She read the few lines eagerly:
"Miss Cynthia Farrow, the well-known actress, was the victim of a serious motor-car accident this afternoon. Returning from the theatre, the car in which Miss Farrow was riding came into collision with a car owned by Mr. C. E. Hoskins, the well-known airman. Miss Farrow was unfortunately thrown out, and is suffering from concussion and severe bruises. Miss Farrow has been appearing at the ---- Theatre as . . . ."
Christine read no more. She did not care for the details of Cynthia Farrow's life; all she cared was that this paragraph settled for once and all her doubt about Jimmy. Of course, Jimmy could not be with her if she were ill and unconscious. She felt bitterly ashamed of her suspicion; her spirits went up like rockets; she threw the paper aside. The terrible load of care seemed lifted for a moment from her shoulders; she was asking Jimmy's pardon on her heart's knees for having ever dreamed that he would do such a thing after all his promises to her.
She opened the door and looked into the corridor. Downstairs she could hear a band playing in the lounge; it sounded inviting and cheery. She went down the stairs and found a seat in a palm-screened corner.
Jimmy had begged her to mix more with other people, and not stay in her room so much. If he came in now he would be pleased to see that she had done as he asked her, she thought with a little thrill.
She could look ahead now, and make plans for their future. She would consent to leaving London at once, and going somewhere where Cynthia Farrow's influence had never made itself felt. She would start all over again; she would be so tactful, so patient. She would win him over to her; make him love her more than he had ever loved Cynthia.
Her face glowed at the thought; her eyes shone like stars. She lost herself in happy introspection.
"Yes--rotten hard luck, isn't it?" said a voice somewhere behind her. "Just when she's on the crest of the wave, as you might say. Doubtful if she gets over it, so I hear."
Christine listened apathetically. She wondered who the voice was talking about; she half turned; trying to see the speaker, but the palms effectually screened him.
A second, less distinct voice made some remark, and the first speaker answered with a little laugh:
"Yes--dead keen, wasn't he, poor beggar; but he wasn't rich enough for her. A woman like that makes diamonds trumps every time, and not hearts, you know--eh? Poor old Jimmy--he always hated Mortlake like the devil. . . . She was in Mortlake's car when the smash occurred, you know . . . No, I don't much think she'll marry him. If she goes on at the rate she's going now, she'll be flying for higher game in a month or two. I know women of that stamp--had some myself, as you might say. . . . What--really! poor old chap! Thought he only got married the other day."
The second voice was more audible now:
"So he did; some little girl from the country, I hear. God alone knows why he did it. . . . Anyway, there can't be any affection in it, because I happen to know that Jimmy was sent for to-night. They said she asked for him as soon as she could speak. . . . Jimmy, mark you! not a bob in the world. . . ." The voice broke in a cynical laugh.
Jimmy! They were talking of Jimmy--and----
All the blood in her body seemed to concentrate suddenly in her heart, and then rush away from it, turning her faint and sick. The many lights in the big lounge seemed to twinkle and go out.
She pressed her feet hard to the floor; she shut her eyes.
After a moment she felt better; her brain began to work again stiffly.
So Jimmy was with Cynthia, after all. Jimmy had been sent for, and Jimmy had gone.
This was the end of everything; this was the end of all her dreams of happiness of the future.
She sat there for a long, long time, unconscious of her surroundings; it was only when the band had stopped playing, and a sort of silence fell everywhere, that she moved stiffly and went back up the stairs to her own room.
She stood there by the bed for a moment, looking round her with dull eyes; the clock on the mantel-shelf pointed to nine.
Too late to go away to-night. Was it too late? A sudden memory leapt to her mind.
Jimmy and she had gone down to Upton House by a train later than this the day after her mother died. She tried to remember; it had been the nine-fifty from Euston, she was sure. She made a rapid calculation; she could catch that if she was quick--catch it if she hurried. She threw off her slippers; she began to collect a few things together in a handbag; her breath was coming fast--her heart was racing. She would never come back any more--never live with him again. She had lost her last shred of trust in him--she no longer loved him.
She was pinning on her hat with shaking fingers when someone tried the handle of the door--someone called her name softly.
"Christine . . ." It was Jimmy.
She stood quite still, hardly daring to breathe. She pressed her hands over her lips, as if afraid that he would hear the quick beating of her frightened heart.
"Christine . . ." He waited a moment, then she heard him saying something under his breath impatiently; another second, and he turned away to the sitting-room opposite.
She heard him moving about there for some time; she looked at the clock. Almost too late to go now; a fever of impatience consumed her.
If only he had not come back--if only she had gone sooner.
She turned out the light, and softly, an inch at a time, opened the door. There was a light burning in the sitting-room; there was a smell of cigarette smoke. Jimmy was still there.
She wondered if she could get away without him hearing her; she tiptoed back into the room, took up her bag from the bed, and crept again to the door.
The floor seemed to creak at every step. Half a dozen times she stopped, frightened; then suddenly the half-closed door of the sitting-room opposite opened, and Jimmy came out.
He was in evening-dress; he still wore a loose overcoat.
For a moment he stared at her blankly. The lights had been lowered a little in the corridor, and at first he was not sure if it was she. Then he strode across to her and caught her by the wrist in a not very gentle grip.
"Where are you going?" he asked roughly.
She cowered back from him against the wall; her face was white, but her eyes blazed at him in passionate defiance.
"I am going away. Let me go. I am never coming back any more."
He half led, half dragged her into the sitting-room; he put his back to the door, and stood looking at her, white-faced, silent.
The breath was tearing from his throat; he seemed afraid to trust himself to speak.
Presently:
"Why?" he asked hoarsely.
Christine was standing against the table, one trembling hand resting on it; she was afraid of him and of the white passion in his face, but she faced him bravely.
"I am never going to live with you any more. I--I wish I had never seen you."
Even her voice seemed to have changed; he realized it dully, and the knowledge added to his anger. She no longer spoke in the half-trembling childish way he remembered; there was something more grown-up and womanly about her.
"Don't be a little fool," he said roughly. "What is the matter? What have I done now? I'm sick to death of these scenes and heroics; for God's sake try and behave like a rational woman. Do you want the whole hotel to know that we've quarrelled?"
"They know already," she told him fiercely.
He came nearer to her.
"Take off your hat and coat, Christine, and don't be absurd. Why, we've only been married a little more than a week." His voice was quieter and more gentle. "What's the matter? Let's sit down and talk things over quietly. I've something to tell you. I wanted to see you to-night; I came to your door just now."
"I know--I heard you."
"Very well; what's it all about? What have I done to upset you like this?"
She shut her eyes for a moment. When he spoke to her so kindly it almost broke her heart; it brought back so vividly the boy sweetheart whom she had never reall
y forgotten. And yet this Jimmy was not the Jimmy she had known in those happy days, This Jimmy only looked at her with the same eyes; in reality he was another man--a stranger whom she feared and almost hated.
He took her hand.
"Christine--are you ill?"
She opened her eyes; they were blazing.
The touch of his fingers on hers seemed to drive her mad.
"Yes," she said shrilly, "I am--ill because of you and your lies, and your hateful deception; ill because you've broken my heart and ruined my life. You swore to me that you'd never see Cynthia Farrow again. You swore to me that it was all over and done with; and now--now----"
"Yes--now," said Jimmy; his voice was hoarse and strained. "Yes--and now," he said again, as she did not answer.
She wrenched herself free.
"You've been with her this evening. You've left me alone here all these hours to be with her. I don't count at all in your life. I don't know why you married me, unless it was to--to pay her out. I wish I'd never seen you. I wish I'd died before I ever married you. I wish--oh, I wish I could die now," she ended in a broken whisper.
Jimmy had fallen back a step; he was no longer looking at her. There was a curious expression of shocked horror in his, eyes as they stared past his wife into the silent room.
Presently:
"She's dead," he said hoarsely. "Cynthia Farrow is dead."
CHAPTER XIV
BITTERNESS
"Dead!" Christine echoed Jimmy's hoarse word in a dull voice, not understanding. "Dead!" she said again blankly.
He moved away from the door; he dropped into a chair and hid his face in his hands.
There was a moment of absolute silence.
Christine stared at Jimmy's bowed head with dull eyes.
She was trying to force her brain to work, but she could not; she was only conscious of a faint sort of curiosity as to whether Jimmy were lying to her; but somehow he did not look as if he were. She tried to speak to him, but no words would come.
Suddenly he raised his head; he was very pale. "Well?" he said defiantly.
His eyes were hard and full of hurt; hurt because of another woman, Christine told herself, in furious pain; hurt because the woman he had really and truly loved had gone out of his life for ever.
She tried to say that she was sorry, but the words seemed to choke her--she was not sorry; she was glad. She was passionately glad that the beautiful woman whom she had at first so ardently admired was now only a name between them.
"So you've no need to be jealous any more," said Jimmy Challoner, after a moment.
No need to be jealous! There was still the same need; death cannot take memory away with it. Christine felt as if the dead woman were more certainly between them now, keeping them apart, than ever before.
The silence fell again; then suddenly Christine moved to the door.
Jimmy caught her hand.
"Where are you going? Don't be a little fool. It's ever so late; you can't leave the hotel to-night."
"I am not going to stay here with you." She did not look at him; did not even faintly guess how much he was longing for a kind word, a little sympathy. He had had the worst shock of his inconsequent life when, in reply to that urgent summons, he had raced round to Cynthia Farrow's flat, and found that he was too late.
"She died ten minutes ago."
Only ten minutes! Jimmy had stared blankly at the face of the weeping maid, and then mechanically taken his watch from his pocket and looked at it. Only ten minutes! If he had not had to hang about for a taxi he would have been in time to have seen her.
Now he would never see her again; as yet he had had no time in which to analyse his feelings; he was numbed with the shock of it all; he listened like a man in a dream to the details they told him. It passed him by unmoved that she had been in Mortlake's car when the accident occurred; it had conveyed nothing to his mind when they told him that the only words she had spoken during her brief flash of consciousness had been to ask for him.
As he stood there in the familiar scented pink drawing-room, his thoughts had flown with odd incongruity to Christine.
She would be kind to him--she would be sorry for him; his whole heart and soul had been on fire to get back to her--to get away from the harrowing silence of the flat which had always been associated in his mind with fun and laughter, and the happiest days of his life.
A fur coat of Cynthia's lay across a chair-back; so many times he had helped her slip into it after her performance at the theatre was ended. He knew so well the faint scent that always clung to it; he shuddered and averted his eyes. She would never wear it again; she was dead! He wondered what would become of it--what would become of all her clothes, and her jewelry and her trinkets.
Suddenly, in the middle of more details, he had turned and rushed blindly away. It was not so much grief as a sort of horror at himself that drove him; he felt as if someone had forced him to look on a past folly--a folly of which he was now ashamed.
He had thought of Christine with a sort of passionate thankfulness and gratitude; and now there was nothing but dislike and contempt for him in her brown eyes. Somehow she seemed like a different woman to the one whom he had so lightly wooed and won such a little while ago. She looked older--wiser; the childishness of her face seemed to have hardened; it was no longer the little girl Christine who faced him in the silent room.
He broke out again urgently:
"Don't be absurd, Christine. I won't have it, I tell you, I forbid you to leave the hotel. After all, you're my wife--you must do as I wish." She seemed not to hear him; she stood with her eyes fixed straight in front of her.
"Please let me go."
"Where are you going? You're my wife--you'll have to stay with me." His hand was on the door handle now; he was looking down at her with haggard eyes in his white face.
"Let's begin all over again, Christine. I've been a rotter, I know; but if you'll have a little patience--it's not too late--we can patch things up, and--and I'll promise you----"
She cut him short.
"You are saying this because she is dead. If she were living you would not care what I did, or what became of me." Suddenly her voice changed wildly. "Oh, let me go--let me go!"
For a moment their glances met, and for the first time in his spoilt and pampered life Jimmy Challoner saw hatred looking at him through a woman's eyes. It drove the hot blood to his head; he was unnerved with the shock he had suffered that evening. For a moment he saw the world red; he lifted his clenched fist.
"Go, then--and a damned good riddance!"
"Jimmy!" Her scream of terror stayed his hand, and kept him from striking her. He staggered back, aghast at the thing he had so nearly done.
"Christine--Christine----" he stammered; but she had gone. The shutting and locking of her bedroom door was his only answer.
CHAPTER XV
SANGSTER SPEAKS IN RIDDLES
Sangster heard of Cynthia Farrow's death late that night.
He was walking up Fleet Street when he ran into a man he knew--a man whom Jimmy knew also; he stopped and caught him by his buttonhole.
"I say, have you heard--awful thing, isn't it?"
Sangster stared.
"Heard! Heard what?"
"About Cynthia Farrow. Had a frightful accident--in Mortlake's car."
Sangster's eyes woke to interest.
"Badly hurt?" he asked briefly.
"Dead!"
"My God!" There was a moment of tragic silence. "Dead!" said Sangster again. He could not believe it; his face was very pale. "Dead!" he said again. His thoughts flew to Jimmy Challoner. "Are you sure?" he asked urgently. "There's no mistake--you're quite sure?"
"Sure! Man alive, it's in all the papers! They've all got hold of a different story, of course; some say she never recovered consciousness, and others----" He lowered his voice. "I happen to know that she did," he added confidentially. "She sent for Challoner, and he was with her when she died."
"Challoner--Jimmy Challoner!" Sangster repeated his friend's name dully. The one shocked thought of his heart was "Christine."
"I always knew she really liked him," the other man went on complacently. "If he'd had Mortlake's money----" He shrugged his shoulders significantly.
Sangster waited to hear no more; he went straight to Jimmy's hotel. It was late then--nearly eleven. The hall porter said in reply to his inquiry that Mr. and Mrs. Challoner had both been in all the evening, he thought, and were still in; he looked at Sangster's agitated face curiously.
"Was you wishing to see Mr. Challoner, sir?"
"No--oh, no. I only thought--you need not tell him that I called." He went away wretchedly; he wondered if Christine knew--and if so, what she must be thinking.
He never slept all night. He was on the 'phone to Jimmy long before breakfast; he was infinitely relieved to hear Jimmy's voice.
"Hallo--yes, I'm all right, thanks. Want to see me? Well----"
There was a pause here. Sangster waited in a fever of impatience. After a moment:
"I'll meet you for lunch, if you like. . . . No, can't before. . . . What do you say? Christine? Oh, yes--yes, thanks; she's very well."
There was another pause. "One o'clock, then."
Jimmy rang off.
Sangster felt easier as he sat down to his breakfast. Jimmy's voice had sounded fairly normal, if a little constrained; and it was not such a very long time till one o'clock, when he would hear all there was to hear.
He forced himself to work all the morning. He did not even glance at a paper; he knew they would be full of Cynthia Farrow's accident and tragic death; he dreaded lest there might be some inadvertent allusion made to Jimmy. He was still hoping that Christine would never know that Jimmy had been sent for; he rightly guessed that if she heard it would mean a long farewell to any hope of happiness in her married life.
Jealousy--bitter jealousy; that was what had been rending her heart, he knew. He stopped writing; he took up a pencil, and absently began scribbling on his blotter.
If Cynthia were out of the way, there was no reason why, in time, Jimmy and his wife should not be perfectly happy. He hoped with all his heart that they would be; he would have given a great deal to have seen Christine smiling and radiant once more, as she had been that night when they all had supper at Marino's.
The Second Honeymoon Page 10