She sat silent beside him, the long and slender hand between her face and him.
“I can take you away,” he went on presently, “and keep you from Pierre until he has given up his search and has gone West again. And I can take you at once—in a day or two. Your understudy can fill the part. This engagement is almost at an end. I can make it up to Morena. After all, if we go, we shall be doing Betty and him a service.”
Joan flung out her hands recklessly. “Oh,” she cried, “what does it matter? Of course I’ll go. I’d run into the sea to escape Pierre—” She leaned back against the cushioned seat, rolled her head a little from side to side like a person in pain. “Take me away,” she repeated. “I believe that if I stay I shall go mad. I’ll go anywhere—with any one. Only take me away.”
CHAPTER XII
THE LEOPARDESS
Pierre stood before the cheap bureau of his ugly hotel bedroom turning a red slip of cardboard about in his fingers. The gas-jet sputtering above his head threw heavy shadows down on his face. It was the face of hopeless, heartsick youth, the muscles sagging, the eyes dull, the lips tight and pale. Since last night when the contemptuous glitter of Joan’s smile had fallen upon him, he had neither slept nor eaten. Jasper had joined him at the theater exit, had walked home with him, and, while he was with the manager, Pierre’s pride and reserve had held him up. Afterwards he had ranged the city like a prairie wolf, ranged it as though it had been an unpeopled desert, free to his stride. He had fixed his eyes above and beyond and walked alone in pain.
Dawn found him again in his room. What hope had sustained him, what memory of Joan, what purpose of tenderness toward her—these hopes and memories and purposes now choked and twisted him. He might have found her, his “gel,” his Joan, with her dumb, loving gaze; he might have told her the story of his sorrow in such a way that she, who forgave so easily, would have forgiven even him, and he might have comforted her, holding her so and so, showing her utterly the true, unchanged, greatly changed love of his chastened heart. This girl, this love of his, whom, in his drunken, jealous madness, he had branded and driven away, he would have brought her back and tended her and made it up to her in a thousand, in ten thousand, ways. Pierre knelt by his bed, his black head buried in the cover, his arms bent above it, his hands clenched. Out there he had never lost hope of finding her, but here, in this peopled loneliness, with a memory of that woman’s heartless smile, he did at last despair. In a strange, torturing way she had been like Joan. His heart had jumped to his mouth at first sight of her. And just there, to his shoulder where her head reached, had Joan’s dear black head reached too. Pierre groaned aloud. The picture of her was so vivid. Not in months had the reality of his “gel” come so close to his imagination. He could feel her—feel her! O God!
That was the sort of night he had spent and the next day he passed in a lethargy. He had no heart to face the future now that the great purpose of his life had failed. Holliwell’s God of comfort and forgiveness forsook him. What did he want with a God when that one comrade of his lonely, young, human life was out there lost by his own cruelty! Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps the wound had killed her. For all these years she might have been lying dead somewhere in the snow, under the sky. Sharp periods of pain followed dull periods of stupor. Now it was night again and a recollection of Jasper’s theater ticket had dragged him to a vague purpose. He wanted to see again that woman who had so vivified his memory of Joan. It would be hateful to see her again, but he wanted the pain. He dressed and groomed himself carefully. Then, feeling a little faint, he went out into the clattering, glaring night.