The Duke's valet prattled on until the second and third liqueurs had solaced his being. Then Victor glanced darkly at the clock.
"Let us go," he roughly said.
The softspoken Naz only thought that the delightful fluid which warmed and comforted his gentle self had had a reverse effect upon his old friend, so--following him gently as Mercier stalked gloomily into the theatre and up to the dress circle, which was well-packed with honest citizens and their wives in their ordinary habit as they lived--he returned to his seat by Julie, and left him to his own devices.
The third act was over. In the fourth Mercier's so-called "sister" had plenty to do. She was a peccant wife, revisiting home in disguise, and seeking her husband's pardon. It was a pathetic scene, when she sought her husband and discovered herself. Throwing off her disguise--she was got up as an old woman--she emerged sweet, fascinating, in a white dress, with her black hair in Magdalen-like confusion, and sinking at his feet, alternately implored and adored with such passion and intensity that tears rolled down the feminine auditors' cheeks, and the house literally rose to her.
"And all that passion is mine, to take or leave as I please," was Victor's saturnine comment, as he leant back in his seat with folded arms and frowned darkly at the stage. He well knew that his amorous dalliance with his step-father's daughter, when he had had nothing more to his taste to dally with, had succeeded in inspiring her with so violent a devotion to him that, if he had not pitied, he might have come to loathe her. When she was a mere pretty, stupid schoolgirl, going to and fro to her middle-class girls' school, satchel in hand, he had had but little patience with her absorption in him and his career. But now that he saw her on the stage, beautiful with an undeniable beauty, full of grace and spontaneity, and possessed of that power which passion gives, he thrilled with mingled desire and satisfaction.
Strange ideas rose up in his mind--ideas of a subtle revenge upon Joan--of intense and vivid gratification to himself.
"Joan will be my wife--my bondslave, to be dealt with how I please, and when I please; and as long as I kiss and caress her no one dare interfere, if I choose that she shall spend almost her life in my arms with my lips on hers," he grimly told himself. "But--Vera loves me--and if I am Vera's lover while I am Joan's uxorious husband, Joan's pride will not allow her to accuse me, even if she suspects! And how her proud, snobbish soul will hate my giving her half my love--as an Eastern potentate gives it to his appointed spouse, while his real devotion is his favourites'!"
The idea gave him a peculiar and indescribable pleasure. It seemed, indeed, to restore his equilibrium. As the curtain fell, he left the auditorium and made his way round to the stage door, as he had promised Vera to do.
"I wish to see Miss Anerley--which is her dressing-room?" he asked, when, after cautiously traversing a dark, unsavoury alley, he had pushed open the swing door, had entered a dimly-lit corridor where a sickly gas flame was flaring in the draught in its wire cage, and met a man coming towards him.
"You are her brother? Come this way, please." The good-natured acting-manager of the touring company, an eager little man in shabby evening dress, escorted Victor along a passage to a door on which "Miss Vera Anerley" was pasted, and knocked.