The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 28

Sylvia understood that the apparent disinclination to admit her was only due to unsatisfied curiosity and that there was not necessarily any suspicion of her motives. At this moment something particularly delicious ran across the path of Mrs. Lebus's tongue, and Sylvia took advantage of the brief pause during which it was devoured, to penetrate into the lobby, where a melancholy citizen in a frock-coat and a straw hat was testing the point of a nib upon his thumb, whether with the intention of offering it to Mrs. Lebus to pick her teeth or of writing a letter was uncertain.

"Oh, Scipio!" said Mrs. Lebus. She p.r.o.nounced it "Skipio."

"Wal?"

"She wants to see Mr. Madden."

"Sure."

The landlady turned to Sylvia.

"Mr. Lebus don't have no objections. Julie, take Miss--What did you say your name was?"

Sylvia saw no reason against falling into what Mrs. Lebus evidently considered was a skilfully laid trap, and told her.

"Scarlett," Mr. Lebus repeated. "We don't possess that name in Sulphurville. Yes, ma'am, that name's noo to Sulphurville."

"Sakes alive, Scipio, are you going to keep Miss Scarlett hanging around all day whiles you gossip about Sulphurville?" his wife asked. Aware of her husband's enthusiasm for his native place, she may have foreseen a dissertation upon its wonders unless she were ruthless.

"Julie'll take you up to his apartment. And don't you forget to knock before you open the door, Julie."

On the way up-stairs in the wake of the servant, Sylvia wondered how she should explain her intrusion to a stranger, even though he were an Englishman. She had so firmly decided to herself it was Arthur that she could not make any plans for meeting anybody else. Julie was quite ready to open the door of the bedroom and let Sylvia enter unannounced; she was surprised by being requested to go in first and ask the gentleman if he could receive Miss Scarlett. However, she yielded to foreign eccentricity, and a moment later ushered Sylvia in.

It was Arthur Madden; and Sylvia, from a mixture of penitence for the way she treated him at Colonial Terrace, of self-congratulation for being so sure beforehand that it was he, and from swift compa.s.sion for his illness and loneliness, ran across the room and greeted him with a kiss.

"How on earth did you get into this horrible hole?" Arthur asked.

"My dear, I knew it was you when I heard your name." Breathlessly she poured out the story of how she had found him.

"But you'd made up your mind to play the Good Samaritan to whoever it was--you never guessed for a moment at first that it was me."

She forgave him the faint petulance because he was ill, and also because it brought back to her with a new vividness long bygone jealousies, restoring a little more of herself as she once was, nearly thirteen years ago. How little he had changed outwardly, and much of what change there was might be put down to his illness.

"Arthur, do you remember Maria?" she asked.

He smiled. "He died only about two years ago. He lived with my mother after I went on the stage."

Sylvia wondered to him why they had never met all these years. She had known so many people on the stage, but then, of course, she had been a good deal out of England. What had made Arthur go on the stage first? He had never talked of it in the old days.

"I used always to be keen on music."

Sylvia whistled the melody that introduced them to each other, and he smiled again.

"My mother still plays that sometimes, and I've often thought of you when she does. She lives at Dulwich now."

They talked for a while of Hampstead and laughed over the escape.

"You were a most extraordinary kid," he told her. "Because, after all, I was seventeen at the time--older than you. Good Lord! I'm thirty now, and you must be twenty-eight!"

To Sylvia it was much more incredible that he should be thirty; he seemed so much younger than she, lying here in this frowsy room, or was it that she felt so much older than he?

"But how on earth did you get stranded in this place?" she asked.

"I was touring with a concert party. The last few years I've practically given up the stage proper. I don't know why, really, for I was doing quite decently, but concert-work was more amusing, somehow. One wasn't so much at the beck and call of managers."

Sylvia knew, by the careful way in which he was giving his reasons for abandoning the stage, that he had not yet produced the real reason. It might have been baffled ambition or it might have been a woman.

"Well, we came to Sulphurville," said Arthur. He hesitated for a moment. Obviously there had been a woman. "We came to Sulphurville," he went on, "and played at the hotel you're playing at now--a rotten hole," he added, with retrospective bitterness. "I don't know how it was, but I suppose I got keen on the gambling--anyway, I had a row with the other people in the show, and when they left I refused to go with them. I stayed behind and got keen on the gambling."

"It was after the row that you took to roulette?" Sylvia asked.

"Well, as a matter if fact, I had a row with a girl. She treated me rather badly, and I stayed on. I lost a good deal of money. Well, it wasn't a very large sum, as a matter of fact, but it was all I had, and then I fell ill. I caught cold and I was worried over things. I cabled to my mother for some money, but there's been no reply. I'm afraid she's had difficulty in raising it. She quarreled with my father's people when I went on the stage. d.a.m.ned narrow-minded set of yokels. Furious because I wouldn't take up farming. How I hate narrow-minded people!" And with an invalid's fretful intolerance he went on grumbling at the ineradicable characteristics of an English family four thousand miles away.

"Of course something may have happened to my mother," he added. "You may be sure that if anything had those beasts would never take the trouble to write and tell me. It would be a pleasure to them if they could annoy me in any way."

A swift criticism of Arthur's att.i.tude toward the possibility of his mother's death rose to Sylvia's mind, but she repressed it, pleading with herself to excuse him because he was ill and overstrained. She was positively determined to see henceforth nothing but good in people, and in her anxiety to confirm herself in this resolve she was ready not merely to exaggerate everything in Arthur's favor, but even to twist any failure on his side into actual merit. Thus when she hastened to put her own resources at his disposal, and found him quite ready to accept without protest her help, she choked back the comparison with Jack Airdale's att.i.tude in similar circ.u.mstances, and was quite angry with herself, saying how much more naturally Arthur had received her good-will and how splendid it was to find such simplicity and sincerity.

"I'll nurse you till you're quite well, and then why shouldn't we take an engagement together somewhere?"

Arthur became enthusiastic over this suggestion.

"You've not heard me sing yet. My throat's still too weak, but you'll be surprised, Sylvia."

"I haven't got anything but a very deep voice," she told him. "But I can usually make an impression."

"Can you? Of course, where I've always been held back is by lack of money. I've never been able to afford to buy good songs."

Arthur began to sketch out for himself a most radiant future, and as he talked Sylvia thought again how incredible it was that he should be older than herself. Yet was not this youthful enthusiasm exactly what she required? It was just the capacity of Arthur's for thinking he had a future that was going to make life tremendously worth while for her, tremendously interesting--oh, it was impossible not to believe in the decrees of fate, when at the very moment of her greatest longing to be needed by somebody she had met Arthur again. She could be everything to him, tend him through his illness, provide him with money to rid himself of the charity of Mrs. Lebus and the druggist, help him in his career, and watch over his fidelity to his ambition. She remembered how, years ago at Hampstead, his mother had watched over him; she could recall every detail of the room and see Mrs. Madden interrupt one of her long sonatas to be sure Arthur was not sitting in a draught. And it had been she who had heedlessly lured him away from that tender mother. There was poetic justice in this opportunity of reparation now accorded to her. To be sure, it had been nothing but a childish escapade--reparation was too strong a word; but there was something so neat about this encounter years afterward in a place like Sulphurville. How pale he was, which, nevertheless, made him more romantic to look at; how thin and white his hands were! She took one of them in her own boy's hands, as so many people had called them, and clasped it with the affection that one gives to small helpless things, to children and kittens, an affection that is half grat.i.tude because one feels good-will rising like a sweet fountain from the depth of one's being, the freshness of which playing upon the spirit is so dear, that no words are enough to bless the wand that made the stream gush forth.

"I shall come and see you all day," said Sylvia. "But I think I ought not to break my contract at the Plutonian."

"Oh, you'll come and live here," Arthur begged. "You've no idea how horrible it is. There was a c.o.c.kroach in the soup last night, and of course there are bugs. For goodness' sake, Sylvia, don't give me hope and then dash it away from me. I tell you I've had a h.e.l.l of a time in this cursed hole. Listen to the bed; it sounds as if it would collapse at any moment. And the bugs have got on my nerves to such a pitch that I spend the whole time looking at spots on the ceiling and fancying they've moved. It's so hot, too; everything's rotted with heat. You mustn't desert me. You must come and stay here with me."

"Why shouldn't you move up to the Plutonian?" Sylvia suggested. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll get one of the doctors to come and look at you, and if he thinks it's possible you shall move up there at once. Poor boy, it really is too ghastly here."

Arthur was nearly weeping with self-pity.

"But, my dear girl, it's much worse than you think. You know those horrible birds' bath-tubs in which they bring your food at third-rate American hotels, loathsome saucers with squash and bits of grit in watery milk that they call cereals, and bony bits of chicken, well, imagine being fed like that when you're ill; imagine your bed covered with those infernal saucers. One of them always used to get left behind when Julie cleared away, and it always used to fall with a crash on the floor, and I used to wonder if the mess would tempt the c.o.c.kroaches into my room. And then Lebus used to come up and make noises in his throat and brag about Sulphurville, and I used to know by his wandering eye that he was looking for what he called the cuspidor, which I'd put out of sight. And Mrs. Lebus used to come up and suck her teeth at me until I felt inclined to strangle her."

"The sooner you're moved away the better," Sylvia said, decidedly.

"Oh yes, if you think it can be managed. But if not, Sylvia, for G.o.d's sake don't leave me alone."

"Are you really glad to see me?" she asked.

"Oh, my dear, it was like heaven opening before one's eyes!"

"Tell me about the girl you were fond of," she said, abruptly.

"What do you want to talk about her for? There's nothing to tell you, really. She had red hair."

Sylvia was glad that Arthur spoke of her with so little interest; it certainly was definitely comforting to feel the utter dispossession of that red-haired girl.

"Look here," said Sylvia. "I'm going to let these people suppose that I'm your long-lost relative. I shall pay their bill and bring the doctor down to see you. Arthur, I'm glad I've found you. Do you remember the cab-horse? Oh, and do you remember the cats in the area and the jug of water that splashed you? You were so unhappy, almost as unhappy as you were when I found you here. Have you always been treated unkindly?"

"I have had a pretty hard time," Arthur said.

"Oh, but you mustn't be sorry for yourself," she laughed.

"No, seriously, Sylvia, I've always had a lot of people against me."

"Yes, but that's such fun. You simply must be amused by life when you're with me. I'm not hard-hearted a bit, really, but you mustn't be offended with me when I tell you that really there's something a tiny bit funny in your being stranded in the Auburn Hotel, Sulphurville."

"I'm glad you think so," said Arthur, in rather a hurt tone of voice.

"Don't be cross, you foolish creature."

"I'm not a bit cross. Only I would like you to understand that my illness isn't a joke. You don't suppose I should let you pay my bills and do all this for me unless it were really something serious."

Sylvia put her hand on his mouth. "I forgive you," she murmured, "because you really are ill. Oh, Arthur, do you remember Hube? What fun everything is!"

Sylvia left him and went down-stairs to arrange matters with Mrs. Lebus.

"It was a relation, after all," she told her. "The Maddens have been related to us for hundreds of years."

"My! My! Now ain't that real queer? Oh, Scipio!"

Mr. Lebus came into view cleaning his nails with the same pen, and was duly impressed with the coincidence.

"Darned if I don't tell Pastor Gollick after next Sunday meeting. He's got a kind of hankering after the ways of Providence. Gee! Why, it's a sermonizing cinch."

There was general satisfaction in the Auburn Hotel over the payment of Arthur's bill.

"Not that I wouldn't have trusted him for another month and more," Mrs. Lebus affirmed. "But it's a satisfaction to be able to turn round and say to the neighbors, 'What did I tell you?' Folks in Sulphurville was quite sure I'd never be paid back a cent. This'll learn them!"

Mr. Lebus, in whose throat the doubts of the neighbors had gathered to offend his faith, cleared them out forever in one sonorous rauque.

The druggist's account was settled, and though, when Sylvia first heard him, he had been doubtful if his medicine was doing the patient any good, he was now most anxious that he should continue with the prescription. That afternoon one of the doctors in residence at the Plutonian visited Arthur and at once advised his removal thither.

Arthur made rapid progress when he was once out of the hospitable squalor of the Auburn Hotel, and the story of Sylvia's discovery of her unfortunate cousin became a romantic episode for all the guests of the Plutonian, a never-failing aid to conversation between wives waiting for their husbands to emerge from their daily torture at the hands of the ma.s.seurs, who lived like imps in the sulphurous glooms of the bath below; maybe it even provided the victims themselves with a sufficiently absorbing topic to mitigate the penalties of their cure.

Arthur himself expanded wonderfully as the subject of so much discussion. It gave Sylvia the greatest pleasure to see the way in which his complexion was recovering its old ruddiness and his steps their former vigor; but she did not approve of the way in which the story kept pace with Arthur's expansion. She confided to him how very personally the news of the sick Englishman had affected her and how she had made up her mind from the beginning that it was a stranded actor, and afterward, when she heard in the drug-store the name Madden, that it actually was Arthur himself. He, however, was unable to stay content with such an incomplete telepathy; indulging human nature's preference for what is not true, both in his own capacity as a liar and in his listeners' avid and wanton credulity, he transferred a woman's intimate hopes into a quack's tale.

"Then you didn't see your cousin's spirit go up in the elevator when you were standing in the lobby? Now isn't that perfectly discouraging?" complained a lady with an astral reputation in Illinois.

"I'm afraid the story's been added to a good deal," Sylvia said. "I'm sorry to disappoint the faithful."

"She's shy about giving us her experiences," said another lady from Iowa. "I know I was just thrilled when I heard it. It seemed to me the most wonderful story I'd ever imagined. I guess you felt kind of queer when you saw him lying on a bed in your room."

"He was in his own room," Sylvia corrected, "and I didn't feel at all queer. It was he who felt queer."

"Isn't she secretive?" exclaimed the lady from Illinois. "Why, I was going to ask you to write it up in our society's magazine, The Flash. We don't print any stories that aren't established as true. Well, your experience has given me real courage, Miss Scarlett. Thank you."

The astral enthusiast clasped Sylvia's hand and gazed at her as earnestly as if she had noticed a s.m.u.t on her nose.

"Yes, I'm sure we ought to be grateful," said the lady from Iowa. "My! Our footsteps are treading in the unseen every day of our lives! You certainly are privileged," she added, wrapping Sylvia in a damp mist of benign fatuity.

"I wish you wouldn't elaborate everything so," Sylvia begged of Arthur when she had escaped from the deification of the two psychical ladies. "It makes me feel so dreadfully old to see myself a.s.suming a legendary shape before my own eyes. It's as painful as being stuffed alive--stuffed alive with nonsense," she added, with a laugh.

Arthur's expansion, however, was not merely grafted on Sylvia's presentiment of his discovery in Sulphurville; he blossomed upon his own stock, a little exotically, perhaps, like the clumps of fiery cannas in the grounds of the hotel, but with a quite conspicuous effectiveness. Like the cannas, he required protection from frost, for there was a very real sensitiveness beneath all that flamboyance, and it was the knowledge of this that kept Sylvia from criticizing him at all severely. Besides, even if he did bask a little too complacently in expressions of interest and sympathy, it was a very natural reaction from his wretched solitude at the Auburn Hotel, for which he could scarcely be held culpable, least of all by herself. Moreover, was not this so visible recovery the best tribute he could have paid to her care? If he appeared to strut--for, indeed, there was a hint of strutting in his demeanor--he only did so from a sense of well-being. Finally, if any further defense was necessary, he was an Englishman among a crowd of Americans; the conditions demanded a good deal of compet.i.tive self-a.s.sertion.

Meanwhile summer was gone; the trees glowed with every shade of crimson. Sylvia could not help feeling that there was something characteristic in the demonstrative richness of the American fall; though she was far from wis.h.i.+ng to underrate its beauty, the display was oppressive. She sighed for the melancholy of the European autumn, a conventional emotion, no doubt, but so closely bound up with old a.s.sociations that she could not wish to lose it. This cremation of summer, these leafy pyrotechnics, this holocaust of color, seemed a too barbaric celebration of the year's death. It was significant that autumn with its long-drawn-out suggestion of decline should here have failed to displace fall; for there was something essentially catastrophic in this ruthless bonfire of foliage. It was not surprising that the aboriginal inhabitants should have been redskins, nor that the gorgeousness of nature should have demanded from the humanity it overwhelmed a readjustment of decorative values which superficial observers were apt to mistake for gaudy ostentation. Sylvia could readily imagine that if she had been accustomed from childhood to these crimson woods, these beefy robins, and these saucer-eyed daisies, she might have found her own more familiar landscapes merely tame and pretty; but as it was she felt dazzled and ill at ease. It's a little more and how much it is, she told herself, pondering the tantalizing similarity that was really as profoundly different as an Amazonian forest from Kensington Gardens.

Arthur's first flamboyance was much toned down by all that natural splendor; in fact, it no longer existed, and Sylvia found a freshening charm in his company amid these crimson trees and unfamiliar birds, and in this staring white hotel with its sulphurous exhalations. His complete restoration to health, moreover, was a pleasure and a pride that nothing could mar, and she found herself planning his happiness and prosperity as if she had already transferred to him all she herself hoped from life.

At the end of September the long-expected remittance arrived from Mrs. Madden, and Sylvia gathered from the letter that the poor lady had been much puzzled to send the money.

"We must cable it back to her at once," Sylvia said.

"Oh, well, now it's come, is that wise?" Arthur objected. "She may have had some difficulty in getting it, but that's over now."

"No, no. It must be cabled back to her. I've got plenty of money to carry us on till we begin to work together."

"But I can't go on accepting charity like this," Arthur protested. "It's undignified, really. I've never done such a thing before."

"You accepted it from your mother."

"Oh, but my mother's different."

"Only because she's less able to afford it than I am," Sylvia pointed out. "Look, she's sent you fifty pounds. Think how jolly it would be for her suddenly to receive fifty pounds for herself."

Arthur warmed to the idea; he could not resist the picture of his mother's pleasure, nor the kind of inverted generosity with which it seemed to endow himself. He talked away about the arrival of the money in England till it almost seemed as if he were sending his mother the acc.u.mulation of hard-earned savings to buy herself a new piano; that was the final purpose to which, in Arthur's expanding fancy, the fifty pounds was to be put. Sylvia found his att.i.tude rather boyish and charming, and they had an argument, on the way to cable the money back, whether it would be better for Mrs. Madden to buy a Bechstein or a Bluthner.

Sylvia's contract with the Plutonian expired with the first fortnight of October, and they decided to see what likelihood there was of work in New York before they thought of returning to Europe. They left Sulphurville with everybody's good wishes, because everybody owed to their romantic meeting an opportunity of telling a really good ghost story at first hand, with the liberty of individual elaboration.

New York was very welcome after Sulphurville. They pa.s.sed the wooded heights of the Hudson at dusk in a glow of somber magnificence softened by the vapors of the river. It seemed to Sylvia that scarcely ever had she contemplated a landscape of such restrained splendor, and she thought of that young New-Yorker who had preferred not to travel more than fifty miles west of his native city, though the motive of his loyalty had most improbably been the beauty of the Hudson. She wondered if Arthur appreciated New York, but he responded to her enthusiasm with the superficial complaints of the Englishman, complaints that when tested resolved themselves into conventional formulas of disapproval.

"I suppose trite opinions are a comfortable possession," Sylvia said. "But a good player does not like a piano that is too easy. You complain of the morning papers' appearing shortly after midnight, but confess that in your heart you prefer reading them in bed to reading a London evening paper, limp from being carried about in the pocket and with whatever is important in it illegible."

"But the flaring head-lines," Arthur protested. "You surely don't like them?"

"Oh, but I do!" she avowed. "They're as much more amusing than the dreary column beneath as tinned tongue is nicer than the dry undulation for which you pay twice as much. Head-lines are the poetry of journalism, and, after all, what would the Parthenon be without its frieze?"

"Of course you'd argue black was white," Arthur said.

"Well, that's a better standpoint than accepting everything as gray."

"Most things are gray."