But he put out his hand and something in his gesture compelled her. She sat down on the round, plush seat in the middle of the room and looked up at the two men helplessly. Joan had once leaned in a doorway, silent and unconsulted, while two men, her father and Pierre, settled their property rights in her. Betty was, after all, in no better case. She listened, whiter and whiter, till at the last she slowly raised her muff and pressed it against her twisted mouth.
Morena stood with his hand resting on the high back of the circular seat almost directly above Betty’s head. It seemed to hold her there like a bar. But it was at Prosper he looked, to Prosper he spoke. “My friend,” he began, and the accentuation of the Hebraic quality of his voice had an instantaneous effect upon his two listeners. Both Prosper and Betty knew he was master of some intense agitation. They were conscious of an increasing rapidity of their pulses. “My friend, I thought that I knew you fairly well, as one man knows another, but I find that there have been certain limits to my knowledge. How extraordinary it is! This inner world of our own lives which we keep closely to ourselves! I have a friend, yes, a very good friend, a very dear friend,”—the ironic insistence upon this word gave Prosper the shock of a repeated blow,—“and I fancy, in the ignorance of my conceit, that this friend’s life is sufficiently open to my understanding. I see him leave college, I see him go out on various adventures. I share with him, by letters and confidences, the excitement of these adventures. I know with regret that he suffers from ill-health and goes West, and there, with a great deal of sympathy, I imagine him living, drearily enough, in some small, health-giving Western town, writing his book and later his play which he has so generously allowed me to produce.”
“What the devil are you after, Jasper?”
“But I do my friend an injustice,” went on the manager, undiverted. “His career is infinitely more romantic. He has built himself a little log house amongst the mountains, and he has decorated it and laid in a supply of dainty and exquisite stuffs. I believe that there is even an outing suit, small and narrow—”
“My God!” said Prosper, very low.
There was a silence. Jasper moved slightly, and Prosper started, but the Jew stayed in his former place, only that he bent his head a little, half-closed his eyes, and marked time with the hand that was not buried in the plush above Betty’s head. He recited in a heavy voice, and it was here that Betty raised her muff!
Jasper is dying. By the time you get this letter he will be dead. If you can forgive me for having failed in courage last year, come back. What I have been to you before, I will be to you again, only this time we can love openly. Come back.
“I am going mad!” said Prosper harshly, and indeed his face had a pinched, half-crazy look.
The Jew waved his hand. “Oh, no, no, no. It is only that you are making a discovery. Letters should be burnt, my friend, not torn and thrown away, but burnt.” He stood up to his stateliest height and he made a curious and rather terrible gesture of breaking something between his two hands. “I have this letter and I hold you and Betty—so!” he said softly—“so!”
Betty spoke. “I might have told you that I loved him, that I have loved him for years, Jasper. If you use this evidence, if you bring this counter-suit, it will bring about the same, the very same, result. Prosper and I—” She broke off choking.