Dope by Sax Rohmer (desktop ebook reader txt) 📕

was busy with plausible deceits to cover the sojourn in Chinatown. Something of Mollie Gretna's foolish enthusiasm had communicated itself to Rita.

Later in the evening Sir Lucien called, and on hearing of the scheme grew silent. Rita glancing at his reflection in the mirror, detected a black and angry look upon his face. She turned to him.

“Why, Lucy,” she said, “don't you want me to go?”

He smiled in his sardonic fashion.

“Your wishes are mine, Rita,” he replied.

She was watching him closely.

“But you don't seem keen,” she persisted. “Are you angry with me?”

“Angry?”

“We are still friends, aren't we?”

“Of course. Do you doubt my friendship?”

Rita's maid came in to assist her in changing for the third act, and Pyne went out of the room. But, in spite of his assurances, Rita could not forget that fierce, almost savage expression which had appeared upon his face when she had told him of Mrs. Sin's visit.

Later she taxed him on the point, but he suffered her inquiry with imperturbable sangfroid, and she found herself no wiser respecting the cause of his annoyance. Painful twinges of conscience came during the ensuing days, when she found herself in her fiance's company, but she never once seriously contemplated dropping the acquaintance of Mrs. Sin.

She thought, vaguely, as she had many times thought before, of cutting adrift from the entire clique, but there was no return of that sincere emotional desire to reform which she had experienced on the day that Monte Irvin had taken her hand, in blind trust, and had asked her to be his wife. Had she analyzed, or been capable of analyzing, her intentions with regard to the future, she would have learned that daily they inclined more and more towards compromise. The drug habit was sapping will and weakening morale, insidiously, imperceptibly. She was caught in a current of that “sacred river” seen in an opium-trance by Coleridge, and which ran—

“Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.”

Pyne's big car was at the stage-door on the fateful Saturday night, for Rita had brought her dressing-case to the theatre, and having called for Kilfane and Mollie Gretna they were to proceed direct to Limehouse.

Rita, as she entered the car, noticed that Juan Mareno, Sir Lucien's man, and not the chauffeur with whom she was acquainted, sat at the wheel. As they drove off:

“Why is Mareno driving tonight, Lucy?” she asked.

Sir Lucien glanced aside at her.

“He is in my confidence,” he replied. “Fraser is not.”

“Oh, I see. You don't want Fraser to know about the Limehouse journey?”

“Naturally I don't. He would talk to all the men at the garage, and from South Audley Street the tit-bit of scandal would percolate through every stratum of society.”

Rita was silent for a few moments, then:

“Were you thinking about Monte?” she asked diffidently.

Pyne laughed.

“He would scarcely approve, would he?”

“No,” replied Rita. “Was that why you were angry when I told you I was going?”

“This 'anger,' to which you constantly revert, had no existence outside your own imagination, Rita. But” he hesitated—“you will have to consider your position, dear, now that you are the future Mrs. Monte.” Rita felt her cheeks flush, and she did not reply immediately.

“I don't understand you, Lucy,” she declared at last. “How odd you are.”

“Am I? Well, never mind. We will talk about my eccentricity later. Here is Cyrus.”

Kilfane was standing in the entrance to the stage door of the theatre at which he was playing. As the car drew up he lifted two leather grips on to the step, and Mareno, descending, took charge of them.

“Come along, Mollie,” said Kilfane, looking back.

Miss Gretna, very excited, ran out and got into the car beside Rita. Pyne lowered two of the collapsible seats for Kilfane and himself, and the party set out for Limehouse.

“Oh!” cried the fair-haired Mollie, grasping Rita's hand, “my heart began palpitating with excitement the moment I woke up this morning! How calm you are, dear.”

“I am only calm outside,” laughed Rita.

The joie de vivre and apparently unimpaired vitality, of this woman, for whom (if half that which rumor whispered were true) vice had no secrets, astonished Rita. Her physical resources were unusual, no doubt, because the demand made upon them by her mental activities was slight.

As the car sped along the Strand, where theatre-goers might still be seen making for tube, omnibus, and tramcar, and entered Fleet Street, where the car and taxicab traffic was less, a mutual silence fell upon the party. Two at least of the travellers were watching the lighted windows of the great newspaper offices with a vague sense of foreboding, and thinking how, bound upon a secret purpose, they were passing along the avenue of publicity. It is well that man lacks prescience. Neither Rita nor Sir Lucien could divine that a day was shortly to come when the hidden presses which throbbed about them that night should be busy with the story of the murder of one and disappearance of the other.

Around St. Paul's Churchyard whirled the car, its engine running strongly and almost noiselessly. The great bell of St. Paul's boomed out the half-hour.

“Oh!” cried Mollie Gretna, “how that made me jump! What a beautifully gloomy sound!”

Kilfane murmured some inaudible reply, but neither Pyne nor Rita spoke.

Cornhill and Leadenhall Street, along which presently their route lay, offered a prospect of lamp-lighted emptiness, but at Aldgate they found themselves amid East End throngs which afforded a marked contrast to those crowding theatreland; and from thence through Whitechapel and the seemingly endless Commercial Road it was a different world into which they had penetrated.

Rita hitherto had never seen the East End on a Saturday night, and the spectacle afforded by these busy marts, lighted by naphtha flames, in whose smoky glare Jews and Jewesses, Poles, Swedes, Easterns, dagoes, and halfcastes moved feverishly, was a fascinating one. She thought how utterly alien they were, the men and women of a world unknown to that society upon whose borders she dwelled; she wondered how they lived, where they lived, why they lived. The wet pavements were crowded with nondescript humanity, the night was filled with the unmusical voices of Hebrew hucksters, and the air laden with the smoky odor of their lamps. Tramcars and motorbuses were packed unwholesomely with these children of shadowland drawn together from the seven seas by the magnet of London.

She glanced at Pyne, but he was seemingly lost in abstraction, and Kilfane appeared to be asleep. Mollie Gretna was staring eagerly out on the