CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Pirates!
For an instant Val thought of nothing but the heavenly surprise of seeing the girl he loved.
Recognition brought a shock of joy, and a wave of love which had been held in check for a time by the weight of misfortune, as the waters of a stormy river in flood are held back by the shut gates of a lock. He had known that he loved her, too well for peace of mind, more passionately and purely than he had thought it was in him to love. But until he saw her face looking up, as if at him, yet unconscious of his gaze—the dear, charming face he had longed for through all his miseries, scarcely dreaming ever to see her again—he had not realised how utterly precious it was, how entirely indispensable in his life.
A wild impulse rushed over him to call her name—"Lesley—Lesley!" and spring from behind the curtain, as if they two were alone together in a world of their own. But after the first luminous instant, the joy of her presence was blotted out in darkness.
He remembered everything; remembered that he was Perceval Gordon, an actor of the submerged tenth, a wretched, penniless barn-stormer, who for the moment came near to being an object of charity.
When he had bidden Lesley goodbye, he was a splendid being who looked down from his heights, and, though loving her, saw her impossible as a wife. Their friendship had begun by being somewhat of a condescension on his part—from his own point of view, at least; and she, half amused, half angry, had seen that point of view quite clearly, nor had she ever attempted to change it, to the last.
At the thought that the curtain would ring up and show him as he was now, to the astonished eyes of Lesley Dearmer, he could have run away, out of the theatre, anywhere—it mattered not where—if only she need not see him, need not know that the magnificent Lord Loveland and the miserable P. Gordon were one.
His blood surged up to his head, throbbing in his temples, and tingling in his ears, but through the confusion of his senses penetrated the knowledge that he could not go.
This trial of endurance—it seemed to him the hardest of all the ordeals he had been forced to face during that fortnight which was a decade—he would have to go through, as he had gone through the others; because, to evade it, he must be worse than a coward. He would be coward and traitor as well; and under all his faults there was something which would not let him be traitor or coward.