The Spring of the Tiger

by Victoria Holt

  ther's son and all that. Naturally he'd expect me to do something some time. I've been what he calls 'marking time' until this was ready."

  "TobyI Going away! You can't. What am I going to do? Who's going to teach me?"

  He smiled at me but it was a sad smile. "You'll have a proper governess or tutor now. It's time you had one. I was only a stand-in, wasn't I? It wasn't serious . . ."

  *'Not serious! I learned more from you than I ever did from anyone. Oh, Toby, you can't go."

  He shook his head. "Have to. My father's been talking to me very seriously. 'Tobias,' he said. He always calls me Tobias, you know. I believe when he was a young man he was known as Bias, which is a strange sort of name for him. Bias! Perhaps that's why he prides himself on being so fair-minded. He always sees two sides to everything, you know." He was rambling on as though to shield me from the shock he knew I must be feeling.

  "Where?" I cried.

  "To India . . . one of our companies there."

  "Your companies? You mean your father's."

  He admitted modestly that he did and then I saw that there were many sides to Toby. As I have said, one of his favorite themes in discussion was that things were never quite as they seemed. I had thought of him as one of my mother's less significant admirers—not quite good enough for the stage, not quite good enough to be allowed to escort her, not quite old enough . . . Mr. Not Quite, as she had once called him. I felt angry to have been so blind. Toby, who loved literature with a passion, who was the best companion in the world, with whom I could laugh and talk as I could with no one else, he was worth all her other admirers put together—and that included Everard. And all the time he was so important; he was the son of rich Tobias (Bias in his youth) who had his fingers in scores of financial pies and whose aim in life—only second to making money—was to make Toby such another as himself.

  I felt ridiculously naive and taking a long time to grow up.

  "He's been waiting for the time," said Toby. "Now it's come."

  *Toby," I said sadly, "when?"

  *'In three weeks."

  I threw myself into his arms and clung to him.

  '"Steady," he said, patting my back awkwardly as though I were choking. "Here, steady, Sarah."

  "Don't go," I begged.

  "I've got to, Sarah. I've got to do something. I just can't go about like this all my life."

  "Why not?"

  "Being my father's son, I couldn't. I've got to be worthy of him."

  "So that you can make a lot of money and tie it up for your sons and grandchildren."

  "There's more to it than that. It's like a game to the Old Man. It's not a matter of getting richer and richer. Money brings responsibilities. For me this has just been a waiting period ... a stamping ground."

  I felt I couldn't bear any more. I dared not try to imagine what it would be like when Toby had gone.

  The news of his imminent departure was received in various ways. My mother was irritated. Toby had been useful and she hated to lose an admirer. "Silly old man," she said. "Parents should never interfere." She vented her scorn on Toby. "I suppose he was not quite bold enough to do what he wanted."

  Meg said: "It was time he went. Frivoling about here ... no life for a young man. Mind you, I'll be sorry. I quite liked him."

  Janet snorted with satisfaction. "Did she think he was going round doing her bidding for the rest of his life? She's got another think coming."

  But I was the one who was desolate.

  He planned all sorts of treats for me during those last weeks, which only made it worse. There was no fun to be found in the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul's or among the tombs of the Abbey, or feeding the ducks in St. James's Park if you knew it was the last time you would do it together. He took me to the theater one night—not to my mother's play but to a grand melodrama called The Silver King, which sent me into raptures, but these could last only for a few blissful seconds until I remembered that this was the last time I should go to the theater with Toby.

  He, too, was sad. I guessed he was thinking of leaving my mother. We drove back in our hansom, neither of us caring very much whether we were home in time.

  Meg let us in conspiratorially. "They're not back yet. Go on up with you."

  I went to my room and stood at the window watching the hansom carry Toby away.

  I could not sleep that night. The moon was nearly full but it threw only a shifting light in my room because there were heavy clouds and a fairly strong wind. I had a deep feeling of sonow because of Toby.

  My mother had not come in. It was half an hour after midnight. She and Everard would have gone on to supper somewhere after the show.

  What was the use of lying there trying to sleep. I got up, put on my dressing gown and went to the window. I caught my breath with a sudden feeling of terror. Standing on the other side of the road was a man. He was in the same spot where I had seen the woman. I could not see his face clearly but I imagined he was middle-aged. Waiting for a glimpse of the goddess? I wondered. He did not look like the sort who would wait at stage doors.

  I stood back from the lace curtains which hung across the window and laid a hand on the velvet draperies. He couldn't see me of course because there was no light in the bedroom, but I could see him from the light of the streetlamp.

  He was waiting for a glimpse of my mother.

  I went back to bed but not to sleep. I kept thinking of the future and what it would be like without Toby. My mother would engage a governess, I supposed. She would not consider sending me away to school. There were those occasions—rare though they were—when she wanted her Little Siddons to come home to.

  The clatter of hoofs. The hansom was coming down the street. I was at the window. My mother and Everard alighted. They came into the house and the door closed behind them. The hansom moved off. The man was still standing on the other side of the road. I wondered what his feelings were to see my mother go into the house with another man.

  I didn't know what it was about those waiting people which filled me with a sense of foreboding, but they did. It was no

  diflFerent, I told myself, from people waiting at the stage door to get a glimpse of her.

  I lay in bed still sleepless. My imagination began to plague me. I imagined the man down there was madly in love with her and planned to shoot her or Everard when they emerged from the house. I was in such a state of anxiety that I almost went to Meg for reassurance. I might have done so if she hadn't shared a room with Janet. I was sure both of them, with their shrewd Cockney reasoning, would soon throw a douche of common sense on my feverish imaginings.

  An hour or so after my mother and Everard had come in I was still awake. It didn't help at all when I went to the window and saw that the man was there.

  "What is he doing?" I asked myself. I would tell Meg in the morning.

  I dozed a bit. It was dawn when I was awakened by the sound of the door being shut as Everard left the house.

  I went to the window to watch him go. He walked up the street, tall, very distinguished-looking. Meg had said: "I reckon hell be a prime minister one day. A pity he's got her. Though I don't know whether her ladyship would be a suitable wife for the prime minister. It's usually the peerage for actresses, which is a different sort of life if you ask me."

  Then I saw the man emerge from the shadow of the trees. He must have been there all night. I watched him walk slowly away in the opposite direction from that which Everard had taken.

  I felt greatly relieved that he had gone, though puzzled as to why he had waited so long. I fell asleep almost immediately.

  Meg came in at half past eight demanding to know if I had decided to spend the day in bed.

  Sun was streaming through the window. How daylight changed everything. It was like a comforting old nanny shutting away the nasty shadows in drawers—not to be brought out again until darkness fell.

  I was on the point of mentioning the man to Meg but I changed my mind.

  He
was only one of the admirers who took pleasure in looking at the house in which the adored one lived. This was all part of being the daughter of a famous actress.

  s.invra

  Toby left two weelcs after that. He didn't come to say good-bye. He had reminded me that farewells were upsetting and old friends such as we were didn't need protestations to know that we were friends forever.

  I felt terribly lonely.

  Meg tried to comfort me. "It had to happen. A young man like that can't spend his life playing, you know. It was like a holiday for him ... a long holiday . . . but there's more serious things in life. It was really playing at being your teacher. There's no excuse now. You'll have to have a real one."

  Janet said: "I'll not stand for one of them stuck-up governesses, I can tell you. Meals in her own room ... too high and mighty to eat with us. This is not the establishment for that sort of thing, I can tell you. Little places like this don't have no room for no governesses."

  "The only thing would be school," put in Meg, "and young Sarah wouldn't like that and nor would she."

  "l tell you the house is not big enough and for two pins I'd be off. I had a long letter from Ethel this morning. . . ."

  Meg listened to the eulogy on the delights of country life versus that of the town, nodded sagely and was as firmly determined to stay with my mother as she had ever been.

  "Oh Meg," I cried, "I couldn't bear to lose you too." Which delighted Meg, of course, although she said grimly: "Well, you'll have to behave yourself, that's all."

  Janet raised her eyes to the ceiling as though she were in communion with the Above and muttered into the pastry she was

  making that Some People—which I presume included my mother and me as well as Meg—were beyond understanding.

  Then the storm broke.

  Everard's wife was going to divorce him. His comings and goings to and from our house had been watched by a detective employed for this purpose. Consequently my mother was to be cited and there was going to be a scandal because of my mother's fame and Everard's position in Parliament.

  Everard had always seemed to be a man who would show no emotion, whatever circumstances he found himself in. Toby and I had laughed about it. I said that if he were told his house was on fire he would merely look mildly surprised and say: "Oh dear, how annoying." We used to invent dramatic situations for Everard and his response to them. It was very childish, I suppose, but it caused a great deal of merriment. Meg used to listen and a faint smile would twitch her lips. "You two!" she said. "Perhaps I'll get some bricks for you to play with." But she liked to hear us laugh, I know, and she, too, was amused by the imperturbability of Everard. One day she said: "How such a man ever got himself into this I can't understand." Then she added darkly: "MenI There's not much I don't know about them. Never had much to do with them on my own account. But I've done a lot of looking on, you might say . . . and don't they tell you that the looker-on sees the best of the game?"

  Well, there was Everard caught up in this tenible situation. Exposure! The political world would know of the liaison with a famous actress and such goings-on (Meg's words) were not what people looked for in their future prime minister. "I'll lay a pound to a penny," prophesied Janet, not without some satisfaction, ''that this will be the end of him in the House of Commons."

  I wished that Toby were here so that we could discuss it and he could tell me what he thought the outcome would be. I gathered that there was evidence . . . irrefutable evidence they called it, procured by a detective who had seen Everard enter the house at twelve-thirty and leave at six . . . not once but on several occasions.

  My mother reacted dramatically, as was to be expected. She walked about her bedroom—a tragedienne this time.

  "And what effect will all this have on the play?'* she demanded.

  "I reckon it will pack 'em in," said Meg. "They'll all want to take a look at the scarlet woman."

  But my mother was angry. It wasn't her image, she said. Oh, how she hated that woman who had started all this. Someone had put her up to it. They could depend on that. She hadn't the brains to think of it herself.

  It was Everard I was really sorry for. I could see what a scandal would mean to him. Not long before Sir Charles Dilke had been in an unsavory divorce case to the delight of his enemies and the horror of his friends, and he, too, had been heading for the prime minister's stakes. The case had ruined his career.

  Everard did not come to Denton Square. That would have been foolish. My mother was fretful, irritable and nervous.

  She came home from the theater alone one night. This was before the story really broke. It had been a miserable evening. Meg was at the theater and Janet was grumbling all the time with a sort of inner satisfaction and her hints were that this would break up the household. My mother would have to live a more natural life, she hinted. Settle down a bit. Perhaps go back to that husband of hers, which was where she belonged. That would mean of course that Janet herself, with Meg beside her, would reach that haven which was Mecca, Valhalla or the Elysian Fields, whichever one thought of as the ideal state.

  My mother went straight to her room, which was on the first floor, and after a while she came up to mine. I had never known her so distraught.

  She sat in a chair and looked at me in bed. She seemed to be assessing me and at length she said: "This is a mess, Siddons."

  I nodded.

  "It's going to be pretty nasty. People can be vicious. It's a good thing you're not away at school. Children can be horrid to each other. You'll be all right, though. It's those of us who are in the public eye who will get the full force of the venom."

  I waited.

  "It's going to sound so different from what it really is. I love Everard, you know."

  I believe she did. He was different from the other admirers. He

  was a steadying influence in her life, which in her more serious moments she knew she needed.

  "Of course," she went on, "he has always been worried by the situation. It was so important to him to lead a regular and conventional life. He is conventional. He hated the way it had to be. But you see we loved each other. I know how different we were . . . personality and all that. . . but we were right for each other. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, of course I do."

  "There'll be horrible things said. I don't know what it's going to do to either of us. It'll finish his career. How do you think I feel. . . being responsible for that!"

  "We're all responsible ourselves for what we do, not other people," I said, quoting Toby.

  She looked at me wistfully. "Little Siddons," she mused. "Not so little now . . . growing up fast. Learning about life. Who told you that? Toby, I suppose."

  I agreed. "He taught me so much," I said.

  She clenched her fist and seemed angry. "He should never have gone away. He ought to have had the guts to stand up to his father. He had a certain courage but never quite enough."

  "How can you say that!" I cried indignantly. "Perhaps it needed more courage to go than to stay. After all he couldn't go on wasting his time. Besides, he's fond of his father. Nobody should judge other people's actions because they don't know all the circumstances."

  She stared at me and then smiled slowly. "That's true, dear child, very true. You'll have to remember that in the weeks to come. I wanted to explain to you. We don't talk together half enough, do we?"

  That was something I could readily agree with.

  "Everard was the only man who really mattered to me," she said.

  I began to think of my father and she knew it.

  "That," she went on, "was a momentary aberration. What does a girl of seventeen know of love? I admit there have been lovers, but Everard was different. We used to think that when she died we'd marry and settle on his country estate with a place in West-

  minster. I should have made a good pariiamentary wife. You're looking skeptical. But it was nice talking about it and Everard believed it would be like that ... in time. She wa
s there though . . . she was always there. He was tied to her."

  ''He married her. He must have loved her at some time."

  ''It was more or less an arranged match. Two political families . . . rich landed gentry. You know the sort of thing. He was very young at the time and he didn't know about this streak of madness in the family. It was soon after the honeymoon that it became apparent. The fact is that there were often nurses in the house and at times she had to be put away. Can you imagine a man like Everard ... set for distinction, certain of parliamentary glory, to be fettered with a wife like that."

  "Poor Everard. I often thought he looked sad."

  "It was his sadness which first attracted me. Strange, that. It was your father's sadness that made me notice him. Perhaps sadness appeals to me. Yes, it does. I wanted to make them laugh and be merry. And then I began to realize how worthwhile Everard was. Clever, different from everyone else. The attraction of contrasts perhaps . . . but it was there ... a strong iron band that held us together. We love each other so much, Siddons, that even with this hanging over us we can't regret."

  "What will happen?"

  "They'll make the most of it. There'll be headlines in the papers. There was the case of Sir Charles Dilke. You don't know about that."

  "I do."

  "Well, you'll know that finished him then. This will finish Everard. He's got enemies in Parliament. Of course he has. A brilliant man always has. There are his political opponents. They're going to start hounding him. And I have my enemies too, you know. They're going to have a field day, those enemies of ours."

  I tried to comfort her, to tell her that it would pass in time.

  "No," she said. "It will make changes. There is someone behind her . . . forcing her to this. She could never have done it on her own. She's just a shell. That'll make things worse, you can be sure of that."

  I reminded her that it was unlike her to look at the black side.