It was a foolish resolve, but, alas! Yorke was never celebrated for wisdom.
The orchestra played the opening to the second act, the usual chorus sang, and the usual comic man cracked the time-honored wheezes, and then the band played a few bars of an evidently well known melody, for the gallery greeted the music with an anticipatory cheer, and a moment afterwards Finetta bounded on the stage. There was a roar of delighted welcome, and amidst it she came sailing and smiling gracefully down to the footlights, her dark eyes flashing round with a half-languorous, half-defiant gleam in them of which the public was so fond.
Then suddenly she saw the well known face there in the stalls. For a second she paused in her slow, waltzing step, and looked at him with a look that he might well take for fear. The conductor of the band glanced up, surprised; it was the first time Finetta had ever missed a step. But before he could pull the band together and catch up the lost bar she had gone on dancing, and danced with her accustomed grace and precision.
Yorke watched her with a grim fury. This smiling, dancing jade had plotted to ruin him, had tried to drive him into a debtors' court—worse, had forced him to marry Eleanor Dallas! He could have sprung up there and then and accused her of her vileness; and the desire to do so was so great that he was on the point of rising to leave the theater and await her at the stage door, when suddenly he saw her falter and stumble, and the next instant—the same instant—she had disappeared, and in the spot where she had just stood was a gaping hole.
The house rose with a gasp, a sigh of horror that rose to a yell of indignation and accusation.
It was the old story: 'Someone had blundered' and left the trap door unbolted, and London's favorite dancer had danced upon it and gone down to the depths beneath.
The audience rose, yelling, shouting, pushing this way and that; the curtain was lowered, the lights turned up, and the manager, in the inevitable evening dress, appeared, with his hand upon his heart. He assured the audience that Miss Finetta was not hurt—not seriously hurt—and that though it would not be wise for her to dance again that evening, he trusted that she would appear again to-morrow night, etc., etc.
Yorke waited till the plausible excuse was concluded, then he quietly—in a dream, as it were—went out and round to the stage door.
And one line of the Book he had, alas! read too seldom, rang in his ears as he went: "Vengeance is Mine!"
The stage door keeper knew him in a moment, but in answer to Yorke's inquiry if he could see Miss Finetta, shook his head.