Years passed, fourteen happy and uneventful years, during most of which the Bonairs lived quietly on their English estate, among their friends in England and from America. Charles’ sisters, Lucile and Marie, with their families, spent alternate summers at Thetford Towers, or traveling on the Continent, while during the winters the Bonairs fled to California.
One day, in early summer, Berry intended to drive over to Crumplesea, in her motor car, to say good-by to her old friends, the Westons, who were leaving the next morning. Willis Weston had married a charming American heiress years ago, and had become one of the leading dramatists and managers of America.
Charles was absent from England, at this time, having gone to New York on business which would detain him there.
It was a perfect summer day, warm and sunny, and Berry could not help feeling happy and secure from trouble or harm. But as in every life, clouds sometimes gather on the horizon and overshadow it for a while; so now, had she only known it, another storm was impending.
The first sign thereof was a slight mishap which brought the motor car to a standstill halfway on the road to Crumplesea.
Berry, who was somewhat of a fatalist in her way, always declared that the thing was foreordained. Mellish, chauffeur, simply said—sotto voce, of course—that it was “cursed bad luck, though no more than he had expected when Mrs. Bonair would have the car out to-day, after she’d been told that it ought to be sent to the garage yesterday, and she might just as well have used the victoria as not.”
The facts of the case may be related in a few words: The motor car had come up over the brow of the hill on its way back from Thetford Towers, and was rolling sedately through the drowsy stillness of Crumplesea, when a sharp metallic “zing-g-g!” sounded, and off came the tire of the left forewheel. Crumplesea boasted of three hotels and no end of “apartments,” but it could only lay claim to one garage, at the other end of the town, close to where the new hall—dignified by the name of opera house—had recently been erected. Mellish, who had learned this fact from the small gathering of idlers which the accident had collected—and to whom Berry was known, by sight and by name, about as well as the town clock itself—imparted the knowledge to his mistress, and was rather surprised that she took it with such equanimity.
“Very well, send for the man and have the thing set right at once,” she said. “It is only a step to the Crumplesea Hotel, and I dare say that Mercy Blint can manage to make me comfortable and get me a cup of tea while I am waiting. You can come back there for me when the tire has been put on again. But don’t be any longer than is absolutely necessary; I want to get home before dark, if possible!”
And then with the utmost serenity she alighted and walked straightway to the Crumplesea Hotel, which establishment was run by a woman who had once been her maid, and who, on the occasion of her marriage with the under butler, had been pensioned off some years ago.
Inquiry brought forth the intelligence that Mercy herself was absent for the day, but Mercy’s husband was there, and himself showed her ladyship into what was known as the coffee room—every other room in the house being engaged at the time—and rushed away in person to get tea for her.
And here it was that Berry saw another sign of trouble—the glaring, brightly colored aggressively prominent sign which always made her think that to-day’s accident had been foreordained.
It took the shape of a bill announcing the forthcoming opening of the new Crumplesea Opera House, when—to quote the announcement verbatim—“Mr. Milton Dante’s celebrated company of London artists would present the world-famous musical play, ‘The Beauty of Gotham,’ headed by the gifted and beautiful American actress and prima donna, Miss Rosalind Montague-Vance.”
A slow pallor, creeping like a snail, came steadily down over Berry’s face as she saw that bill. She stood for a long time looking fixedly at the printed words and not saying one word, not making one sound.
So she was still standing when, some twenty minutes later, her tea was brought into her by the obsequious Blint himself.
She sat down and drank the tea and ate the buttered toast she had ordered, and then rang the bell and called the man back to the room.
“Blint,” she said, pointing to the bill hanging upon the wall, “have those people come to Crumplesea as yet? I see they are advertised to open the new hall next Thursday. Have they come here yet?”
“No, my lady, not yet, of course; it’s best part of a week until Thursday. The advance agent will be here to-morrow, though, to make arrangements for rooms and the like. Hamer—him as runs the Cliff Hotel, as you may remember, seeing that he’s a tenant of yours—got word to that effect this afternoon, and come over to see if I’d any rooms vacant; him not being able to put up the whole party.”
Berry pushed back her empty teacup, and rose.
“See that they don’t get any, then,” she said, in a singularly dry voice. “See that every room in every hotel in the place is engaged for me. I don’t care what it costs, I want them all. Engage them for me.”
“I beg pardon, ma’am, but—but can you really mean it?”
“Am I in the habit of saying things that I do not mean? I see that they are billed to appear for three nights. Take all the vacant rooms in all the hotels for that period, in my name. Shut them out of every accommodation and force them to go elsewhere, if you can, and that woman, above all!”
The man gave a nervous start and looked as though he had received a shock.
“My lady!” he said, with a frightened look. “Heaven preserve us! it’s not her? It’s never the—the Yankee woman who married your—your brother, Mr. Vance?”
“Yes, it is. I never want to see her, but I recognize the name; as Mercy would have done, had she been at home. Now go and do what I have told you, and see that the woman finds no place to stop here. If you think the manager of the hall can be bought to cancel the engagement of the company——”
“It is not possible, my lady; the thing was arranged months ago.”
“So much the worse for me, then. However, I’ll do what I can. Go and engage every vacant room you can hear of, and go at once, please.”
Blint, in a state of shaking nervousness, flew to obey, and when, half an hour afterward, he came back to announce that he had done as he had been bidden, he found the repaired motor car at the door and her ladyship sitting in it.
“Thank you,” she said, as Blint came back with the list of the rooms he had engaged in her name. “Reckon up the sum total and I will send you a check for the amount. Home, Mellish.”
And then the motor car swung out into the roadway and rolled off through the fast deepening Kentish dusk.
And this was how it was that when Mr. Milton Dante’s advance agent came down to Crumplesea to arrange accommodations for the company, he found every available inch of room in the several hotels engaged for a week to come.
“Company’ll have to go into apartments, that’s all,” he said, in his airy, offhand way to Mr. Bodwin, the proprietor and manager of the newly erected Crumplesea Opera House. “Dante won’t like that, of course, for he’s struck a rich thing in getting the provincial rights to the ‘Beauty of Gotham,’ and he’s putting on no end of side, and insisting on all the members of the company putting up at hotels, instead of lodging houses and the like. It’s hard on some of ’em—especially the low-salaried ‘utility people’—but he’s in a position to dictate, and it’s that or nothing for most of ’em, poor devils! I dare say there’ll be many of ’em who’ll be as pleased as Punch over the mishap; but if the Montague doesn’t raise the roof, when she learns that she will have to go into apartments, you can write me down as an ass.”
“Dear me! is she a very violent person, then?” queried the manager apprehensively. “We are a very circumspect people here in Crumplesea, Mr. Billet, although the place is gaining renown as a seaside resort, and you quite alarm me with these hints.”
“Oh, don’t let that worry you. She won’t be in the town twenty-four hours before every man in it is gone on her and willing to swear that she’s the sweetest thing that ever happened. If ever she manages to get a hearing in London—and she will yet; she’s not the kind of woman to be kept in the provinces forever—somebody’s title will come her way, I warrant you. And it won’t be a mere empty title, either; it will be one well backed up with capital—trust her for that! She’s a highflyer, and she comes from a country where they know how to get full value for everything. Wait till she gets to London, that’s all. She’s not too old to hook a fish worth landing, even yet.”
“How old is she, Mr. Billet?”
“Ask me something easier! On the stage she looks about twenty, on the street about—oh, well, I’m too old a hand at this business to be caught belying the posters,” returned Mr. Billet, with a laugh and a wink. “But look here; draw your own conclusions. She owns up to five and twenty, and when a woman does that—especially a woman in the theatrical profession—you can safely add anything from five to ten to her figures, and not feel that you are doing her any injustice. Now then, show me the way to the post office, will you? I want to send a wire to Dante to prepare him for this little muddle about the accommodations; and, look here, Mr. Bodwin! take a fool’s advice and don’t you waste your time in going off your head over fair Rosalind when you see her—though, I dare say, you will, for all that; she seems born to make men do it wherever she goes—but just remember that you haven’t the ghost of a chance; and wouldn’t have if you owned all Crumplesea. Remember, I have warned you.”
“Thank you, but it is useless warning. I am already a married man.”
Mr. Billet looked up into his face, and laughed.
“So was Anthony,” he said. “Now come and show me the way to the post office.”
The curtain had fallen upon the close of the second act of “The Beauty of Gotham,” and Miss Montague-Vance had disappeared for the nonce from the enraptured gaze of Oakhampton—it was at the Oakhampton Theater that the company was appearing to-night—when Mr. Milton Dante—his baptismal certificate read “Peter Burridge,” by the way—came round behind the scenes in a state of angry excitement and rapped loudly upon Miss Montague-Vance’s dressing-room door.
“It’s me—Milt,” he said, in the quiet original grammar of his native Battersea. “I’ve got something to show you. Can I come in?”
“No. If it’s anything important, just wait five minutes and I’ll be out.”
The five minutes passed and the door opened, and out of it issued a creature so lovely, that even Mr. Milton Dante—who ought by this time to be used to it, Heaven knows—felt a little thrill as the vision dawned upon him.
“Scotland! but you do look scrummy to-night!” he said admiringly.
“Never mind how I look,” returned “the vision,” with an exceedingly earthy air. “You didn’t come here to pay me silly compliments, I fancy; or if you did, you are wasting your time and mine, to no purpose. What is it you want to say to me? Is it anything nice, or the reverse?”
“The reverse, I’m afraid. Our next ‘stand’ is Crumplesea, and the company will have to go into apartments when we get there.”
“Oh! no, it won’t; at least I won’t. None of your seaside apartments for me, if you please! Let others do what they like—or what you like; I suppose it amounts to that—but I want the best hotel in the place.”
“Well, I’m afraid we can’t get in. Billet has just wired me that every hotel in the place is engaged by some old fool of a woman called Mrs. Bonair, and that—I say! great Scott! are you ill? Thunder! you’re as white as a ghost.”
“Never mind what I am or what I am not,” she answered, in a singularly hard and singularly uneven voice. “So that woman has heard of my coming and has tried like this to shut me out, has she?”
“What woman? What the dickens are you talking about? And I say, whatever has come over you? I expected you to raise the roof and to shy things when you heard of this, and I’m blessed if you’re not taking it as meek as Moses.”
“No, not quite so meek—as you will learn before this affair is over. So that woman is going to try to shut me out, is she? Well, it will be a bad day’s work for her—I promise you that. I would have let her alone if she had been sensible and let me alone. But she chooses to show her claws, and so I’ll show mine.”
“Who the dickens are you talking about?”
“About this woman, this Mrs. Bonair, who is going to try the trick of shutting me out of Crumplesea.”
“Great Scott! do you know her?”
“Oh, yes, I know her—and what’s more, she shall know me in a few days, and better than she ever knew me before in her life. Look here, here’s something for you to know about me as well—I’ve a daughter.”
“You?”
“Yes. You’ve often wondered where I sent so much of my salary, and now you know. I’ve a daughter who’s nearly sixteen years old.”
“The dickens you say! It can’t be true.”
“Oh, yes, and what’s more, it is. She’s at school, and I haven’t seen her—no, and haven’t wanted to, either—since she was old enough to walk alone. I’m going to see her now, however, and Mrs. Bonair is going to see her, too—see her and hear of her for the first time. Shut me out, will she? Show her claws like that, eh, after I’ve let her alone for all these years? Well, if ever—get out of the way, for goodness’ sake! That’s the curtain bell, and that little beast of a call boy never notified me that it was time to begin.”
And then, without another word, she turned and ran up the stairs to the stage as fast as her little satin-shod feet could go.