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. 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!"