"And if he did?"
"Don"t be absurd. You know Brent."
"He"s not in love with you," a.s.sented Palmer. "He doesn"t want you that way. There"s some woman somewhere, I"ve heard--and he doesn"t care about anybody but her."
He was speaking in a careless, casual way, watching her out of the corner of his eye. And she, taken off guard, betrayed in her features the secret that was a secret even from herself.
He sprang up with a bound, sprang at her, caught her up out of her chair, the fingers of one hand clasping her throat.
"I thought so!" he hissed. "You love him--d.a.m.n you! You love him! You"d better look out, both of you!"
There came a knock at the door between her bedroom and that of Madame Clelie. Palmer released her, stood panting, with furious eyes on the door from which the sound had come. Susan called, "It"s all right, Clelie, for the present." Then she said to Palmer, "I told Clelie to knock if she ever heard voices in this room--or any sound she didn"t understand." She reseated herself, began to ma.s.sage her throat where his fingers had clutched it. "It"s fortunate my skin doesn"t mar easily," she went on. "What were you saying?"
"I know the truth now. You love Brent. That"s the milk in the cocoanut."
She reflected on this, apparently with perfect tranquillity, apparently with no memory of his furious threat against her and against Brent. She said:
"Perhaps I was simply piqued because there"s another woman."
"You are jealous."
"I guess I was--a little."
"You admit that you love him, you----"
He checked himself on the first hissing breath of the foul epithet. She said tranquilly:
"Jealousy doesn"t mean love. We"re jealous in all sorts of ways--and of all sorts of things."
"Well--_he_ cares nothing about _you_."
"Nothing."
"And never will. He"d despise a woman who had been----"
"Don"t hesitate. Say it. I"m used to hearing it, Freddie--and to being it. And not "had been" but "is." I still am, you know."
"You"re not!" he cried. "And never were--and never could be--for some unknown reason, G.o.d knows why."
She shrugged her shoulders, lit another cigarette. He went on:
"You can"t get it out of your head that because he"s interested in you he"s more or less stuck on you. That"s the way with women. The truth is, he wants you merely to act in his plays."
"And I want that, too."
"You think I"m going to stand quietly by and let this thing go on--do you?"
She showed not the faintest sign of nervousness at this repet.i.tion, more carefully veiled, of his threat against her--and against Brent. She chose the only hopeful course; she went at him boldly and directly. Said she with amused carelessness:
"Why not? He doesn"t want me. Even if I love him, I"m not giving him anything you want."
"How do you know what I want?" cried he, confused by this unexpected way of meeting his attack. "You think I"m simply a brute--with no fine instincts or feelings----"
She interrupted him with a laugh. "Don"t be absurd, Freddie,"
said she. "You know perfectly well you and I don"t call out the finer feelings in each other. If either of us wanted that sort of thing, we"d have to look elsewhere."
"You mean Brent--eh?"
She laughed with convincing derision. "What nonsense!" She put her arms round his neck, and her lips close to his. The violet-gray eyes were half closed, the perfume of the smooth amber-white skin, of the thick, wavy, dark hair, was in his nostrils. And in a languorous murmur she soothed his subjection to a deep sleep with, "As long as you give me what I want from you, and I give you what you want from me why should we wrangle?"
And with a smile he acquiesced. She felt that she had ended the frightful danger--to Brent rather than to herself--that suddenly threatened from those wicked eyes of Palmer"s. But it might easily come again. She did not dare relax her efforts, for in the succeeding days she saw that he was like one annoyed by a constant p.r.i.c.king from a pin hidden in the clothing and searched for in vain. He was no longer jealous of Brent. But while he didn"t know what was troubling him, he did know that he was uncomfortable.
CHAPTER XXIII
IN but one important respect was Brent"s original plan modified. Instead of getting her stage experience in France, Susan joined a London company making one of those dreary, weary, cheap and trashy tours of the smaller cities of the provinces with half a dozen plays by Jones, Pinero, and Shaw.
Clelie stayed in London, toiling at the language, determined to be ready to take the small part of French maid in Brent"s play in the fall. Brent and Palmer accompanied Susan; and every day for several hours Brent and the stage manager--his real name was Thomas Boil and his professional name was Herbert Streathern--coached the patient but most unhappy Susan line by line, word by word, gesture by gesture, in the little parts she was playing. Palmer traveled with them, making a pretense of interest that ill concealed his boredom and irritation. This for three weeks; then he began to make trips to London to amuse himself with the sports, amateur and professional, with whom he easily made friends--some of them men in a position to be useful to him socially later on. He had not spoken of those social ambitions of his since Susan refused to go that way with him--but she knew he had them in mind as strongly as ever. He was the sort of man who must have an objective, and what other objective could there be for him who cared for and believed in the conventional ambitions and triumphs only--the successes that made the respectable world gape and grovel and envy?
"You"ll not stick at this long," he said to Susan.
"I"m frightfully depressed," she admitted. "It"s tiresome--and hard--and so hideously uncomfortable! And I"ve lost all sense of art or profession. Acting seems to be nothing but a trade, and a poor, cheap one at that."
He was not surprised, but was much encouraged by this candid account of her state of mind. Said he:
"It"s my private opinion that only your obstinacy keeps you from giving it up straight off. Surely you must see it"s nonsense. Drop it and come along--and be comfortable and happy. Why be obstinate? There"s nothing in it."
"Perhaps it _is_ obstinacy," said she. "I like to think it"s something else."
"Drop it. You want to. You know you do."
"I want to, but I can"t," replied she.
He recognized the tone, the expression of the eyes, the sudden showing of strength through the soft, young contour. And he desisted.
Never again could there be comfort, much less happiness, until she had tried out her reawakened ambition. She had given up all that had been occupying her since she left America with Freddie; she had abandoned herself to a life of toil.
Certainly nothing could have been more tedious, more tormenting to sensitive nerves, than the schooling through which Brent was putting her. Its childishness revolted her and angered her. Experience had long since lowered very considerably the point at which her naturally sweet disposition ceased to be sweet--a process through which every good-tempered person must pa.s.s unless he or she is to be crushed and cast aside as a failure. There were days, many of them, when it took all her good sense, all her fundamental faith in Brent, to restrain her from an outbreak. Streathern regarded Brent as a crank, and had to call into service all his humility as a poor Englishman toward a rich man to keep from showing his contempt. And Brent seemed to be--indeed was--testing her forbearance to the uttermost. He offered not the slightest explanation of his method. He simply ordered her blindly to pursue the course he marked out. She was sorely tempted to ask, to demand, explanations. But there stood out a quality in Brent that made her resolve ooze away, as soon as she faced him. Of one thing she was confident.
Any lingering suspicions Freddie might have had of Brent"s interest in her as a woman, or even of her being interested in him as a man, must have been killed beyond resurrection.
Freddie showed that he would have hated Brent, would have burst out against him, for the unhuman, inhuman way he was treating her, had it not been that Brent was so admirably serving his design to have her finally and forever disgusted and done with the stage.
Finally there came a performance in which the audience--the gallery part of it--"booed" her--not the play, not the other players, but her and no other. Brent came along, apparently by accident, as she made her exit. He halted before her and scanned her countenance with those all-seeing eyes of his.
Said he:
"You heard them?"
"Of course," replied she.