been for that bally storm, I shouldn't have caught you up! As it was, before you came on board this afternoon I presented myself with the card of a London newspaper and an old card of Roger's which was among a few things of his I'd kept for emergencies. I can copy his handwriting well enough to write a few words and not be suspected except by an intimate friend of his, so I scribbled on the card an order to view the yacht. I got on board all right and wandered about with a notebook. I soon found the right place to hide, in the storeroom, behind some barrels.
“But I had to make every one who'd seen me think I'd gone back on shore. That was easy! I said to a sailor fellow by the gangplank that I was going, and said I'd mislaid an envelope with a tip for him and another man in it. I thought I'd left it on a table in the dining saloon, and he'd better look for it or it might be picked up by somebody else. He went before I could say 'knife!' and the envelope really was there, so he didn't have to hurry back. Two minutes later I was in the store-room, and no one the wiser. Heavens, but I got the jumps waiting for the stewardesses to be safe in bed before I could creep out to pay your cabin a call!”
“So, to cure the 'jumps' you annexed a whole bottle of brandy,” I said.
“I did—for that and another reason you may find out. But I'm hanged if you're not a cool hand for a young girl who has just heard her lover's a married man! I thought by this time you'd be in hysterics.”
“Girls of my generation don't have hysterics,” I deliberately taunted her. By the dyed hair and vestiges of rouge and powder which streaked the battered face I guessed that a fling at her age would sting like a poisoned dart. I wanted to rouse the woman's temper. If she lost her head, she might show her hand!
“You'll have worse than hysterics, you fool, before I finish,” she flung back. “I'm going to make Roger Fane acknowledge me as his wife and give me all I want in life—money and motor cars and pearls and a position in society. I'm tired of being a free lance.”
“He won't do it!” I said.
“He'll have to, when he hears what will happen if he doesn't. If I can't live a life worth living, I'll die. Roger Fane will go off his yacht under arrest as my murderer.”
“You deserve that he should kill you, but he will not,” I assured her.
“He'll hang for killing me, anyhow. You see, the more motive he has to destroy me, the more impossible for him or you to prove his innocence. Do you think I'd have told you all this if any one would believe such a cock-and-bull story as it would sound to a jury? But I've finished now. I've said what I came to say. Now I'm ready to act. Do you want a row, or will you go quietly to the door of Roger's cabin—he must be there by this time—and tell him that his wife, Linda Lehman, is waiting for him in your stateroom? That'll fetch him!”
I had no doubt it would, My only doubt was what to do! But if I refused, the woman was sure to keep her word and rouse the yacht by screams. That would be the worst thing possible for Shelagh and Roger. I decided to go and break to him the dreadful news with merciful swiftness.
If I could, I would have turned a key upon the creature, but the doors of the Naiad's cabins were furnished only with bolts. My one hope that she would keep to my room was that she was still too drunk to move about safely, and that, despite her bluff, the best card she had was diplomacy with Roger.
Quietly I closed the door and tiptoed to his, three staterooms distant from mine. My tap was so light that, if he had gone to sleep, I should have had to knock again. But he opened the door at once. He was fully dressed and had a book in his hand.
“Something has happened,” I whispered in answer to his amazed look. “Let me come in and explain. I can't talk out here.”
He stood aside in silence, and I stepped in. Then I motioned to him to shut the door quickly.