The porcelain mask A detective story
which even a poor liar may achieve in a moment of desperation: "It--it
was money that I borrowed for my sister's illness. I had to sign some
notes, and----"
"You shall have the money, Helen, but the truth is always the best in
the first place, dear. I want us always to be frank with each other. I
want you to feel that you can come to me with everything. After all,
a falsehood is the most futile thing in the world. You should have
told me the exact truth about the matter from the beginning. I'll get
in touch with Atchinson on the phone to-morrow and arrange it. You
shall have the money to-morrow night, but you must never lie to me,
dear--under any conditions. A lie is one of the things I find it hard
to forgive."
His tone was so gentle, his agreement to the request so prompt, and his
faith in her so unquestioning that Helen was touched. It made her think
that she might almost learn to love him; impulsively she brushed her
lips to the back of his hand.
"That's good of you, Kirklan; you--you'll never know what a weight
you've taken from my mind. You--you do love me a very great deal."
"Better than all else in the world, Helen!" he answered huskily.
There was a silence, to Gilmore an enraptured silence in which he felt
closer to his wife than ever before. It seemed that suddenly there was
a new bond between them.
"What does Atchinson think of the new book?" she asked him presently.
"Does he think it will have the success of the last one?"
"Yes, even more. He's enthusiastic--even for Atchinson." His lips
parted into a smile. "Speaking of Atchinson, that reminds me.
He was trying to convince me that he saw you in New York this
afternoon--going into some cheap dump just around the corner from
Eighth Avenue."
With a startled gasp, Helen's hand jerked away from the fondling caress
of his fingers and, clenched, went to her mouth. Her eyes became wide
with something that was more than either surprise or bewilderment. Her
gaze was fixed upon his face with a fascinated stare, and the smile
that she attempted was only a sickly grimace.
"Why, Kirklan! In--in New York? How silly! You know very well that I
drove the car to Tuxedo."
Kirklan Gilmore's blood was suddenly ice; his eyes were no longer
smiling.
"Great Lord!" he whispered. "It's true. Atchinson was right. Helen,
you've lied to me; you----"
"No!" she cried in a desperate frenzy of denial. "I swear to you----"
"I see guilt in your face. I know now; I know that you were the woman
Atchinson saw in New York this afternoon. What does it mean, Helen?
These lies, this deceit--what does it mean?"
Helen laughed hysterically.
"Don't--don't be so tragic--over nothing. I wasn't in New York; you
just startled me, that's all. Please don't be so silly. Atchinson was
mistaken; some one who looked like me, perhaps."
But, as much as he wanted to believe her, Kirklan Gilmore could not
convince himself; her face had betrayed her. The blood was pounding
in his brain, and he felt that the mystery of it, the doubts, the
suspicions would certainly drive him mad.
CHAPTER V
VICTOR SARBELLA
The next morning, after a sleepless night, found Gilmore haggard and
hollow-eyed. There were moments when his wife's persistent denials
almost convinced him that it was all a horrible mistake; for a
beautiful woman in tears can be most plausible at dissimulation; and
then, when trying hardest to believe her, there would come before him,
with photographic clearness, the memory of her startled face, the
sudden guilty terror in her eyes, and credulity would crumble.
He was up hours before the rest of the household, although the cook was
stirring and brewed him a cup of coffee, which he gulped mechanically
and then fled to the solitude of his studio, thinking that he might
relieve the tension by forgetting himself in his work.
That, of course was ridiculous; there was no possibility of mental
detachment with his brain in such a riotous tumult. Sheet after sheet
of paper he drew before him to receive his thoughts, but, instead
of smooth sentences flowing from his pen, he found himself tracing
meaningless lines. He gave up any attempt at creation and tried
correcting, ironing out rough spots in the manuscript, where he had
left off three weeks previous, but in his present frame of mind all
spots were rough, just jumbled words. He tossed down his pen with a
violent force that crumpled the gold point and sent a spray of ink
spattering across the desk top. Then he leaped to his feet and began to
pace the floor like a caged beast.
"I've got to know the truth!" he groaned. "I think I could make myself
forgive her anything, but the deceit of it is driving me mad! What
could have taken her to that place--what is she hiding from me? Her
reason for wanting the thousand dollars--perhaps, that too, was a lie."
It suddenly dawned upon him how little he knew of Helen's life; nothing
more than she had been pleased to tell him, and that had not been
much. She had seldom spoken of her family, and then only in a hazy,
unenlightening sort of way. He had rather got the impression that her
parents had died when she was a child, and that a shadowy, indefinite
aunt had reared her.
Gilmore's love for his wife had been so blindly intense, so headlong
that it had never occurred to him to weigh these things. He had loved
her for herself, and that had been sufficient.
Until long past noon he remained locked within the studio, and no one
came to disturb him. At last he could no longer endure the oppression
of four walls; the day was hot, and he had neglected to open the
windows; the air was stifling. So he flung himself out of the renovated
stable and plunged, with hardly any sense of direction, across the open
country--trying to think, trying to think!
Thus he missed the arrival of Victor Sarbella, his artist guest; in
fact he had forgotten that Sarbella was coming. It was a quarter past
four when one of the village taxis turned in at Greenacres, nosed
along the driveway and, coming to a stop beneath the portico, deposited
Victor Sarbella and his bags beside the long, cool porch.
One did not need to hear the name to be certain of Sarbella's Italian
blood, for from his Florentine father he had got the intense black eyes
and the tinting of skin which belong to that warm-blooded race. He was
a handsome, powerfully built man, nearing forty. His hands, as he paid
the driver, were revealed as long-fingered, tapering, such hands as
properly belong to the artist.
With a honk of the horn the taxi moved off, and Victor Sarbella looked
about him, his black eyes snapping with an appreciative light. The
artist in him was delighted with the charm of Greenacres.
"My friend," he mused, "has a most beautiful home; a beautiful wife,
too, I am told."
Attracted by the taxi's arrival, Bates, the butler, shambled out across
the porch, followed by Joan Sheridan. Joan had met him at a literary
affair in New York the previous winter, and of course she remembered
him; Victor Sarbella was not the kind of man that one found it possible
to forget. She met him with an outstretched hand.
"Welcome to Greenacres, Mr. Sarbella. Kirk told me last night that you
were coming. I haven't seen Kirk all morning, but I suppose he's at the
studio. Have you seen him, Bates?"
"Not all day, Miss Joan; as you say, perhaps the studio."
Joan nodded. "I'll find him, Bates, while you take in Mr. Sarbella's
bags. He loses all track of time when he really gets to work, and he's
got to make up for three lost weeks."
"Naturally my poor friend takes up hees pen like, as they say, a slave
scourged to hees dungeon," he laughed. While he had spent a good many
years in America with his mother who, following the death of his
Italian father, had taken up residence in New York, there was a touch
of foreign accent in the pronunciation of certain words. His education
had been in Florence, and each winter he returned there for two or
three months. "Tell me, Mees Sheridan, is hees new wife so beautiful as
I have been told?"
Joan nodded. "Yes, she is beautiful, a very beautiful woman. Now I'll
run and find Kirk. He'll feel much humiliated that he wasn't here to
greet you. You're to make the illustrations for the new book. That's
wonderful. I've always admired your drawings; there's such intensity in
your pictures."
Sarbella, bowing, murmured an acknowledgment of the compliment and
turned to follow the butler into the house and up the stairs to the
second floor. A few minutes later he was unpacking his bags, as Bates
drew a tub of water for him.
"What time is dinner, Bates?"
"A quarter past six, Mr. Sarbella."
"It is now nearly half past four," said the artist, glancing at his
watch. "Every one dresses for dinner, I suppose."
"Oh, certainly, sir."
"Then I wish you would press my dinner coat, Bates; it's badly
wrinkled. I was never good at packing. You may tell Meester Gilmore
that I will not come down until six. There's no sense in dressing
twice."
"Quite so," nodded Bates and, accepting the dinner coat, shuffled out
of the room.
Sarbella took a brief plunge in the tub of tepid water, finished it off
with an invigorating cold shower, and, slipping into a light bath robe,
pulled a chair to the window and began to smoke. His thoughts evidently
took an unpleasant turn, for his eyes glowed hotly, and his muscles
tensed until his fingers crushed the burning cigarette, and the fiery
end of it smoldered odorously in the nap of the rug at his feet.
"To-day is the ninth," he smiled, half aloud; "day after to-morrow
would have been hees twenty-third birthday--Andrea's twenty-third
birthday! If I could but find her, that woman, I would kill her with my
own hands! Heaven curse her! She----"
The tense soliloquy of hate was interrupted by a rap at the door;
Sarbella turned with a start and called, "Yes, come."
Kirklan Gilmore, face still haggard, his eyes bloodshot, entered the
room with tumbling words of apology.
"Can you forgive my discourtesy, Victor?" he exclaimed. "I should have
been here to receive you. A fine host you must think me when----"
"Poof! That for your discourtesy, my good friend!" broke in Sarbella
with a laugh and a snap of the fingers. "We are artists, you and I;
you are an artist of the pen, and I an artist of the brush. So we
understand each other. I think nothing of it. But, my friend, what has
happened to you? Your face is that of a man who is ill."
Gilmore gave a jerky laugh. "It's nothing, Victor--nothing. Poor
night's sleep, that's all." While their friendship was a warm one, it
had never reached the point of intimacy; and to no friend on earth
would Kirklan Gilmore have confided the truth. "We'll have a cocktail
or so before dinner, and that will put new life back into me again."
Sarbella felt certain that this was an evasion and a very thin one;
through Gilmore's eyes he saw a soul in torment. But he pretended to
accept the explanation.
"The beautiful new wife, she must not see you so. It will make her
unhappy."
Gilmore's lips tightened, and he hastily changed the subject.
"To-morrow, Victor, we'll dig in and talk over the illustrations you
are to make. I have an idea or so, but I'll have to chase along now and
dress for dinner. Did Bates tell you? A quarter past six? When you've
dressed go on downstairs; we'll have the cocktails on the veranda. I'll
be down ahead of you, perhaps; I'm a regular fireman for throwing on my
clothes."
And he bolted abruptly from the room. Victor Sarbella stared after the
closed door and shook his head slowly.
"Ah!" he murmured. "A poor night's sleep, he says. I fear it is nothing
so simply remedied as that. It was tragedy I saw in his face--tragedy.