Charles Rex - Ethel May Dell (i love reading .TXT) 📗

farther forward, screening her from observation.
"Go on! Drink!" he said, with insistence, and in a moment his hand closed upon hers, guiding the wine to her lips.
She drank obediently, not meeting his look, and he took the glass from her, and set it down.
"Now we will go. Are you ready?"
She rose, and he stood aside for her. As she passed him, his hand closed for an instant upon her bare arm in a grasp that was close and vital. She threw him a quick, upward glance; but still she said no word.
They passed out through the throng of diners almost unobserved, but in the corridor Spentoli leaned against a pillar smoking a long, black cigar. He made no movement to intercept them, but his eyes with their restless fire dwelt upon the girl in a fashion that drew her own irresistibly. She saw him and slightly paused.
It was the pause of the hunted animal that sees its retreat cut off, but in an instant Saltash's voice, very cool, arrogantly self-assured, checked the impulse to panic.
"Straight on to the lift, _ma chere_! See! It is there in front of you. There will be no one in the gallery. Go straight on!"
She obeyed him instinctively as her habit was, but in the lift she trembled so much that he made her sit down. He stood beside her in silence, but once lightly his hand touched her cheek. She moved then swiftly, convulsively, and caught it in both her own. But the next moment he had gently drawn it free.
The gallery that ran round three sides of the great _salon_ was deserted. There was only one point at the far end whence a view of the stage that had been erected for the dancer could be obtained. Towards this Saltash turned.
"We shall see her from here," he said.
The place was but dimly illumined by the flare of the many lights below--two great crystal candelabra that hung at each end being left unlighted. Under one of these was a settee which Saltash drew forward to the balcony.
"No one will disturb us here," he said. "We can smoke in peace."
He offered her his cigarette-case, but she refused it nervously, sitting down in a corner of the settee in the crouched attitude of a frightened creature seeking cover. The band was playing in the _salon_ now, and people were beginning to crowd in.
Saltash leaned back in his corner and smoked. His eyes went to and fro ceaselessly, yet the girl beside him was aware of a scrutiny as persistent as if they never left her. She sat in silence, clasping and unclasping her hands, staring downwards at the shining stage.
Very soon the _salon_ was full of people, and the lights were lowered there while on the stage only a single shaft of blinding violet light remained, shooting downwards from the centre. Toby's eyes became fixed upon that shaft of light. She seemed to have forgotten to breathe.
The band had ceased to play. There fell a potent silence. The multitude below sat motionless, as if beneath a spell. And then she came.
No one saw her coming. She arrived quite suddenly as though she had slid down that shaft of light. And she was there before them dancing, dancing, like a winged thing in the violet radiance. Not a sound broke the stillness save a single, wandering thread of melody that might have come from the throat of a bird, soft, fitful, but half-awake in the dawning.
The violet light was merging imperceptibly into rose--the unutterable rose of the early morning. It caught the dancing figure, and she lifted her beautiful face to it and laughed. The gauzy scarf streamed out from her shoulders like a flame, curving, mounting, sinking, now enveloping the white arms, now flung wide in a circle of glittering splendour.
A vast breath went up from the audience. She held them as by magic--all save one who leaned back in his corner with no quickening of the pulses and watched the girl beside him sitting motionless with her blue eyes wide and fixed as though they gazed upon some horror from which there was no escape.
The rose light deepened to crimson. She was dancing now in giddy circles like a many-coloured moth dazzled by the dawn. The melody was growing. Other bird-voices were swelling into sound--a wild and flute-like music of cadences that came and went--elusive as the laughter of wood-nymphs in an enchanted glade. And every one of that silent crowd of watchers saw the red light of dawn breaking through the trees of a dream-forest that no human foot had ever trod.
Slowly the crimson lightened. The day was coming, and the silent-flitting moth of night was turning into a butterfly of purest gold. The scarf still floated about her like a gold-edged cloud. The giddy whirl was over. She came to rest, poised, quivering in the light of the newly-risen sun, every line of her exquisite body in the accord of a perfect symmetry. Yes, she was amazing; she was unique. Wherever she went, the spell still held. But to-night she was as one inspired. She did not see her spellbound audience. She was dancing for one alone. She was as a woman who waits for her lover.
In some fashion this fact communicated itself to her worshippers. They guessed that somewhere near that dazzling figure the stranger whom no one knew was watching. Insensibly, through the medium of the dancer, his presence made itself felt. When that wonderful dance of the dawn was over and the thunder of applause had died away, they looked around, asking who and where he was. But no one knew, and though curiosity was rife it seemed unlikely that it would be satisfied that night.
Up in the gallery Toby drew a deep breath as of one coming out of a trance, and turned towards the man beside her. The light had been turned on in the _salon_ below, and it struck upwards on her face, showing it white and weary.
"So she has found another victim!" she said.
"It seems so," said Saltash.
She looked at him in the dimness. "Did you know that--that Captain Larpent was with her?"
"No," said Saltash. He leaned forward abruptly, meeting her look with a sudden challenge. "Did you?"
She drew back sharply. "Of course not! Of course not! What--what should I know about her?"
He leaned back again without comment, and lighted another cigarette.
At the end of several seconds of silence, Toby spoke again, her locked fingers pulling against each other nervously.
"I wonder--do you mind--if I go soon? I--I am rather tired."
The lights went out as she spoke, and Saltash's face became invisible. He spoke quite kindly, but with decision, out of the darkness.
"After this dance, _ma chere_--if you desire it."
The music began--weird and mournful--and a murmur went round among the eager watchers. It was her most famous dance--the dance of Death, the most gruesome spectacle, so it was said, that any dancer had ever conceived. She came on to the stage like the flash of an arrow, dressed in black that glittered and scintillated with every amazing movement. And then it began--that most wonderful dance of hers that all the world was mad to see.
It was almost too rapid for the eye to follow in its first stages--a fever of movement--a delirium indescribable--a fantasy painful to watch, but from which no watcher could turn away. Even Saltash, who had taken small interest in the previous dance, leaned forward and gave his full attention to this, as it were in spite of himself. The very horror of it was magnetic. They seemed to look upon a death-struggle--the wild fight of a creature endowed with a fiery vitality against an enemy unseen but wholly ruthless and from the first invincible.
Those who saw that dance of Rozelle Daubeni never forgot it, and there was hardly a woman in the audience who was not destined to shudder whenever the memory of it arose. It was arresting, revolting, terrible; it must have compelled in any case. A good many began to sob with the sheer nervous horror of it, yearning for the end upon which they were forced to look, though with a dread that made the blood run cold.
But the end was such as no one in that assembly looked for. Just as the awful ecstasy of the dance was at its height, just as the dreaded crisis approached, and they saw with a gasping horror the inevitable final clutch of the unseen enemy upon his vanquished victim; just as she lifted her face in the last anguish of supplication, yielding the last hope, sinking in nerveless surrender before the implacable destroyer, there came a sudden flare of light in the _salon_, and the great crystal candelabra that hung over the end of the gallery where the man and the girl were seated watching became a dazzling sparkle of overwhelming light.
Everyone turned towards it instinctively, and Toby, hardly knowing what she did, but with the instinct to escape strong upon her, leapt to her feet.
In that moment--as she stood in the full light--the dancer's eyes also shot upwards and saw the sum young figure. It was only for a moment, but instantly a wild cry rang through the great _salon_--a cry of agony so piercing that women shrieked and trembled, hiding their faces from what they knew not what.
In the flash of a second the light was gone, the gallery again in darkness. But on the stage a woman's voice cried thrice: "Toinette! Toinette! Toinette!" in the anguished accents of a mother who cries for her dead child, and then fell into a tragic silence more poignant than any sound--a silence that was as the silence of Death.
And in that silence a man's figure, moving with the free, athletic swing of a sailor, crossed the stage to where the dancer lay huddled in the dimness like a broken thing, lifted her--bore her away.


CHAPTER VI
THE NEW LOVER

Very late that night when all the crowds who had assembled to watch Rozelle Daubeni had dispersed with awe-struck whisperings, two men came down the great staircase into the empty vestibule and paused at the foot.
"You are leaving Paris again?" said Saltash.
The other nodded, his face perfectly emotionless, his eyes the eyes of a sailor who searches the far horizon. "There is nothing to keep me here," he said, and absently accepted a cigarette from the case that Saltash proffered. "I have always hated towns. I only came--" He stopped, considered a moment, and said no more.
Saltash's eyes were upon him, alert, speculative, but wholly without malice. "You came--because you were sent for," he said.
Larpent nodded twice thoughtfully, more as if in answer to some mental suggestion than as if the words had been actually uttered. He struck a match and held it for Saltash. Then, as he deliberately lighted his own cigarette, between slow puffs he spoke: "There was only--one reason on earth--that would have brought me."
"Yes?" said Saltash. He dropped into a chair with the air of a man who has limitless leisure at his disposal, but his tone was casual. He did not ask for confidence.
Larpent stood still gazing before him through the smoke with keen, unwavering eyes.
"Only one reason," he said again, and still he seemed to speak as one who communes with his inner soul. "She was dying--and she wanted me." He paused a moment, and an odd tremor went through him. "After twenty years," he said, as if in wonder at himself.
Saltash's look came swiftly upwards. "I've heard that before," he said. "Those she caught she kept--always. No other woman was ever worth while after Rozelle."
Larpent's hand clenched instinctively, but he said nothing.
Saltash