CHAPTER XIITHE LEOPARDESS
Pierre stood before the cheap bureau of his ugly hotel bedroom turning a red slip of cardboard about in his fingers. The gas-jet sputtering above his head threw heavy shadows down on his face. It was the face of hopeless, heartsick youth, the muscles sagging, the eyes dull, the lips tight and pale. Since last night when the contemptuous glitter of Joan’s smile had fallen upon him, he had neither slept nor eaten. Jasper had joined him at the theater exit, had walked home with him, and, while he was with the manager, Pierre’s pride and reserve had held him up. Afterwards he had ranged the city like a prairie wolf, ranged it as though it had been an unpeopled desert, free to his stride. He had fixed his eyes above and beyond and walked alone in pain.
Dawn found him again in his room. What hope had sustained him, what memory of Joan, what purpose of tenderness toward her—these hopes and memories and purposes now choked and twisted him. He might have found her, his “gel,”his Joan, with her dumb, loving gaze; he might have told her the story of his sorrow in such a way that she, who forgave so easily, would have forgiven even him, and he might have comforted her, holding her so and so, showing her utterly the true, unchanged, greatly changed love of his chastened heart. This girl, this love of his, whom, in his drunken, jealous madness, he had branded and driven away, he would have brought her back and tended her and made it up to her in a thousand, in ten thousand, ways. Pierre knelt by his bed, his black head buried in the cover, his arms bent above it, his hands clenched. Out there he had never lost hope of finding her, but here, in this peopled loneliness, with a memory of that woman’s heartless smile, he did at last despair. In a strange, torturing way she had been like Joan. His heart had jumped to his mouth at first sight of her. And just there, to his shoulder where her head reached, had Joan’s dear black head reached too. Pierre groaned aloud. The picture of her was so vivid. Not in months had the reality of his “gel” come so close to his imagination. He could feel her—feel her! O God!
That was the sort of night he had spent and the next day he passed in a lethargy. He had noheart to face the future now that the great purpose of his life had failed. Holliwell’s God of comfort and forgiveness forsook him. What did he want with a God when that one comrade of his lonely, young, human life was out there lost by his own cruelty! Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps the wound had killed her. For all these years she might have been lying dead somewhere in the snow, under the sky. Sharp periods of pain followed dull periods of stupor. Now it was night again and a recollection of Jasper’s theater ticket had dragged him to a vague purpose. He wanted to see again that woman who had so vivified his memory of Joan. It would be hateful to see her again, but he wanted the pain. He dressed and groomed himself carefully. Then, feeling a little faint, he went out into the clattering, glaring night.
Pierre’s experience of theater-going was exceedingly small. He had never been in so large a play-house as this one of Morena’s; he had never seen so large and well-dressed an audience; never heard a full and well-trained orchestra. In spite of himself, he began to be distracted, excited, stirred. When the curtain rose on the beautiful tropical scene, the lush island, the turquoise sea, the realistic strip of golden sand, Pierre gave anaudible oath of admiration and surprise. The people about him began to be amused by the excitement of this handsome, haggard young man, so graceful and intense, so different with his hardness and leanness, the brilliance of his eyes, the brownness of his skin. His clothes were good enough, but they fitted him with an odd air of disguise. An experienced eye would inevitably have seen the appropriateness of flannel shirt, gay silk neck-handkerchief, boots, spurs, andchaparreras. Pierre was entirely unaware of being interesting or different. At that moment, caught up in the action of the play, he was as outside of himself as a child.
The palms of stage-land stirred, the ferns swayed; between then: tall, vivid greenness came Joan with her tread and grace and watchful eyes of a leopardess, her loose, wild hair decked with flowers: these and her make-up and her thinness disguised her completely from Pierre, but again his heart came to his throat and, when she put her hands up to her mouth and called, his pulses gave a leap. He shut his eyes. He remembered a voice calling him in to supper. “Pi-erre! Pi-erre!” He could sniff the smoke of his cabin fire. He opened his eyes. Of course, she wasn’t Joan, this strange, gaunt creature. Besides, his wife couldnever have done what this woman was doing. Why, Joan couldn’t talk like this, she couldn’t act to save her soul! She was as simple as a child, and shy, with the unself-conscious shyness of wild things. To be sure, this “actress-lady” was making-believe she was a wild thing, and she was doing it almighty well, but Joan had been the reality, and grave and still, part of his own big, grave, mountain country, not a fierce, man-devouring animal of the tropics. Pierre lived in the play with all but one fragment of his brain, and that remembered Joan. It hurt like a hot coal, but he deliberately ignored the pain of it. He followed the action breathlessly, applauded with contagious fervor, surreptitiously rid himself of tears, and when, in the last scene, the angry, jealous woman sprang upon her tamer, he muttered, “Serve you right, you coyote!” with an oath of the cow-camp that made one of his neighbors jump and throttle a startled laugh.
The curtain fell, and while the applause rose and died down and rose again, and the people called for “Jane West! Jane West!” the stage-director, a plump little Jew, came out behind the footlights and held up his hand. There was a gradual silence.
“I want to make an interesting announcement,”he said; “the author of ‘The Leopardess’ has hitherto maintained his anonymity, but to-night I have permission to give you his name. He is in the theater to-night. The name is already familiar to you as that of the author of a popular novel, ‘The Cañon’: Prosper Gael.”
There was a stir of interest, a general searching of the house, clapping, cries of “Author! Author!” and in a few moments Prosper Gael left his box and appeared beside the director in answer to the calls. He was entirely self-possessed, looked even a little bored, but he was very white. He stood there bowing, a graceful and attractive figure, and he was about to begin a speech when he was interrupted by a renewed calling for “Jane West!” The audience wanted to see the star and the author side by side. Pierre joined in the clamor.
After a little pause Jane West came out from the opposite wing, walking slowly, dressed in her green gown, jewels on her neck and in her hair. She did not look toward the audience at all, nor bow, nor smile, and for some reason the applause began to falter as though the sensitive mind of the crowd was already aware that here something must be wrong. She came very slowly, her arms hanging, her head bent, her eyes lookingup from under her brows, and she stood beside Prosper Gael, whose forced smile had stiffened on his lips. He looked at her in obvious fear, as a man might look at a dangerous madwoman. There must have been madness in her eyes. She stood there for a strange, terrible moment, moving her head slightly from side to side. Then she said something in a very low tone. Because of the extraordinary carrying quality of her voice—the question was heard by every one there present:
“Youwrote the play?Youwrote the play?”
She said it twice. She seemed to quiver, to gather herself together, her hands bent, her arms lifted. She flew at Prosper with all the sudden strength of her insanity.
There was an outcry, a confusion. People rushed to Gael’s assistance. Men caught hold of Joan, now struggling frantically. It was a dreadful sight, mercifully a brief one. She collapsed utterly, fell forward, the strap of her gown breaking in the grasp of one of the men who held her. For an instant every one in the audience saw a strange double scar that ran across her shoulder to the edge of the shoulder-blade. It was like two bars.
Pierre got to his feet, dropped back, and hidhis face. Then he was up, and struggling past excited people down the row, out into the aisle, along it, hurrying blindly down unknown passages till somehow he got himself into that confused labyrinth behind the scenes. Here a pale, distracted scene-shifter informed him that Miss West had already been taken home.
Pierre got the address, found his way out to the street, hailed a taxicab, and threw himself into it. He sat forward, every muscle tight; he felt that he could take the taxicab up and hurl it forward, so terrible was his impatience.
An apartment house was a greater novelty to him even than a theater, but, after a dazed moment of discovering that he did not have to ring or knock, but just push open the great iron-scrolled door and step into the brightly lighted, steam-heated marble hall, he decided that the woman at the desk was a person in authority, and to her he addressed himself, soft hat gripped in his hand, his face set to hide excitement.
The girl was pale and red-eyed. They had brought Miss West in a few minutes ago, she told him, and carried her up. She was still unconscious; poor thing! “I don’t think you could see her, sir. Mr. Morena is up there, and Mr. Gael, and a doctor. A trained nurse has been sent for. Everythingin the world will be done. She’s such an elegant actress, ain’t she? I’ve often seen her myself. And so kind and pleasant always. Yes, sir. I’ll ask, if you like, but I’m sure they won’t allow you up.”
She put the receiver to her ear, pushed in the black plug, and Pierre listened to her questions.
“Can Miss West see any one? Can an old friend”—for so Pierre had named himself—“be allowed to see her? No. I thought not.” This, with a sympathetic glance at Pierre. “She is not conscious yet. Dangerously ill.”
“Could I speak to the doctor?” Pierre asked hoarsely.
“The gentleman wants to know if he can speak to the doctor. Certainly not at present. If he will wait, the doctor will speak to him on the way out.”
Pierre sat on the bench and waited. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, head crushed in both hands, and the woman stared at him pitilessly—not that he was aware of her scrutiny. His eyes looked through his surroundings to Joan. He saw her in every pose and in every look in which he had ever seen her, and, with a very sick and frightened heart, he saw her, at the last, pass by him in her fur coat, throwing him that half-contemptuouslook and smile. She didn’t know him. Was he changed so greatly? Or was the change in her so enormous that it had disassociated her completely from her old life, from him? He kept repeating to himself Holliwell’s stern, admonishing speech: “However changed for the worse she may be when you do find her, Pierre, you must remember that it is your fault, your sin. You must not judge her, must not dare to judge her. Judge yourself. Condemn yourself. It is for her to forgive if she can bring herself to do it.”
So now Pierre fought down his suspicions and his fears. He had not recognized Prosper. The man who had come in out of the white night, four years ago, had worn his cap low over his eyes, his collar turned up about his face, and, even at that, Pierre, in his drunken stupor, had not been able to see him very clearly. This Prosper Gael who had stood behind the footlights, this Prosper Gael at whom Joan, from some unknown cause, had sprung like a woman maddened by injury, was a person entirely strange to Pierre. But Pierre hated him. The man had done Joan some insufferable mischief, which at the last had driven her beside herself. Pierre put up a hand, pressing it against his eyes. He wanted to shut out the picture of that struggling girl with her torn dressand the double scar across her shoulder. If it hadn’t been for the scar he would never have known her—his Joan, his gentle, silent Joan! What had they been doing to her to change her so? No, not they. He. He had changed her. He had branded her and driven her out. It was his fault. He must try to find her again, to find the old Joan—if she should live. The doctor had said that she was desperately ill. O God! What was keeping him so long? Why didn’t he come?
The arrival of the trained nurse distracted Pierre for a few moments. She went past him in her gray cloak, very quiet and earnest, and the elevator lifted her out of sight.
“Were you in the theater to-night?” asked the girl at the desk, seeing that he was temporarily aware of her again.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She was puzzled by his appearance and the fashion of his speech. He must be a gentleman, she thought, for his bearing was gentle and assured and unself-conscious, but he wore his clothes differently and spoke differently from other gentlemen. That “Yes, ma’am,” especially disturbed her. Then she remembered a novel she had read and her mind jumped to a conclusion. She leaned forward.
“Say, aren’t you from the West?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You weren’t ever a cowboy, were you?”
Pierre smiled. “Yes, ma’am. I was raised in a cow-camp. I was a cowboy till about seven years ago when I took to ranchin’.”
“Where was that?”
“Out in Wyoming.”
“And you’ve come straight from there to New York?” She pronounced it “Noo Yoik.”
“No, ma’am. I’ve been in Alasky for two years now. I’ve been in a lumber-camp.”
“Gee! That’s real interesting. And you knew Miss West before she came East, then?”
“Yes, ma’am.” But there was a subtle change in Pierre’s patient voice and clear, unhappy eyes, so that the girl fell to humming and bottled up her curiosity. But just as soon as he began to brood again she gave up her whole mind to staring at him. Gee! He was brown and strong and thin! And a good-looker! She wished that she had worn her transformation that evening and her blue blouse. He might have taken more interest in her.
A stout, bald-headed man, bag in hand, stepped out of the elevator, and Pierre rippled to his feet.
“Are you the doctor?”
“Yes. Oh, you’re the gentleman who wantedto see Miss West. She’s come to, but she is out of her head completely ... doesn’t know any one. Can you step out with me?”
Pierre kept beside him and stood by the motor, hat still in his hand, while the doctor talked irritably: “No. You certainly can’t see her, for some time. I shall not allow any one to see her, except the nurse. It will be a matter of weeks. She’ll be lucky if she gets back her sanity at all. She was entirely out of her head there at the theater. She’s worn out, nerves frayed to a frazzle. Horribly unhealthy life and unnatural. To take a country girl, an ignorant, untrained, healthy animal, bring her to the city and force her under terrific pressure into a life so foreign to her—well! it was just a piece of d——d brutality.” Then his acute eye suddenly fixed itself on the man standing on the curb listening.
“You’re from the West yourself?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Knew her in the old days—eh?”
“Yes, sir.” Pierre’s voice was faint and he put a hand against the motor.
“Well, why don’t you take her back with you to that life? You’re not feeling any too fit yourself, are you? Look here. Get in and I’ll drop you where you belong.”
Pierre obeyed rather blindly and leaned back with closed eyes. The doctor got out a flask and poured him a dose of brandy.
“What’s the trouble? Too much New York?”
Pierre shook his head and smiled. “No, sir. I’ve been bothered and didn’t get round to eating and sleeping lately.”
“Then I’ll take you to a restaurant and we’ll have supper. I need something myself. And, look here, I’ll make you a promise. Just as soon as I consider her fit for an interview with any one, I’ll let you see Miss West. That helps you a whole lot, doesn’t it?”
But there were other powers, besides this friendly one, watching over Joan, and they were bent upon keeping Pierre away. Day after sickening day Pierre came and stood beside the desk, and the girl, each time a little more careless of him, a little more insolent toward him—for the cowboy would not notice her blue blouse and her transformation and the invitation of her eyes—gave him negligent and discouraging information.
“Miss West was better, but very weak. No. She wouldn’t see any one. Yes, Mr. Morena could see her, but not Mr. Landis, certainly not Mr. Pierre Landis, of Wyoming.”
And the doctor, being questioned by the half-frantic Westerner, admitted that Mr. Morena had hinted at reasons why it might be dangerous for the patient to see her old friend from the West. Pierre stood to receive this sentence, and after it, his eyes fell. The doctor had seen the quick, desperate moisture in them.
“I tell you what, Landis,” he said, putting a hand on Pierre’s shoulder. “I’m willing to take a risk. I’m sure of one thing. Miss West hasn’t even heard of your inquiries.”
“You mean Morena’s making it up—about her not being willing to see me?”
“I do mean that. And no doubt he’s doing it with the best intentions. But I’m willing to take a risk. See those stairs? You run up them to the fifth floor. The nurse is out. Gael is in attendance; that is, he’s in the sitting-room. She doesn’t know of his presence, hasn’t been allowed to see him. Miss West’s door—the outside one—is ajar. Go up. Get past Gael if you can. Behave yourself quietly, and if you see the least sign of weakness on the part of Miss West, or if she shows the slightest disinclination for your company, come down—I’m trusting you—as quickly as you can and tell me. I’ll wait. Have I your promise?”
“Yes, sir,” gasped Pierre.
The doctor smiled at the swift, leaping grace of his Western friend’s ascent. He was anxious concerning the result of his experiment, but there was a memory upon him of a haunted look in Joan’s eyes that seemed the fellow to a look of Pierre’s. He rather believed in intuitions, especially his own.
CHAPTER XIIITHE END OF THE TRAIL
At the top of the fourth flight of steps, Pierre found himself facing a door that stood ajar. Beyond that door was Joan and he knew not what experience of discovery, of explanation, of punishment. What he had suffered since the night of his cruelty would be nothing to what he might have to suffer now at the hands of the woman he had loved and hurt. That she was incredibly changed he knew, what had happened to change her he did not know. That she had suffered greatly was certain. One could not look at the face of Jane West, even under its disguise of paint and pencil, without a sharp realization of profound and embittering experience. And, just as certainly, she had gone far ahead of her husband in learning, in a certain sort of mental and social development. Pierre was filled with doubt and with dread, with an almost unbearable self-depreciation. And at the same time he was filled with a nameless fear of what Joan might herself have become.
He stood with his hand on the knob of thathalf-opened door, bent his head, and drew some deep, uneven breaths. He thought of Holliwell as though the man were standing beside him. He stepped in quietly, shut the door, and walked without hesitation down the passageway into the little, sunny sitting-room. There, before the crackling, open fire, sat Prosper Gael.
Prosper, it seemed, was alone in the small, silent place. He was sitting on the middle of his spine, as usual, with his long, thin legs stretched out before him and a veil of cigarette smoke before his eyes. He turned his head idly, expecting, no doubt, to see the nurse.
Pierre, white and grim, stood looking down at him.
The older man recognized him at once, but he did not change his position by a muscle, merely lounged there, his head against the side of the cushioned chair, the brilliant, surprised gaze changing slowly to amused contempt. His cigarette hung between the long fingers of one hand, its blue spiral of smoke rising tranquilly into a bar of sunshine from the window.
“The doctor told me to come up,” said Pierre gravely. He was aware of the insult of this stranger’s attitude, but he was too deeply stirred, too deeply suspenseful, to be irritated by it. Heseemed to be moving in some rare, disconnected atmosphere. “I have his permission to see—to see Miss West, if she is willing to see me.”
Prosper flicked off an ash with his little finger. “And you believe that she is willing to see you, Pierre Landis?” he asked slowly.
Pierre gave him a startled look. “You know my name?”
“Yes. I believe that four years ago, on an especially cold and snowy night, I interrupted you in a rather extraordinary occupation and gave myself the pleasure of shooting you.” With that he got to his feet and stood before the mantel, negligently enough, but ready to his fingertips.
Pierre came nearer by a stride. He had been stripped at once of his air of high detachment. He was pale and quivering. He looked at Prosper with eyes of incredulous dread.
“Were you—that man?” A tide of shamed scarlet engulfed him and he dropped his eyes.
“I thought that would take the assurance out of you,” said Prosper. “As a matter of fact, shooting was too good for you. On that night you forfeited every claim to the consideration of man or woman. I have the right of any decent citizen to turn you out of here. Do you still maintainyour intention of asking for an interview with Miss Jane West?”
Pierre, half-blind with humiliation, turned without a word and made his way to the door. He meant to go away and kill himself. The purpose was like iron in his mind. That he should have to stand and, because of his own cowardly fault, to endure insult from this contemptuous stranger, made of life a garment too stained, too shameful to be worn. He was in haste to be rid of it. Something, however, barred his exit. He stumbled back to avoid it. There, holding aside the curtain in the doorway, stood Joan.
This time there was no possible doubt of her identity. She was wrapped in a long, blue gown, her hair had fallen in braided loops on either side of her face and neck. The unchanged eyes of Joan under her broad brows looked up at him. She was thin and wan, unbelievably broken and tired and hurt, but she was Joan. Pierre could not but forget death at sight of her. He staggered forward, and she, putting up her arms, drew him hungrily and let fall her head upon his shoulder.
“My gel! My Joan!” Pierre sobbed.
Prosper’s voice sawed into their tremulous silence.
“So, after all, the branding iron is the properinstrument,” he said. “A man can always recognize his estray, and when she is recognized she will come to heel.”
Joan pushed Pierre from her violently and turned upon Prosper Gael. Her voice broke over him in a tumult of soft scorn.
“You know nothing of loving, Prosper Gael, not the first letter of loving. Nobody has learned that about you as well as I have. Now, listen and I will teach you something. This is something thatIhave learned. There are worse wounds than I had from Pierre, and it is by the hands of such men as you are that they are given. The hurts you get from love, they heal. Pierre was mad, he was a beast, he branded me as though I had been a beast. For long years I couldn’t think of him but with a sort of horror in my heart. If it hadn’t been for you, I might never have thought of him no other way forever. But what you did to me, Prosper, you with your white-hot brain and your gray-cold heart, you with your music and your talk throbbing and talking and whining about my soul, what you did to me has made Pierre’s iron a very gentle thing. I have not acted in the play you wrote, the play you made out of me and my unhappiness, without understanding just what it was that you did tome. Perhaps if it hadn’t been for the play, I might even have believed that you were capable of something better than that passion you had once for me—but not now. Never now can I believe it. What you make other people suffer is material for your own success and you delight in it. You make notes upon it. Pierre was mad through loving me, too ignorantly, too jealously, but what you did to me was through loving me too little. That was a brand upon my brain and soul. Sometimes since then that scar on my shoulder has seemed to me almost like the memory of a caress. I went away from Pierre, leaving him for dead, ready for death myself. When you left me, you left me alive and ready for what sort of living? It has been Pierre’s love and his following after me that have kept me from low and beastly things. I’ve run from him knowing I wasn’t fit to be found by him, but I’ve run clean and free.” She began to tremble. “Will you say anything more to me and to my man?”
Prosper’s face wore its old look of the winged demon. He was cold in his angry pain.
“Just one thing to your man, perhaps, if you will allow me, but perhaps you’ll tell him that yourself. That his method is the right one, I admit. But in one respect not even a brand will altogetherpreserve property rights. Morena could say something on that score. So could I....”
“Hush!” said Joan; “I will tell him myself. Pierre, I left you for dead and I went away with this man, and after a while, because I thought you were dead, and because I was alone and sorrowful and weak, and because, perhaps, of what my mother was, I—I—” She fell away from Pierre, crouched against the side of the door, and wrapped the curtain round her face. “He told me you were dead—” The words came muffled.
Pierre had let her go and turned to Prosper. His own face was a mask of rage. Prosper knew that it was the Westerner’s intention to kill. For a minute, no longer, he was a lightning channel of death. But Pierre, the Pierre shaped during the last four difficult years, turned upon his own writhing, savage soul and forced it to submit. It was as though he fought with his hands. Sweat broke out on him. At last, he stood and looked at Prosper with sane, stern eyes.
“If that’s true what you hinted, if that’s true what she was tryin’ to tell, if it’s even partly true,” he said painfully, “then it was me that brought it upon her, not you—an’ not herself, but me.”
He turned back to Joan, drew the curtainfrom her face, drew down her hands, lifted her and carried her to the couch beside the fire.
There she shrank away from him, tried to push him back.
“It’s true, Pierre; not that about Morena, but the rest is true. It’s true. Only he told me you were dead. But you weren’t—no, don’t take my hands, I never did have dealings with Holliwell. Indeed, I loved only you. But you must have known me better than I knew myself. For I am bad. I am bad. I left you for dead and I went away.”
He had mastered her hands, both of them in one of his, and he drew them close to his heart.
“Don’t Joan! Hush, Joan! You mustn’t. It was my doings, gel, all of it. Hush!”
He bent and crushed his lips against hers, silencing her. Then she gave way and clung to him, sobbing.
After a while Pierre looked up at Prosper Gael. All the patience and the hunger and the beauty of his love possessed his face. There was simply no room in his heart for any lesser thing.
“Stranger,” he said in the grave and gentle Western speech, “I’ll have to ask you to leave me with my wife.”
Prosper made a curious, silent gesture of self-despairand went out, feeling his way before him.
It was half an hour later when the doctor came softly to the door and held back the curtain in his hand. He did not say anything and, after a silent minute, he let fall the curtain and moved softly away. He was reassured as to the success of his experiment. He had seen Joan’s face.
THE END
THE END