The Ghost by Arnold Bennett (best ereader for students txt) 📖

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"Her half-sister isn't quite so harmless. She is the daughter of a Spanish mother, while Marie is the daughter of an English mother, a Cockney woman. As to Carlotta, when I was younger"--oh, the deliciously aged air with which this creature of twenty-three referred to her youth--"I was singing at the Opera Comique in Paris, where Carlotta was starring, and I had the misfortune to arouse her jealousy. She is frightfully jealous, and get worse as she gets older. She swore to me that if I ever dared to appear at the Comique again she would have me killed. I laughed. I forgot the affair, but it happens that I never have sung at the Comique since that time. And now that I am not merely to appear at the Comique, but am going to sing 'Carmen' there, her own particular role, Deschamps is furious. I firmly believe she means harm. Twice she has written to me the most formidable threats. It seems strange that I should stand in awe of a woman like Carlotta Deschamps, but so it is. I am half-inclined to throw up the engagement."

That a girl of Rosa's spirit should have hesitated for an instant about fulfilling her engagement showed most plainly, I thought, that she was not herself. I assured her that her fears were groundless, that we lived in the nineteenth century, and that Deschamps' fury would spend itself in nothing worse than threats. In the end she said she would reconsider the matter.

"Don't wait to reconsider," I urged, "but set off for Paris at once. Go to-day. Act. It will do you good."

"But there are a hundred things to be thought of first," she said, laughing at my earnestness.

"For example?"

"Well, my jewels are with my London bankers."

"Can't you sing without jewels?"

"Not in Paris. Who ever heard of such a thing?"

"You can write to your bankers to send them by registered post."

"Post! They are worth thousands and thousands of pounds. I ought really to fetch them, but there would scarcely be time."

"Let me bring them to you in Paris," I said. "Give me a letter to your bankers, and I will undertake to deliver the jewels safely into your hands."

"I could not dream of putting you to so much trouble."

The notion of doing something for her had, however, laid hold of me. At that moment I felt that to serve even as her jewel-carrier would be for me the supreme happiness in the world.

"But," I said, "I ask it as a favor."

"Do you?" She gave me a divine smile, and yielded.

At her request we did not leave the church together. She preceded me. I waited a few minutes, and then walked slowly out. Happening to look back as I passed along the square, I saw a woman's figure which was familiar to me, and, dominated by a sudden impulse, I returned quickly on my steps. The woman was Yvette, and she was obviously a little startled when I approached her.

"Are you waiting for your mistress?" I said sharply. "Because...."

She flashed me a look.

"Did monsieur by any chance imagine that I was waiting for himself?"

There was a calm insolence about the girl which induced me to retire from that parley.

In two hours I was on my way to London.


CHAPTER IX


THE TRAIN

The boat-train was due to leave in ten minutes, and the platform at Victoria Station (how changed since then!) showed that scene of discreet and haughty excitement which it was wont to exhibit about nine o'clock every evening in those days. The weather was wild. It had been wet all day, and the rain came smashing down, driven by the great gusts of a genuine westerly gale. Consequently there were fewer passengers than usual, and those people who by choice or compulsion had resolved to front the terrors of the Channel passage had a preoccupied look as they hurried importantly to and fro amid piles of luggage and groups of loungers on the wind-swept platform beneath the flickering gas-lamps. But the porters, and the friends engaged in the ceremony of seeing-off, and the loungers, and the bookstall clerks--these individuals were not preoccupied by thoughts of intimate inconveniences before midnight. As for me, I was quite alone with my thoughts. At least, I began by being alone.

As I was registering a particularly heavy and overfed portmanteau to Paris, a young woman put her head close to mine at the window of the baggage-office.

"Mr. Foster? I thought it was. My cab set down immediately after yours, and I have been trying to catch your eye on the platform. Of course it was no go!"

The speech was thrown at me in a light, airy tone from a tiny, pert mouth which glistened red behind a muslin veil.

"Miss Deschamps!" I exclaimed.

"Glad you remember my name. As handsome and supercilious as ever, I observe. I haven't seen you since that night at Sullivan's reception. Why didn't you call on me one Sunday? You know I asked you to."

"Did you ask me?" I demanded, secretly flattered in the extremity of my youthfulness because she had called me supercilious.

"Well, rather. I'm going to Paris--and in this weather!"

"I am, too."

"Then, let's go together, eh?"

"Delighted. But why have you chosen such a night?"

"I haven't chosen it. You see, I open to-morrow at the Casino de Paris for fourteen nights, and I suppose I've got to be there. You wouldn't believe what they're paying me. The Diana company is touring in the provinces while the theatre is getting itself decorated. I hate the provinces. Leeds and Liverpool and Glasgow--fancy dancing there! And so my half-sister--Carlotta, y'know--got me this engagement, and I'm going to stay with her. Have you met Carlotta?"

"No--not yet." I did not add that I had had reason to think a good deal about her.

"Well, Carlotta is--Carlotta. A terrific swell, and a bit of a Tartar. We quarrel every time we meet, which isn't often. She tries to play the elder sister game on me, and I won't have it. Though she is elder--very much elder, you now. But I think her worst point is that she's so frightfully mysterious. You can never tell what she's up to. Now, a man I met at supper last night told me he thought he had seen Carlotta in Bloomsbury yesterday. However, I didn't believe that, because she is expecting me in Paris; we happen to be as thick as thieves just now, and if she had been in London, she would have looked me up."

"Just so," I replied, wondering whether I should endeavor to obtain from Marie Deschamps information which would be useful to Rosa.

By the time that the star of the Diana had said goodbye to certain male acquaintances, and had gone through a complicated dialogue with her maid on the subject of dress-trunks, the clock pointed almost to nine, and a porter rushed us--Marie and myself--into an empty compartment of a composite coach near to the engine. The compartment was first class, but it evidently belonged to an ancient order of rolling stock, and the vivacious Marie criticized it with considerable freedom. The wind howled, positively howled, in the station.

"I wish I wasn't going," said the lady. "I shall be horribly ill."

"You probably will," I said, to tease her, idly opening the Globe. "It seems that the morning steamer from Calais wasn't able to make either Dover or Folkestone, and has returned to Calais. Imagine the state of mind of the passengers!"

"Ugh! Oh, Mr. Foster, what is that case by your side?"

"It is a jewel-case."

"What a big one!"

She did not conceal her desire to see the inside of it, but I felt that I could not, even to satisfy her charming curiosity, expose the interior of Rosa's jewel-case in a railway carriage, and so I edged away from the topic with as much adroitness as I was capable of.

The pretty girl pouted, and asked me for the Globe, behind which she buried herself. She kept murmuring aloud extracts from the Globe's realistic description of the weather, and then she jumped up.

"I'm not going."

"Not going?"

"No. The weather's too awful. These newspaper accounts frighten me."

"But the Casino de Paris?"

"A fig for it! They must wait for me, that's all. I'll try again to-morrow. Will you mind telling the guard to get my boxes out, there's a dear Mr. Foster, and I'll endeavor to find that maid of mine?"

The train was already five minutes late in starting; she delayed it quite another five minutes, and enjoyed the process. And it was I who meekly received the objurgations of porters and guard. My reward was a smile, given with a full sense of its immense value.

"Good-by, Mr. Foster. Take care of your precious jewel-case."

I had carried the thing in my hand up and down the platform. I ran to my carriage, and jumped in breathless as the train whistled.

"Pleasant journey!" the witch called out, waving her small hand to me.

I bowed to her from the window, laughing. She was a genial soul, and the incident had not been without amusement.

After I had shut the carriage door, and glanced out of the window for a moment in the approved way, I sank, faintly smiling at the episode, into my corner, and then I observed with a start that the opposite corner was occupied. Another traveller had got into the compartment while I had been coursing about the platform on behalf of Marie, and that traveller was the mysterious and sinister creature whom I had met twice before--once in Oxford Street, and once again during the night watch in the cathedral at Bruges. He must have made up his mind to travel rather suddenly, for, in spite of the weather, he had neither overcoat nor umbrella--merely the frock coat and silk hat of Piccadilly. But there was no spot of rain on him, and no sign of disarray.

As I gazed with alarmed eyes into the face of that strange, forbidding personality, the gaiety of my mood went out like a match in a breeze. The uncomfortable idea oppressed me that I was being surely caught and enveloped in a net of adverse circumstances, that I was the unconscious victim of a deep and terrible conspiracy which proceeded slowly forward to an inevitable catastrophe. On each of the previous occasions when this silent and malicious man had crossed my path I had had the same feeling, but in a less degree, and I had been able to shake it off almost at once. But now it overcame and conquered me.

The train thundered across Grosvenor Bridge through the murky weather on its way to the coast, and a hundred times I cursed it for its lack of speed. I would have given much to be at the journey's end, and away from this motionless and inscrutable companion. His eyes were constantly on my face, and do what I would I could not appear at ease. I tried to read the paper, I pretended to sleep, I hummed a tune, I even went so far as to whistle, but my efforts at sang-froid were ridiculous. The worst of it was that he was aware of my despicable condition; his changeless cynical smile made that fact obvious to me.

At last I felt that something must happen. At any rate, the silence