CHAPTER IIMORENA’S WIFE
Betty Morena was sitting in a rustic chair before an open fire, smoking a cigarette. She was a short woman, so slenderly, even narrowly built, as to appear overgrown, and she was a mature woman so immaturely shaped and featured as to appear hardly more than a child. Her curly, russet hair was parted at the side, her wide, long-lashed eyes were set far apart, her nose was really a finely modeled snub,—more, a boy’s nose even to a light sprinkling of freckles,—and her mouth was provokingly the soft, red mouth of a sorrowful child. She lounged far down in her chair, her slight legs, clad in riding-breeches of perfect cut, stretched out straight, her limber arms along the arms of the chair, her chin sunk on her flat chest, and her big, clear eyes staring into the fire. It was an odd figure of a wife for Jasper Morena, a Jew of thirty-eight, producer and manager of plays.
When Betty Kane had run away with him, there had been lamentation and rage in the houses of Kane and of Morena. To the pride of an oldHebrew family, the marriage even of this wandering son with a Gentile was fully as degrading as to the pride of the old Tory family was the marriage with a Jew. Her perverse Gaelic blood on fire with the insults heaped upon her lover, Betty, seventeen years old, romantic, clever, would have walked over flint to give her hand to him. That was ten years ago. Now, when Jasper came into her room, she drew her quick brows together, puffed at her cigarette, and blinked as though she was looking at something distasteful and at the same time rather alarming.
“Have they stopped dancing, Jasper?” she asked in a voice that was at once brusque and soft.
Jasper rubbed his hands delightedly. He was still merry, and came to stand near the fire, looking down at her with eyes entirely kind and admiring.
“Have you ever noticed Jane, who cooks for the outfit, Betty?”
“Yes. She’s horrible.”
“She’s extraordinary, and I mean to get hold of her for Luck’s play. Did you read it?”
“Yes.”
“The play is absolutely dependent on the leading part and I have found it simply impossibleto fill. Now, here’s a woman of extraordinary grace and beauty—”
Betty lifted skeptical eyebrows, twisted her limber mouth, but forbore to contradict.
“And with a magical voice—a woman who not only looks the part, but is it. You remember Luck’s heroine?”
Betty flicked off the ash of her cigarette and looked away. “A savage, isn’t she? The man has her tamed, takes her back to London, and there gives her cause for jealousy and she springs on him—yes, I remember. This woman, Jane, is absolutely without education and hasn’t a notion of acting, I suppose.”
Jasper rubbed his hands with increased delight. “Not a notion and she murders the King’s English. But she is Luck’s savage and—in spite of your eyebrows, Betty—she is beautiful. I can school her. It will take money, no end of patience, but I can do it. It’s one of the things I can do. But, of course, there’s the initial difficulty of persuading her to try it.”
“That oughtn’t to be any difficulty at all. Of course she’ll jump at the chance.”
“I’m not so sure. She was ready to throw me out of the kitchen to-night. She is really a virago. Do you know what one of the men said abouther?” Jasper laughed and imitated the gentle Western drawl. “Jane’s plumb movin’ to me. She’s about halfway between ‘You go to hell’ and ‘You take me in your arms to rest.’”
Betty smiled. Her smile was vastly more mature than her appearance. It was clever and cynical and cold. The Oriental, looking down at her, lost his merriment.
“Do you feel better, dear?” he asked timidly. “Do you think you will be able to go back next week?”
She stood up as he came nearer and walked over to the little table that played the part of dressing-table under a wavy mirror. “Oh, yes. I am quite well. I don’t think the doctors have much sense. I’m sure I hadn’t anything like a nervous breakdown. I was just tired out.”
Jasper drew back the hand whose touch she had eluded, and nervously, his long supple fingers a little unsteady, lighted a cigarette. At that moment he did not look like a spider, but like a lover who has been hurt. Betty could see in the mirror a distorted image of his dejected gracefulness, but, entirely unmoved, she put up her thin, brown hands and began to take the pins out of her hair.
“I like your Jane experiment,” she said. “Letme know how you get on with it and whether I can help. I shall have to turn in now. I’m dead beat. Yarnall took me halfway up the mountain and back. Good-night.”
Jasper looked at her, then pressed his lips into a straight line and went to the door which led from her bedroom to his. He said “Good-night” in a low tone, glanced at her over his shoulder, and went out.
Betty waited an instant, then slowly unlaced her heavy, knee-high boots, took them off, and began to walk to and fro on stocking feet, hands clasped behind her back. With her curly hair all about her face and shoulders, she looked like a wild, extravagantly naughty school-girl, a girl in a wicked temper, a rebel against authority. In fact, she was rejoicing that this horrible enforced visit to the West was all but over. One week more! She was almost at an end of her endurance. How she hated the beautiful white night outside, those mountain peaks, the sound of that rapid river, the stillness of sagebrush, the voice of the big pines! And she hated the log room, its simplicity now all littered with incongruous luxuries; ivory toilet articles on the board table; lacy, beribboned underwear thrown over the rustic chair; silver-framed photographs; an exquisite, gold-mountedcrystal vase full of wild flowers on the pine shelf; satin bedroom slippers on the clay hearth; a gorgeous, fur-trimmed dressing-gown over the foot of her narrow, iron cot; all the ridiculous necessities that Betty’s maid had put into her trunk. Yes, Betty hated it all because it was what she had always thirsted for. What a malevolent trick of fate that Jasper should have brought her to Wyoming, that the doctor had insisted upon at least a month of just this life. “Take her West,” he had said, and Betty, lying limp and white in her bed, her small head sunk into the pillow, had jerked from head to foot. “Take her West. I know a ranch in Wyoming—Yarnall’s. She’ll get outdoor exercise, tonic air, sound sleep, release from all these pestiferous details, like a cloud of flies, that sting women’s nerves to death. Don’t pay any attention to whether she likes it or not. Let her behave like a naughty child, let her kick and scream and cry. Pick her up, Morena, and carry her off. Do you hear? Don’t let her make you change your plans.” The doctor had seen his patient’s convulsive jerk. “Pack her up. Make your reservations and go straight to ‘Buck’ Yarnall’s ranch, Lazy-Y,—that’s his brand, I believe,—Middle Fork, Wyoming. I’ll send him a wire. He knows me.She needs all outdoors to run about in. She needs joggin’ around all day through the sagebrush on a cow-pony in that sun; she needs the smell of a camp-fire—Gad! wish I could get back to it myself.”
Betty, having heard this out, began to laugh. She laughed till they gave her something to keep her quiet. But, except for that laughter, she had made no protest whatever; she did not “kick and scream and cry.” In fact, though she looked like a child, she was not at all inclined to such exhibitions. This doctor had not seen her through her recent ordeal. Two years before her breakdown, Jasper had been terribly hurt in an automobile accident, and Betty had come to him at the hospital, had waited, as white as a snow-image, for the result of the examination. They had told her emphatically that there was no hope. Jasper Morena could not live for more than a few days. She must not allow herself to hope. He might or might not regain consciousness. If he did, it would be for a few minutes before the end. Betty had listened with her white, rigid, child face, had thanked them, had gone home. There in her exquisite, little sitting room above Central Park, she had sat at her desk and written a few lines on square, gray note paper.
“Jasper is dying,” she had written. “By the time you get this, he will be dead. If you can forgive me for having failed in courage last year, come back. What I have been to you before I will be again, only, this time we can love openly. Come back.”
“Jasper is dying,” she had written. “By the time you get this, he will be dead. If you can forgive me for having failed in courage last year, come back. What I have been to you before I will be again, only, this time we can love openly. Come back.”
Then she had dropped her head on the desk and cried. Afterwards she had addressed her letter to a certain Prosper Gael. The letter went to Wyoming. When it reached its destination, it was taken over a mountain-range by a patient Chinaman.
Three days later Jasper regained consciousness and began slowly to return to health. He had the tenacious vitality of his race, and, in his own spirit, an iron will to live. He kept Betty beside his bed for hours, and held her cold hand in his long, sensitive one, and he stared at her under his lashes till she thought she must go mad. But she did not. She nursed him through an interminable convalescence. She received Prosper, very early in this convalescence, by her husband’s bed, and Jasper had murmured gratitude for the emotion that threatened to overwhelm his friend. It was not till some time—an extraordinarily long time—after Morena’s complete recovery that she had snapped like a brokenicicle. And then, forsooth, they had sent her to Wyoming to get back her health!
Having paced away some of her restlessness, Betty stopped by the cabin window and pushed aside one of the short, calico curtains. She looked out on the court. A tall woman had just pulled up a bucket of water from the well and had emptied it into a pitcher. She finished, let the bucket drop with a whirr and a clash, and raised her head. For a second she and Jasper Morena’s wife looked at each other. Betty nodded, smiled, and drew the curtain close.
CHAPTER IIIJANE
After that night, there began a sort of persecution, skillfully conducted by Jasper and Betty, against the ferocity of Jane. It was a persecution impossible to imagine in any other setting, even the social simplicity of Lazy-Y found itself a trifle amused. For Jasper, the stately Jewish figure, would carry pails of water for Jane from the well to the kitchen, would help her in the vegetable garden, and to straighten out her recalcitrant stove-pipe; Betty would put on an apron a mile too large, to wash dishes and shell peas. She would sit on the kitchen table swinging her long, childlike legs and chatter amiably. Jasper talked, too, to the virago, talked delightfully, about horses and dogs,—he had a charming gift of humorous observation,—talked about hunting and big-game shooting, about trapping, about travel, and, at last, about plays. Undoubtedly Jane listened. Sometimes she laughed. Once in a while she ejaculated, musically, “Well!” Occasionally she swore.
One afternoon he met her riding home froman errand to a neighboring ranch, and, turning his horse, rode with her. In worn corduroy skirt, flannel shirt, and gray sombrero, she looked like a handsome, haggard boy, and, that afternoon, there was a certain unusual wistfulness in her eyes, and her mouth had relaxed a little from its bitterness. Perhaps it was the beauty of a clear, keen summer day; without doubt, also, she was touched by the courteous pleasure of his greeting and by his giving up his ride in order to accompany her. She even unbent from her silence and, for the first time, really talked to him. And she spoke, too, in a new manner, using her beautiful voice with beautiful carefulness. It was like a master-musician who, after a long illness, takes up his beloved instrument and tentatively tests his shaken powers. Jasper had much ado to keep his surprise to himself, for the rough ranch girl could speak pure enough English if she would.
“You and your wife are leaving soon?” she asked him, and, when he nodded, she gave a sigh. “I’ll be missing you,” she said, throwing away herbrusquerielike a rag with which she was done. “You’ve been company for me. You’ve made use of lots of patience and courage, but I have really liked it. I’ve not got the ways of being sociable and I don’t know that I want ever toget them. I am not seeking for friends. There isn’t another person on the ranch that would dare talk to me as you and Mrs. Morena have talked. They don’t know anything about me here and I don’t mean that they should know.” She paused, then gave way to an impulse of confidence. “One of the boys asked me to marry him. He came and shouted it through the window and I caught him with a pan of water.” She sighed. “I don’t know rightly if he meant it for a joke or not, but the laugh wasn’t on me.”
Jasper controlled his laughter, then saw the dry humor of her eyes and lips and let out his mirth.
“Why, sir,” said Jane, “you’d be surprised at the foolishness of men. Sometimes it seems that, just for pure contrariness, they want to marry her that least wants them about. The day I came tramping into this valley, I stopped for food at the ranch of an old bachelor down yonder at the ford. And he invited me to be his wife while I was drinking a glass of water from his well. He told me how much money he had and said he’d start my stove for me winter mornings. There’s a good husband! And he was sure kind to me even when I told him ‘no.’ ’T was that same evening that the boy from Lazy-Y rode in and claimed me for a cook. Mr. Yarnall is a trustingman. He took me and didn’t ask any questions. I told him I was ‘Jane’ and that I wasn’t planning to let him know more. He hasn’t asked me another question since. He’s a gentleman, I figure it, and he’s kind of quiet himself about what he was before he came to this country. He’s a man of fifty and he has lots back of him only he’s taken a fresh start.” She sighed, “Folks like you and Betty seem awfully open-hearted. It’s living in cities, I suppose, where every one knows every one else so well.”
This astonishing picture of the candid simplicity of New York’s social life absorbed Jasper’s attention for some time.
“Wouldn’t you like to live in a city, Jane?”
She laughed her short, boyish “Hoo!” “It isn’t what I would like, Mr. Morena,” she said. “Why, I’d like to see the world. I would like to be that fellow who was condemned to wander all over the earth and never to die. He was a Jew, too, wasn’t he?”
Jasper flushed. People were not in the habit of making direct reference to his nationality, and, being an Israelite who had early cut himself off with dislike from his own people and cultivated the society of Gentiles, “a man without a country,” he was acutely sensitive.
“The Wandering Jew? Yes. Where did you ever hear of him?”
“I read his story,” she answered absently; “an awful long one, but interesting, about lots of people, by Eugène Sue.”
Jasper’s lips fell apart and he stared. She had spoken unwittingly and he could see that she was not thinking of him, that she was far away, staring beyond her horse’s head into the broad, sunset-brightened west.
“Where were you schooled?” he asked her.
He had brought her back and her face stiffened. She gave him a startled, almost angry look, dug her heels into her horse and broke into a gallop; nor could he win from her another word.
A few days before he left, he took Yarnall into his confidence. At first the rancher would do nothing but laugh. “Jane on the boards! That’s a notion!” followed by explosion after explosion of mirth. The Jew waited, patient, pliant, smiling, and then enumerated his reasons. He talked to Yarnall for an hour, at the end of which time, Yarnall, his eyes still twinkling, sent for Jane.
The two men sat in a log-walled room, known as the office. Yarnall’s big desk crowded a stove. There was no other furniture except shelves and a box seat beneath a window. Jasper sat on theend of the desk, swinging his slim, well-booted leg; Yarnall, stocky, gray, shabby, weather-beaten, leaned back in his wicker chair. The door which Jasper faced was directly behind Yarnall. When Jane opened it, he turned.
The girl looked grim and a little pale. She was evidently frightened. This summons from Yarnall suggested dismissal or reproof. She came around to face him and stood there, looking fierce and graceful, her head lowered, staring gloomily at him from under her brows. To Jasper she gave not so much as a glance.
“Well, Jane, I fancy I shall have to let you go,” said Yarnall. He was not above tormenting the wild-cat. Female ferocity always excites the teasing boy in a man. “You’re getting too ambitious for us. You see, once these rich New Yorkers take you up, you’re no more use to a plain ranchman like me.”
“What are you drivin’ at?” asked Jane.
“Do let me explain it to her, Yarnall!” Jasper snapped his elastic fingers, color had risen to his face, and he looked annoyed. “Miss Jane, won’t you sit down?”
Jane turned her deep, indignant eyes upon him. “Are you and your wife the rich New Yorkers he says are takin’ me up?”
“No, no. He’s joking. This is a serious business. It’s of vital importance to me and it ought to be of vital importance to you. Please do sit down!”
Jane took a long step back and sat down on the settle under the long, horizontal window. She folded her hands on her knee and looked up at Morena. She had transferred her attention completely to him. Yarnall watched them. He was an Englishman of much experience and this picture of the skillful, cultivated, handsome Jew angling deftly for the gaunt, young savage diverted him hugely. He screwed up his eyes to get a picture of it.
“I am a producer and manager of plays,” said Jasper, “which means that I take a play written by a more gifted man and arrange it for the stage. Have you ever seen a play?”
“No, sir.”
“But you have some idea what they are?”
“Yes. I have read them. Shakespeare wrote quite a lot of that kind of talking pieces, didn’t he?”
Jasper was less surprised than Yarnall. “At present I have a play on my hands which is a very brilliant and promising piece of work, but which I have been unable to produce for lack of a heroine. There isn’t an actress on my list thatcan take the part and do it justice. Now, Miss Jane, I believe that with some training you could take it to perfection. My wife and I would like to take you to New York, paying all your expenses, of course, and put you into training at once. It would take a year’s hard work to get you fitted for the part. Then next fall we could bring out the play and I think I can promise you success and fame and wealth in no small measure. I don’t know you very well; I don’t know whether or not you are ambitious; but I do know that every woman must love beauty and ease and knowledge and experience. For what else,” he smiled, “did Eve eat the apple? All these you can have if you will let us take you East. Of course, if I find you cannot take this part, I will hold myself accountable for you. I will not let you be a loser in any way by the experiment. With your beauty”—Yarnall fell back in his chair and gaped from the excited speaker to the silent listener—“and your extraordinary voice, and your magnetism, you must be especially fitted for a career of some kind. I promise to find you your career.”
Every drop of blood had fallen from Jane’s face and the rough hands on her knee were locked together.
“What part,” she asked in a quick, low voice, “is this that you think I could learn to do?”
Jasper changed his position. He came nearer and spoke more rapidly. “It is the story of a girl, a savage girl, whom a man takes up and trains. He trains her as a professional might train a lioness. It is a passion with him to break spirits and shape them to his will. He trains her with coaxing and lashing—not actual lashing, though I believe in one place he does come near to beating her—and he gets her broken so that she lies at his feet and eats out of his hand. All this, you understand, while he’s an exile from his own world. Then, in the second act,—that is the second part of the play,—he takes his tamed lioness back to civilization. They go to London and there the woman does his training infinite credit. She is extraordinarily beautiful; she is civilized, successful, courted. Her eccentricities only add to her charm. So it goes on very prettily for a while. Then he makes a mistake. He blunders very badly. He gives his lioness cause for jealousy and—to come to the point—she flies at his throat. You see, he hadn’t really tamed her. She was under the skin, a lioness, a beast, at heart.”
Jasper had been absorbed in the plot and hadnot noticed Jane, but Yarnall for several minutes had been leaning forward, his hands tightened on the arms of his chair. The instant Jasper stopped he held up his hand.
“Quiet, Jane,” he said softly as a man might speak to a plunging horse. “Steady!”
Jane got to her feet. She was very white. She put up her hand and pressed the back of it against her forehead and from under this hand she looked at the two men with eyes of such astonished pain and beauty as they could never forget.
“Yes,” she said presently; “that’s something Icoulddo.”
At once Jasper hastened to retrieve his error. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ve been horribly clumsy. Do forgive me. Do let me explain. I didn’t mean that you were a wild—”
She let the hand fall and held it up to stop his speech. “I’m not taking offense, Mr. Morena,” she said. “You say you arrange plays and that you have been seeking for some one to play that girl, that lioness-girl who wasn’t rightly tamed, though the man had done his worst to break her?”
Jasper nodded with a puzzled, anxious air. For all his skill and subtlety, he could not interpret her tone.
“And you think I’m beautiful?”
“My dear child, I know you are,” said he. “You try to disguise it. And I know that in many other ways you disguise yourself. I think you make a great mistake. Your work is hard and rough—”
She smiled. “I’m not complaining of my work,” she said. “It’s rough and so am I. Oh, yes, I’m real, true rough. I was born to roughness and raised to it. I’m not anything I don’t seem, Mr. Morena. I’ve had rough travel all my days, only—only—” She sat down again, twisting her hands painfully in her apron and bending her face down from the sight of the two men. The line of her long, bent neck was a beautiful thing to see. She spoke low and rapidly, holding down her emotion, though she could not control all the exquisite modulations of her voice. “There’s only one part of my travel that I want to forget and that’s the one smooth bit. And it’s hateful to me and you’ve been reminding me of it. I must tell you now that I’d rather be burnt by a white-hot iron”—here she gave him a wide and horrified look like a child who speaks of some dreadful remembered punishment—“than do that thing you’ve asked of me. I hate everything you’ve been telling me about. I don’t want to bebeautiful. I don’t want any one to be telling me such things. I don’t want to be any different from what I am now. This is my real self. It is. I hate beauty. I hate it. I’m not good enough to love it. Beauty and learning and—and music—”
Her head had been bending lower and lower, her voice rocking under its weight of restrained anguish. On the word “music” she dropped her head to her knees and was silent.
“I can’t talk no more,” she said, after a moment, and she stood up and ran out of the room.
“I’ll be d——d!” swore Yarnall.
But Jasper stood, his face pale, smiting one hand into the other.
“I feel that I, at least, deserve to be,” he said.
CHAPTER IVFLIGHT
There was a girl named Joan who followed Pierre Landis because he laid his hand upon her wrist, and there was another Joan who fled up the mountain-side at sight of him, as though the fire that had once touched her shoulder had burnt its way into her heart. Then there was a third Joan, a Joan astray. It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y Ranch and had cooked for and bullied “the outfit”—a Joan of set face and bitter tongue, whose two years’ lonely battle with life had twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan’s brief code of moral law there was one sin—the dealings of a married woman with another man. When Pierre’s living and seeking face looked up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper’s cabin, she felt for the first time that she had sinned, and so, for the first time, she was a sinner, and the inevitable agony of soul began.
She fled and hid till dark, then prowled about till she knew that Wen Ho was alone in thehouse. She came like a spirit from hell and questioned him.
“What did the men ask? What did you tell them?”
The men had asked for a lady. He had told them, as Prosper had once instructed him, that no lady was living there, that the man had just gone. They had been satisfied and had left. But Joan was still in terror. Pierre must never find her now. She had accepted the lie of a stranger, had left her husband for dead, had made no effort to ascertain the truth, and had “dealings with another man.” Joan sat in judgment and condemned herself to loneliness. She turned herself out from all her old life as though she had been Cain, and, following Wen Ho’s trail over the mountains, had gone into strange lands to work for her bread. She called herself “Jane” and her ferocity was the armor for her beauty. Always she worked in fear of Pierre’s arrival, and, as soon as she had saved money enough for further traveling, she moved on. She worked by preference on lonely ranches as cook or harvester, and it was after two years of such life that she had drifted into Yarnall’s kitchen. She was then greatly changed, as a woman who works to the full stretch of her strength, who suffers privationand hardship, who gives no thought to her own youth and beauty, and who, moreover, suffers under a scourge of self-scorn and fear, is bound to change. Of all the people that had seen her after months of such living, Jasper Morena was the only one to find her beautiful. But with his sensitive observation he had seen through the shell to the sweetness underneath; for surely Joan was sweet, a Friday’s child. It was good that Jasper had torn the skin from her wound, good that he had broken up the hardness of her heart. She left him and Yarnall that afternoon and went away to her cabin in the trees and lay face down on the bare boards of the floor and was young again. Waves of longing for love and beauty and adventure flooded her. For a while she had been very beautiful and had been very passionately loved; for a while she had been surrounded by beauty and taught its meanings. She had fled from it all. She hated it, yes, but she longed for it with every fiber of her being. The last two years were scalded away. She was Joan, who had loved Pierre; Joan, whom Prosper Gael had loved.
Toward morning, dawn feeling with white fingers through the pine boughs into her uncurtained window, Joan stopped her weeping andstood up. She was very tired and felt as though all the hardness and strength had been beaten from her heart. She opened her door and looked at pale stars and a still, slowly brightening world. In a hollow below the pines a stream ran and poured its hoarse, hurrying voice into the silence. Joan bent under the branches, undressed and bathed. The icy water shocked life back into her spirit. She began to tingle and to glow. In spite of herself she felt happier. She had been stony for so long, neither sorrowful nor glad; now, after the night of sharp pain, she was aware of the gladness of morning. She came up from her plunge, glowing and beautiful, with loose, wet hair.
In the corral the men were watering their teams; above them on the edge of a mesa, against the rosy sky, the other ponies, out all night on the range, were trooping, driven by a cowboy who darted here and there on his nimble pony, giving shrill cries. In the clear air every syllable was sharp to the ear, every tint and line sharp to the eye. It was beautiful, very beautiful, and it was near and dear to her, native to her—this loveliness of quick action, of inarticulate calling to dumb beasts, of work, of simple, often repeated beginnings. She was glad that she was workingwith her hands. She twisted up her hair and went over to the ranch-house where she began soberly and thankfully to light her kitchen fire.
It was after breakfast, two or three mornings later, when a stranger on a chestnut pony rode into Yarnall’s ranch, tied his pony to a tree, and, striding across the cobbled square, came to knock at the office door. At the moment, Yarnall, on the other side of the house, was saying farewell to his guests, and helping the men pile the baggage into the two-seated wagon, so this other visitor, getting no answer to his knock, turned and looked about the court. He did not, it was evident, mind waiting. It was to be surmised from the look of him that he was used to it; patient and not to be discouraged by delay. He was a very brown young man of quite astounding beauty and his face had been schooled to keenness and restraint. He was well-dressed, very clean, an outdoor man, a rider, but a man who had, in some sense, arrived. He had the inimitable stamp of achievement. He had been hard driven—the look of that, too, was there; he had been driven to more than ordinary effort. One of the men, seeing him, walked over and spoke respectfully.
“You want to see Mr. Yarnall?”
“Yes, sir.” The man’s eyes were searching the ranch-house wistfully again. “I would like to see him if I can. I have some questions to ask him.”
“He’s round the house, gettin’ rid of a bunch of dudes. Some job. Both hands tied up. Will you go round or wait?”
The stranger dropped to his heels, squatted, and rolled a cigarette.
“I’ll wait,” he murmured. “You can let him know when the dudes make their get-away. He’ll get round to me. My name? It won’t mean anything to him—Pierre Landis.”
He did not go round the house, and Yarnall, being very busy and perturbed for some time after the departure of his guests, did not get round to him till nearly noon. By that time he was sitting on the step, his back against the wall, still smoking and still wistfully observant of his surroundings.
He stood up when Yarnall came.
“Sorry,” said the latter; “that fool boy didn’t tell me you were here till ten minutes ago. Come in. You’ll stop for dinner—if we get any to-day.”
“Thank you,” said Pierre.
He came in and talked and stayed for dinner. Yarnall was used to the Western fashion of doingbusiness. He knew that it would be a long time before the young man would come to his point. But the Englishman was in no hurry, for he liked his visitor and found his talk diverting enough. Landis had been in Alaska—a lumber camp. He had risen to be foreman and now he was off for a vacation, but had to go back soon. He had been everywhere. It seemed to Yarnall that the stranger had visited every ranch in the Rocky Mountain belt.
After dinner, strolling beside his host toward his horse, Pierre spoke, and before Yarnall had heard a word he knew that the long delay had been caused by suppressed emotion. Pierre, when he did ask his question, was white to the lips.
“I’ve taken a lot of your time,” he said slowly. “I came to ask you about someone. I heard that you had a woman on your ranch, a woman who came in and didn’t give you any history. I want to see her if I may.” He was actually fighting an unevenness of breath, and Yarnall, unemotional as he was, was gripped with sympathetic suspense. “I want,” stammered the young man, “to know her name.”
Yarnall swore. “Her name, as she gave it,” said he, “is Jane. But, my boy, you can’t see her. She left this morning.”
Pierre raised a white, tense face.
“Left?” He turned as if he would run after her.
“Yes, sir. These people I’ve had here took her away with them. That is, they’ve been urging her to go, but she’d refused. Then, suddenly, this morning, just as they were putting the trunks in, up came Jane, white as chalk, asking them to take her with them, said she must go. Well, sir, they rigged her up with some traveling clothes and drove away with her. That was six hours ago. By now they’re in the train, bound for New York.”
Yarnall’s guest looked at him without speaking, and Yarnall nervously went on, “She’s been with us about six months, Landis, and I don’t know anything about her. She was tall, gray eyes, black hair, slow speaking, and with the kind of voice you’d be apt to notice ... yes, I see she’s the girl you’ve been looking for. I can give you the New York people’s address, but first, for Jane’s sake,—I’m a pretty good friend of hers, I think a lot of Jane,—I’ll have to know what you want with her—what she is to you.”
Pierre’s pupils widened till they all but swallowed the smoke-colored iris.
“She is my wife,” he said.
Again Yarnall swore. But he lit a cigarette and took his time about answering. “Well, sir,” he said, “you must excuse me, but—it was because she saw you, I take it, that Jane cut off this morning. That’s clear. Now, I don’t know what would make a girl run off from her husband. She might have any number of reasons, bad and good, but it seems to me that it would be a pretty strong one that would make a girl run off, with a look such as she wore, from a man like you. Did you treat her well, Landis?”
It had the effect of a lash taken by a penitent. The man shrank a little, whitened, endured. “I can’t tell you how I treated her,” he said in a dangerous voice; “it don’t bear tellin’. But—I want her back. I was—I was—that was three years ago; I am more like a man now. You’ll give me the people’s name, their address?...”
Pierre laid his hand on the older man’s wrist and gave it a queer urgent and beseeching shake.
After a moment of searching scrutiny, Yarnall bent his head.
“Very well,” said he shortly; “come in.”
CHAPTER VLUCK’S PLAY
A young man who had just landed in New York from one of the big, adventurous transatlantic liners hailed a taxicab and was quickly drawn away into the glitter and gayety of a bright winter morning. He sat forward eagerly, looking at everything with the air of a lad on a holiday. He was a young man, but he was not in his first youth, and under a heavy sunburn he was pale and a trifle worn, but there was about him a look of being hard and very much alive. Under a broad brow there were hawk eyes of greenish gray, a delicate beak, a mouth and chin of cleverness. It was an interesting face and looked as though it had seen interesting things. In fact, Prosper Gael had just returned from his three months of ambulance service in France, and it was the extraordinary success of his play, “The Leopardess,” that had chiefly brought him back.
“Dear Luck,” his manager had written, using the college title which Prosper’s name and unvarying good fortune suggested, “you’d bettercome back and gather up some of these laurels that are smothering us all. The time is very favorable for the disappearance of your anonymity. I, for one, find it more and more difficult to keep the secret. So far, not even your star knows it. She calls you ‘Mr. Luck’ ... to that extent I have been indiscreet....”
Prosper had another letter in his pocket, a letter that he had re-read many times, always with an uneasy conflict of emotions. He was in a sort of hot-cold humor over it, in a fever-fit that had a way of turning into lassitude. He postponed analysis indefinitely. Meanwhile his eyes searched the bright, cold city, its crowds, its traffics, its windows—most of all, its placards, and, not far to seek, there were the posters of “The Leopardess.” He leaned out to study one of them; a tall, wild-eyed woman crouched to spring upon a man who stared at her in fear. Prosper dropped back with a gleaming smile of amused excitement. “They’ve made it look like cheap melodrama,” he said to himself; “and yet it’s a good thing, the best thing I’ve ever done. Yet they will vulgarize the whole idea with their infernal notions of ‘what the public wants.’ Morena is as bad as the rest of them!” He expressed disgust, but underneath he was aglowwith pride and interest. “There’s a performance to-night. I’ll dine with Jasper. I’ll have to see Betty first....” His thoughts trailed off and he fell into that hot-cold confusion, that uncomfortable scorching fog of mood. The cab turned into Fifth Avenue and became a scale in the creeping serpent of vehicles that glided, paused, and glided again past the thronged pavements. Prosper contrasted everything with the grim courage and high-pitched tragedy of France. He could not but wonder at the detached frivolity of these money-spenders, these spinners in the sun. How soon would the shadow fall upon them too and with what change of countenance would they look up! To him the joyousness seemed almost childish and yet he bathed his fagged spirit in it. How high the white clouds sailed, how blue was the midwinter sky! How the buildings towered, how quickly the people stepped! Here were the pretty painted faces, the absurd silk stockings, the tripping, exquisitely booted feet, the swinging walk, the tall, up-springing bodies of the women he remembered. He regarded them with impersonal delight, untinged by any of his usual cynicism.
It was late afternoon when Prosper, obedient to a telephone call from Betty, presented himselfat the door of Morena’s house, just east of the Park, off Fifth Avenue; a very beautiful house where the wealthy Jew had indulged his passion for exquisite things. Prosper entered its rich dimness with a feeling of oppression—that unanalyzed mood of hot and cold feeling intensified to an almost unbearable degree. In the large carved and curtained drawing-room he waited for Betty. The tea-things were prepared; there would be no further need of service until Betty should ring. Everything was arranged for an uninterrupted tête-à-tête. Prosper stood near an ebony table, his shoulder brushed by tall, red roses, and felt his nerves tighten and his pulses hasten in their beat. “The tall child ... the tall child ...” he had called her by that name so often and never without a swift and stabbing memory of Joan, and of Joan’s laughter which he had silenced.
He took out the letter he had lately received from Betty and re-read it and, as he read, a deep line cut between his eyes. “You say you will not come back unless I can give you more than I have ever given you in the past. You say you intend to cut yourself free, that I have failed you too often, that you are starved on hope. I’m not going to ask much more patience of you. I failed you that first time because I lost courage; thesecond time, fate failed us. How could I think that Jasper would get well when the doctors told me that I mustn’t allow myself even a shadow of hope! Now, I think that Jasper, himself, is preparing my release. This all sounds like something in a book. That’s because you’ve hurt me. I feel frozen up. I couldn’t bear it if now, just when the door is opening, you failed me. Prosper, you are my lover for always, aren’t you? I have to believe that to go on living. You are the one thing in my wretched life that hasn’t lost its value. Now, read this carefully; I am going to be brutal. Jasper has been unfaithful to me. I know it. I have sufficient evidence to prove it in a law court and I shall not hesitate to get a divorce. Tear this up, please. Now, of all times, we must be extraordinarily careful. There has never been a whisper against us and there mustn’t be. Jasper must not suspect. A counter-suit would ruin my life. I must talk it over with you. I’ll see you once alone—just once—before I leave Jasper and begin the suit. We must have patience for just this last bit. It will seem very long....”
Prosper folded the letter. He was conscious of a faint feeling of sickness, of fear. Then he heard Betty’s step across the marble pavement of the hall. She parted the heavy curtains, drew themtogether behind her, and stood, pale with joy, opening and shutting her big eyes. Then she came to meet him, held him back, listening for any sound that might predict interruption, and gave herself to his arms. She was no longer pale when he let her go. She went a few steps away and stood with her hands before her face, then she went to sit by the tea-table. They were both flushed. Betty’s eyes were shining under their fluttering lids. Prosper rejoiced in his own emotion. The mental fog had lifted and the feeling of faintness was gone.
“You’ve decided not to break away altogether, then?” she asked, giving him a quick glance.
He shook his head. “Not if what you have written me is true. I’ve had such letters from you before and I’ve grown very suspicious. Are you sure this time?” He laid stress upon his bitterness. It was his one weapon against her and he had been sharpening it with a vague purpose.
“Oh,” said Betty, speaking low and furtively, “Jasper is fairly caught. I have a reliable witness in the girl’s maid. There is no doubt of his guilt, Prosper, none. Everyone is talking of it. He has been perfectly open in his attentions.”
Every minute Betty looked younger and prettier, more provoking. Her child-mouth with itsclever smile was bright as though his kiss had painted it.
“Who is the girl?” asked Prosper. He was deeply flushed. Being capable of simultaneous points of view, he had been stung by that cool phrase of Betty’s concerning “Jasper’s guilt.”
“I’ll tell you in a moment. Did you destroy my letter?”
He shook his head.
“Oh, Prosper, please!”
He took it out, tore it up, and walking over to the open fire, burned the papers. He came back to his tea. “Well, Betty?”
“The girl,” said Betty, “is the star in your play, ‘The Leopardess,’ the girl that Jasper picked up two Septembers ago out West. He has written to you about her. She was a cook, if you please, a hideous creature, but Jasper saw at once what there was in her. She has made the play. You’ll have to acknowledge that yourself when you see her. She is wonderful. And, partly owing to the trouble I’ve taken with her, the girl is beautiful. One wouldn’t have thought it possible. She is not charming to me, she’s not in the least subtle. It’s odd that she should have had such an effect upon Jasper, of all men....”
Prosper sipped his tea and listened. He lookedat her and was bitterly conscious that the excitement which had pleased and surprised him was dying out. That faintness again assailed his spirit. He was feeling stifled, ashamed, bored. Yes, that was it, bored. That life of service and battle-danger in France had changed him more than he had realized till now. He was more simple, more serious, more moral, in a certain sense. He was like a man who, having denied the existence of Apollyon, has come upon him face to face and has been burnt by his breath. Such a man is inevitably moral. All this long, intricate intrigue with the wife of a man who called him friend, seemed to him horribly unworthy. If Betty had been a great lover, if she had not lost courage at the eleventh hour and left him to face that terrible winter in Wyoming, then their passion might have justified itself: but now there was a staleness in their relationship. He hated the thought of the long divorce proceedings, of the decent interval, of the wedding, of the married life. He had never really wanted that. And now, in the ebb of his passion, how could he force himself to take her when he had learned to live more keenly, more completely without her! He would have to take her, to spend his days and nights with her, to travel with her. She would want to visitthat gay, little forsaken house in a Wyoming cañon. With vividness he saw a girl lying prone on a black rug before a dancing fire, her hair all fallen about her face, her secret eyes lifted impatiently from the book—“You had ought to be writin’, Mr. Gael....”
“What are you smiling for, Prosper?” Betty asked sharply.
He looked up, startled and confused. “Sorry. I’ve got into beastly absent-minded habits. Is that Morena?”
Jasper opened the curtains and came in, greeting Prosper in his stately, charming fashion. “To-night,” he said, “we’ll show you a leopardess worth looking at, won’t we, Betty? But first you must tell us about your own experience. You look wonderfully fit, doesn’t he, Betty? And changed. They say the life out there stamps a man, and they’re right. It’s taken some of that winged-demon look out of your face, Prosper, put some soul into it.”
He talked and Betty laughed, showing not the slightest evidence of effort, though the soul Jasper had seen in Prosper’s face felt shriveled for her treachery. Prosper wondered if she could be right in her surmise about Jasper. The Jew was infinitely capable of dissimulation, but there wasa clarity of look and smile that filled Prosper with doubts. And the eyes he turned upon his wife were quite as apparently as ever the eyes of a disappointed man.
So absorbed was he in such observations that he found it intolerably difficult to fix his attention on the talk. Jasper’s fluency seemed to ripple senselessly about his brain.
“You must consent to one thing, Luck: you must allow me to choose my own time for announcing the authorship.” This found its way partially to his intelligence and he gave careless assent.
“Oh, whenever you like, as soon as I’ve had my fun.”
“Of course—” Morena was thoughtful for an instant. “How would it do for me to leave it with Melton, the business manager? Eh? Suppose I phone him and talk it over a little. He’ll want to wait till toward the end of the run. He’s keen; has just the commercial sense of the born advertiser. Let him choose the moment. Then we can feel sure of getting the right one. Will you, Luck?”
“If you advise it. You ought to know.”
“You see, I’m so confoundedly busy, so many irons in the fire, I might just miss the psychicmoment. I think Melton’s the man—I’ll call him up to-night before we leave. Then I won’t forget it and I’ll be sure to catch him too.”
Again Prosper vaguely agreed and promptly forgot that he had given his permission. Later, there came an agonizing moment when he would have given the world to recall his absent, careless words.
With an effort Prosper kept his poise, with an effort, always increasing, he talked to Jasper while Betty dressed, and kept up his end at dinner. The muscles round his mouth felt tight and drawn, his throat was dry. He was glad when they got into the limousine and started theaterwards. It had been a long time since he had been put through this particular ordeal and he was out of practice.
They reached the house just as the lights went out. Prosper was amused at his own intense excitement. “I didn’t know I was still such a kid,” he said, flashing a smile, the first spontaneous one he had given her, upon Betty who sat beside him in the proscenium box.
The success of his novel had had no such effect upon him as this. It was entrancing to think that in a few moments the words he had written would come to him clothed in various voices, the peoplehis brain had pictured would move before him in flesh and blood, doing what he had ordained that they should do. When the curtain rose, he had forgotten his personal problem, had forgotten Betty. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hand.
The scene was of a tropical island, palms, a strip of turquoise sea. A girl pushed aside the great fronds of ferns and stepped down to the beach. At her appearance the audience broke into applause. She was a tall girl, her stained legs and arms bare below her ragged dress, her black hair hung wild and free about her face and neck. As the daughter of a native mother and an English father, her beauty had been made to seem both Saxon and savage. Stained and painted, darkened below the great gray eyes, Joan with her brows and her classic chin and throat, Joan with her secret, dangerous eyes and lithe, long body, made an arresting picture enough against the setting of vivid green and blue. She moved slowly, deliberately, naturally, and stood, hands on hips, to watch a ship sail into the turquoise harbor. It was not like acting, she seemed really to look. She threw back her head and gave a call. It was the name of her stage brother, but it came from her deep chest and through her longcolumn of a throat like music. Prosper brought down his hands on the railing before him, half pushed himself up, turned a blind look upon Betty, who laid a restraining hand upon his arm.
He whispered a name, which Betty could not make out, then he sat down, moistened his lips with his tongue, and sat through the entire first act and neither moved nor spoke. As the curtain went down he stood up.
“I must go out,” he said, and hesitated in the back of the box till Jasper came over to him with an anxious question. Then he began to stammer nervously. “Don’t tell her, Jasper, don’t tell her.”
“Tell her what, man? Tell whom?” Jasper gave him a shake. “Don’t you like Jane? Isn’t she wonderful?”
“Yes, yes, extraordinary!”
“Made for the part?”
“No.” Prosper’s face twisted into a smile. “No. The part came second, she was there first. Morena, promise me you won’t tell her who wrote the play.”
“Look here, Prosper, suppose you tell me what’s wrong. Have you seen a ghost?”
Prosper laughed; then, seeing Betty, her face a rigid question, he struggled to lay hands upon his self-control.
“Something very astonishing has happened, Morena,—one of those ‘things not dreamt of in a man’s philosophy.’ I can’t tell you. Have you arranged for me to meet Jane West?”
“After the show, yes, at supper.”
“But not as the author?”
“No. I was waiting for you to tell her that.”
“She mustn’t know. And—and I can’t meet her that way, at supper.” Again he made visible efforts at self-control. “Don’t tell Betty what a fool I am. I’ll go out a minute. I’ll be all right.”
Betty was coming toward them. He gave a painful smile and fled.