The maid strove to think of some phrase that would describe the visitor, but she fell back hopelessly upon her original statement.
"She's a lady, miss." Then, with a sudden radiancy lighting her eyes, she added, "And there's a little boy with her."
"My entertainment seems to be turning into a children's treat," Sylvia muttered to herself. "_Sic itur ad astra._"
"I beg your pardon, miss, did you say to show her in?"
Sylvia nodded.
Presently a tall young woman in the late twenties, with large and brilliant gray eyes, rose-flushed and deep in furs, came in, accompanied by an extraordinarily handsome boy of seven or eight.
"How awfully good of you to let me waste a few minutes of your time,"
she said, and as she spoke, Sylvia had a fleeting illusion that it was herself who was speaking, a sensation infinitely rapid, but yet sufficiently clear to make her ask herself the meaning of it, and to find in the stranger's hair the exact replica of her own. The swift illusion and the equally swift comparison were fled before she had finished inviting her visitor to sit down.
"I must explain who I am. I've heard about you, oh, of course, publicly, but also from my brother."
"Your brother?" repeated Sylvia.
"Yes, Michael Fane."
"He's not with you?"
"No. I wish he had been. Alas! he's gone off to look for a friend who, by the way, I expect you know also. Maurice Avery? All sorts of horrid rumors about what had happened to him in Morocco were being brought back to us, so Michael went off last spring, and has been with him ever since."
"But I thought he was a monk," Sylvia said.
Mrs. Merivale laughed with what seemed rather like relief. "No, he's neither priest nor monk, thank goodness, though the prospect still hangs over us."
"After all these years?" Sylvia asked, in astonishment.
"Oh, my dear Miss Scarlett, don't forget the narrow way is also long.
But I didn't come to talk to you about Michael. I simply most shamelessly availed myself of his having met you a long time ago to give myself an excuse for talking to you about your performance. Of course it's absolutely great. How lucky you are!"
"Lucky?" Sylvia could not help glancing at the handsome boy beside her.
"He's rather a lamb, isn't he?" Mrs. Merivale agreed. "But you started all sorts of old, forgotten, hidden-away, burned-out fancies of mine this afternoon, and--you see, I intended to be a professional pianist once, but I got married instead. Much better, really, because, unless--Oh, I don't know. Yes, I _am_ jealous of you. You've picked me up and put me down again where I was once. Now the conversation's backed into me, and I really do want to talk about you. Your performance is the kind about which one wonders why nobody ever did it before. That's the greatest compliment one can pay an artist, I think. All great art is the great expression of a great commonplace; that's why it always looks so easy. I do hope you're having the practical success you deserve."
"Yes, I think I shall be all right," Sylvia said. "Only, I expect that after the New-Year I shall have to cut my show considerably and take a music-hall engagement. I'm not making a fortune at the Pierian."
"How horrid for you! How I should love to play with you! Oh dear! It's heartrending to say it, but it's much too late. Well, I mustn't keep you. You've given me such tremendous pleasure and just as much pain with it as makes the pleasure all the sharper.... I'll write and tell Michael about you."
"I expect he's forgotten my name by now," Sylvia said.
"Oh no, he never forgets anybody, even in the throes of theological speculation. Good-by. I see that this is your last performance for the present. I shall come and hear you again when you reopen. How odious about music-halls. You ought to have called yourself Silvia Scarletti, told your press agent that you were the direct descendant of the composer, vowed that when you came to England six months ago you could speak nothing but Polish, and you could have filled the Pierian night and day for a year. We're queer people, we English. I think, you know, it's a kind of shyness, the way we treat native artists. You get the same thing in families. It's not really that the prophet has no honor, etc.; it really is, I believe, a fear of boasting, which would be such bad form, wouldn't it? Of course we've ruined ourselves as a nation by our good manners and our sense of humor. Why, we've even insisted that what native artists we do support shall be gentlemen first and artists second. In what other country could an actor be knighted for his trousers or an author for his wife's dowry? Good-by. I do wish you great, great success."
"Anyway, I can't be knighted," Sylvia laughed.
"Oh, don't be too sure. A nation that has managed to turn its artists into gentlemen will soon insist on turning its women into gentlemen, too, or at any rate on securing their good manners in some way."
"Women will never really have good manners," Sylvia said.
"No, thank God. There you're right. Well, good-by. It's been so jolly to talk to you, and again I've loved every moment of this afternoon.
Charles," she added to the handsome boy, "after bragging about your country's good manners, let's see you make a decent bow."
He inclined his head with a grave courtesy, opened the door for his mother, and followed her out.
The visit of Michael's sister, notwithstanding that she had envied Sylvia's luck, left her with very little opinion of it herself. What was her success, after all? A temporary elation dependent upon good health and the public taste, financially uncertain, emotionally wearing, radically unsatisfying and insecure, for, however good her performance was, it was always mummery, really, as near as mummery could get to creative work, perhaps, but mortal like its maker.
"Sad to think this is the last performance here," said her maid.
Sylvia agreed with her. It was a relief to find a peg on which to hang the unreasonable depression that was weighing her down. She passed out of her dressing-room. As the stage door swung to behind her a figure stepped into the lamplight of the narrow court; it was Jimmy Monkley.
The spruceness had left him; all the color, too, had gone from his face, which was now sickly white--an evil face with its sandy mustache streaked with gray and its lusterless green eyes. Sylvia was afraid that from the way she started back from him he would think that she scorned him for having been in prison, and with an effort she tried to be cordial.
"You've done damned well for yourself," he said, paying no attention to what she was saying. She found this meeting overwhelmingly repulsive and moved toward her taxi. It was seeming to her that Monkley had the power to snatch her away and plunge her back into that life of theirs. She would really rather have met Philip than him.
"Damned well for yourself," he repeated.
"I'm sorry I can't stay. I'm in a hurry. I'm in a hurry."
She reached the taxi and slammed the door in his face.
This unexpected meeting convinced Sylvia of the necessity of attaching herself finally to a life that would make the resurrection of a Monkley nothing more influential than a nightmare. She knew that she was giving way to purely nervous fears in being thus affected by what, had she stopped to think, was the natural result of her name's becoming known.
But the liability to nervous fears was in itself an argument that something was wrong. When had she ever been a prey to such hysteria before? When had she allowed herself to be haunted by a face, as now she was being haunted by Monkley's face? Suppose he had seated himself behind the taxi and that when she reached the Airdales' house he should once more be standing on the pavement in the lamplight?
In Brompton Road Sylvia told the driver to stop. She wanted to do some Christmas shopping. After an hour or more spent among toys she came out with a porter loaded with packages, and looked round her quickly; but of course he was not upon the pavement. How absurd she had been! In any case, what could Monkley do? She would forget all about him. To-morrow was Christmas Eve. There was going to be such a jolly party at the Airdales'. The taxi hummed toward West Kensington. Sylvia leaned back, huddled up with her thoughts, until they reached Lillie Road. She had passed Mrs. Meares's house so many times without giving it a second look. Now she found herself peering out into the thickening fog in case Monkley should be standing upon the door-step. She was glad when she reached the Airdales' house, warm and bright, festooned with holly and mistletoe. There were pleasant little household noises everywhere, comfortable little noises, and a rosy glow from the silken shades of the lamps; the carpet was so quiet and the parlor-maid in a clean cap and apron so efficient, so quick to get in all the parcels and shut out the foggy night.
Olive was already in the drawing-room, and because this was to be a specially unceremonious evening in preparation for the party to-morrow, Olive was in a pink tea-gown that blended with the prettiness of her cozy house and made her more essentially a part of it all. How bleak was her own background in comparison with this, Sylvia thought. Jack was dining out most unwillingly and had left a great many pleas to be forgiven by Sylvia on the first night of her Christmas visit. After dinner they sat in the drawing-room, and Sylvia told Olive about her meeting with Monkley. She said nothing about Michael Fane's sister; that meeting did not seem to have any bearing upon the subject she wanted to discuss.
"Can you understand," Sylvia asked, "being almost frightened into marriage?"
"Yes, I think so," Olive replied, as judicially as the comfort of her surroundings would allow. It was impossible to preserve a critical attitude in this room; in such a suave and genial atmosphere one accepted anything.
"Well, do you still object to my marrying Arthur?" Sylvia demanded.
"But, my dear, I never objected to your marrying him. I may have suggested, when I first saw him, that he seemed rather too much the type of the ordinary actor for you, but that was only because you yourself had always scoffed at actors so haughtily. Since I've known him I've grown to like him. Please don't think I ever objected to your marrying him. I never felt more sure about anybody's knowing her own mind than I do about you."
"Well, I am going to marry him," Sylvia said.
"Darling Sylvia, why do you say it so defiantly? Everybody will be delighted. Jack was talking only the other day about his perpetual dread that you'd never give yourself a chance of establishing your position finally, because you were so restless."
Sylvia contemplated an admission to Olive of having lived with Arthur for a year in America, but in this room the fact had an ugly look and seemed to belong rather to that evil face of the past that had confronted her with such ill omen this evening, rather than to anything so homely as marriage.
"Arthur may not be anything more than an actor," she went on. "But in my profession what else do I want? He has loved me for a long time; I'm very fond of him. It's essential that I should have a background so that I shall never be shaken out of my self-possession by anything like this evening's encounter. I've lived a life of feverish energy, and it's only since the improvisations that I can begin to believe it wasn't all wasted. I made a great mistake when I was seventeen, and when I was nineteen I tried to repair it with a still greater mistake. Then came Lily; she was a mistake. Oh, when I look back at it all, it's nothing but mistake after mistake. I long for such funny ordinary little pleasures. Olive darling, I've tried, I've tried to think I can do without love, without children, without family, without friends. I can't."
The tears were running swiftly, and all the time more swiftly, down Sylvia's cheeks while she was speaking. Olive jumped up from her soft and quilted chair and knelt beside her friend.
"My darling Sylvia, you have friends, you have, indeed you have."
"I know," Sylvia went on. "It's ungrateful of me. Why, if it hadn't been for you and Jack I should have gone mad. But just because you're so happy together, and because you have Sylvius and Rose, and because I flit about on the outskirts of it all like a timid, friendly, solitary ghost, I must have some one to love me. I've really treated Arthur very badly. I've kept him waiting now for a year. I wasn't brave enough to let him go, and I wasn't brave enough to marry him. I've never been undecided in my life. It must be that the gipsy in me has gone forever, I think. This success of mine has been leading all the time to settling down properly. Most of the people who came back to me out of the past were the nice people, like my old mistress and the grown-up twins, and I want to be like them. Oh, Olive, I'm so tired of being different, of people thinking that I'm hard and brutal and cynical. I'm not. Indeed I'm not. I couldn't have felt that truly appalling horror of Monkley this evening if I were really bad."