It was not much, and reading it over again did not make it grow longer. She already could have told the story over verbatim-years of practice from studying librettos-but even so she did not like to leave the paper on the table to be swept away; instead she carried it into the bedroom and put it into her bureau, and went outside to tend the roses. In twenty minutes she came back inside and read it once more, and then went out to the front stoop.
The street boys knew her, courtesy of a ball returned after a broken window without more than a calm request they should aim away from her house in future. They were happy to take a few pennies to fan out into the town for news for her. An hour brought her a slightly worn copy of The Strand with Dr. Watson's voice thick as old treacle on the page, full of studied melodrama and real grief.
At breakfast the next morning, she read it over and over again, while across the table Godfrey placidly read a fresh newspaper, full of different news.
There was no reason it ought to have cut up her peace. She had not seen the man in two years and then had known him not at alclass="underline" that he had once invaded her house in guise to rob her was not much foundation for affection, except what one might feel, she supposed, for a satisfying opponent one has bested. The story-of course she had read it-the story had been very flattering, but she had enough of admirers to discount the value of another, even one who put her photograph above emeralds. And in any case, now he was dead.
The magazine went into the drawer with the newspaper, however.
Her mornings were of a settled round these days: what little management the little house needed, a trifle of work in the garden, a handful of calls received and returned. If her marriage had not made her wholly respectable, it had made her sufficiently so to permit her neighbors to excuse an acquaintance which so satisfyingly allowed them to partake of just the least bit of notoriety, indirectly; to mention in whispers, at assemblies and balls, yes, that is her, the famous-
Irene tried not to think in such a way of them, those kind and stupid ladies who came visiting. Ordinarily she did not. She could not begrudge anyone a little excitement at so little expense to her, and they were kind: when she had been ill, last year-so wretchedly inadequate a word for that hollowed-out experience, tears standing in her eyes because she would not, would not let them run, not in front of the businesslike doctor speaking to Godfrey over her head, telling him prosaically they must be cautious, warning against another attempt too soon, while he washed his hands of the blood-
They had been really kind then, beyond polite expressions of sympathy: food appearing in those first few days when she could think not at all, and clean linen; Mrs. Lydgate and Mrs. Darrow coming by in the mornings with embroidery, sitting in perfect silence for hours while the window-squares of sun tracked a pathway across the sitting room. They had asked her to sing, a week later on, and when she had stopped halfway through Una voce poco fa, drooping over the pianoforte, they had taken up without a word a conversation about their unreliable maidservants, until she had mastered herself.
So she could not despise them anymore, because the kindness was real, as all the crowned glories had proven not to be; she knew better now, or thought she knew, how to value the treasures of the world against one another. But that week she found herself freshly impatient; she did not attend to the conversation in Mrs. Wessex's drawing room, until someone said to her, a little cautiously, "But you knew him, my dear, didn't you?"
"No," she said, "no more than the hare knows the hound."
"Well, it's a pity," Mrs. Ballou said, in her comfortably stolid way, without ever looking up from her knitting. "I'm sure I don't know what he was about, though, letting that dreadful man throw him off a mountain instead of calling the police, like a sensible man."
"Oh," Irene said, "yes," and taking her leave very abruptly went outside and stood in the street, half-angry and half-amused with herself, to be so schooled by a fat old dowager. Of course he was not dead.
She was not sure what to feel for a moment, but her sense of humor won out in the end, and she laughed on the doorstep and went home to throw the papers into the dustbin at last. There was an end of it, she told herself; it was the inherent absurdity of the story which had gnawed at her.
John Watson believed his own story, she was sure. He was, she thought, very much like Godfrey: the sort of man who would think it-not romantic, but rather quite ordinary pro patria mori, even if there were convenient alternatives to be had for the cost of a little reasoning. The sort of man who would trust in what a friend told him, unquestioningly, because to doubt would be faintly disloyal. Easy to fool such a man, and more than a little cruel to do so.
"Is something distressing you, my dear?" Godfrey asked, and she realized she was drumming her fingertips upon the writing table, while her correspondence went unanswered.
"I am only out of sorts," she said. "This wretched heat!" This was not very just: it was only the beginning of June.
Two days later she took a train to Paris: alone, but for her maid. "If you would not mind waiting a week, I could tie up my affairs tolerably well," Godfrey said.
"You are very good, but in a week, I dare say the fit will have passed, and I will not want to go anywhere," Irene said. "Besides, I know you could not leave things in a state such as would leave you with an easy mind. No, I will fly away to Paris and repair my plumage, see some disreputable old friends and my very respectable singing-master, and come back just as soon as you have begun to miss me properly."
"Then you should have to turn around as soon as you had set foot out of the door," he said, gallantly.
She could be cruel too; perhaps that was what interested her.
In Paris, she left her maid behind in the hotel and went hunting. The whole enterprise was a shot at a venture, of course, but she thought either here or Vienna, and Paris was closer to Geneva. Irene spent the days sitting outside small cafés, legs crossed in neatly pressed trousers with her hair pinned back sharply under a top hat, sipping coffee and watching all the world as it passed before her table, noisy and vivid; watched women in elegant dresses going stately by like something from another life. Her nose was not yet used to the stench of the hansom cabs after so long in the quiet countryside; she felt herself set apart from it all, an observer by the side of the river.
When the lamplighters came around, she left a handful of coins and slipped away: to the Opéra, to the Symphony, where she bribed the ushers to let her in after the first act. Standing in the high tiers and off to the side, she studied the faces of the orchestras through a glass while below her Faust was carried away by demons, or Tchaikovsky's sixth tripped and glittered off the bows. Afterwards she went backstage with a bouquet of roses, instant camouflage against inquiry, and walked among the musicians to fish for accents.
On the fourth night she went to the Opéra-Comique, and the third violinist was a man with a narrow face, cheeks sallow and nose hawklike, who studied his music with more fierce concentration than a professional ought to have required.
She did not write to Godfrey that night: she spent it practicing beside the open window of her room, breathing in the warm, humid air of Paris, heads on the street turning up in the circle of gaslight below to look up as they went by. Behind her, the maid unpacked the dresses from the traveling trunk and pressed them with a heated iron. In the morning, through an acquaintance, Irene presented herself to the director as Madame Richards from America, and sang just well enough to be placed in the chorus and considered a possible understudy for Rosette in Manon.