Charles Rex Part 65

Up in the gallery Toby drew a deep breath as of one coming out of a trance, and turned towards the man beside her. The light had been turned on in the _salon_ below, and it struck upwards on her face, showing it white and weary.

"So she has found another victim!" she said.

"It seems so," said Saltash.

She looked at him in the dimness. "Did you know that--that Captain Larpent was with her?"

"No," said Saltash. He leaned forward abruptly, meeting her look with a sudden challenge. "Did you?"

She drew back sharply. "Of course not! Of course not! What--what should I know about her?"

He leaned back again without comment, and lighted another cigarette.

At the end of several seconds of silence, Toby spoke again, her locked fingers pulling against each other nervously.

"I wonder--do you mind--if I go soon? I--I am rather tired."

The lights went out as she spoke, and Saltash's face became invisible. He spoke quite kindly, but with decision, out of the darkness.

"After this dance, _ma chere_--if you desire it."

The music began--weird and mournful--and a murmur went round among the eager watchers. It was her most famous dance--the dance of Death, the most gruesome spectacle, so it was said, that any dancer had ever conceived. She came on to the stage like the flash of an arrow, dressed in black that glittered and scintillated with every amazing movement. And then it began--that most wonderful dance of hers that all the world was mad to see.

It was almost too rapid for the eye to follow in its first stages--a fever of movement--a delirium indescribable--a fantasy painful to watch, but from which no watcher could turn away. Even Saltash, who had taken small interest in the previous dance, leaned forward and gave his full attention to this, as it were in spite of himself. The very horror of it was magnetic. They seemed to look upon a death-struggle--the wild fight of a creature endowed with a fiery vitality against an enemy unseen but wholly ruthless and from the first invincible.

Those who saw that dance of Rozelle Daubeni never forgot it, and there was hardly a woman in the audience who was not destined to shudder whenever the memory of it arose. It was arresting, revolting, terrible; it must have compelled in any case. A good many began to sob with the sheer nervous horror of it, yearning for the end upon which they were forced to look, though with a dread that made the blood run cold.

But the end was such as no one in that a.s.sembly looked for. Just as the awful ecstasy of the dance was at its height, just as the dreaded crisis approached, and they saw with a gasping horror the inevitable final clutch of the unseen enemy upon his vanquished victim; just as she lifted her face in the last anguish of supplication, yielding the last hope, sinking in nerveless surrender before the implacable destroyer, there came a sudden flare of light in the _salon_, and the great crystal candelabra that hung over the end of the gallery where the man and the girl were seated watching became a dazzling sparkle of overwhelming light.

Everyone turned towards it instinctively, and Toby, hardly knowing what she did, but with the instinct to escape strong upon her, leapt to her feet.

In that moment--as she stood in the full light--the dancer's eyes also shot upwards and saw the sum young figure. It was only for a moment, but instantly a wild cry rang through the great _salon_--a cry of agony so piercing that women shrieked and trembled, hiding their faces from what they knew not what.

In the flash of a second the light was gone, the gallery again in darkness. But on the stage a woman's voice cried thrice: "Toinette!

Toinette! Toinette!" in the anguished accents of a mother who cries for her dead child, and then fell into a tragic silence more poignant than any sound--a silence that was as the silence of Death.

And in that silence a man's figure, moving with the free, athletic swing of a sailor, crossed the stage to where the dancer lay huddled in the dimness like a broken thing, lifted her--bore her away.

CHAPTER VI

THE NEW LOVER

Very late that night when all the crowds who had a.s.sembled to watch Rozelle Daubeni had dispersed with awe-struck whisperings, two men came down the great staircase into the empty vestibule and paused at the foot.

"You are leaving Paris again?" said Saltash.

The other nodded, his face perfectly emotionless, his eyes the eyes of a sailor who searches the far horizon. "There is nothing to keep me here,"

he said, and absently accepted a cigarette from the case that Saltash proffered. "I have always hated towns. I only came--" He stopped, considered a moment, and said no more.

Saltash's eyes were upon him, alert, speculative, but wholly without malice. "You came--because you were sent for," he said.

Larpent nodded twice thoughtfully, more as if in answer to some mental suggestion than as if the words had been actually uttered. He struck a match and held it for Saltash. Then, as he deliberately lighted his own cigarette, between slow puffs he spoke: "There was only--one reason on earth--that would have brought me."

"Yes?" said Saltash. He dropped into a chair with the air of a man who has limitless leisure at his disposal, but his tone was casual. He did not ask for confidence.

Larpent stood still gazing before him through the smoke with keen, unwavering eyes.

"Only one reason," he said again, and still he seemed to speak as one who communes with his inner soul. "She was dying--and she wanted me." He paused a moment, and an odd tremor went through him. "After twenty years," he said, as if in wonder at himself.

Saltash's look came swiftly upwards. "I've heard that before," he said.

"Those she caught she kept--always. No other woman was ever worth while after Rozelle."

Larpent's hand clenched instinctively, but he said nothing.

Saltash went on in the same casual tone. "She never caught me, _mon ami_.

I met her too late in life--when I was beginning to get fastidious." His monkey-like grin showed for a moment. "I appreciated her charm, but--it left me cold."

"You never saw her in her first youth," said Larpent, and into his fixed eyes there came a curious glow--the look of a man who sees a vision.

"What was she like then?" said Saltash.

Slowly the sailor answered him, word by word as one spelling out a strange language. "She was like a b.u.t.terfly that plays among the flowers in the early morning. She had the look of a boy--the wide-open eyes, the fearless way, the freedom, the daring. Her innocence--her loveliness--" Something rose unexpectedly in his throat. He stopped and swallowed hard. "My G.o.d! How lovely she was!" he said, in a strangled voice.

Saltash got up in his sudden, elastic fas.h.i.+on. "Look here! You want a drink. Sit down while I get you one!"

He was gone with the words, not waiting for the half-uttered remonstrance that the other man sent after him.

Larpent stood staring heavily before him for a s.p.a.ce, then turned with a mechanical movement and dropped into a chair. He was sitting so, bent forward, his hands clasped in front of him when Saltash returned. He had the worn, grey look of a man tired out with hard travel.

Saltash poured out a drink and held it down to him. "Here's the stuff!

Drink, man! It'll put new life into you."

Larpent drank, still in that slow, mechanical fas.h.i.+on. But as he drained the gla.s.s his eyes met Saltash's alert look and a faint, grim smile crossed his haggard features.

"Don't let me spoil your holiday, my lord!" he said.

"Don't be a d.a.m.n' fool!" said Saltash.

Larpent sat in silence for several seconds. Then in a more normal tone he spoke again. "I had to come to her. G.o.d knows what made her want me after all these years. But I couldn't refuse to come. I had her message two days ago. She said she was alone--dying. So I came." He paused and wiped his forehead. "I thought she had tricked me. You saw her as she was to-night. She was like that--full of life, superb. But--I had come to her, and I found I couldn't leave her. She wanted me--she wanted me--to take her back." He got up, but not with any agitation, and began to pace to and fro as though he paced a deck. "You will think me mad of course.

You never came under the spell. But I, I was first with her; and perhaps it was fitting that I should be the last. Had she lived--after to-night--I would have taken her away. She would never have danced again.

I would have taken her out of this d.a.m.nable world that had dragged her down. I'd have saved her somehow."

"You wouldn't," said Saltash. "It's like a recurrent fever. You'd never have held her."

"I say I would." Larpent spoke deeply, but still without emotion. "I could have done it--and no one else on earth. I tell you I was first with her, and a woman doesn't forget the first. I had a power that no other man ever possessed, or ever could possess. I was--her husband."