“I know,” she said; “they are hounding you still. They hated me, too!” She came quite close to him. “What need we care? What are they all to us?”
It was the Jane of the Drury Lane greenroom he saw now—the Jane whose brilliance and wit had held him then; but there was something deeper in her look that he had never seen before: a recklessness, an invitation and an assent.
“Jane!” he exclaimed.
She touched his hand. “Why should we stay here? Let us go away from them all—where they cannot follow us to sting!”
Gordon stared at her, his eyes holding hers. To go away—with her? To slip the leash of all that was pagan in him? What matter? He was damned anyway—a social Pariah; why strive to undeserve the reputation? His thought was swirling through savage undercurrents of vindictive wrath, circling, circling like a Maelstrom, about this one dead center: Civilization had cast him off. Henceforth his life was his own, to live to himself, for his own ends, as the savage, as the beast of the field. To live and to die, knowing that no greater agony than was meted to him now could await him, even in that nethermost reach where the lost are driven at the end.
“We must comfort him if we can!” The words Shelley had spoken seemed to vibrate in the stillness like the caught key of an organ. He turned to where Villa Diodati above them slept in the long arms of the night shadows, listening to the contending voices within him. Comfort? The placid comfort of philosophy for him whose flesh was fever and his blood quicksilver? In this girl life and action beckoned to him—life full and abundant—forgetfulness, wandering, and pleasure, fleeting surely, but still his while it should last! And yet—
The girl’s hand was on the skiff. On a sudden a cry of fear burst from her lips and she shrank back as a disordered figure broke from the darkness and clutched Gordon’s arm fiercely.
“Where are you taking her now?”
Gordon’s thought veered. In his numbness of feeling there scarce seemed strangeness in the apparition. As he looked at the oriental, mustachioed face, haggard and haunted, his lips rather than his mind replied:
“Who knows?”