The Mystery of Mrs. Brandreth/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
You know, when you're on shipboard, how new people appear from day to day, long after you've seen every one on the passenger list! It is as if they had been dropped on deck from stealthy aëroplanes in the dark watches of the night.
And that was the way in which this girl appeared, this girl who worked the lightning change in Ralston Murray. It didn't seem possible that she could have come on board the ship nearly two days ago, and we not have heard of her, for she was the prettiest person I'd ever seen in my life. One would have thought that rumors of her beauty would have spread, since some one must have seen her, even if she had been shut up in her cabin.
Heads were turned in her direction as she came walking slowly toward us, and, thanks to this silent sensation, I saw the tall, slight figure in mourning while it was still far off.
The creature was devastatingly pretty, too pretty for any one's peace of mind, including her own, the kind of girl you wouldn't ask to be your bridesmaid for fear the bridegroom would change his mind at the altar!
“Jim,” I exclaimed, “the prettiest girl in the world is now coming toward you.”
“Really?” said he. “I was under the impression that she sat beside me.”
I suppose I must have spoken rather more loudly than I meant, for my excited warning to Jim caught the ear of Ralston Murray. My deep interest in him had woven an invisible link between him and me, though we had never spoken or even smiled at one another, for sympathy inevitably has this effect. Therefore his hearing was attuned to my voice more readily than to others in his neighborhood. He had apparently been half asleep, but he opened his eyes wide just in time to see the girl as she approached his chair. Never had I beheld such a sudden change on a human face. It was a transfiguration.
The man was very weak, but he sat straight up, and for a moment all look of illness was swept away.
“Rosemary,” he cried out sharply.
The girl stopped. She had been pale, but at sight of him and the sound of his voice she flushed to her forehead, I thought that her first impulse was to run away, but she controlled it,
“Major Murray!” she faltered. “I—I didn't dream of—seeing you here,”
“I have dreamed many times of seeing you,” he answered, “and I wished for it—very much.”
“Ah,” thought I, “that is the real wish! That's what the look in his eyes meant, not just getting back to England and dying in a certain house. Now I know.”
Every one near his chair had become more or less interested in Murray, romantic and pathetic figure that he was, Now, a middle-aged man whose chair was near Murray's on the right, scrambled out of a fur rug.
“I'm off to the smoking room,” he said. “Won't you”—to the girl—“take my chair and talk to your friend? I shall be away until after luncheon, maybe till tea time.”
I fancied that the girl was divided in her mind between a longing to stay and a longing to flee. But, of course, she couldn't refuse the offer, and presently she was seated beside Ralston Murray, their arms touching. I could hear almost all they said. This was not eavesdropping, because, if they'd cared to be secretive, they could have lowered their voices,
Soon, to my surprise, I learned that the girl was married. She didn't look married, or have the air of being married, somehow, and in the conversation which followed, she contradicted herself two or three times. Perhaps it was only because I confused myself with wild guesses, but from some things she said, one would think she was free as air, from others that she was tied down to a rather monotonous kind of life. She spoke of America as if she knew it only from a short visit. Then, in answer to a question of Murray's, she said, as if reluctantly, that she had lived here in New York, and Baltimore, and Washington for years.
It was quite evident to me, whether or not it was to Murray, that Mrs, Brandreth—as he called her after the first outburst of “Rosemary!”—disliked talking of herself and her way of life. She wanted to talk about Ralston Murray, or failing that subject, of almost anything which was remote from her own affairs.
I gathered, however, that she and Murray had known each other eight years ago or more, and that they had met somewhere abroad, out of England. There had been an aunt of Rosemary's with whom she had traveled as a young girl. The aunt was dead, but even the joss of a loved relative didn't account to my mind for this girl's sensitiveness about the past.
“They must have been engaged, these two, and something happened to break it off,” I thought. “But he can bear to talk of old times, and she can't. Odd, because she must have been ridiculously young for a love affair all those years ago. She doesn't look more than twenty-one now, though she must be of course—at least twenty-four. And he is probably thirty-two or three.”
I am often what Jim calls “intuitive,” and I had a strong impression that there was something the beautiful Mrs. Brandreth was desperately anxious to conceal, desperately afraid of betraying by accident. Could it have to do with her husband? I wondered. She seemed very loath to speak of him, and I couldn't make out from what she said even whether the man was still in existence. Her mourning—so becoming to her magnolia skin, great dark eyes, and ash-blond hair—didn't look like widow's mourning. Still, it might be, with the first heaviness of crape thrown off. Or, of course, the girl's peculiar reticence might mean that there had been, or was to be, a divorce.
I didn't move from my deck chair till luncheon time, but I had to go then, with Jim, and we left Mrs. Brandreth ordering her lunch from the deck steward. She would have it with Major Murray, who, poor fellow, was allowed no other food than milk.
When we came back on deck, it was to walk. We had been below for an hour or more, but the girl and the man were still together. As Jim and I passed and repassed those chairs, I could throw a quick glance in their direction without being observed. Mrs. Brandreth's odd nervousness and shy distress seemed to have gone. The two were talking together so earnestly that a school of porpoises might have jumped on deck without their knowing that anything out of the way had happened.
Later in the afternoon, the owner of Mrs. Brandreth's chair appeared, but when she would blushingly have given up her place, he refused to take it.
“I've only come to say,” he explained, “that one place on deck is the same to me as any other place. So why shouldn't I have your chair, wherever it is, and you keep mine? It's very nice for the major to have found a friend, and it will do him a lot of good. I'm a doctor, and if I were his physician, such society would be just what I would prescribe for him.”
Mrs. Brandreth had a chair, it seemed, though she said she'd come on board so tired that she had stopped in her cabin until this morning. Whether or not she were pleased at heart with the proposal, she accepted it after a little discussion, and Murray's tragic eyes burned with a new light.
I guessed now that his wish had been to see this beautiful girl again before he died. The fact that he was doomed to death no doubt spiritualized his love. He no longer dreamed of being happy in ways which strong men of his age call happiness, and so, in these days, he asked little of fate. Just a farewell sight of the loved one, a new memory of her to take away with him. And if I were right in my judgment, this was the reason why, even if Mrs. Brandreth had a husband in the background, these hours with her would be hours of joy for Murray, without thought of any future.
That evening as Jim and I were strolling out of our little salon to dinner, the door of the cabin adjoining mine opened, and it was with a shock of surprise that I saw Mrs, Brandreth. So she was my mysterious neighbor who cried and moaned in her sleep! I was thrilled at the discovery, but almost at once I told myself that I ought to have Sherlocked the truth the moment this troubled, beautiful being had appeared on deck.
Mrs. Brandreth was in black, of course, but she had changed into semi-evening dress, and her white neck was like swansdown in its folded frame of filmy gauze. Over the glittering waves of her ash-blond hair she had thrown a long, black veil of embroidered Spanish lace which fell nearly to her knees, and somehow before she could shut the door, a gust of wind seized both it and the veil. As the door slammed, it caught the veil, and the girl was struggling to free herself when Jim said:
“Let me help you!”
Of course, she had to thank him, and explain how she ought to have shut her window, as ours was temporarily the rough side of the ship. She and I smiled at each other, and so our acquaintance began. I guessed from the veil that she was dining in Murray's company, and pictured them together with the deck to themselves, and moonlight flooding the sea.
Next day the smile and nod, which Mrs. Brandreth and I exchanged, won a pleasant look from Ralston Murray for me. Naturally we began speaking soon after that, and before another day had passed, either Jim or I often dropped into the empty chair if Mrs. Brandreth were not on deck. Murray was interested to know that we would be neighbors of his, and that I was the granddaughter of the famous beauty his old bachelor cousin had loved,
I remember it was the night after my first real talk with him that I met Mrs. Brandreth again as we both opened our doors. Jim was playing bridge or poker with some men, and hadn't noticed the dressing bugle. I was ready, and going to remind him of the hour, yet I was charmed to be stopped by Mrs. Brandreth. Hitherto, though friendly when we were with our two men, or only one of them, she had seemed like a wild bird trying to escape if we happened to be alone. It was as if she were afraid I might ask her questions which she would not wish to answer. But now she stopped me of her own accord,
“I—I've been wanting to speak to you about something,” she began, with one of her bright blushes. “It's only this, when I'm tired or nervous, I'm afraid I talk in my sleep. I came on board tired out. I had a great grief a few months ago, and I can't get over the strain of it. Sometimes when I wake up, I find myself crying, and have an impression that I've called out. Now I know that you're next door, and I'm rather worried lest I have disturbed you.”
I hurried to reassure her. She hadn't disturbed me at all. I was, I said, a splendid sleeper.
“You haven't heard anything?” she persisted.
I felt she would know I was fibbing if I did fib, so it wasn't worth while.
“I have heard a sound like crying now and then,” I admitted.
“But no words? I hope not, as people say such silly things in their sleep, don't they? Things not even true.”
“I think I've heard you call out 'Mother!' once or twice.”
“Oh! And that is all?”
“Really, that's all! Absolutely!” It was true, and I could speak with such sincerity that I forced belief.
Mrs. Brandreth looked relieved.
“I'm glad!” she smiled. “I hate to make myself ridiculous. And I'm trying very hard now to control my subconscious self, which gets out-of-hand at night. It's simply the effect of my—grief—my loss which I spoke of just now. I'm fairly normal otherwise.”
“I hope you're not entirely normal!” I smiled back. “People one speaks of as 'normal' are so bromidic and dull! You look far too interesting, too individual to be normal.”
She laughed.
“So do you!”
“Oh, I'm not normal at all, thank goodness!””
“Well, you're certainly interesting and individual—far more than I am!”
“Anyhow, I'm sympathetic,” I said. “I'm tremendously interested in other people. Not in their affairs, but in themselves. I never want to know a thing they don't want me to know, yet I'm so conceited that I always imagine I can help when they need help, just by sympathy alone, without a spoken word. But to come back to you! I have a lovely remedy for restlessness at night: not that I need it often myself, but my French-Italian maid carries dried orange leaves and blossoms for me. She thinks tisanes better than doctor's medicines. May she make some orange-flower tea for you to-night at bedtime?”
Mrs. Brandreth had shown signs of stiffening a little as I began, but she melted toward the last, and said she would love to try the poetic-sounding tea.
It was made, proved a success, and she was grateful. Perhaps she remembered my hint that I never wanted to know things which my friends didn't want me to know, because she made some timid advances as the days went on. We had quite intimate talks about books and various views of life, as we walked the deck together, and I began to feel that there was something else she longed to say, something which rose constantly to her lips only to be frightened back again. What could it be? I wondered. And in the end would she speak, or decide to be silent?