Second Latchkey

Williamson, Charles Norris

• Publisher: pubOne.info
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9782819901723
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Even when Annesley Grayle turned out of the Strand toward the Savoy she was uncertain whether she would have courage to walk into the hotel. With each step the thing, the dreadful thing, that she had come to do, loomed blacker. It was monstrous, impossible, like opening the door of the lions' cage at the Zoo and stepping inside.

CHAPTER I

  A WHITE ROSE

  Even when Annesley Grayle turned out of the Strand toward the Savoy she was uncertain whether she would have courage to walk into the hotel. With each step the thing, the dreadful thing, that she had come to do, loomed blacker. It was monstrous, impossible, like opening the door of the lions' cage at the Zoo and stepping inside.

  There was time still to change her mind. She had only to turn now ... jump into an omnibus ... jump out again at the familiar corner, and everything would be as it had been. Life for the next five, ten, maybe twenty years, would be what the last five had been.

  At the thought of the Savoy and the adventure waiting there, the girl's skin had tingled and grown hot, as if a wind laden with grains of heated sand had blown over her. But at the thought of turning back, of going "home" – oh, misused word! – a leaden coldness shut her spirit into a tomb.

  She had walked fast, after descending at Bedford Street from a fierce motor-bus with a party of comfortable people, bound for the Adelphi Theatre. Never before had she been in a motor-omnibus, and she was not sure whether the great hurtling thing would deign to stop, except at trysting-places of its own; so it had seemed wise to bundle out rather than risk a snub from the conductor, who looked like pictures of the Duke of Wellington.

  But in the lighted Strand she had been stared at as well as jostled: a girl alone at eight o'clock on a winter evening, bare-headed, conspicuously tall if conspicuous in no other way; dressed for dinner or the theatre in a pale gray, sequined gown under a mauve chiffon cloak meant for warm nights of summer.

  Of course, as Mrs. Ellsworth (giver of dress and wrap) often pointed out, "beggars mustn't be choosers"; and Annesley Grayle was worse off than a beggar, because beggars needn't keep up appearances. She should have thanked Heaven for good clothes, and so she did in chastened moods; but it was a costume to make a girl hurry through the Strand, and just for an instant she had been glad to turn from the white glare into comparative dimness.

  That was because offensive eyes had made her forget the almost immediate future in the quite immediate present. But the hotel, with light-hearted taxis tearing up to it, brought remembrance with a shock. She envied everyone else who was bound for the Savoy, even old women, and fat gentlemen with large noses. They were going there because they wanted to go, for their pleasure. Nobody in the world could be in such an appalling situation as she was.

  It was then that Annesley's feet began to drag, and she slowed her steps to gain more time to think. Could she – could she do the thing?

  For days her soul had been rushing toward this moment with thousand-horsepower speed, like a lonely comet tearing through space. But then it had been distant, the terrible goal. She had not had to gasp among her heart-throbs: "Now! It is now!"

  Creep as she might, three minutes' brought her from the turning out of the Strand close to the welcoming entrance where revolving doors of glass received radiant visions dazzling as moonlight on snow. "No, I can't!" the girl told herself, desperately. She wheeled more quickly than the whirling door, hoping that no one would think her mad. "All the same, I was mad," she admitted, "to fancy I could do it. I ought to have known I couldn't, when the time came. I'm the last person to – well, I'm sane again now, anyway!"

  A few long steps carried the girl in the sparkling dress and transparent cloak into the Strand again. But something queer was happening there. People were shouting and running. A man with a raucous, alcoholic voice, yelled words Annesley could not catch. A woman gave a squeaking scream that sounded both ridiculous and dreadful. Breaking glass crashed. A growl of human anger mingled with the roar of motor-omnibuses, and Miss Grayle fell back from it as from a slammed door in a high wall.

  As she stood hesitating what to do and wondering if there were a fire or a murder, two women, laughing hysterically, rushed past into the hotel court. "Hurry up," panted one of them. "They'll think we belong to the gang. Let's go into the hotel and stay until it's over." "Oh, what is it?" Annesley entreated, running after the couple. "Burglars at a jeweller's window close by – there are women – they're being arrested," one of the pair flung over her shoulder, as both hurried on. "'Women ... being arrested ...'" That meant that if she plunged into the fray she might be mistaken for a woman burglar, and arrested with the guilty. Even if she lurked where she was, a prowling policeman might suppose she sought concealment, and bag her as a militant.

  Imagine what Mrs. Ellsworth would say – and do – if she were taken off to jail!

  Annesley's heart seemed to drop out of its place, to go "crossways," as her old Irish nurse used to say a million years ago.

  Without stopping to think again, or even to breathe, she flew back to the hotel entrance, as a migrating bird follows its leader, and slipped through the revolving door behind the fugitives. "It's fate," she thought. "This must be a sign coming just when I'd made up my mind."

  Suddenly she was no longer afraid, though her heart was pounding under the thin cloak. Fragrance of hot-house flowers and expensive perfume from women's dresses intoxicated the girl as a glass of champagne forced upon one who has never tasted wine flies to the head. She felt herself on the tide of adventure, moving because she must; the soul which would have fled, to return to Mrs. Ellsworth, was a coward not worthy to live in her body.

  She had room in her crowded mind to think how queer it was – and how queer it would seem all the rest of her life in looking back – that she should have the course of her existence changed because burglars had broken some panes of glass in the Strand. "Just because of them – creatures I'll never meet – I'm going to see this through to the end," she said, flinging up her chin and looking entirely unlike the Annesley Grayle Mrs. Ellsworth knew. "To the end!"

  She thrilled at the word, which had as much of the unknown in it as though it were the world's end she referred to, and she were jumping off. "Will you please tell me where to leave my wrap?" she heard herself inquiring of a footman as magnificent as, and far better dressed than, the Apollo Belvedere. Her voice sounded natural. She was glad. This added to her courage. It was wonderful to feel brave. Life was so deadly, worse – so stuffy – at Mrs. Ellsworth's, that if she had ever been normally brave like other girls, she had had the young splendour of her courage crushed out.

  The statue in gray plush and dark blue cloth came to life, and showed her the cloak-room.

  Other women were there, taking last, affectionate peeps at themselves in the long mirrors. Annesley took a last peep at herself also, not an affectionate but an anxious one. Compared with these visions, was she (in Mrs. Ellsworth's cast-off clothes, made over in odd moments by the wearer) so dowdy and second-hand that – that – a stranger would be ashamed to – – ?

  The question feared to finish itself. "I do look like a lady, anyhow," the girl thought with defiance. "That's what he – that seems to be the test."

  Now she was in a hurry to get the ordeal over. Instead of hanging back she walked briskly out of the cloak-room before those who had entered ahead of her finished patting their hair or putting powder on their noses.

  It was worse in the large vestibule, where men sat or stood, waiting for their feminine belongings; and she was the only woman alone. But her boat was launched on the wild sea. There was no returning.

  The rendezvous arranged was in what he had called in his letter "the foyer."

  Annesley went slowly down the steps, trying not to look aimless. She decided to steer for one of the high-back brocaded chairs which had little satellite tables. Better settle on one in the middle of the hall.

  This would give him a chance to see and recognize her from the description she had written of the dress she would wear (she had not mentioned that she'd be spared all trouble in choosing, as it was her only real evening frock), and to notice that she wore, according to arrangement, a white rose tucked into the neck of her bodice.

  She felt conscious of her hands, and especially of her feet and ankles, for she had not been able to make Mrs. Ellsworth's dress quite long enough. Luckily it was the fashion of the moment to wear the skirt short, and she had painted her old white suede slippers silver.

  She believed that she had pretty feet. But oh! what if the darn running up the heel of the pearl-gray silk stocking should show, or have burst again into a hole as she jumped out of the omnibus? She could have laughed hysterically, as the escaping women had laughed, when she realized that the fear of such a catastrophe was overcoming graver horrors.

  Perhaps it was well to have a counter-irritant.

  Though Annesley Grayle was the only manless woman in the foyer, the people who sat there – with one exception – did not stare. Though she had five feet eight inches of height, and was graceful despite self-consciousness, her appearance was distinguished rather than striking. Yes, "distinguished" was the word for it, decided the one exception who gazed with particular interest at that tall, slight figure in gray-sequined chiffon too old-looking for the young face.

  He was sitting in a corner against the wall, and had in his hands a copy of the Sphere, which was so large when held high and wide open that the reader could hide behind it. He had been in his corner for fifteen or twenty minutes when Annesley Grayle arrived, glancing over the top of his paper with a sort of jaunty carelessness every few minutes at the crowd moving toward the restaurant, picking out some individual, then dropping his eyes to the Sphere.

  For the girl in gray he had a long, appraising look, studying her every point; but he did the thing so well that, even had she turned her head his way, she need not have been embarrassed. All she would have seen was a man's forehead and a rim of smooth black hair showing over the top of an illustrated paper.

  What he saw was a clear profile with a delicate nose slightly tilting upward in a proud rather than impertinent way; an arch of eyebrow daintily sketched; a large eye which might be gray or violet; a drooping mouth with a short upper lip; a really charming chin, and a long white throat; skin softly pale, like white velvet; thick, ash-blond hair parted in the middle and worn Madonna fashion – there seemed to be a lot of it in the coil at the nape of her neck.

  The creature looked too simple, too – not dowdy, but too unsophisticated, to have anything false about her. Figure too thin, hardly to be called a "figure" at all, but agreeably girlish; and its owner might be anywhere from twenty to five or six years older. Not beautiful: just an average, lady-like English girl – or perhaps more of Irish type; but certainly with possibilities. If she were a princess or a millionairess, she might be glorified by newspapers as a beauty.

  Annesley forced her nervous limbs to slow movement, because she hoped, or dreaded – anyhow, expected – that one of the dozen or so unattached men would spring up and say, constrainedly, "Miss Grayle, I believe? – er – how do you do?" If only he might not be fat or very bald-headed!

  He had not described himself at all. Everything was to depend on her gray dress and the white rose. That seemed, now one came face to face with the fear, rather ominous.

  But no one sprang up. No one wanted to know if she were Miss Grayle; and this, although she was ten minutes late.

  Her instructions as to what to do at the Savoy were clear. If she were not met in the foyer, she was to go into the restaurant and ask for a table reserved for Mr. N. Smith. There she was to sit and wait to be joined by him. She had never contemplated having to carry out the latter clause, however; and when she had loitered for a few seconds, the thought rushed over her that here was a loop-hole through which to slip, if she wanted a loop-hole.

  One side of her did want it: the side she knew best and longest as herself, Annesley Grayle, a timid girl brought up conventionally, and taught that to rely on others older and wiser than she was the right way for a well-born, sheltered woman to go through life. The other side, the new, desperate side that Mrs. Ellsworth's "stuffiness" had developed, was not looking for any means of escape; and this side had seized the upper hand since the alarm of the burglars in the Strand.

  Annesley marched into the restaurant with the air of a soldier facing his first battle, and asked a waiter where was Mr. Smith's table.

  The youth dashed off and produced a duke-like personage, his chief. A list was consulted with care; and Annesley was respectfully informed that no table had been engaged by a Mr. N. Smith for dinner that evening. "Are you sure?" persisted Annesley, bewildered and disappointed. "Yes, miss – madame, I am sure we have not the name on our list," said the head-waiter.

  The blankness of the girl's disappointment looked out appealingly from wistful, wide-apart eyes. The man was sorry. "There may be some misunderstanding," he consoled her. "Perhaps Mr. Smith has telephoned, and we have not received the message. I hope it is not the fault of the hotel. We do not often make mistakes; yet it is possible. We have had a few early dinners before the theatre and there is one small table disengaged. Would madame care to take it – it is here, close to the door – and watch for the gentleman when he comes?" "When he comes!" The head-waiter comfortably took it for granted that Mr. Smith had been delayed, that he would come, and that it would be a pity to miss him. The polite person might be right, though with a sinking heart Annesley began to suspect herself played with, abandoned, as she deserved, for her dreadful boldness.

  Perhaps Mr. Smith had been in communication with someone else more suitable than she, and had thrown over the appointment without troubling to let her know. Or perhaps he had been waiting in the foyer, had inspected her as she passed, and hadn't liked her looks.

  This latter supposition seemed probable; but the head-waiter was so confident of what she ought to do that the girl could think of no excuse. After all, it would do little harm to wait and "see what happened." As Mr. Smith was apparently not living at the Savoy (he had merely asked her to meet him there), he might have had an accident in train or taxi. Annesley had made her plans to be away from home for two hours, so she could give him the benefit of the doubt.

  A moment of hesitation, and she was seating herself in a chair offered by the head-waiter. It was one of a couple drawn up at a small table for two. Sitting thus, Annesley could see everybody who came in, and – what was more important – could be seen. By what struck her as an odd coincidence, the table was decorated with a vase of white roses whose hearts blushed faintly in the light of a pink-shaded electric lamp.

  A quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, dragged along, and no Mr. Smith. Annesley could follow the passing moments on her wrist-watch in its silver bracelet, the only present Mrs. Ellsworth had ever given her, with the exception of cast-off clothes, and a pocket handkerchief each Christmas.

  Every nerve in the girl's body seemed to prickle with embarrassment. She played with a dinner roll, changed the places of the flowers and the lamp, trying to appear at ease, and not daring to look up lest she should meet eyes curious or pitying. "What if they make me pay for dinner after I've kept the table so long?" she thought in her ignorance of hotel customs. "And I've got only a shilling!"

  Half an hour now, all but two minutes! There was nothing more to hope or fear. But there was the ordeal of getting away. "I'll sit out the two minutes," she told herself. "Then I'll go. Ought I to tip the waiter?" Horrible doubt! And she must have been dreaming to touch that roll! Better sneak away while the waiter was busy at a distance.

  Frightened, miserable, she was counting her chances when a man, whose coming into the room her dilemma had caused her to miss, marched unhesitatingly to her table.

CHAPTER II

SMITHS AND SMITHS

Annesley glanced up, her face aflame, like a fanned coal. The man was tall, dark, lean, square-jawed, handsome in just that thrilling way which magazine illustrators and women love; the ideal story-hero to look at, even to the clothes which any female serial write...