CHAPTER II—ACT II

Out Long Island way on the North Shore where Newport goes to stretch her tired limbs after a busy season, there’s a house set like a long white couch on a green carpet that spreads straight to the Sound.

The place is called Restawhile—and having some twenty rooms, not to speak of servant quarters, is known modestly as a cottage.

Here Dick Cunningham brought his bride following their honeymoon trip through the Orient. Here they spent the greater part of each year. For with its kennels and stables, Nancy loved it next to the house of the fir trees which would always be her castle of romance. Besides, it was not too near Broadway, not near enough for whisperings of the Rialto to tug at the heart or fill the eyes. Or if the dull ache of longing too deep for tears did come, it was a place to hide them from a curious public.

The announcement of Nancy’s marriage and retirement from the stage had come as a shock to the social world and a bomb to the theatrical. Broadway buzzed, Fifth Avenue bristled, and poor Jerry Coghlan almost went crazy. But as the calcium of the society column replaced her beloved footlights, the star of the theater became a star of the social realm and another nine days’ wonder became memory.

The column told of her dinners and dances, of her trips to Florida, her visits to Newport. It listed her with her husband among inveterate first-nighters and usually added: “The one-time Nancy Bradshaw whose romantic marriage robbed the stage of one of its most promising young actresses.”

Eventually it announced with clarion blast the arrival of Dick Junior and later Nancy the Second, quite as if a chubby Dick and Nancy Cunningham were more important than the same weight John and Mary Smith.

A fairy tale come true even the most caustic observer would have remarked, had he known the history of the beautiful woman seated on the stone-paved veranda of Restawhile one April afternoon five years after the curtain descended on Act I.

She wore a short white skirt, green sweater and white sport shoes. Strands of hair had been tossed across her eyes by a romp on the lawn with young Dicky. He sat at her feet now, pink legs outstretched, and mobilized between them a regiment of wooden soldiers.

Ted Thorne and her former manager had driven out to read Thorne’s latest drama, written with Lilla Grant in mind. She was the season’s new darling and her hybrid little face with its eyes from the Orient and nose from Erin’s Isle decorated many a magazine cover and wood-cut. It might also have been seen at the Ritz lunching daily with varied and various conquests. She had acquired an air and no longer spoke of her profession as “the show business.” Her gowns were the talk of fashion editors, her hats the despair of imitators. She was colorful as a Bakst drawing and as decorative.

The woman in white skirt and sweater that matched the lawn sat listening at one side of the tea table, while Coghlan at her right measured three fingers of Scotch against two of soda and the playwright’s voice sounded vibrant against the sweet spring stillness. It was a tense elemental story suggested to him by Nancy, with Hawaii—land of love—as a setting. Finally he closed the script and looked across at her.

“What do you think of it?”

“The best thing you’ve done, Ted,” she announced instantly.

“Of course, it’s only in the rough. But I wanted your opinion. Am I like that fellow who knows all about the Himalayas because he never got there?”

“Just like him—an authority,” she retorted.

“But straight—how does it strike you?”

“I love it! You’ve never written anything with greater emotional possibilities.”

“How do you like Lilla for the lead?”

“Just the type. And good from a box-office standpoint, too—she’s made such a hit this season.”

“Some kid!” put in Jerry, tinkling the ice pleasantly against his glass. “Always said she’d make her mark. And take it from me, Jerry Coghlan knows what he’s talking about.”

Nancy smiled. “You couldn’t find any one better to play an Hawaiian.”

“Oh yes, we could!” came from Thorne.

“Who?”

“You.”

She laughed and in her laughter the men detected nothing but mirth.

“Don’t you ever have a hankering for the old game, Nancy?” Coghlan demanded. “Don’t the theater ever get in your blood?”

She bent and lifted young Dick suddenly to her knees.

“Here’s my theater,” was her answer.

The playwright’s gaze traveled over the two gold heads to the father’s eyes that smiled from the baby face into his mother’s. Fat arms wound round her neck and she sank her lips in the fluffy curls.

“You’ve got a part that suits you to perfection,” he said in a low voice.

“Say, there ain’t any part Nancy couldn’t play! Always said she had class. And take it from me—”

“It’s good to know you haven’t forgotten us,” Thorne interrupted, still in that low tone. “Whenever things get balled up I say to myself: ‘Here goes for a run out to Restawhile. Nancy’ll help me straighten them out.’”

“It’s good to know you feel that way. You see”—she held Dicky closer—“I can give you the viewpoint of the audience now.”

That night she told her husband of the play. They had dined at the Courtleigh Bishop place, some five miles distant, and during the drive home Nancy had been unusually quiet. She walked up the wide staircase, head bent, her long velvet cloak pulled close around her as if for protection against the country chill of April. But as he followed into her boudoir with its amber lights and drapes of cornflower blue she dropped into a chair, let the wrap slip from her shoulders and leaned forward, speaking rapidly.

“Tell me something of your doings to-day, Dick. You haven’t yet.”

He recounted the day’s activities—certain complications that had arisen in his Western interests. Cunningham, in spite of wealth or perhaps because of it, was not a waster. She listened eagerly to every word.

“And, by-the-way,” he added, much as an afterthought; “I lunched with a former friend of yours, Lilla Grant. Met her as I was going into the Ritz. She was alone—so was I. So we joined forces.”

She leaned back with a deep sigh.

“I’m glad you told me that.”

His reply held a note of surprise.

“Why?”

“Because Mary Bishop made it a point to inform me to-night that she’d seen you there. ‘Dicky still has a penchant for the theatrical profession,’ she said, ‘I saw him lunching to-day with a stage beauty.’ Of course, it amused me but I just had a feeling that I’d like to hear about it from you.”

“It was of no importance. I might not have thought of mentioning it.”

“No. Still—I suppose I’m silly and feminine—but if you hadn’t, I think it would have hurt.”

“Do I demand to know every time Thorne comes out here?”

“You don’t have to, Dick.” Her eyes were still intent on him.

“I’ve lunched with Lilla Grant other days and haven’t thought of mentioning it.”

“I know that, too.”

His eyebrows shot up. “How?”

“Other women.”

He laughed. “How they do love each other!”

She laughed with him. “It’s all right now. You’ve told me. I just didn’t want to think you’d deceive me.”

“But, my dear girl, an omission like that is not deliberate deceit.”

“Omission,” came softly, “is often twin sister to commission.”

His lips went tight. “Does that mean you’d ever let anything as cheap as suspicion of me enter your mind?”

She got up, brushing her mouth across the hard line of his. “If I love you as much as I do, it’s reasonable to suppose other women might.”

And that was when she gave him the story of Thorne’s play—more to change the subject than anything else—with eyes shining and slim jeweled hands sending sparks into the room’s golden shadows. He listened, watching her, the light on her face, the blaze of enthusiasm under the thick lashes.

“It’s a splendid part for Lilla,” she ended. “She’ll be fascinating in it, don’t you think?”

“Great!” And after a moment, “Nancy—does seeing so much of Thorne and old Jerry ever tempt you to go back on the stage?”

She went close to him as if his bigness were a shelter.

“It’s a temptation I’d never acknowledge, dear heart—not even to myself.”

“But you haven’t answered me.”

“I did that when I made my choice—when I married you. I couldn’t be disloyal to that. Besides”—and all the woman of her went into the words—“you and the two little yous fill my life. I’ve no time for any other devotion.”

He looked down at the head, reddened under the amber lights, at the graceful line of throat and shoulder, at the proud lips that were his. And his arms swept up and round her.

* * * * *

Drama moves swiftly. No pause for explanation once the wheels are set going, no rambling into far corners for side lights as in the novel, but a tornado-like gathering of incident that hurls itself without notice into crashing storm. Life crowded into a few short hours, just as a few short hours so often crowd life into one crashing crisis. Without warning, or at least without warning heeded, one answers the doorbell or opens a telegram or takes up a telephone receiver. And behold, the face blanches, the heart stops beating, to beat again with hammer stroke too horrible to bear!

It happened that Thorne’s roadster drew up under the porte-cochère one May day and, removing dusty goggles, he announced that he had come to talk about a scene that stumped him.

“I’ve traveled to Mecca to consult the Oracle.”

Nancy shook hands enthusiastically. Dick had been away for several days; her favorite mount, Lord Chesterfield, had been taken to town by the head groom for treatment under a famous “vet”; and endless dinners had bored her to a state of loneliness known only to those whose lives have hummed with activity. Her husband would not be back until to-morrow and to put in a few hours with Ted in the atmosphere of the theater was a welcome diversion.

When they had discussed pros and cons and the kick in the big scene; when the playwright in hushed voice had told Dicky the usual pirate tale, and the three had lunched together under the trees, Nancy jumped up.

“Ted, will you run me into town this afternoon? I want to have a look at Lord Chesterfield. He went lame last week, you know.”

Thorne beamed.

“Bully! It’s a whale of a day. Why not stay in? We can dine and I’ll run you out early.”

But she refused. The kiddies were put to bed at six-thirty and she wanted to be back before then.

“I’ll take the train back. Don’t bother about that.”

She came downstairs presently buttoned into a gray topcoat. From under a tight little turban the sunset hair waved, held by a gray veil.

They tore out of the grounds, along roads of glass at a pace that left both breathless. Nancy felt the sluggishness of the past few days lashed out of her blood. It flew happily to her cheeks, tingled to her finger tips, sent the laughter into her lips as the man beside her gave the latest bits of Broadway gossip, the latest funny story from a region teeming with them. She stored them up for Dick, picturing his enjoyment when on his return next day she should give them with all her embellishment of mimicry.

The first pungent scent of summer, clover and sweet grass and occasional great mounds of hay, rose from the meadows as they sped past. The vault above was intensely turquoise and without a cloud. It would be a heavenly night with a young silver moon etched against the sky and all things filmed by its light. She wished Dick were going to be home. They could have taken a tearing ride like this with all the countryside to themselves.

The breezes became sultry. City smoke crept in. The car jerked over cobbles, dodging barelegged youngsters and wedging at last into the clatter of Queensboro Bridge. Nancy’s nose crinkled. She had come to hate the city with its odors and noises and strained faces and heavy air, all the elements which had passed unnoticed when she was part of it and a struggler.

From the cluttered Eastside they went through the district whose boarded doors and windows like the blank eyes of the blind proclaimed it fashionable; then the dust-covered green of the Park and out at the street in the Sixties where down the block three windows blinked coquettishly.

Nancy descended, held out a hand. “Good luck, Ted. And let’s hear it when you’ve got it ready.”

His alert gaze was bright with satisfaction. “You’ve set me on the right track. You always do.”

She waved as he drove off, then rang the bell beside the big door. It swung back slowly, heavily, and the head-groom stood in the opening. She caught the look of surprise that swept over his face, passing as quickly after the manner of well-trained servants who are supposed to have no emotions.

“How is Lord Chesterfield?” she inquired, stepping out of the sunlight.

“He’s not been so fine to-day, madam. I think there’s pain in the left forefoot.”

“I want to have a look at him.”

“Yes, madam.”

He closed the door, led the way to the run. But Nancy started toward the stairs.

He turned. “Is there anything I can do for you, madam?”

“No, that’s all right, Jarvis. I’ll just leave my coat and come down.”

“I can take it.” He stepped forward hastily, with rather a note of apology. “The painters are up there, madam. The rain of two days ago made a leak in the roof and I had to have them in. The place is in something of a mess.”

But Nancy was already halfway up the stairs. “It doesn’t matter.”

She disappeared, dropped her coat on the divan in the gray room, and looked ceilingward. No sign of repairs there. Probably the leak was at the front of the house.

Turning into the hall she noticed that Jarvis had followed her.

“Pardon me, madam—will you be coming down to see Lord Chesterfield now?”

“Just a minute.”

She threw open the double oak doors at the end. And her breath stopped as she did on the threshold.

A stream of sunshine flecked with motes came through the far window and centered on the couch. Lounging there in a position of uttermost comfort was Dick and at his feet, hatless and cross-legged like some willing slave of the harem, Lilla Grant. A look of flame was in his non-committal eyes and in her heavy ones, languor. The ripe red lips were raised. From her fingers a cigarette dangled as he leaned close and struck a match. All too evident, though, that it was not to light the cigarette those lips were lifted.

Nancy’s hand went to her throat. That was all. Went to her throat and clung there.

The two started at the sound of another’s presence. The match halted. Cunningham looked up. He straightened, sat for an instant without moving, then got to his feet.

The provocation faded from Lilla’s lips. A moment before she had had the unmistakable air of being perfectly at home. Now as she followed the man’s sharp glance she stiffened. Uneasily she too rose and, as neither of the others spoke, gave a nervous little laugh.

“Why, Nancy, this is a coincidence! We’ve been expecting Ted Thorne for tea and only half an hour ago tried you on the phone to get you, too.”

Nancy made no attempt to refute the glib lie. She simply stood gazing at her husband as if her eyes were touching him. Then she turned away.

“I think—I won’t wait,” she managed to say and went out, closing the door.

At the other side she stopped, hands pressed tight to her lips, and waited for courage to go forward.

Partway down the stairs she saw Jarvis looking up. Fright grayed his face.

“I’ll see Lord Chesterfield now,” she told him and followed to the run.

With gaze straining through the train window an hour later at meadow and woodland she did not see, she was carried back to Restawhile, to the babies waiting for her.

The moon rose, as she had pictured it, paling the trees outside her room and the lawn beneath.

At last her door opened. Cunningham entered, closing it softly, switched on the lights and saw her sitting hunched in a chair, with eyes bewildered as if they could not realize the thing they had revealed. He spoke her name—once, twice. She did not even glance at him.

“Nancy, answer me!”

She turned slowly.

“I ask you not to jump at conclusions. Nancy—”

“Yes!”

“Why didn’t you wait?”

Her gaze locked with his incredulously. “You think I could have waited?”

“I understand,” he put in hastily. “That’s why I made no attempt to detain you. The situation was awkward.”

She laughed. It might have been a cry from the soul.

“Awkward, nothing more!” he hurried on. “I admit, it looked damning. I, myself, would have judged as you did. But I give you my word—”

She swept it aside.

“Jarvis tried to keep me from going up. That alone proves—”

“Jarvis is a servant, with the view point of his class.”

She uttered the thought that had been spinning round in her brain. “He would scarcely have tried to protect you if that had been her first visit.”

“Why not? He concluded because a woman happened to be there with me—alone—Bah,” he broke off, “that end of it’s not worth considering! What you think is all that concerns me. And what you think is only too evident.”

“What I think—what I think!” Her hands clasped and unclasped incessantly. Her voice came strangled.

He had been pacing up and down. Now he pulled a chair close to hers.

“But you’re wrong, dear. It’s circumstantial evidence and worth as much. I came back to-day unexpectedly, looked in at the uptown office before going home and found a message from Lilla, asking me to see her this afternoon without fail. I called her hotel and arranged to meet her at the stable. Jarvis had notified me that Lord Chesterfield was seedy and it occurred to me that by having her come there, I’d save time.”

“You—” the words came haltingly as if difficult to speak—“you didn’t seem in haste when I saw you.”

“Come now—be sporting, dear.” He tried to make a laugh cut the tension. “You know my interest in the theater.”

“Yes—I know.”

“Well, Lilla’s consulted me any number of times about one thing or another. And she has a Bohemian way of establishing palship that you don’t understand.”

“Don’t I?”

“No. I wouldn’t want you to. But the fact remains that Lilla on the floor with a cigarette in her mouth means no more than another woman at the tea table.”

She made no reply.

“Of course she lied when she said we were expecting Thorne,” he pursued. “You knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yes. He was out here to-day and motored me in. But I’d have known anyway.”

“Can’t understand why it’s so much easier for women to lie than tell the truth.”

“Perhaps men teach them it’s easier.”

There was a breath without words.

“For instance,” she went on monotonously and her eyes dropped to the hands clenched against her knees, “you’re going to tell me I’ve no right to misjudge either you or Lilla.”

“Why, my dearest,” Cunningham lifted her lowered face, looked long into it. “There’s nothing mysterious in the whole affair. Kane offered to star her in a new production if she’d get him the backing and she wants me to put up the money. That’s the long and short of it. I had every intention of consulting you.”

She drew away, looking at him straight and direct. Her lips opened but closed without speech. She had been on the point of asking how it happened that he had arrived in town a day ahead of time without letting her know, why he had failed to telephone. But she could not bring herself to question him. And he gave little time.

Lifting both her hands he unlocked them, drew them to his breast and met her eyes unwavering.

“Lilla and I are nothing more than good pals, like—like you and Thorne. I want you to believe that.”

“It’s impossible, Dick—after what I saw to-day.”

“Why? Have you ever before had cause to doubt me?”

“No.” She hesitated a bit before admitting it.

“Then why seize on the first occasion?”

“Seize on it? Seize on it?” She gave another low breathless laugh. “That—that’s funny! Seize on my own misery—seize on the shattering of all I hold dear!”

“You’re nervous and hysterical now and things look monstrous. But I know you too well to think this mood can last.” His hands crept toward her shoulders. All through the interview there had been no conflict on his part, no man-woman antagonism, just an assumption of honest effort to convince her. And now he adroitly resorted to the means by which he had won her, a man’s most convincing way of setting himself right, the lover’s. He drew her, resisting, out of the chair—enfolded her in his arms—bent his lips, whispered: “No other woman could mean anything while I have you. Don’t you know that?”

A moment passed, longer than any she had ever lived through. Then, so low that he could scarcely hear: “I’m going to believe you, Dick—because I want to believe you,” she said.

Neither of them referred to it again. As if by mutual agreement the matter was sealed. Whatever scar the experience had left so far as Nancy was concerned, her lips were closed as the lips of the dead.

When eventually she heard through Thorne that along the Rialto it was whispered Lilla actually was considering an offer from Kane, she felt immensely relieved. Dick had told her the truth then about that end of it. Why was the rest not true as well?

And as if to assure her, his devotion duplicated that of their honeymoon. Her happiness seemed the thought paramount, her peace of mind his topmost concern. It continued so until business called him West, the tangle that for some time had been knotting his California interests. The letters he sent, when they were not of her and the children, spoke of his boredom after affairs of the day were done with, of the humidity and discomfort of the rainy season and emphasized his eagerness to return. They came from various coast cities—San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles.

“It’s possible you may not hear from me the next few weeks,” a final communication told her. “I find it necessary to go to New Mexico to look into a railroad proposition. For a time I may be located miles from any post office. But know that I’m safe and thinking of you, my dearest, and expect me back sometime in September.”

Nancy packed when it arrived and left to visit the Bishops at Newport. Stopping overnight in town, she ran into Coghlan on his way to the Knickerbocker Grill, daily trysting place of managers.

“Say, what d’you think of Lilla?” He chortled in the midst of pouring out plans for the coming season. “Gone to Hawaii to get atmosphere before she signs up for that lead. Atmosphere! Can you beat it? Paying her own expenses, too. Told her she was crazy, but nothing to it—had to go. Developing too much temperament for her own good, that kid!”

Nancy had not yet brought herself to the point of hearing Lilla’s name without wincing. But she managed a smile and asked: “When does she return?”

“Next month sometime. Told her rehearsals begin the fifteenth whether she’s on the job or not. So you can bank on it, she’ll be here.” His appraising yet impersonal glance ran the length of Nancy’s graceful figure, from the wide hat shading her eyes to the narrow brown pumps and slim ankles. “All to the good, Nancy,” he sighed regretfully, “all to the good! Just home and mother stuff too! And, by golly, five years ago I guyed myself into thinking I’d turn you out the greatest actress in America!”

She wondered vaguely as she sped toward the worldly paradise whose gates had swung wide to her whether old Jerry was right. Would she have become a great actress or just the darling of a few fickle years? That girl with her wild dark eyes and swirl of golden hair, would the public she had loved have wept and laughed with her to-day? She wondered and smiled reminiscently, a smile with a tear, like some bittersweet memory of the dead.

At the station she was met by her host, otherwise known as Mary Bishop’s husband, and in a supremely groomed car was driven through supremely groomed streets, ultra as the leaders who dwelt there. Courty Bishop sat back beside her, caressed his waxed mustache and regaled her with choice bits of news, just as Coghlan had regaled her the day before. After all, she told herself, there wasn’t much difference in the two worlds. Appraisingly, but with a look not quite so impersonal as that of her former manager, the sophisticated eyes turned to scan her beauty while his facile tongue rambled on.

“I say—you top ’em all, Nancy! What a risk that boy, Dick, takes—leaving you alone so long!”

“Not so much of a risk,” she laughed, mentally placing her husband next to the little man.

“But what the deuce takes him such a distance this time of year?”

“Oh, railroad stuff.”

“Bore—the tropics in midsummer!”

“Tropics?”

“Well,—that’s what I’d call the Hawaiian Islands. One of my men, McIntyre, met him on the way out. Wrote that if Cunningham didn’t kick at going, guessed he couldn’t. But why in hades—”

The woman beside him heard no more. Hawaii!! Like some giant machinery against her ears, his words became a whirr. She smiled mechanically, as so many women have done, while the world stood still.

Fate had lifted the prompter’s hand and slowly the curtain descended on Act II of Nancy Bradshaw’s life drama.