Chapter XXVI: A Curtain and a Shadow

The whole thing had perhaps taken ten minutes; ten years without it would have taken less strength from Magdalen Clyde. The world had fallen down about her ears; Lovell, her lover, the core of her heart, was no better than Starr-Dalton, whom she had hated. Dolly----

“I must get home quickly to Dolly,” she thought, when voices and steps had gone, and she could dare the few steps that lay between.

It was a quiet street at night. She met not one soul--and remembered it afterward in another place. There was not a light in the house, nor a sound, as she fitted her latch-key in Madame Aline’s door. As it clicked behind her she called out chokingly:

“Dolly! Dolly! bring down a light. Where are you?” She was sobbing without tears. It was she who must tell Dolly she was found out, must help her to get away to-night, anywhere; Dolly, who was between the devil and the deep sea, and must face prosecution for bigamy, or worse. “Dolly!” she called again, and the sound of her voice came back to her.

In the dark senseless terror smote her. She felt her way to the stair foot; ran up half-a-dozen steps, fell; ran again, with her skirt torn and her breath out of her; called in the dark landing outside the kitchen door.

“She’s out!” she said to herself. It seemed impossible that anyone with a secret like Dolly’s should dare to go out. If it were true, there must be people who knew it; and Dolly--she might meet any one of them in the street.

Her fingers closed on the kitchen match-box, and the match she lighted went out, just as the electric light had that night at Krug’s, where one man at least had known Dolly; and Dolly had been afraid.

She lighted another match, and the gas flashed up. Magdalen stood staring.

There was an unearthly neatness in the kitchen, a smell of yellow soap and charwoman; a look of--she flew from room to room, lighting the gas in each till it flared. Every single thing in the house was packed up--gone. Even her own clothes had vanished. Dolly was out, indeed; forever and a day.

For a moment Magdalen shook where she stood among Madame Aline’s fixtures, with the awful fear that perhaps Dolly had sent her to Marlow just to be able to do this in peace.

She sat down and put both hands to her head.

“That’s nonsense!” she said to herself feverishly. “Something must have frightened her. I was a fool to leave her here alone after telling her about that dream.”

Then something flashed over her.

What had Stratharden been doing in front, almost, of Dolly’s door? What had Buff Ogilvie been doing as Dick Lovell in Hare’s Rents? For all she knew there had been enough to frighten Dolly. With her fingers over her eyes she tried to think collectedly and could not. Thought after thought broke and raveled in her brain. In despair she spoke aloud in the desolate kitchen.

“Dolly’s gone! Stratharden’s found her out! Lovell’s Buff Ogilvie, Stratharden’s son.”

Her voice broke in a high, dreadful whisper. “And he kissed me! Oh, my God! He kissed me.”

She forgot she was hungry, tired to death. Under the unshaded gas-jet she sat like a dead woman who grows cold. There were lines on her face that no girl’s should have--the awful marks it leaves to find out the man she has loved.

After a long time she began to mutter to herself.

“He kissed me, and he spied on me. For what was that old French woman but a spy? I hate him. I could----”

With senseless fury she struck at the arm of her chair just as she could have struck at Lovell’s face or at his heart with a knife, for that matter.

Black murder was in her blood where she sat alone, for that blood was wilder than she knew. The horror of her passion passed and left her cold again.

“Lovell’s my business,” she said to the dirty gray wallpaper, “and I’ll have time to settle it. It’s Dolly who matters now. I’ve got to find her, and the best way is to sit here. She’ll find out how to let me know. If she even went to Marlow after me she’ll wire here when she finds I didn’t stay there.”

But it was only a sop to Cerberus; she had no real thought that Dolly had gone to Marlow.

“I could send a ‘collect’ wire if I knew where,” she thought with an ugly, mirthless laugh. “But I’d be a fool to go out even to the telegraph office. For all I know Dolly may only be round the corner; she might come back for me any minute. I daren’t be out.”

A clock Dolly had forgotten struck in the silence. Seven; it was only seven, and she had thought it the middle of the night. The homely, comfortable sound brought her awful loneliness home to Magdalen Clyde. In all London there was not one soul she could turn to; in spite of common sense, she sat listening breathlessly for Dolly; Dolly, who was miles away. Once she caught herself longing madly for Lovell to come that she might tell him what she knew, with the dreadful cleverness a cold anger that can neither forget nor forgive lends a woman’s tongue. But there was small danger of his coming. Had she not made him swear to stay away when she thought he loved her? He would not come now when he had gone off with Stratharden to help hunt out Dolly’s shame.

Somehow she had no contempt for Dolly now; no one but a brave woman would have dared to act Dolly’s lie.

In the flaring kitchen her eyes fell on the black oblong of the uncurtained window; the dark of it held her gaze as a shining ball hypnotizes. A sound, the ghost of a sound, would have made her get up and lock it, fasten the shutters close; but there was no sound.

A curious smell, half sweet, half nauseous, like decaying lilac flowers, reached her by little puffs and eddies. There must be old flowers in the rubbish-filled coal-box; she could not take the trouble to look. There was a blank weariness on her, the stupidity that comes after dreadful anger. Down-stairs, in that room she had dreamed of, she would have had every sense awake; up here she gave way to the numbness that was creeping over her; if Dolly rang the bell now she would hardly care to answer the summons. The smell of those stale flowers was very strong.

Her head felt heavy; she leaned back in the stiff kitchen chair and rested it against the wall. The gaslight turned her strange hair into a glorious burnished halo, but under it the pale face was like a mask, with half-closed, unwinking eyelids. The queer odor thickened, lost its nauseousness, was sweet. To her tired brain it seemed to float in tangible drifts like thin smoke; it soothed her. She must be very tired to fancy such things about some dead flowers in the coal-box.

Of course, since she had overheard Stratharden, she had no fears for Dolly’s safety or Ronald’s. That danger was gone when lawful means would dispose of them; for herself she had never had any fears; no one had anything against her. Everything seemed a long way off, very unimportant; there was comfort in the bare little kitchen that smelt so sweet; it was making her sleepy. The gas ceased to flare in her eyes, a gray curtain seemed to fall between her and the black square of window.

A--gray--curtain. It was like shutting her eyes; only nicer, much nicer; but, of course, they were shut since she was so nearly asleep.

If anyone had looked through that bare window--and it might not have been so hard, for beneath the window was a stone coping a foot wide and higher than a man’s knee--he might have seen an ugly sight. For the room was dim, indeed, with a mist that was thick, as it killed the air; and in the middle of it a girl sat asleep with her eyes open. It was too late for a sound to rouse her now if that was a sound behind her.

In her empty bedroom the light went out. A black, wavering thing slipped along the floor and down the stairs noiselessly. In the hall was the hat and coat Magdalen had thrown down when she came in; when the shadow had passed them they were gone. The lights were gone, too, all but a feeble glimmer that did not come from gas.

The little clock struck nine and the shadow moved faster.

It was up-stairs again now, black in the gray kitchen. It held a candle close to those open, unseeing eyes that never winked. The window opened softly and presently stood wide.

But hours of air would not wake this pale girl any more than lifting her, dragging her head away from the rough wooden chair where a splinter had caught in the thick mass of her hair.

The kitchen light was out now and the sound of feet was audible, if there had been anyone to hear it. Not even a black shadow can go down-stairs quite noiselessly if it is real enough to carry a dead weight in its arms.

The fresh night wind blew in and out of the kitchen, in and out of Magdalen’s bedroom, and scattered some fine ashes through the dark. The clock struck ten, tremulously, as if it were afraid in an empty house, and over it came the shrill whirr of an electric bell.

A woman ran up the entrance stairs with a child in her arms and stamped her foot as she lighted the gas at her own door and saw a telegraph boy there.

“What good are telegrams?” she cried. “Here, give it to me! You’ve been hours.”

She went in as Magdalen had done, but in her face there was no surprise when she saw the house was empty. She had known it would be this two hours. She took a telegram from her pocket and stared at it.

“MADAME ALINE, Hare’s Buildings, London: I am not coming back. You
had better come here. Bring my things.”

The date was Marlow. And to Marlow had Dolly gone in haste and come back frantic. There was no Magdalen who had sent that wire. “A foreign-looking woman,” the man said at the telegraph office, “pale, with queer eyes.” And that must have been Magdalen.

With a self-control that came from blank anguish Dolly made a bed for Ronald and put him in it. Magdalen had thrown her over; she had said she wanted to live her own life, and now she was doing it.

“Lovell,” said Dolly to herself. “It’s Lovell.”

She had not known it could hurt her so to find Magdalen no better than herself. For it must be that. She remembered the day Magdalen had come home transfigured with that in her eyes no woman can either hide or counterfeit. She was too sick to be angry.

The bell rang violently; rang again as if it would never stop.

“She’s back! she’s no key!” Dolly flew to the door dizzy with joy. And on the threshold was Mrs. Keith.