The Cords of Vanity. A Comedy of Shirking

8. He Duels with a Stupid Woman

1

Yet I approached the garden on Saturday night with an elated heart. This was the last evening of the engagement of the Imperial Dramatic Company. To-morrow the troupe was to leave Fairhaven; but I was very confident that the leading lady would not accompany them, and by reason of this confidence, I smiled as I strode through the city of Fairhaven, and hummed under my breath an inane ditty of an extremely sentimental nature.

As I bent over the little wooden gate, and searched for its elusive latch, a man came out of the garden, wheeling sharply about the hedge that, until this, had hidden him; and simultaneously, I was aware of the mingled odour of bad tobacco and of worse whiskey. Well, she would have done with such people soon! I threw open the gate, and stood aside to let him pass; then, as the moon fell full upon the face of the man, I gave an inarticulate, startled sound.

'Fine evening, sir,' suggested the stranger.

'Eh?' said I; 'eh? Oh, yes, yes! quite so!' Afterward I shrugged my shoulders, and went into the garden, a trifle puzzled. 

2

I found her beneath a great maple in the heart of the enclosure. It was a place of peace; the night was warm and windless, and the moon, now come to its full glory, rode lazily in the west through a froth of clouds. Everywhere the heavens were faintly powdered with stardust, but even the planets seemed pale and ineffectual beside the splendour of the moon.

The garden was drenched in moonshine—moonshine that silvered the unmown grass-plots, and converted the white rose-bushes into squat-figured wraiths, and tinged the red ones with dim purple hues. On every side the foliage blurred into ambiguous vistas, where fireflies loitered; and the long shadows of the nearer trees, straining across the grass, were wried patterns scissored out of blue velvet. It was a place of peace and light and languid odours, and I came into it, laughing, the possessor of an over-industrious heart and of a perfectly unreasoning joy over the fact that I was alive.

'I say,' I observed, as I stretched luxuriously upon the grass beside her, 'you put up at a shockingly disreputable place, Signorina.' 'Yes?' said she.

'That fellow who just went out,' I explained—'do you know the police want his address, I think? No,' I continued, after consideration, 'I am sure I'm not mistaken,—that is either Ned Lethbury, the embezzler, or his twin-brother. It's been five years since I saw him, but that is he. And that', said I, with proper severity, 'is a sample of the sort of associate you prefer to your humble servant! Ah, Signorina, Signorina, I am a tolerably worthless chap, I admit, but at least I never forged and embezzled and then skipped my bail! So you had much better marry me, my dear, and say good-bye to your peculating friends. But, deuce take it! I forgot—I ought to notify the police or something, I suppose.'

She caught my arm. Her mouth opened and shut again before she spoke. 'He—he is my husband,' she said, in a toneless voice. Then, on a sudden, she wailed: 'Oh, forgive me! Oh, my great, strong, beautiful boy, forgive me, for I am very unhappy, and I cannot meet your eyes— your honest eyes! Ah, my dear, my dear, do not look at me like that,— you don't know how it hurts!'

The garden noises lisped about us in the long silence that fell. Then the far-off whistling of some home going citizen of Fairhaven tinkled shrilly through the night, and I shuddered a bit.

'I don't understand,' I commenced, strangely quiet. 'You told me—'

'Ah, I lied to you! I lied to you!' she cried. 'I didn't, mean to— hurt you. I did not know—I couldn't know—I was so lonely, Bobbie,' she pleaded, with wide eyes; 'oh, you don't know how lonely I am. And when you came to me that first night, you—why, you spoke to me as the men I once knew used to speak. There was respect in your voice, and I wanted that so; I hadn't had a man speak to me like that for years, you know, Bobbie. And, boy dear, I was so lonely in my squalid world,—and it seemed as if the world I used to know was calling me— your world, Bobbie—the world I am shut out from.'

'Yes,' I said; 'I think I understand.'

'And I thought for a week—just to peep into it, to be a lady again for an hour or two—why, it didn't seem wicked, then, and I wanted it so much! I—I knew I could trust you, because you were only a boy. And I was hungry—so hungry for a little respect, a little courtesy, such as men don't accord strolling actresses. So I didn't tell you till the very last I was married. I lied to you. Oh, but you don't understand, this stupid, honest boy doesn't understand anything except that I have lied to him!'

'Signorina,' I said, again, and I smiled, resolutely, 'I think I understand.' I took both her hands in mine, and laughed a little. 'But, oh, my dear, my dear,' I said, 'you should have told me that you loved another man; for you have let me love you for a week, and now I think that I must love you till I die.'

'Love him!' she echoed. 'Oh, boy dear, boy dear, what a Galahad it is! I don't think Ned ever cared for anything but Father's money; and I— why, you have seen him. How could I love him?' she asked, as simply as a child.

I bowed my head. 'And yet—' said I. Then I laughed again, somewhat bitterly. 'Don't let's tell stories, Mrs. Lethbury,' I said; 'it is kindly meant, I know, but I remember you now. I even danced with you once, some seven years ago,—yes, at the Green Chalybeate. I remember the night, for a variety of reasons. You are Alfred Van Orden's daughter; your father is a wealthy man, a very wealthy man; and yet, when your—your husband disappeared you followed him—to become a strolling actress. Ah, no, a woman doesn't sacrifice everything for a man in the way you have done, unless she loves him.'

I caught my breath. Some unknown force kept tugging down the corners of my mouth, in a manner that hampered speech; moreover, nothing seemed worth talking about. I had lost her. That was the one thing which mattered.

'Why, of course, I went with him,' she assented, a shade surprised; 'he was my husband, you know. But as for loving,—no, I don't think Ned ever really loved me,' she reflected, with puckering brows. 'He took that money for—for another woman, if you remember. But he is fond of me, and—and he needs me.'

I did not say anything; and after a little she went on, with a quick lift of speech.

'Oh, what a queer life we have led since then! You can't imagine it, my dear. He has been a tavern-keeper, a drummer,—everything! Why, last summer we sold rugs and Turkish things in Atlantic City! But he is always afraid of meeting someone who knows him, and—and he drinks too much. So we have not got on in the world, Ned and I; and now, after three years, I'm the leading lady of the Imperial Dramatic Company, and he is the manager. I forgot, though,—he is advance-agent this week, for he didn't dare stay in Fairhaven, lest some of the men at Mr. Charteris's should recognize him, you know. He came back only this evening—'

She paused for a moment; a wistful quaver crept into her speech. 'Oh, it's queer, it's queer, Bobbie! Sometimes—sometimes when I have time to think, say on long Sunday afternoons, I remember my old life, every bit of it,—oh, I do remember such strange little details! I remember the designs on the bread and butter plates, and all the silver things on my desk, and the plank by my door that always creaked and somehow never got fixed, and the big, shiny buttons on the coachman's coat,— just trifles like that. And—and they hurt, they hurt, Bobbie, those little, unimportant things! They—grip my throat.'

She laughed, not very mirthfully. 'Then I am like the old lady in the nursery rhyme, and say, Surely, this can't be I. But it is I, boy dear,—a strolling actress, a barn-stormer! Isn't it queer, Bobbie? But, oh, you don't know half —'

I was remembering many things. I remembered Lethbury, a gross man, superfluously genial, whom I had never liked, although I recalled my admiration of his whiskers. I recollected young Amelia Van Orden, not come to