Mystery Villa (31 page)

‘Lilian Ellis next,' said Martin, in a loud voice. He was slightly bored with the whole business, and, besides, he knew Mrs Martin was keeping hot for him a nice plate of fried fish and chips. ‘Now where's she got to?' he demanded wearily.

‘I'm here,' a small voice answered, as there came forward – though looking more than half-inclined to run for it – a girl who had been standing and shivering and panicking in a corner close by, waiting for the summons that had seemed so long in coming, while the courage she had with pain and grief screwed up to sticking point oozed slowly, surely away, till now very little indeed of it was left her.

She was tall, too; nearly as tall as the magnificent Caroline herself, though built on much less generous lines – ‘scraggy' was in fact the description Caroline had done her best to broadcast of her – and she was as dark as Caroline was fair, with very large dark brown eyes and dark rippling hair. Her features were a little on the small side, though finely moulded and in perfect proportion, and, if it was the beauty of the soft radiance of her eyes that generally attracted attention first, a minor beauty she could equally have boasted was the perfection of her teeth. Their regular and pearly whiteness flashed like a ray of light through her rare smile, but unfortunately she had never learnt the trick of showing them to advantage. Her lips were generally pressed firmly together to express the resolution and distrust a hard, unlucky life had taught her, though it may be her smile was all the more captivating when it came because it so seldom lit up the gravity of her young face. At the moment she was perhaps hardly looking her best, for her nervousness was palpable, and had induced a slight perspiration, while a chilly draught, blowing straight into the corner where she had been waiting, had resulted in a certain unfortunate redness of the nose. Now, as she moved forward in answer to Martin's summons, she and Caroline came face to face, and, with real admiration, Lilian whispered:

‘You looked lovely. They did clap, didn't they?' Caroline's glance flashed over the other girl and recognized a dangerous rival. There was, it had to be acknowledged, something attractive, something in an odd contradictory way both appealing and compelling, about her. Feature by feature, item by item, Caroline was confident of her own superiority – with the possible exception of those lustrous teeth silly little Lilian had luckily no idea how to use to advantage. Not that Caroline was dissatisfied with her own, polished and shining and large and strong, real ‘ivory castles' of the advertisement that could crack a nut with ease but, if hers were ‘ivory castles,' Lilian's were like two rows of well-matched pearls, and added their share to that rather inexplicable attractiveness the child certainly possessed. People were such fools, too – Lilian's smile might win them to give her an applause to rival that just now awarded to Caroline. Like summer lightning across the sea all this flashed through her mind – though intensely felt rather than clearly thought – and showed her dream of Hollywood endangered. She said:

‘Disqualified – isn't it awful?'

Lilian looked bewildered.

‘Disqualified,' Caroline repeated, in a rapid whisper. ‘I stopped too long on the stage – against the rules. You've got to run away just as soon as the clapping starts, or they disqualify you. Mind you're careful.'

‘Oh, I will – oh, I am sorry,' Lilian exclaimed, in consternation at such a catastrophe. ‘Oh, they won't really–'

‘Now then, Miss Ellis, stage waiting,' Martin bawled. ‘Come along there – got to finish some time to-night,' he protested, thinking longingly of fish and chips – so much more to a practical, middle-aged man than all the lovely ladies that are or ever were.

Lilian found herself on the stage. This surprised her, for she had no idea how she had got there. The one clear thought in her mind was that she must be careful not to get disqualified. If that happened she would lose her chance of getting the job as permanent mannequin at the Brush Hill Bon Marche she had applied for, and had been as good as promised if she met with any success to-night. Mr Ginn, the staff manager, was in front to-night, she knew, though of course it was quite impossible to distinguish him in that sea of white faces, all intimidatingly staring. She could only hope he thought she was satisfactory, for a job at the Brush Hill Bon Marche meant a lot to a girl with a fretful, invalid mother to support as well as two small brothers of inconceivable appetites and an absolutely bewildering habit of growing out of their clothes almost as soon as they put them on. At any rate, the one thing she had to be careful of was not to risk poor Carrie's fate and get herself disqualified.

No one was clapping as yet as they had clapped the unlucky Caroline. In point of fact, as she had only just stepped into their view, the spectators had as yet hardly had time, but to her it seemed that she had been standing there a hundred years or so. But, if they were not clapping, they were all, as she perceived to her extreme astonishment, staring their very hardest. It was rather awful. It needed courage to stand there and endure that. And she had never had much courage, only temper – as her mother had found out once or twice when she had pushed complaining a little bit too far, or those two boys of whom a shameful legend of her youth proclaimed that she had chased them with a dinner-knife all down the street merely because they had been having some fun with a lame kitten. Indeed in the school she had been attending at the time the shocking story was still repeated of how, when a horrified mistress asked her what she had been intending to do with the dinner-knife, she responded firmly:

‘I was going to chop them up.'

But, in an emergency like this, temper and fierce display of dinner-knives were no use, only firm courage was required, and, above all, care to run no risk of sharing Caroline's unhappy fate of disqualification.

The clapping started, a little hesitatingly, for no one was quite so sure about this thin and nervous-looking girl as they had been about the flamboyant, self-confident Caroline. But the clapping continued – it even grew in volume. Bewildered, Lilian listened. It seemed to her to have gone on for long, and vividly she remembered Caroline's warning. If she were not careful she would share the same unhappy fate. To avoid it, one had to run, it seemed, when the clapping started. And now it had started.

She ran.

The clapping stopped. Someone laughed. Laughter's infectious, and this audience was in a happy mood. It spread; it ran like the wind from one to another. A gust of uproarious merriment followed Lilian as she fled, till one might have thought it blew her from the stage. The judging committee in the big stage box shared in the general hilarity to such an extent that most of its members forgot even to mark her card. Mr Sargent said:

‘The little fool's ruined her chance all right.' He added reflectively: ‘I thought at first she was going to be the high spot of the evening.'

Martin called:

‘Next, please; next number.' He said to Lilian as, bewildered and breathless, she paused near by, ‘What in blazes made you play the giddy goat like that?'