The porcelain mask A detective story
We all have our tragedies; I, too, have had mine. Poor Andrea; he was
so young to die. And our mother----" He blinked back the moisture
which flooded his eyes and tossed off the bath robe of silk crape,
starting to get into his clothes. Before he had finished, the butler
returned with the freshly pressed dinner coat, uttered a few polite
banalities, and departed.
Sarbella smoked another cigarette and then went downstairs to the
veranda, where he found that Gilmore had preceded him, looking a little
less pale than some minutes before. But the color in the author's
cheeks was plainly artificial, induced no doubt by a nip or so from the
bottle of liquor with which he was engaged in mixing the cocktails.
The man was making a supreme effort to conceal the true state of his
feelings, and being only moderately successful at it.
"The ladies will be down in a moment," said Gilmore, moving the
cocktail shaker back and forth. "Joan tells me that she saw you when
you arrived. Great admirer of your work, Joan; she's tickled to death
that you're going to do the drawings for the book. She'll probably help
you pick out some of the dramatic high spots; she knows the manuscript
forward and backward. Here's my mother now; I hear her coming through
the hall."
Victor Sarbella turned to greet Mrs. Gilmore, Kirklan's stepmother,
whom he had not met before.
"Mother, this is Mr. Sarbella. Further introductions are unnecessary,
Victor, because she's heard all about you."
As Sarbella bowed over her hand, Joan joined them.
"I think you can fill the glasses, Kirk," she said with a glance at the
tray. "Helen was directly behind me, as I came down the stairs. You
know, Mr. Sarbella, we're terribly punctual about dinner. The way the
servants do discipline us these days!"
The screen door onto the porch opened again, and Helen Gilmore came out
quietly, almost listlessly.
Kirklan was filling the last glass. "Victor, I want you to meet my
wife; Helen, this is Mr. Sarbella--the artist, you know," he said.
"Perhaps I neglected to tell you that he was expected."
There was a pause.
The polite, formal smile on the artist's lips was washed away by a
tidal wave of emotion--surprise, incredulity, horror--which left his
face white and rigid; into his eyes there blazed a scorching fire of
hatred that, since his back was toward the others, was seen only by
Helen.
At mention of his name Helen had stopped, her own features ghastly;
but she quickly checked the startled gasp which rose in her white
throat and, by the most tremendous effort, managed to control herself.
However, her agitation escaped neither her husband nor Joan; both of
them sensed what a dramatic shock the meeting had been to her.
Sarbella mastered his emotions wonderfully, and he came of a race that
is essentially emotional. And while he could not hide the pallor of his
face, he did mask that first flash of hatred which had blazed in his
eyes. Yet he dared not trust his tongue. Silently he bowed.
Kirklan Gilmore's unsteady hand splashed the last cocktail all over the
tray.
"Perhaps--perhaps you've--met before?" he suggested, alarmed by what
was obviously an attempt to conceal a mutual recognition.
"No," answered Victor Sarbella, his voice husky despite himself, "Mrs.
Gilmore and I have never met until this moment. It is a circumstance
that I very much regret."
"Mr. Sarbella," said Helen, an almost hysterical catch in her voice,
"is a total stranger. The name startled me. It is such an unusual name,
and I once had a--a friend who----"
"Dinner is served!" announced Bates. He said it quietly enough, but it
was like a thunderclap, this interruption.
"Here's how!" cried Joan, picking up her cocktail glass. "You'll go a
long way before you find anything like this, Mr. Sarbella; it's some of
the old stock that Kirk's father had in the cellar--oh, years and years
ago." It served to break the tension. "Here's to the new book--may it
be a tremendous success!"
"Great gods!" Sarbella said under his breath, as he mechanically lifted
his glass. "It is she--the woman! I find her here, the wife of--of my
friend. Merciful Heaven, his wife!"
CHAPTER VI
IN THE STUDIO
There can be nothing so dismal as pretended gayety, nothing so
mirthless as hollow, empty laughter. After that startling encounter
between Victor Sarbella and Helen Gilmore, both of them fighting for
self-control, all five on the porch drank the toast that Joan had
offered in an attempt to save the situation. Joan, of course, could not
know what it was all about, but she sensed the ominous trend of things.
She had seen the look of frozen terror in Helen's face, had seen the
muscles bulge and rise beneath the shoulders of Sarbella's perfectly
fitting dinner coat, and, while she had not glimpsed his face, it was
easy to know that he, too, had experienced a distinct shock.
"I have not tasted a better cocktail since my last trip abroad,"
exclaimed the artist, forcing a smile to his face. As a matter of fact,
he had swallowed the drink mechanically, hardly tasting it.
"Now for dinner!" cried Joan, taking full command of things. Putting
her fingers on Sarbella's arm, she led the way into the house and
toward the big, old-fashioned dining room.
Kirklan Gilmore jerked himself together with visible effort; his
impulse was to dash forward, face his wife and his friend squarely,
demanding sternly, "What does this mean? Answer me! What does this
mean?" But good breeding demanded restraint; his obligations as a host
required a simulated appearance of naturalness. With a queer mental
offshoot he wondered how he would have made one of the characters in
his books behave under a similar circumstance.
A moment or so later the five were at the dinner table. Even Mrs.
Gilmore, whom nature had endowed with no large store of astuteness,
realized the strain, realized that something was tremendously amiss,
and she, poor and well-meaning soul, made matters all the worse by the
uneasy, inquiring glances that she cast about the table in nervous
bewilderment.
Victor Sarbella managed to carry things off with fairly commendable
grace, but not so with Helen Gilmore, who made clumsy mistakes with
the table silver and not once lifted her eyes either to her husband or
the others. The rouge on her cheeks made the paleness nothing short of
ghastly.
Kirklan Gilmore's eyes, slightly narrowed and brighter than they should
have been, shot quick, queer glances from his wife to his guest.
Perhaps it was but natural that his mind swept to one conclusion--a
previous affair between these two. His friend and his wife! The salad
fork trembled in his hand. Time after time he suppressed the impulse to
leap to his feet, voicing the demand that kept shrieking through his
mind: "What is there between you two?"
Only Joan's persevering diplomacy kept them at fairly even keel; she
rattled on with scarcely a halt. But the dinner was a thoroughly
miserable affair, and by the time it came to an end the nerves of the
five were raw.
Joan's heart ached for the suffering she saw in Kirklan's face, and
there swept through her an intensified hate for the woman who had won
the man she loved.
"She's going to wreck his life!" she said under her breath. "I know
it--I know it! She's killing him--killing his soul! If she does that,
I'll----" The thought that came into her mind frightened her, for she
had not known that there was so much of primitive passion in herself.
The moment the unhappy dinner came to an end, Helen Gilmore murmured an
almost incoherent something about a headache and fled upstairs to her
room. The other Mrs. Gilmore, too, faded out of sight, still wondering
what it might be all about. Joan was inclined to remain, but Kirklan
showed very plainly that she wasn't wanted.
"Run along, Joan, if you don't mind," he said in a jerky, strained
voice. "Sarbella and I"--it was to be noted that he had dropped the
more cordial and customary name of Victor--"are going to--to talk
things over. Come out to the studio with me, Sarbella; the manuscript
of the book is out there."
Victor Sarbella was not deceived into any notion that Gilmore had in
mind a discussion of the new novel, and, while he shrank from what he
felt sure was going to be a cross-examination, he did not see how he
could very well refuse.
"All right," he agreed with a nod, reaching for his cigarette case.
Silently the two men left the house and cut across the lawn through the
gathering dusk toward the studio. No word was spoken as they entered
the building and mounted the stairs to the writer's workroom above.
Kirklan Gilmore switched on the lights, and the two faced each other at
the desk strewn with pages of the manuscript. Sarbella remained calm,
but the other let himself go, and his whole body shook like a man in
the grip of a chill.
"Well, let's have it--the truth!" he rasped, almost a sobbing catch in
his voice.
Victor Sarbella finished off his cigarette with a long puff that slid
the burning edge of the tobacco tube close to his lips; at the same
time he reached for a fresh smoke, tapped it on the back of his hand,
and then lighted it with the stub of the old. A thin trickle of smoke
swam slowly through his parted lips.
"Just what do you mean?" he parried.
"Don't you fence with me, Sarbella!" Gilmore shouted hoarsely. "I've
got to the breaking point. My nerves are stretched tight as piano
wires; if something snaps----"
"That's the trouble, Kirklan," Sarbella broke in soothingly. "You're
nervous and upset over something; that's the size of it. You were upset
when I first saw you, and I----"
"That's got nothing to do with it, Sarbella. You know very well what I
mean. I saw Helen--my wife--saw her face when I introduced you two on
the porch. Introduced you!" His voice rose shrilly. "I guess you know
her better than I do; I saw----"
"Kirklan," again interrupted Sarbella, "that is where you are
absolutely wrong. I give you my solemn word of honor, my oath as a
gentleman, that until this evening I never saw Mees Gilmore."
"Oath of a gentleman!" derided Gilmore. "You're the sort who would lie
like a gentleman. Man, I tell you that I saw--her face! Helen, my wife,
was afraid of you. Why was she afraid of you? Why did her face turn so
pale? Why did she look as if she were fainting?"
"She said," Sarbella replied smoothly, "that it was the name--that she
had once known some one named Sarbella. Why couldn't that be true!"
"It could be, but it isn't. Sarbella, you're hiding something from me,
and I've got to have the truth." His hands were clenched, and his eyes
blazed with jealousy. "Isn't it a fact that you were once in love with
her?"
A harsh, humorless laugh, the sort of a laugh that it is not pleasant
to hear, burst through Sarbella's lips.
"In love with her? Great Lord, no--a thousand times no! I----" He
broke off, on the verge of saying too much, of betraying the truth in
one exclamation of passionate, hot-blooded hatred. "I tell you again,
Kirklan, that your wife and I never met until this very evening. That
is quite all I have to say; you must take that or leave it."
Sarbella paused as if he would choke on one more word.
Chest heaving, lips twitching, Kirklan Gilmore leaned heavily across
the table, staring into the eyes of this other man whom he had
considered his friend. Suddenly he straightened and leaped toward the
door, turning the key in the lock; swiftly he turned and faced Victor
Sarbella.
"Take it or leave it, eh?" he panted. "Suppose I won't leave it;
suppose I tell you that you're not to leave this room until you tell
me what I want to know? What you are hiding from me?" His voice broke.