The Heather-Moon
Would she love one man, and marry the other? Or would only one of these
two men count in her life?
Perhaps Queen Mary's mirror knew. It looked capable of knowing--and
keeping--any secret of the human heart.
* * * * *
That night--oh, my prophetic soul!--Morgan Bennett saw Barrie at the
theatre, and looked at her through his opera-glasses almost as often as
he looked at Mrs. Bal in her gay, exciting comedy-drama, "The Nelly
Affair." The play had been written for the actress and suited her
exactly. In fact its whole success was made by her magnetic personality,
her beauty, and her dresses. She scarcely left the stage, and had
something to do or say every minute, yet I noticed that she found
opportunities to observe where Bennett's eyes were straying. As for
Barrie, she saw nothing, heard nothing, thought of nothing, but her
mother, glorious Barbara, who for this evening was Nelly Blake, a girl
of eighteen, seeming not a day older. Barrie, in a white dress, with her
hair in two long braids (Mrs. Bal thought she was too young to wear it
done up), sat among us in an ecstasy. Was ever any one so beautiful, so
clever, so altogether marvellous as darling Barbara? This was as it
should be; and we who knew the girl, knowing that she had never before
seen a play, nor the inside of a theatre, thought her pathetic; but
Morgan Bennett, who did not know her, merely thought her pretty and
wondered how he could get to know her. The very flash of his
opera-glasses was interested and eager; and when I proudly took the girl
behind the scenes to compliment Mrs. Bal after the first act, I was far
from surprised to see Bennett appear almost immediately in the same
mystic region. Barrie and I were with Barbara in a little room which she
intended to use as a boudoir for the week of her engagement; and when an
employe of the theatre announced Mr. Bennett, she looked annoyed. For an
instant she hesitated visibly; but as he was probably aware that she had
visitors, there was no good excuse for sending him away. Part of Mrs.
Bal's success with men consists in knowing what kind of snubs they will
meekly endure from a lovely spoiled woman, what kind they neither forget
nor forgive. She sent word to Mr. Bennett that he might come in.
He accepted the invitation promptly, and Barbara, with quick presence of
mind, introduced him to her little "sister Barribel."
"Barribel! That's a pretty name," he said, shaking hands with Barrie,
his eyes on her face. "Miss Barribel Ballantree, I suppose."
"You may suppose so!" returned Mrs. Bal, laughing.
"I saw this young lady sitting out in front," he went on, instead of
congratulating the actress at once on the success of the first act,
which had "gone" splendidly with the large audience. "I said to myself
there must be a relationship between you two: and I was wondering."
"Well, you needn't bother to wonder any more," broke in Mrs. Bal, very
gay but slightly shrill. "I must have spoken to you about Barrie?"
"'Barrie' is what you call her?" said he, smiling at the girl. "That's a
very nice pet name, and suits her, somehow. You surely never spoke of
your sister to me. I shouldn't have forgotten." He added the last words
with a look intended as a compliment for Barrie; and any woman wishing
to monopolize his attention exclusively might have been pardoned for
thinking that he had looked at her more than often enough in the
circumstances. In his big way he is attractive, to certain types of
women, very attractive indeed, and I could understand that his millions
might not be his only charm for Mrs. Bal. He has eyes which can be
fierce as an eagle's; the strong, almost cruel jaw of the predestined
millionaire who will mount to success at any cost; a pleasure-loving
mouth, and--when he is pleased--a boyish smile. When he is severely
displeased, I shouldn't care to be there to see him, especially if he
were displeased with me. But I suspect Mrs. Bal to be one of those women
who could not love a man unless she were afraid of him. In that may have
lain the secret of Somerled's former fascination for her, if it existed.
"If I've forgotten to mention Barrie, it's because I'm always talking
about _you_, when we're together," Mrs. Bal excused herself with dainty
impertinence of the sort Bennett will stand from her. "If it isn't about
you, it's about your motors--or some affair of yours."
"I thought you, and _your_ affairs were generally the subject of our
conversations," retorted the big man, still looking more at the young
girl than at the woman. "Miss Ballantree is your affair----"
"She has only just become so," Barbara hurried to explain. "Her
grandmother, who thoroughly disapproves of me and all actresses, has
kept the child shut up in a moated grange all her life. It's a wonder I
didn't forget her existence! She _had_ begun to seem like a sort of
dream-sister, until she suddenly dropped in on me yesterday, and
announced that she'd run away from home. I'm simply enchanted to have
the darling with me, for my own sake, or I should be if I hadn't such a
beautiful, unselfish nature that I find I worry myself into fits about
her when she's out of my sight. To-night I couldn't half act, because I
was thinking about her all the time, and wondering what on earth I could
do to make her happy. I foresee I shan't be able to study or rehearse or
anything, while she's getting into mischief in a big hotel. I shall send
her away though to-morrow, for a few days, with some _very_ dear friends
of hers, who will give her a good time until I settle down and feel at
home with this new play--in which, by the way, you don't seem to take
the _slightest_ interest. You haven't said a word about it, or how it
went, or how I acted."
"You know better than that----" Bennett was beginning when Barrie (to
whom, despite his size, he was a figure of no importance) broke in
without being aware that he was speaking.
"Oh, Barbara, you won't make me go _to-morrow_; You promised----"
"If she promised, we must make her stick to her promise," said Bennett,
forgiving the interruption, and perhaps willing to tease Mrs. Bal.
The beautiful Barbara, however, had gathered together her scattered
wits, and was too wise to show that she was being teased. "I know, I
meant to keep you with me this Edinburgh week anyhow," she answered the
girl. "But, sweetest, you won't want to hold me to the promise, no
matter what Mr. Bennett or any one else says, if I tell you that I'm
worrying over your being here? I don't feel it's the right thing for
you. And it's certain Grandma will change her will if she hears you're
living with me. It's a miracle I didn't dry up in my part to-night from
sheer anxiety and absent-mindedness. You'd hate me to _fail_ through
you, dear one, I know."
"Oh, yes--anything but that," Barrie exclaimed, tears in her eyes.
Alas, if only some other name than that of M. P. Bennett had added
itself to her list of admirers, all might have been well for Barrie with
sister Barbara, at least for a little while! As it was, the girl's fate
was sealed. So much the better for me: yet my fool of a heart ached for
her disappointment, instead of leaping for joy at my own good luck.
Mrs. Bal looked at the girl with an odd expression on her charming face,
painted for the stage. There was compunction, if not remorse, in the big
brown eyes, but there was no relenting. She liked Barrie and enjoyed her
childish adoration, but she loved herself, and she wanted to "land"
Morgan Bennett. The girl would have to be sacrificed; still, those
rising tears gave Barbara pain to see. She would really have been glad
to make Barrie happy, if the creature's youth and beauty had not been an
hourly peril for her.
"Don't look so disconsolate, dear," she said. "You're going to have a
glorious time. And if wet eyelashes are a compliment to me, they're just
the opposite to Mr. Norman."
"Is it Mr. Norman the novelist?" Bennett wanted to know.
"Yes. And he's going to let Barrie help him with a story--or else he's
putting her into one, I'm not quite sure which."
Barbara threw him this bit of information with a sweetly casual air, but
it was one of the cleverest things she ever did, on the stage or off.
Somehow, with a smile that flashed over us all with a special meaning
for each--affection for Barrie, a benediction for me, and a secret
understanding for Bennett--she contrived to convey to him the idea that
her little sister was already bespoken. No use his being led away by
rosebud innocence! It was engaged, and if he were wise he would be true
to his love for the full-blown rose.
"Just think, pet, what an honour to be taken about by such famous people
as Basil Norman and Aline West," she went on, "and to have them for your
best friends. You'd have had a horrid dull time with them gone, for I
should have had to leave you alone a lot. And next week, when they bring
you back to me at Glasgow, your future will be all beautifully
arranged."
"But Mrs. West isn't well enough to go to-morrow----" Barrie pleaded.
"No. But Mrs. Vanneck will chaperon you for a few days. You ought to be
frightfully happy, seeing Scotland with those you love while your poor
Barbara works for her daily bread. And now you must go out in front
again with Mr. Norman, if you don't want to miss the beginning of the
second act. Mr. Bennett has seen it, so he can stop with me five minutes
if he likes, till my call."
Barrie had been at rehearsal, and would no doubt have been quite willing
to miss any part of the play not graced by Mrs. Bal's presence on the
stage; but short as was the time since she made her mother's
acquaintance, she had learned to know the lady well enough to realize
when she was not wanted. She went with me like a lamb resigned to the
slaughter; and so, I was sure, would she start with us next day. But
just here, I think, is the place to write down what had meanwhile
happened to Mrs. James. If it hadn't been for that happening, perhaps we
should not, after all, have snatched the girl away so easily from
Somerled. And the funny thing was--for it had its funny side, as even he
must have seen--the funny thing was, that all was his own fault. When he
planned that wonderful surprise for Mrs. James, he little thought it
would be the means of stealing his trump card from him. Generous he may
be, and is, I must admit; but it's not likely that he would have been
unselfish enough to put himself in a hole for Mrs. James's happiness,
especially as he could have got just as much credit from Barrie by
waiting a few weeks--say, until the end of the "heather moon."
To have brought in the "surprise" in its proper order, I should have
worked it into my notes between our sight-seeing expedition in the
afternoon, and the theatre in the evening, for it was common property by
that time. We all knew (from Mrs. James, not from himself), what a noble,
magnificent, wonderful, glorious, altogether pluperfect fellow Somerled
was, to have interested himself in her behalf, and to have given her
such happiness as all her friends had thought her mad to dream of
through the dreary years.
Always, it seems, she believed that her husband, who disappeared
seventeen years ago, was alive, and only waiting for success to crown
his ambitions, before returning to her. Everybody else thought he had
drowned himself, because of some professional trouble. But Mrs. James's
faith has been the great romance of her life; and Barrie (or the little
woman herself, I don't know which) told Somerled the story the day they
left Carlisle in his car. Some details caught his attention, and made
him wonder if Mrs. James's instinct were not more right than other
people's reason.
When Somerled went to America as a boy, he travelled in the steerage. On