CHAPTER VIJOAN AND PROSPER
The situation was no doubt an extraordinary, an unimaginable one, but it had to be met. When he returned to the box, Prosper had himself in hand, and, sitting a little farther back than before, he watched the second act with a sufficiency of outward calm.
This part was the most severe test of his composure, for he had fashioned it almost in detail upon that idyll in a cañon. There were even speeches of Joan’s that he had used. To sit here and watch Joan herself go through it, while he looked on, was an exciting form of torment. The setting was different, tropical instead of Northern, and the half-native heroine was more passionate, more emotional, more animal than Joan. Nevertheless, the drama was a repetition. As Prosper had laid his trap for Joan, silently, subtly undermining her whole mental structure, using her loneliness, playing upon the artist soul of her, so did this Englishman lay his trap for Zona. He was more cruel than Prosper, rougher, necessarily more dramatic, but there was all theessence of the original drama, the ensnarement of a simple, direct mind by a complex and skillful one. Joan’s surrender, Prosper’s victory, were there. He wondered how Joan could act it, play the part in cold blood. Now he was condemned to live in his own imagination through Joan’s tragedy. There was that first pitifulness of a tamed and broken spirit; then later, in London, the agony of loneliness, of separation, of gradual awakening to the change in her master’s heart. Prosper had written the words, but it was Joan who, with her voice, the music of memory-shaken heart-strings, made the words alive and meaningful. Others in the audience might wonder over the girl’s ability to interpret this unusual experience, to make it natural, human, inevitable. But Prosper did not wonder. He knew that simply she forced herself to re-live this most painful part of her own life and to re-live it articulately. What, in God’s name, had induced her to do it? Necessity? Poverty? Morena? All at once he remembered Betty’s belief, that Joan was the manager’s mistress—his wild, beautiful Joan, Joan the creation of his own wizardry. This thought gave him such pain that he whitened.
“Prosper,” murmured Betty, “you must tell me what is wrong. Evidently your nerves arein bad shape. Is the excitement too much for you?”
“I believe it is,” he said, avoiding her eyes and moving stiff, white lips; “I’ve never seen such acting. I—I—Morena says he’ll let me see her in her dressing-room afterwards. You see, Betty, I’m badly shaken up.”
“Ye-es,” drawled Betty, and looked at him through narrowed lids, and she sat with this look on her face and with her fingers locked, when Prosper, not giving her further notice, followed Morena out.
“Jasper,”—Prosper held his friend back in the middle of a passage that led to the dressing-rooms,—“I want very particularly to see Miss West alone. I am very much moved by her performance and I want to tell her so. Also, I want her to express herself naturally with no idea of my being the author of the play and without the presence of her manager. Will you just ask if she will see a friend of yours—alone?”
Jasper smiled his subtle smile. “Of course, Prosper. It’s all as clear as daylight.”
Prosper did not notice the Jew’s intelligent expression. He was too much absorbed in his own excitement. In a moment he would be with Joan—Joan, his love of winter nights!
Morena tapped upon a door. A maid half-opened it.
“Ask Miss West, please, if she will see a friend of Mr. Morena’s. Tell her I particularly wish her to give him a private interview.” He scribbled a line on a card and the maid took it in.
In five minutes, during which the two men waited silently, she came back.
“Miss West will see your friend, sir.”
“Ah! Then I’ll take myself off. Prosper, will you join Betty and me at supper?”
“No, thanks. I’ll have my brief interview with Miss West and then go home, if you’ll forgive me. I’m about all in. New York’s too much for a man just home from the front.”
Jasper laid his hand for a moment on Prosper’s shoulder, smiled, shrugged, and turned away. Prosper waited till his friend was out of sight and hearing, then knocked and was admitted to the dressing-room of Miss Jane West.
She had not changed from the evening dress she had worn in the last scene nor had she yet got rid of her make-up. She was sitting in a narrow-backed chair that had been turned away from the dressing-table. The maid was putting away some costumes.
Prosper walked half across the room and stopped.
“Miss West,” he said quietly.
She stood up. The natural color left her face ghastly with patches of paint and daubs of black. She threw back her head and said, “Prosper!” just above her breath.
“Go out, Henrietta.” This was spoken to the maid in the voice of Jane the virago and Henrietta fled.
At sight of Joan, Prosper had won back instantly his old poise, his old feeling of ascendancy.
“Joan, Joan,” he said gently; “was ever anything so strange? Why didn’t you let me know? Why didn’t you answer my letters? Why didn’t you take my money? I have suffered greatly on your account.”
Joan laughed. Four years ago she would not have been capable of this laugh, and Prosper started.
“I wrote again and again,” he said passionately. “Wen Ho told me that you had gone, that he didn’t know anything about your plans. I went out to Wyoming, to our house. I scoured the country for you. Did you know that?”
“No,” said Joan slowly, “I didn’t know that But it makes no difference to me.”
They were still standing a few paces apart, too intent upon their inner tumult to heed any outward situation. She lowered her head in that dangerous way of hers, looking up at him from under her brows. Her color had returned and the make-up had a more natural look.
“Maybe you did write, maybe you did send money, maybe you did come back—I don’t care anything for all that.” She made a gesture as if to sweep something away. “The day after you left me in that house, Pierre, my husband, came up the trail. He was taking after me. He meant to fetch me home. You told me”—she began to tremble so violently that the jewels on her neck clicked softly—“you told me he wasdead.”
Prosper came closer, she moving back, till, striking the chair, she sat down on it and looked up at him with her changed and embittered eyes.
“Would you have gone back to him, Joan Landis, after he had tied you up and branded your shoulder with his cattlebrand?”
“What has that got to do with it?” she asked, her voice lifting on a wave of anger. “That was between my man and me. That was not for you to judge. He loved me. It was through loving me too much, too ignorantly, that he hurt me so.” She choked. “But you—”
“Joan,” said Prosper, and he laid his hand on her cold and rigid fingers, “I loved you too.”
She was still and stiff. After a long silence she seemed to select one question from a tide of them.
“Why did you leave me?”
“I wrote you a full explanation. The letter came back to me unread.”
Again Joan gave the laugh and the gesture of disdain.
“That doesn’t matter ... your loving or not loving. You made use of me for your own ends, and when you saw fit, you left me. But that’s not my complaint. I don’t say I didn’t deserve that. I was easy to use. But it was all based on what wasn’t true. I was married, my man was living, and I had dealings with you. That was sin. That was horrible. That was what my mother did. She was a ——” Joan used the coarse and ugly word her father had taught her, and Prosper laid a hand over her mouth.
“Joan! No! Never say it, never think it. You are clean.”
Joan twisted herself free, stood up, and walked away. “I amthat!” she said grimly; “and it was you that made me. You took lots of trouble to make me see things in a way where nothing a person wants is either right or wrong. You mademe thirsty with your talk and your books and your music, and when I was tormented with thirst, you came and offered me a drink of water. That was it. I don’t care about your not marrying me. I still don’t see that that has much to do with it except, perhaps, that a man would be caring to give any woman he rightly loves whatever help or cherishing or gifts the world has decided to give her. But, you see, Prosper, we didn’t start fair. You knew that Pierre was alive.”
“But, Joan, you say yourself that marrying—”
She stopped him with so fierce a gesture that he flinched. “Yes. Pierre did rightly love me. He gave me his best as he knew it. Oh, he was ignorant, a savage, I guess, like I was. But he did rightly love me. He was not trying to break my spirit nor to tame me, nor to amuse himself with me, nor to give me a longing for beauty and easiness and then leave me to fight through my own rough life without any of those things. Did you really think, Prosper Gael, that I would stay in your house and live on your money till you should be caring to come back to me—if ever you would care? Did you honestly think that you would be coming back—as—as my lover? No. Whatever it was that took you away, it was likely to keep you from me for always, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Prosper in a muffled voice, “it was likely to. But, Joan, Fate was on your side. Since I have been yours, I haven’t belonged to any one but you. You’ve put your brand on me.”
“I don’t want to hear about you,” Joan broke in. “I am done with you. Have you seen this play?”
“Yes.” He found that in telling her so he could not meet her eyes.
“Well, the man who wrote that knew what you are, and, if he didn’t, every one that has seen me act in it, knows what you are.” She paused, breathing fast and trembling. “Good-bye,” she said.
He went vaguely toward the door, then threw up his head defiantly. “No,” he said, “it’s not going to be good-bye. I’ve found you. You must let me tell you the truth about myself. Come, Joan, you’re as just as Heaven. You never read my explanations. You’ve never heard my side of it. You’ll let me come to see you and you’ll hear me out. Don’t do me an injustice. I’ll leave the whole thing in your hands after that. But you must give me that one chance.”
“Chance?” repeated Joan. “Chance for what?”
“Oh,”—Prosper flung up his lithe, long hands—“oh, for nothing but a cleansing inyour sight. I want what forgiveness I can wring from you. I want what understanding I can force from you. That’s all.”
She thought, standing there, still and tall, her arms hanging, her eyes wide and secret, as he had remembered them in her thin, changed, so much more expressive face.
“Very well,” she said, “you may come. I’ll hear you out.” She gave him the address and named an afternoon hour. “Good-night.”
It was a graceful and dignified dismissal. Prosper bit his lip, bowed and left her.
As the door closed upon her, he knew that it had closed upon the only real and vivid presence in his life. War had burnt away his glittering, clever frivolity. Betty was the adventure, Betty was the tinsel; Joan was the grave, predestined woman of his man. For the first time in his life he found himself face to face with the cleanness of despair.
CHAPTER VIIAFTERMATH
Joan waited for Prosper on the appointed afternoon. There was a fire on her hearth and a March snow-squall tapped against the window panes. The crackle of the logs inside and that eerie, light sound outside were so associated with Prosper that, even before he came, Joan, sitting on one side of the hearth, closed her eyes and felt that he must be opposite to her in his red-lacquered chair, his long legs stuck out in front, his amused and greedy eyes veiled by a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Since she had seen him at the theater, she had been suffering from sleeplessness. At night she would go over and over the details of their intercourse, seeing them, feeling them, living them in the light of later knowledge, till the torment was hardly to be borne. Three days and nights of this inner activity had brought back that sharp line between her brows and the bitter tightening of her lips.
This afternoon she was white with suspense. Her dread of the impending interview was like a physical illness. She sat in a high-backed chair,hands along the arms, head resting back, eyes half-closed, in that perfect stillness of which the animal and the savage are alone entirely capable. There were many gifts that Joan had brought from the seventeen years on Lone River. This grave immobility was one. She was very carefully dressed in a gown that accentuated her height and dignity. And she wore a few jewels. She wanted, pitifully enough, to mark every difference between this Joan and the Joan whom Prosper had drawn on his sled up the cañon trail. If he expected to force her back into the position of enchanted leopardess, to see her “lie at his feet and eat out of his hand,” as Morena had once described the plight of Zona, he would see at a glance that she was no longer so easily mastered. In fact, sitting there, she looked as proud and perilous as a young Medea, black-haired with long throat and cold, malevolent lips. It was only in the eyes—those gray, unhappy, haunted eyes—that Joan gave away her eternal simplicity of heart. They were unalterably tender and lonely and hurt. It was the look in them that had prompted Shorty’s description, “She’s plumb movin’ to me—looks about halfway between ‘You go to hell’ and ‘You take me in your arms to rest.’”
Prosper was announced, and Joan, keeping her stillness, merely turned her head toward him as he came into the room.
She saw his rapid observation of the room, of her, even before she noticed the very apparent change in him. For he, too, was haggard and utterly serious as she did not remember him. He stood before her fire and asked her jerkily if she would let him smoke. She said “Yes,” and those were the only words spoken for five unbearable minutes the seconds of which her heart beat out like a shaky hammer in some worn machine.
Prosper smoked and stood there looking, now at her, now at the fire. At last, with difficulty, he smiled. “You are not going to make it easy for me, are you, Joan?”
For her part she was not looking at him. She kept her eyes on the fire and this averted look distressed and irritated his nerves.
“I am not trying to make it hard,” she said; “I want you to say what you came to say and go.”
“Didyouever love me, Joan?”
He had said it to force a look from her, but it had the effect only of making her more still, if possible.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, answeringwith her old directness. “I thought you needed me. I was alone. I was scared of the emptiness when I went out and looked down the valley. I thought Pierre had gone out of the world and there was no living thing that wanted me. I came back and you met me and you put your arms round me and you said”—she closed her eyes and repeated his speech as though she had just heard it—“‘Don’t leave me, Joan.’”
Her voice was more than ever before moving and expressive. Prosper felt that half-forgotten thrill. The muscles of his throat contracted. “Joan, I did want you. I spoke the truth,” he pleaded.
She went on with no impatience but very coldly. “You came to tell me your side. Will you tell me, please?”
For the first time she looked into his eyes and he drew in his breath at the misery of hers.
“I built that cabin, Joan,” he said, “for another woman.”
“Your wife?” asked Joan.
“No.”
“For the one I said must have been like a tall child? She wasn’t your wife? She was dead?”
Prosper shook his head. “No. Did you think that? She was a woman I loved at that time verydearly and she was already married to another man.”
“You built that house for her? I don’t understand.”
“She had promised to leave her husband and to come away with me. I had everything ready, those rooms, those clothes, those materials, and when I went out to get her, I had a message saying that her courage had failed her, that she wouldn’t come.”
“She was a better woman than me,” said Joan bitterly.
Prosper laughed. “By God, she was not! She sent me down to hell. I couldn’t go back to the East again. I had laid very careful and elaborate plans. I was trapped out there in that horrible winter country....”
“It was not horrible,” said Joan violently; “it was the most wonderful, beautiful country in all the world.” And tears ran suddenly down her face.
But she would not let him come near to comfort her. “Go on,” she said presently.
“Before you came, Joan,” Prosper went on, “it was horrible. It was like being starved. Every thing in the house reminded me of—her. I had planned it all very carefully and we were to havebeen—happy. You can fancy what it was to be there alone.”
Joan nodded. Shewasjust and she was honestly trying to put herself in his place. “Yes,” she said; “if I had gone back and Pierre had been dead, his homestead would have been like that to me.”
“It was because I was so miserable that I went out to hunt. I’d scour the country all day and half the night to tire myself out, that I could get some sleep. I was pretty far from home that moonlight night when I heard you scream for help....”
Joan’s face grew whiter. “Don’t tell about that,” she pleaded.
He paused, choosing another opening. “After I had bandaged you and told you that Pierre was dead—and I honestly thought he was—I didn’t know what to do with you. You couldn’t be left, and there was no neighbor nearer than my own house; besides, I had shot a man, and, perhaps,—I don’t know, maybe I was influenced by your beauty, by my own crazy loneliness.... You were very beautiful and very desolate. I was in a fury over the brute’s treatment of you....”
“Hush!” said Joan; “you are not to talk about Pierre.”
Prosper shrugged. “I decided to take you home with me. I wanted you desperately, just, I believe, to take care of, just to be kind to—truly, Joan, I was lonely to the point of madness. Some one to care for, some one to talk to, was absolutely necessary to save my reason. So when I was leading you out, I—I saw Pierre’s hand move—”
Joan stood up. After a moment she controlled herself with an effort and sat down again. “Go on. I can stand it,” she said.
“And I thought to myself, ‘The devil is alive and he deserves to be dead. This woman can never live with him again. God wouldn’t sanction such an act as giving her back to his hands.’ And I was half-mad myself, I’d been alone so long ... I stood so you couldn’t see him, Joan, and I threw an elk-hide over him and led you out.”
“I followed you; I didn’t look at Pierre; I left him lying there,” gasped Joan.
Prosper went on monotonously. “When I came back a week later, I thought he would be dead. It was dusk, the wind was blowing, the snow was driving in a scud. I came down to the cabin and dropped below the drift by that northern window, and, the second I looked in, I dropped outof sight. There was a light and a fire. Your husband was lying before the fire on a cot. There was another man there, your Mr. Holliwell; they were talking, Holliwell was dressing Pierre’s wound. I went away like a ghost, and while I was going back, I thought it all out; and I decided to keep you for myself. I suppose,” said Prosper dully, “that that was a horrible sin. I didn’t see it that way then. I’m not sure I see it that way now. Pierre had tied you up and pressed a white-hot iron into your bare shoulder. If you went back to him, if he took you back, how was I to know that he might not repeat his drunken deviltry, or do worse, if anything could be worse! It was the act of a fiend. It put him out of court with me. Whatever I gave you, education and beauty, and ease, must be better and happier for you than life with such a brute as Pierre—”
“Stop!” said Joan between her teeth; “you know nothing of Pierre and me; you only know that one dreadful night. You don’t know—the rest.”
“I don’t want to know the rest,” he said sharply; “that is enough to justify my action. I thought so then and I think so now. You won’t be able to make me change that opinion.”
“I shall not try,” said Joan.
He accepted this and went on. “When I found you in your bed waiting for news of Pierre, I thought you the most beautiful, pitiful thing I had ever seen. I loved you then, Joan, then. Tell me, did I ever in those days hurt you or give you a moment’s anxiety or fear?”
“No,” Joan admitted, “you did not. In those days you were wonderful, kind and patient with me. I thought you were more like God than a human then.”
Prosper laughed with bitterness. “You thought very wrong, but, according to my own lights, I was very careful of you. I meant to give you all I could and I meant to win you with patience and forbearance. I had respect for you and for your grief and for the horrible thing you had suffered. Joan, by now you know better what the world is. Can you reproach me so very bitterly for our—happiness, even if it was short?”
“You lied to me,” said Joan. “It wasn’t just. We didn’t start even. And—and you knew what you wanted of me. I never guessed.”
“You didn’t? You never guessed?”
“No. Sometimes, toward the last, I was afraid. I felt that I ought to go away. That day I ran off—you remember—I was afraid of you. I feltyou were bad and that I was bad too. Then it seemed to me that I’d been dreadfully ungrateful and unkind. That was what began to make me give way to my feelings. I was sorrowful because I had hurt you and you so kind! The day I came in with that suit and spoke of—her as a ‘tall child’ and you cried, why, I felt so sorrowful that I’d made you suffer. I wanted to comfort you, to put my hands on you in comfort, like a mother, I felt. And you went out like you were angry and stayed away all night as though you couldn’t bear to be seeing me again in your house that you had built for her. So I wrote you my letter and went away. And then—it was all so awful cold and empty. I didn’t know Pierre was out there. I came back....”
They were both silent for a long time and in the silence the idyll was re-lived. Spring came again with its crest of green along the cañon and the lake lay like a turquoise drawing the glittering peak down into its heart.
“My book—its success,” Prosper began at last, “made me restless. You’ll understand that now that you are an artist yourself. And one day there came a letter from that woman I had loved.”
“It was a little square gray envelope,” saidJoan breathlessly. “I can see it now. You never rightly looked at me again.”
“Ah!” said Prosper. He turned and hid his face.
“Tell me the rest,” said Joan.
He went on without turning back to her, his head bent. “The woman wrote that her husband was dying, that I must come back to her at once.”
The snow tapped and the fire crackled.
“And when you—went back?”
“Her husband did not die,” said Prosper blankly; “he is still alive.”
“And you still love her very much?”
“That’s the worst of it, Joan,” groaned Prosper. His groan changed into a desperate laugh. “I love you. Now truly I do love you. If I could marry you—if I could have you for my wife—” He waited, breathing fast, then came and stood close before her. “I have never wanted a woman to be my wife till now. I want you. I want you to be the mother of my children.”
Then Joan did look at him with all her eyes.
“I am Pierre’s wife,” she said. The liquid beauty had left her voice. It was hoarse and dry. “I am Pierre’s wife and I have already been the mother of your child.”
There was a long, rigid silence. “Joan—when?—where?” Prosper’s throat clicked.
“I knew it before you left. I couldn’t tell you because you were so changed. I worked all winter. It—it was born on an awful cold March night. I think the woman let it—made it—die. She wanted me to work for her during the summer and she thought I would be glad if the child didn’t live. She used to say I was ‘in trouble’ and she’d be glad if she could ‘help me out.’... It was what I was planning to live for ... that child.”
During the heavy stillness following Joan’s dreadful, brief account of birth and death, Prosper went through a strange experience. It seemed to him that in his soul something was born and died. Always afterwards there was a ghost in him—the father that might have been.
“I can’t talk any more,” said Joan faintly. “Won’t you please go?”
CHAPTER VIIIAGAINST THE BARS
Jasper Morena had stood for an hour in a drafty passage of that dirty labyrinth known vaguely to the public as “behind the scenes,” listening to the wearisome complaints of a long-nosed young actor. It was the sixth of such conversations that he had held that day: to begin with, there had been a difficulty between a director and the leading man. Morena’s tact was still complete; he was very gentle to the long-nosed youth; but the latter, had he been capable of seeing anything but himself, must have noticed that his listener’s face was pale and faintly lined.
“Yes, my boy, of course, that’s reasonable enough. I’ll do what I can.”
“I don’t make extravagant demands, you see,” the young man spread down and out his hands, quivering with exaggerated feeling; “I ask only for decent treatment, what my own self-respect ab-so-lute-ly demands.”
Morena put a hand on his shoulder and walked beside him.
“Did you ever stop to think,” he said with his charming smile, “that the other fellow is thinking and saying just the same thing? Now, this chap that has, as you put it, got your goat, why, he came to me himself this morning, and, word for word, he said of you just precisely what you have just said of him to me. Odd, isn’t it?”
Again the young actor stopped for one of his gestures, hands up this time. “But, my God, sir! Is there such a thing as honesty? He couldn’t accuse me of—”
“Well, he thought he could. However, I do get your point of view and I think we can fix it up for you so that you’ll get off with your self-respect entirely intact. I’ll talk to George to-morrow. You’re worth the bother. Good-afternoon.”
The young man bowed, his air of tragic injury softened to one of tragic self-appreciation. Worth the bother, indeed!
Morena left him at the top of the dingy stairs down which the manager fled to an alley at one side of the theater, where his car was waiting for him. He stood for a while with his foot on the step and his hand on the door, looking rather blankly at the gray, cold wall and the scurrying whirlwinds of dust and paper.
“Drop yourself at the garage, Ned,” he said, “and I’ll take the car.”
He climbed in beside the wheel. He was very tired, but he had remembered that Jane West, when he had last seen her, had worn a look of profound discouragement. She never complained, but when he saw that particular expression he was frightened and the responsibility for her came heavily upon him. This wild thing he had brought to New York must not be allowed to beat its head dumbly against the bars.
When he had got rid of his driver, he turned the car northward, and a few minutes later Mathilde, the French maid chosen by Betty, opened Jane’s door to him.
While he took off his coat he looked along the hall and saw its owner sitting, her chin propped on a latticework of fingers. She was gazing out of the window. It was a beautiful, desperate silhouette; something fateful in the long, still pose and the fixed look. She was still dressed in street clothes as when she had left the theater, a blouse and skirt of dark gray, very plain. Her figure, now that it was trained to slight corseting, was less vigorous and more fine-drawn. She was very thin, but she had lost her worn and haggard look; the premature hard lines had almost disappeared;a softer climate, proper care, rest, food, luxury had given back her young, clear skin and the brightness of eyes and lips. Her hair, arranged very simply to frame her face in a broken setting of black, was glossy, and here and there, deeply waved. It was the arrangement chosen for her by Betty and copied from a Du Maurier drawing of the Duchess of Towers. It was hard to believe that this graceful woman was the virago Jane, harder for any one that had seen a heavy, handsome girl stride into Mrs. Upper’s hotel and ask for work, to believe that she was here.
Morena clapped his hands in the Eastern fashion of summons, and Jane looked toward him.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m glad you came.”
He strolled in and stood beside her shaking his head.
“I didn’t like the look of you this afternoon, my dear.”
“Well, sir,” said Jane, “I don’t like the look of you either.” She smiled her slow, unself-conscious smile. “You sit down and I’ll make tea for you.”
He knew that thought for some one else was the best tonic for her mood, so he dropped, with his usual limp grace, into the nearest chair, put back his head and half-closed his eyes.
“I’m used up,” he said; “I haven’t a word—not one to throw at a dog.”
“Please don’t throw one at me, then. I surely wouldn’t take it as a compliment.” She made the tea gravely, as absorbed in the work as a little girl who makes tea for her dolls. She brought him his cup and went back to her place and again her face settled into that look. She had evidently forgotten him and her eyes held a vision as of distances.
He put a hand up to break her fixed gaze. “What is it, Jane? What do you see?”
To his astonishment she hid her face in her hands. “It’s awful to live like this,” she moaned; and it frightened him to see her move her head from side to side like an imprisoned beast, shifting before bars.
He looked about the pretty room and repeated, “Like this?” half-reproachfully.
“I hate it!” She spoke through her teeth. “I hate it! And, oh, the sounds, the noises, grinding into your ears.”
Here the hands came to her ears and framed a white, desperate face in which the lids had fallen over sick eyes.
Jasper sat listening to the hum and roar and clatter of the street. To him it was a pleasantsound, and here it was subdued and remote enough. Her face was like that of some one maddened by noise.
“You don’t smell anything fresh”—her chest lifted—“you don’t get air. I can’t breathe. Everything presses in.” She opened her eyes, bright and desperate. “What am I doing here, Mr. Morena?”
He had put down his cup quietly, for he was really half-afraid of her. “Why did you come, Jane?”
“Because I was afraid of some one. I was running away, Mr. Morena. There’s some one that mustn’t ever find me now, and to run away from him—that was the business of my life. And it kept my heart full of him and the dread of his coming. You see, that was my happiness. I hoped he was taking after me so’s I could run away.” She laughed apologetically. “Does that sound crazy to you?”
“No. I think I understand. And here?”
“He’ll never come here. He’ll never find me. It’s been four years. And I’m so changed. This”—she gave herself a downward look—“this isn’t the ‘gel’ he wants.... Probably by now he’s given me up. Maybe he’s found another. Everything that’s bad and hateful canfind me out here. Bad things can find you out and try to clutch after you anywheres. But when something wild and clean comes hunting for you, something out of the big lonely places—why, it would be scared to follow into this city.”
“You’re lonely, Jane. I’ve told you a hundred times that you ought to make friends for yourself.”
“Oh, I don’t care for that. I don’t want friends, not many friends. These acting people, they’re not real folks. I don’t savvy their ways and they don’t savvy mine. They always end by disliking me because I’m queer and different from them. You have been my friend, and your wife—that is, she used to be.” Suddenly Jane became more her usual self and spoke with childlike wistfulness. “She doesn’t come to see me any more, Mr. Morena. And I could love her. She’s so like a little girl with those round eyes—” Jane held up two circles made by forefingers and thumbs to represent Betty’s round eyes. “Oh, dear!” she said; “isn’t she awfully winning? Seems as if you must be taking care of her. She’s so small and fine.”
Jasper laughed with some bitterness.
“She doesn’t like me now,” sighed Jane, but the feelings Betty had hurt were connected witha later development so that they turned her mood and brought her to a more normal dejection. She was no longer a caged beast, she had temporarily forgotten her bars.
“I think you’re wrong,” said Jasper doubtfully. “Betty does like you. She’s merely busy and preoccupied. I’ve been neglected myself.”
Jane gave him a far too expressive look. It was as though she had said, “You don’t fancy that she cares for you?”
Jasper flushed and blinked his long, Oriental eyes.
“It’s a pity you haven’t a lover, Jane,” he said.
She had walked over to the window, and his speech, purposely a trifle cruel and insulting, did not make her turn.
“You’re angry,” she said. “You’d better go home. I’m not in good humor myself.”
At which he laughed his murmuring, musical laugh and prepared to leave her.
“I have a great deal of courage,” he said, getting into his coat, “to bring a wild-cat here, chain her up, and tease her—eh?”
“You think you have me chained?” Her tone was enraged and scornful. “I can snap your flimsy little tether and go.”
She wheeled upon him. She looked tall and fierce and free.
“No, no,” he cried with deprecating voice and gesture. “You are making Mr. Luck’s fortune and mine, not to mention your own. You mustn’t break your chains. Get used to them. We all have to, you know. It’s much the best method.”
“I shall never get used to this life, never. It just—somehow—isn’t mine.”
“Perhaps when you meet Mr. Luck, he’ll be able to reconcile you.”
Her expressive face darkened. “When shall I meet Mr. Luck?”
“Soon, I hope. Mr. Melton knows just when to announce the authorship.”
“I hate Mr. Luck more than any one in the world,” she said in a low, quiet voice.
Jasper stared. “Hate him! Why, in the name of savagery, should you hate him?”
“Oh, I can’t explain. But you’d better keep us apart. How came he to write ‘The Leopardess’?”
“I shall leave him to tell you that. Good-night.”
CHAPTER IXGRAY ENVELOPES
It was with more than the usual sinking of heart that Jasper let himself that evening into the beautiful house which Betty and he called their home. Joan’s too expressive look had stung the old soreness of his disillusionment. He knew that the house was empty of welcome. He took off his hat and coat dejectedly. There were footsteps of his man who came from the far end of the hall.
While he stood waiting, Jasper noticed the absence of a familiar fragrance. For the first time in years Betty had forgotten to order flowers. The red roses which Jasper always caressed with a long, appreciative finger as he went by the table in the hall, were missing. Their absence gave him a faint sensation of alarm.
“Mr. Kane, Mrs. Morena’s brother, has called to see you, sir. He is waiting.”
Jasper’s eyebrows rose. “To see me? Is he with Mrs. Morena now?”
“No, sir. Mrs. Morena went out this morning and has not yet returned. Mr. Kane has been here since five o’clock, sir.”
“Very well.”
It was a mechanical speech of dismissal. The footman went off. Jasper stood tapping his chin with his finger. Woodward Kane come to see him during Betty’s absence! Woodward had not spoken more than three or four icy words of necessity to him since the marriage. After a stiff, ungracious fashion this brother had befriended Betty, but to his Jewish brother-in-law he had shown only a slightly disguised distaste. The Jew was well used to such a manner. He treated it with light bitterness, but he did not love to receive the users of it in his own house. It was with heightened color and bent brows that he pushed apart the long, crimson hangings and came into the immense drawing-room.
It was softly lighted and pleasantly warmed. A fire burned. The tall, fair visitor rose from a seat near the blaze and turned all in one rigid piece toward his advancing host. Jasper was perfectly conscious that his own gesture and speech of greeting were too eager, too ingratiating, that they had a touch of servility. He hated them himself, but they were inherited with his blood, as instinctive as the wagging of a dog’s tail. They were met by a precise bow, no smile, no taking of his outstretched hand.
Jasper drew himself up at once, put the slighted hand on the back of a tall, crimson-damask chair, and looked his stateliest and most handsome self.
“Betty hasn’t come in yet,” he said. “You’ve been waiting for her?”
Woodward Kane pulled at his short, yellow mustache and stared at Jasper with his large, blank, blue eyes. “As a matter of fact I didn’t call to see my sister, but to see you. I have just come from Elizabeth. She is at my house. She came to me this morning.”
Jasper’s fingers tightened on the chair. “She is sick?”
“No.” There was a pause during which the blank, blue eyes staring at him slowly gathered a look of cold pleasure. Jasper was aware that this man who hated him was enjoying his present mission.
“Shall we sit down? I shall have to take a good deal of your time, I am afraid. There is rather a good deal to be gone over.”
Jasper sat down in the chair the back of which he had been holding. “Will you smoke?” he asked, and smiled his charming smile.
There was now not a trace of embarrassment, anger, or anxiety about him. His eyes were quiet,his voice flexible. Woodward declined to smoke, crossed his beautifully clothed legs and drew a small gray envelope from his pocket. Jasper’s eyes fastened upon it at once. It was Betty’s paper and her angular, boyish writing marched across it. Evidently the note was addressed to him. He waited while Woodward turned it about in his long, stiff, white fingers.
“About two months ago Betty came to me one evening in great distress of mind. She asked for my advice and to the best of my ability I gave it to her. I wish that she had asked for it ten years ago. She might have saved herself a great deal. This time she has not only asked for it, but she has been following it, and, in following it, she has now left your house and come to mine. This, of course, will not surprise you.”
“It does, however, surprise me greatly.” It was still the gentle murmur, but Jasper’s cigarette smoke veiled his face.
“I cannot understand that. However, it’s not my business. Betty has asked me to interview you to-day so that she may be spared the humiliation. After this, you must address your communications to her lawyers. In a short time Rogers and Daring will serve you with notice of divorce.”
Jasper sat perfectly still, leaning slightly forward, his cigarette between his fingers.
“So-o!” he said after a long silence. Then he held out his hand. “I may have Betty’s letter?”
Woodward Kane withheld it and again that look of pleasure was visible in his eyes. “Just a moment, please. I should like to have my own say out first. I shall have to be brutal, I am afraid. In these matters there is nothing for it but frankness. Your infidelity has been common talk for some time. The story of it first came to Betty’s ears on the evening when she came to me two months ago. Since then there has been but one possible course.”
Jasper kept another silence, more difficult, however, than his last. His pallor was noticeable. “You say my—infidelity is common talk. There has been a name used?”
“Your protégée from Wyoming—Jane West.”
Jasper was on his feet, and Woodward too rose, jerkily holding up a hand. “No excitement, please,” he begged. “Let us conduct this unfortunate interview like gentlemen, if possible.”
Jasper laughed. “As you say—if possible. Why, man, it was Betty who helped me bring Miss West to New York, it was Betty who helped me to install her here, it was Betty who chose thefurnishings for her apartment, who helped her buy her clothes, who engaged her maid, who gave her most of her training. This is the most preposterous, the most filthy perversion of the truth. Betty must know it better than any one else. Come, now, Woodward, there’s something more in it than this?” Jasper had himself in hand, but it was easy now to see the effort it cost him. The veins of his forehead were swollen.
“I shall not discuss the matter with you. Betty has excellent evidence, unimpeachable witnesses. There is no doubt in my mind, nor in the minds of her lawyers, that she will win her suit and get her divorce, her release. Of course, you will not contest—”
Jasper stopped in his pacing which had begun to take the curious, circling, weaving form characteristic of him, and, standing now with his head thrown back, he spoke sonorously.
“Do you imagine for one instant, Kane,—does Betty imagine for one instant,—that I shall not contest?”
This changed the look of cold pleasure in Woodward’s eyes, which grew blank again. “Do you mean me to understand—Naturally, I took it for granted that you would act as most gentlemen act under the circumstances.”
“Then you have taken too much for granted, you and Betty. Ten years ago your sister gave herself to me. She is mine. I will not for a whim, for a passion, for a temporary alienation, let her go. Neither will I have my good name and the name of a good woman besmirched for the sake of this impertinent desire for a release. I love my wife”—his voice was especially Hebraic and especially abhorrent to the other—“and as a husband I mean to keep her from the ruin this divorce would mean to her—”
“Far from being her ruin, Morena, it would be the saving of her. Her ruin was as nearly as possible brought about ten years ago, when against the advice, against the wishes of every one who loved her, she made her insane marriage with an underbred, commercial, and licentious Jew. She was seventeen and you seized your opportunity.”
Jasper had stepped close. He was a head taller and several inches broader of shoulder than his brother-in-law. “As long as you are in my house, don’t insult me. I am, as you say, a Jew, and I am, as you say, of a commercial family. But I am not, I have never been licentious. Is it necessary to use such language? You suggested that this interview be conducted by us like gentlemen.”
“The man who refuses to give her liberty to a wife that loathes him, scarcely comes under the definition.”
“My ideas on the matter are different. We need not discuss them. If you will let me read my wife’s letter, I think that we can come to an end of this.”
Woodward unwillingly surrendered the small, gray envelope to a quivering, outstretched hand. Jasper turned away and stood near the lamp. But his excitement prevented him from reading. The angular writing jumped before his eyes. At last, the words straightened themselves.