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. "I--I can't stand these lies, these evasions, this deceit any longer. You have given me your word that you have told the truth, that you never saw Helen before to-day. I don't know whether to believe that or not. But, if it is the truth, you know something--something about her. In Heaven's name, man, tell me! Who is she? I ask you--what is she?"

Victor Sarbella shook his head slowly. "She is your wife," he answered, as if that might explain why he must keep sealed lips, but Gilmore would not have it rest that way.

"Yes," he groaned, "she is my wife, but who was she, what was she before--before she became my wife? I think you know." His shoulders shook with a dry sob. "Sarbella, can't you see what this is doing to me--that it is driving me mad?"

Again Sarbella's head described a sadly negative gesture. "I am sorry, Kirklan," he said; "believe me, Kirklan, I am your friend, and I am sorry, but there is nothing I can tell you. Set at rest any fears you may have had about"--his lips twitched into a bitter smile--"about any romantic attachment between us. Anything but that!"

Kirklan Gilmore took a step forward; the next instant he had flung himself on Sarbella, and, although he was the less powerful man, the latter was taken off his guard and staggered back into a chair.

"You tell me what you know, and tell me now, or I'm going to kill you!" he gritted. "Tell me before I have to choke the life out of you." His fingers squeezed about the artist's throat, and Sarbella had to fight him off to break the grip. With a tremendous heave of the muscles he flung Gilmore back, and the novelist, reeling, lost his balance and plunged heavily to the floor.

He lay absolutely still.

Victor Sarbella stood over him, staring down at him pityingly. "I am sorry for you, Kirklan," he said huskily: "yes, I am sorry--very sorry." He went to the door, unlocked it with the key, and turned, just as Gilmore was struggling up. "I cannot very well remain your guest now, Kirklan. Oh, I don't mean just this." His fingers touched his torn collar, the rumpled bosom of his dress shirt. "But I'll stay until to-morrow. We can't forget that we are under obligations to the publishers. Yes, I will wait until to-morrow; see if you can't pull yourself together long enough to talk things over."

Gilmore gave no sign that he had heard, and Victor Sarbella passed on out of the studio and down the old wooden steps of the stable. When the door closed, Kirklan Gilmore slowly dragged himself to his feet and moved toward the chair by the desk. Like a rheumatic old man with protesting bone joints, he lowered himself into the chair, his body sagging limply forward until he lay across the desk, his face pillowed in his arms. He lay like that, his senses numbed, almost as if he were dead, for a long time.