The maid had vanished. The big front door still stood open behind Jim. He swung towards it and looked down.
“This way, Lieutenant. The thing that must be done had better be done now.”
Rather hesitantly Zack Trowbridge mounted the steps, for the first time since Jim had met him removing his hat indoors.
“Yeah, Mr. Blake? What thing?”
“Lieutenant, would you like to meet Yvonne Brissard?”
It was Lieutenant Trowbridge’s turn to seem lowering, confused, and dubious.
“Well, now, Mr. Blake, I dunno. My wife…”
“It doesn’t matter, though. You can’t meet her; none of us can meet her.”
“Why not?”
The sky had darkened still more, as though for rain. The hall was full of shadows even before Jim closed the front door.
“Because there isn’t any Yvonne Brissard,” he answered. “At least, there isn’t any in New Orleans, wherever the real owner of the name may be.”
“Then what’s going on here? Why did you ask whether I wanted to meet her?”
“Because there’s a lady here you’re bound to meet sooner or later. It’ll be less of a shock to you both if you meet her, so to speak, under my chaperonage.”
Jill had advanced over polished hardwood. Out from the back parlor, eyes dancing and face alight with sheer enjoyment, moved with easy grace the tall, slender woman in the yellow dress.
Jim drew himself up.
“Lieutenant Trowbridge,” he said, “may I have the honor of presenting you to the distinguished British actress, Miss Constance Lambert, who as ‘Yvonne Brissard’ has played her greatest part from the end of March until almost the end of October?” He turned to Jill. “You’re her sister, aren’t you?”
14
“UNDER ANY OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, Mr. Blake,” Constance Lambert said five minutes later, “I might be annoyed with you; I might be seriously annoyed. But something this morning makes me so happy, so wonderfully happy, I couldn’t possibly be annoyed with anyone, least of all the man who did that wonderful, that so-flattering interview in Harper’s Weekly! Never mind, for the moment, what makes me so happy. You see…”
All four of them—Miss Lambert, her sister, Jim, Lieutenant Trowbridge—sat in General Clayton’s back parlor, amid the heavily carved wood, lambrequins, marble-topped tables, antimacassars, and chairs with cushions of overstuffed velvet that marked a post-Civil War splendor from the day before yesterday.
Only Constance Lambert, radiating her famous charm, seemed utterly at ease. The other three were distinctly uncomfortable, Lieutenant Trowbridge twirling his derby hat on his left knee.
“Of course,” Miss Lambert continued, “what happened to Leo was absolutely ghastly; I shall never get over that, I know. And yet at the same time—let truth be told, though the skies fall!—I am happy and I can’t help showing it. You see…”
“For heaven’s sake, Connie,” Jill burst out, not for the first time, “do let him speak at least one word, can’t you? How did you know it was Connie, Jim?”
Jim, seated on the arm of Jill’s chair, stared at the coffee-service on the table.
“I was unpardonably dense at first,” he said. “But nobody could help noticing when so many little things piled up.
“I think suspicion started with wondering how Yvonne Brissard, a notoriously disreputable character who wasn’t received anywhere, could persuade Mathilde de Jarnac Laird to rent a villa Mrs. Laird had meant for a shrine to her brother’s memory. Then, if Yvonne could find herself on such familiar terms with General and Mrs. Clayton…!
“The only explanation was that she mightn’t be disreputable at all, but ultra-reputable: someone these conservative people would have felt honored to receive if they could have done it openly. An imposture of some kind, in short; but what kind of imposture and by whom? You don’t want me to go on with this, do you?”
“By gum, Franz Josef,” said Lieutenant Trowbridge, snorting like a bull, “but that’s just what we do want and no mistake! There’ll be trouble if you don’t go on, I’m warning you! Well?”
Jim pondered.
“In England,” he replied, “I knew the world of the theatre pretty well. Not in America, where I don’t know it at all. But in London, after seven years, I’d become almost as familiar with stage people as with my own crowd in Fleet Street.
“Take Jill here, whom I first met in New York Monday morning and encountered again Monday night when I boarded the train at Washington. She wasn’t an actress; I could be sure of that. She hadn’t the theatrical air or manner, which you can’t possibly mistake in any actress you ever meet.”
“Thanks so much,” smiled Constance Lambert. “Or—always saving my presence, you mean?”
“No, Miss Lambert; I needn’t apologize. There’s nothing wrong with the theatrical manner. It may and usually does mean very good manners, as it does with you. I say only that it exists.
“Well, Jill didn’t have it. And yet, from the time that train left Washington, she kept bringing up the subject of the theatre or making gratuitous references to theatrical circles. Last night, at the Villa de Jarnac, she capped it all. When I stopped on the verge of saying something, she told me I ‘dried.’ That, Lieutenant Trowbridge, is a term they use when an actor or actress forgets the next line. You and I, not stage people, would be inclined to say ‘dry up.’ But in England, at least, they never do; they say ‘dry.’
“It had been Jill, on that train, who asked whether I knew Constance Lambert. There was also an interesting little comparison in the matter of dates, though it failed fully to register at the time. End of February: Constance Lambert leaves London, apparently for Italy. End of March: Yvonne Brissard arrives in New Orleans; the whole dance begins. And Jill has been here for seven months, too.
“Was it possible?”
Jim glanced at the actress, who had sat back comfortably with her knees crossed.
“You have a deservedly great name, Miss Lambert,” Jim went on. “You have been praised with equal warmth both by critics and by populace in every suitable vehicle from Shakespeare to Shaw. You have appeared several seasons in New York, I know, though I didn’t think you had ever appeared in New Orleans.”
“Except in my present role, I never have,” she told him delightedly. “Else I mightn’t have been able to bring it off, might I? New York, yes. That’s why Mr. Alden—but never mind. You were saying?”
“If I sought some eminent lady of the stage, admired and respected everywhere, who might be playing a prank of this sort, yours would be among the first names to occur. It did occur. Last night, when I asked somebody for a description of Yvonne Brissard, he gave so striking a description of Constance Lambert that I felt almost sure.
“Much other information disclosed itself last night. Yvonne Brissard, I heard, employed a ‘social secretary,’ who was said to have accompanied her to Alabama. And Jill, while still professing to be a stranger, knew altogether too much about the Villa de Jarnac: including the fact that those double doors of the way-through to the racetrack had been locked and barred since the new tenant took over.”
“Well, what could I be expected to say?” cried Jill. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? Go on!”
Jim put his hand lightly on her shoulder.
“There remained,” he said, “only the question of the ease with which ‘Yvonne Brissard’ had been accepted both by Mrs. Sam Laird and by the Claytons. The difficulties, however, were not really too formidable.
“Puritan prejudice against the stage was already fading when the late Sir Henry Irving received his knighthood in ’95. Today, except among the very old-fashioned, it has ceased to exist. Unfamiliar though I may be with New Orleans, parts of the South I know well. If no such prejudice is felt in the best circles of Richmond or Charleston, prejudice seemed still more unlikely here.
“And almost immediately there was confirmation. That inexorable old aristocrat, Mathilde de Jarnac Laird, has an unvarying ritual.
Every night, seeing to it that dinner is over by nine-thirty, she retires to her room and reads plays. Her fondness for the stage couldn’t have been so very secret, could it?”
“Fondness for the stage?” echoed Constance Lambert, sitting up straight. “When she was a young girl and a talented amateur (or so she says), she wanted to go on the stage professionally, only her brother wouldn’t let her. And she’s not the only one in her family with aspirations to be an artist. My dear man, if I told you everything…!”
“Everything, no doubt, will soon be clear.” Jim took up the story. “Mrs. Laird, of course, must have been in on the secret to start with. Regarding the Claytons: I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting the general or his wife. But not long ago, when I had already made up my mind and lacked only a look at the elusive ‘Yvonne Brissard,’ another witness remarked that Margot de Sancerre Clayton has a notably theatrical manner.
“An elaborate hoax, then, was being perpetrated by Miss Lambert and by Jill, undoubtedly a close friend or a relative. And Leo Shepley must have been behind it. Remembering Leo’s passion for practical jokes…”
Constance Lambert sprang to her feet and struck a pose.
“Hoax?” she scoffed. “I do protest and asseverate, from the very bottom of my heart, it was no hoax or joke! It was done for the very best possible reason, since—”
“Connie dear,” Jill interposed, “can’t you let him explain? I didn’t think I was going to like this at all, and yet…no wonder he could write The Count of Monte Carlo! Really and truly, Jim, it’s the best detective work I ever heard of!”
“I’d say it’s pretty damn good, too,” declared Lieutenant Trowbridge, making a gesture with his hat. “If he can use the same brains on the rest of the business, we oughtn’t to have much work left. And Mr. Shepley was behind the joke, was he? Was that why you wanted me to ask his aunt about the last time he went abroad? I haven’t had a chance to see Mrs. Penderel again, but was that why?”
“Yes. For whatever reason the three of them planned it, it must have been planned either in England or on the Continent, perhaps in Italy. Unfortunately, Leo had almost thrown me off the track by swearing Jill was the secretary of some nonexistent financier named Hollister. He urged me not to mention it to Jill until she told me, and I didn’t.”
“He wasn’t trying to hoax you, Jim!” the girl said with some fervency. “He only did that to shield me, because I begged him on the train to make up some explanation.
“You see, Jim, after meeting you at Harper’s on Monday morning, I had started to grow panicky. You hadn’t said much, but you had said you were a working newspaperman after a story. So I thought to myself, ‘What if it’s our story, Connie’s and mine?’ I hadn’t any reason to think that; it’s the silly, overpowering sort of fear which does jump into one’s head, and gets worse and worse as you think about it.
“Afterwards, meeting Leo on the train between New York and Washington, I begged him to think of some explanation that didn’t involve me as the ‘social secretary’ of a notorious prostitute. It was just in case you did turn up after all. Leo thought of an explanation; he did make me a secretary. And I was most awfully glad I’d consulted him—anyway, at the moment I was glad—when the train gave that great jump and I landed in your arms again. Connie and I hadn’t been doing anything against the law, of course. It was just one thing: when you looked at the situation in the cold light of reason, our whole position seemed so infantile and absurd! Doesn’t that explain whatever may have seemed odd about my conduct, either in New York or on the train?”
“Not entirely, Jill. It doesn’t explain why you wouldn’t use my drawing-room.”
Once more Constance Lambert turned on her charm.
“Doesn’t it, Jim?” she asked, dropping “Mr. Blake” for good and all. “That, I’m afraid, is a personal matter my sister had better explain to you in private. No, no, dear!” she added in haste, as Jill made an instinctive movement of protest. “I’m not going to embarrass you or tell tales out of school. However, since I’m the one best fitted to explain why I played Yvonne Brissard and had a heavenly time doing it, I had better do the explaining at once.”
Having taken the center of the stage, Constance evidently had no intention of relinquishing it. She strolled to the two windows at the back of the room and sauntered past them, for a moment as though studying the bobbles on their curtains. Then she turned back, a dream in her eyes.
“My real name, you know, is Matthews: Constance Matthews. But ‘Matthews’ wouldn’t look so well in lights, as old Benny MacFishbein insisted when I first tried out for rep. I’ve been Constance Lambert for so many years I can’t even think of myself by any other name. I’ve been very lucky, I know. And yet it’s meant work, too; God alone knows how hard I’ve worked!
“I really did go to Italy at the end of February. If you ask me nicely, Jim, I can still return and play Marcia in The Count of Monte Carlo. It’s not a bad part, and I think I might do something big with it. But at that moment I’d just had a row with George Alexander, who can be appallingly exasperating when his conceit shows; the weather in England was awful; and I felt the pressure of things had become just too much!
“Let me see, now,” she mused. “At the moment, Jim, you’re a gentleman of leisure with a successful book behind you. But you do represent Harper’s Weekly, don’t you?”
“On this occasion, yes.”
“Then you probably know Henry Mills Alden, the editor of Harper’s Magazine?”
“Yes, very well.”
“As I was saying, Jill and I went first to Rome. But there were so many British and Americans they were all over me. ‘Do this, Miss Lambert. Do that, Miss Lambert. And you will be nice about it, won’t you?’ It was worse than it is in London sometimes. So Jill and I went south to Naples. We stayed at the hotel; you know—the big one overlooking the bay, where Vesuvius seems so very close, and you see the little lights of the funicular going up the mountain at night. There were scads of visitors there as well, but the only one we took to was Leo Shepley, who seems outwardly crude and isn’t.”
“Connie—!” began Jill.
“Yes, dear, of course. I must keep reminding myself poor Leo’s dead, and in some sense it may be my fault he’s dead.”
“Connie, that’s utterly silly! You couldn’t possibly…”
“I know, dear, I know. But I have fancies of the ‘what-if’ sort, like yours. Just indulge me a little, won’t you? I’m coming to the point at once.
“We hadn’t been at the hotel more than a week when a letter from Mr. Alden was forwarded by my agent in London. It was a charming letter. He and all his friends, he said, had seen me in New York when I played Candida, and Rosalind, and Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camellias. I seemed very young to have accomplished so much and seen so much. Would I be at all interested in writing my memoirs for serialization in his magazine? If so…and so on.
“Even in that short time I’d come to be fairly well acquainted with Leo; I’m supposed to make friends easily. And one night, when the do-this, do-that brigade had been at me until I felt I could scream, I burst out a little. I said, ‘I’ve a good mind to write my autobiography. And I’ll really write it, too,’ I said, ‘and not get somebody to do the job for me. Oh,’ I said…what did I say, Jill?”
Jill arose from the chair and assumed a tragic air like her sister’s.
“‘Oh,’” Jill breathed in her soft voice, “‘if only I could have peace and quiet to do it! If only I could retire to some place where they wouldn’t be at me as soon as I showed my face in the foyer or answered a telephone! But it can’t be done in England; it can’t be done in Rome; it can’t even be done in Naples. Where might it be done?’”
Constance took up that tale.
“Leo, bless him, didn’t laugh at me; he was dead serious. ‘As long as you remain Constance Lambert,’ he said, ‘it can’t be done anywhere. Furthermore, if you tried to put on some mask of anonymity, they’d find you o
ut in less than a week. But there is a way. If you don’t mind playing one more disreputable part, in life rather than on the stage, I can tell you where and I can tell you how.’
“Then he gave me a partial history of Yvonne Brissard: who actually, it seems, has gone off to Budapest or Constantinople or somewhere with a Balkan nobleman she used to know in Paris.
“‘If you play Yvonne Brissard in New Orleans,’ he said, ‘nobody will receive you or even telephone you, or be at you in any way. But are you sure, me dear,’” and she mimicked Leo’s manner to the life, “‘are you sure you want nobody to know who you are?’ I can still see him looking at me, as though he could see farther through me than I can see through myself, and yet I can’t swear I know what he meant.”
“He meant, Connie,” Jill informed her with some intensity, “that you’ve got to have somebody to act for in private, even if you can’t do it in public on a stage!”
Constance cried out at her.
“This from you, an allegedly devoted sister? ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless kin!’ If that’s tampering with King Lear, never mind. And I forgive you, Jill, because there may be some truth in it.”
More self-mockery than pettishness gleamed in the expressive eyes.
“The fact is,” she confessed, “that none of us likes to be totally unknown wherever we go; we need sustenance for self-respect and the ego. Leo explained about the formidable old party, Mathilde Laird, who’s just fussy and pernickety, in the main; not very formidable after first acquaintance. He said she’d keep my secret if I made her promise, and rent me a beautiful house that was going begging. And the extent of that woman’s information! She’s seen Duse, she’s seen Sarah Bernhardt, she’s watched every great artist from Edwin Booth’s later years to the present; she knows more stage history than I do!”
Jim intervened. “What about the general and his wife?”
“They’ve been good friends, too. To meet ’em now, Jim, you’d never imagine that before the Civ—I mustn’t say Civil War, must I?—that as dashing youngsters before the Great Unpleasantness that couple were principal figures in a famous murder case solved by Judah P. Benjamin, the lawyer who afterwards went to England and became one of our greatest barristers. They’ve been most sympathetic and helpful, especially the general’s wife, and they are the best people. It’s tragic irony, isn’t it, that I should blunder into a murder case? And that the victim should be poor Leo himself?”
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