Chapter V: Part 5

But already the hand was laid tenderly upon his own, and Hampstead returned the clasp like one who holds the poles of a battery and cannot let go.

Laughing softly, Woman drew Man gently to her, his eyes gazing fascinated into the depths of hers, his body bending weakly, nearer and nearer.

"John!" she breathed softly, "John!"

But at the first warmth of breath upon his cheek, the explosion came. He snatched her in his arms as if she had been a child, and pressed her to his heart rapturously, but violently. And then his lips found hers, vehemently, almost brutally, as if he would take revenge upon them for the passion their sight and touch had roused in him. She struggled, but he pressed her tighter and tighter, till at length she gave up, and he felt only the rhythmic pulsing of her body.

When at length he released the lips and held the face from him to gaze into it fondly, her eyes were closed, and the head fell limply over his arm with the long tresses sweeping to the floor.

In sudden compunction he placed her tenderly upon the divan.

"I have hurt you, Marien; I have hurt you. Forgive me; oh, forgive me!" he implored in tones of deep feeling.

When she remained quite motionless, he asked, foolishly, "Marien, have you fainted?"

Slowly her bosom rose with a respiration so deep and long that it seemed to stir every fold of her pleated gown and every cushion on the divan, while with the eyes still closed the face moved gently from side to side to convey the negative.

"Thank God!" he groaned, dropping to his knees beside her, where, seizing her hand, he began to press his kisses upon it.

Presently disengaging the hand, Marien lifted it, felt her way over his face and began to push back the towsled mop of hair from his brow, and to stroke it affectionately.

"I thought I had hurt you," he crooned.

"You did," she murmured.

"Oh, I am so, so sorry," he breathed, seizing her hand once more and pressing it against his heart.

"I do not think I am sorry," she sighed contentedly, and was still again, the lashes lying flat upon her cheeks, the long tresses in disarray about her head.

Lying there so white and motionless, she looked to John like a crushed flower. Her very beauty was broken. As he gazed, remorse and contrition overcoming him, her lips parted in a half smile while she whispered:

"The--the calculated life cannot always be depended upon, can it?"

Innocently spoken, the words came to John with the force of a reproach, which hurt all the more because he was sure no reproach had been meant. She had trusted him, and he had failed. His sense of guilt was already strong. At the words he leaped up and rushed toward the hat-tree upon which his hat and coat had been disposed. Yet before he could seize them and start for the door, Marien was before him, barring his way, looking pale but majestic, like a disheveled queen.

"Let me go," he said stubbornly. "I am unworthy to be here."

"Stay," she whispered, in a tone sweeter, tenderer, than he had ever heard her use before. "It is my wish. I do not," and she hesitated for a word, "I do not misunderstand you--poor, lonely, hungry man!"

"Supper, Madame!" piped the voice of Julie.

*CHAPTER XII*

*A THING INCALCULABLE*

One whole month passed before John sat again at midnight in the Roman chair with Marien _vis-a-vis_ upon her heaped-up cushions. Many things may happen in a month. Many did in this. For John it was a month of progress in his art. Though the People's Stock Company had passed out of existence within two weeks after Marien Dounay's departure from it, John had done so well that he found no difficulty in securing an engagement as heavy man across the bay in Oakland with the Sampson Stock, the grade of which was higher and its permanency well established.

It was also a month of progress in his passion for Marien Dounay, although during all those thirty days he did not see her once. In the meantime imagination fed him. Every memory of that night and every deduction from those memories fanned the flame of his infatuation. Each in itself was slight, but they were like a thousand gossamer webs. Once spun, their combined holding power was as the strength of many cables.

Take, for instance, the environment in which he found her. It spoke gratifyingly to him of a genuinely good, modest nature to see that she shrank away from the garish theatrical hotels to this quiet nest with Julie. It revealed a true woman's instinct for domesticity not only surviving but flourishing in this vagabond life to which her profession compelled her.

And yet how unlike the life of the fine women he had known in the old First Church. It would have so shocked them,--this roving, Bohemian life that turned the night into day, the deep-sleep time from twelve to three into the leisure, happy, carefree hours that were like the sun at noon instead of the dark of midnight. How unbecoming it would have been in those coddled home-keeping women of the First Church, this reversal of life,--how immoral even! Yet to her it was natural. In her it was moral. It did pay a proper respect to those conventions which protect the character and happiness of woman. It was not prudish. It was better than prudish, it was good. Her virtue was not forced. It was hardy, indigenous, self-enveloping. Yes, this whole mode of life became her in her profession.

And the thought that he was of her profession threw him into raptures. Hers was a life into which he could enter,--had entered already, by reason of the favor she had shown him. What could that favor mean? Nothing else but love. She had given him too much, forgiven him too much in that one evening for him to question that at all.

And he loved her! Doubt on that score had vanished so many days ago that he could not remember he had ever doubted it.

That the partnership could not at first be equal, he was humiliatingly aware; but the development of his own powers would soon balance the inequality. However, it was something else that for the moment wiped out of mind the enormity of his presumption, and this was that memory of unpleasant experiences at which she had hinted. The thought of this beautiful, ambitious, devoted creature battling her way alone among selfish, brutal, designing men was maddening to him. The chivalrous impulse to be with her, to protect her, to battle for her, made him forget entirely considerations of inequality, and he prepared to offer himself boldly. If she did not invite him again soon, he meant to seek her out; but the invitation came before his processes had reached that stage.

John was impatiently prompt. His eyes leaped upon her eagerly as if to make sure she was still real, still the flesh and blood confirmation of his passion. She was,--not a doubt of it. Her eye was bright; the clasp of her hand was warm. Her personal power was never more evident, its whimsical manifestations never more varied, interesting, or captivating than now.

To John, no longer quite so hungry, for his salary was larger now, that supper was not so much a meal as a series of delightful additions to his impressions of the finer side of the character of Marien. But with the supper despatched, and his beautiful hostess again lolling in luxurious relaxation, it was her personality once more rather than her character which began to play upon him like an instrument with strings. Lazily she brooded and mused, talked and was silent, drifting from momentary vivacities to periods of depressed abstraction. Again and again John felt her eyes upon him scrutinizingly, estimatingly almost, it seemed to him. Because it was a supremely blissful experience to submit himself thus to the play of her moods, John postponed the declaration he felt impelled to make until it burst from him irresistibly, like a geyser.

"Listen!" he broke out excitedly, and began to pour out impetuously the tale of his swiftly ripened infatuation.

Marien did listen at first as if surprised, and then with a flush of pleasure that steadily deepened on her cheeks. Even when he had concluded she sat for a moment with lips half parted, eyes half closed, and an expression of enchantment upon her face as if listening to music that she wished might flow on forever.

"Do not speak!" John protested suddenly, as her expression appeared to change. "The picture is too beautiful to spoil. Let me take from your lips in silence the kiss that seals our betrothal."

But Marien held him off with sudden strength.

"Marien, I love you. I love you," he protested vehemently.

"No," Marien replied, lifting herself higher amid the pillows and speaking alertly as if she had just been given words to answer. "You do not love me. You love the thing you think I am."

John's blond brows were lifted in mute protest.

"Listen!" she exclaimed. "You compelled me to listen. Now I must compel you to listen--mad, impetuous man!" and she seemed almost resentful. "In what you have just been saying, you have written a part for me. You have given me a character. If I could play that part always, I should be what you are in love with, and you would love me always; but I cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it now for an hour and then perhaps never again."

"Never again?" Hampstead gasped, something in the finality of her tone thrilling him through with a hollow, sickening note.

Her eyelids narrowed as she replied: "You forget that I, too, live the calculating life."

There was again that mysteriously sinister meaning in her utterance of the word "calculating."

"The key to my life is not love; it cannot be love," she went on. "I am not the purring kitten you have described. It angers me to have you think so. I am not a thing to love and fondle. I am a tigress tearing at one object. I am," and in the vehement force of her utterance she seemed to grow tall and terrible, "I am an ambitious woman! An unscrupulous, designing, clambering, ambitious woman!"

"But I love you, Marien," John iterated weakly.

"There is no place for love in the calculating life," she rejoined unhesitatingly. "Love is a thing incalculable." Yet as she uttered this sentence, her tone softened, and her eyes had a look of awe and hunger oddly mixed in them; but immediately the expression of resolute ambition succeeded to her features.

"When I am at the top," she proposed loftily.

"But the better part of life may be gone then," John protested bitterly. "The top! When shall we reach the top?"

"I shall reach it in a bound when my opportunity comes," Marien answered with cool assurance. "Nobody, not even myself, knows how good I am. Any night some man may sit in front who has both the judgment to see and the money to command playwrights, theaters, New York appearances to order. When they come, I shall conquer. Oh," and her eyes sparkled while she shivered with a thrill of self-gratulation, "it is wonderful to feel the great potential thing inside of you, to know that your wings are strong enough to fly and you only wait the coming of the breeze. It is dazzling, intoxicating, to think that within three months I may be a Broadway star; that within a year the whole English-speaking world may recognize that a new queen of the emotional drama and of tragedy has been crowned. Until that hour," and she lowered her voice as she checked the exaltation of her mood, "until that hour a lover would be a millstone."

"But," exulted John, "you are not at the top yet. I may arrive first!"

Marien looked him up and down and laughed, just laughed,--about the look and laugh that Parks had given him.

Hampstead's eager face flushed.

"You do not think that possible," he challenged aggressively.

"No, dear boy," replied the woman, her tone and manner swiftly sympathetic, "I know it is not possible. You do not realize how far you have to go. If you have genius, you do not show it. You have talent, temperament, intelligence, application; these may win for you, but the way will be long and the compensation uncertain. If you persist for ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years, till some of your exuberance has died, till experience has rounded you off, till you have learned from that great big compelling teacher out there in front, the audience, what is art and what is not; while you may not be accounted a great star, yet the world will recognize your craftsmanship and concede you a place of eminence upon the stage, a position well worth occupying, but one for which you will pay long years before you get it."

"But our love," John protested helplessly.

"Who said 'our love,'" Marien declaimed almost petulantly. "I have not confessed to any love."

"But--but," and John's eyes opened widely, "you would not permit--"

"I did not permit," she flashed. "You took, and I forgave because I told you I could understand. Can you not, blind man, also understand? If man is sometimes man, will not woman also sometimes be woman?"

"Did it mean--no more than that?"

John's eyes searched hers accusingly.

Her answer was to scorn to answer. She made it seem that she was dismissing him, exactly as any heartless woman might dismiss a favorite who had amused her for an hour, but whose antics and cajoleries had now begun to pall.

Dazed and dumb, Hampstead seemed to feel his way backward toward the door, where Julie came mysteriously, unsummoned, to help him on with his coat and thrust his hat into his hand. When John turned for a last look, Marien's back was turned, and though the head was bowed and the side of the face half concealed, he thought he saw a look of agony upon it.

"Marien," he murmured hoarsely, with sudden emotion. "Marien!"

But on the instant she raised her face to him, and it was the old face, wonderful and witching, beaming with a happy, cordial smile as she laid her hand in his without a sign of restraint of any sort. The very heartlessness of it completed his bewilderment. Did the woman not know that she was breaking his heart? It killed his hope; it cowed him and threw him into a sullen mood.

"Good-by, Miss Dounay," he said huskily.

Her eloquent eyes shot him a look in which reproach and tenderness mingled, while her hand pulsed quickly like a heart beating in his palm. What mood of sullenness could withstand that look? Not his. He smiled, as if a ray of sunshine played upon his face, and amended with:

"Good night, Marien."

"Good-by, John," she answered sweetly.

The door was closed behind him before John realized that with all her sweetness, she had said good-by, and the emphasis was on the "by."

At the corner the bewildered man turned and looked up. He could see the lace curtain at the window, but he could not see the pillows on the divan quivering with sobs from a soft burden that had flung itself among them when the door was closed.

*CHAPTER XIII*

*THE SCENE PLAYED OUT*

Marien Dounay loved him, but for the sake of her own ambition was trying to kill that love. This was the explanation which the sleepless, tossing hours fed again and again into John Hampstead's mind until he accepted it as the demonstrated truth.

As for himself, he could no more have killed his love for Marien than he could have killed a child. He determined deliberately to match his will against hers and break it; to see her again immediately, to meet her arguments with better arguments, her firm rejections with firmer affirmations; to melt her resolution with an appeal to her heart; in short, and by some means not now clear, to overmaster her purpose for the sake of her own happiness as well as his.

But a thought of Bessie Mitchell came crowding in. Now this was not altogether strange, since John had half-consciously cherished the notion that he would some day love Bessie, and he reflected now that she must have had a feeling of the same sort toward himself. Perhaps this was why she cried that day upon the rocks; perhaps, too, that was why he kissed her, for he was beginning now to understand some things better than he had before. Conscience demanded therefore that he write Bessie a tactful letter which, while vague and general, would yet somehow reveal the tremendous change in the drift of his affections.

Just that much, however, was going to be hard--a brutal piece of work--to merely hint that some other woman might be coming more intimately into his life than this trustful, jolly-hearted companion. But it was honest and it must, therefore, be done.

Hampstead summoned grimly all his resolution and dipped his pen in ink.

"Dear Bessie," he wrote, and then his pen stopped, and an itching sensation came into the corners of his eyes and a lump into his throat.

Presently he laid the pen down as resolutely as he had taken it up. He could not write Bessie out of his life, after all; at least not like that. Instead he wrote a letter that was a lie, or that started out to be a lie; but the surprising thing to Hampstead was that while he wrote, visioning Bessie at home in Los Angeles, rose-embowered, or walking to school beneath rows of palms, he was himself transported to Los Angeles, and the letter was not false. He was back again in the old life, and Bessie was an interesting and necessary part of it.

Yet he found he could not seal himself into the old life when he closed the flap of the envelope. The moment the letter was mailed, his mind went irresistibly back to Marien, whom it was a part of his plan to see that very day. This was possible because Mowrey rehearsals were long and somewhat painful affairs.

Hurrying from the Sampson Stock, at the end of his own rehearsal, John was able to cross the bay and reach the Grand Opera House while Mowrey's people were still wearily at work, and to make his way apparently unseen through the huge, gloomy auditorium to a box which was deep in shadow, as boxes usually are at rehearsal time.

Marien was "on", and the big fellow's heart leaped at the sound of her voice; yet presently it stood still again, for his jealous ear had detected a disquieting note in her utterance, a sort of cajoling purr which the lover recognized instantly. It was not Marien Dounay in rehearsal, nor yet in "character"; it was Marien herself when in her most ingratiating mood, and was meant neither for the rehearsal nor for the character, but for the actor who played the opposing role.

Who, by the way, was this handsome man, with the rare, low voice that combined refinement and carrying power, so absolutely sure of himself, whose every move betokened the seasoned, accomplished actor, and who displayed to perfection those very graces which John himself hoped some day to exhibit?

In the box in front of Hampstead was another ghostly figure, also watching the rehearsal. John reached forward and touched him on the shoulder, whispering hollowly: "Who is the new leading man?"

"Charles Manning of New York," was the reply; "specially engaged for this and three other roles."

"Thank you," said John, swallowing hard, for now he understood perfectly the disagreeable meaning of those cajoleries. They represented just one more element in Marien Dounay's calculating life. This New York actor might go back and drop the word that would bring her opportunity, the thing her vaulting ambition coveted more than it coveted love. Therefore she was taking deliberate advantage of these situations to kindle a personal interest in herself, for which, once her object was gained, she would refuse responsibility as heartlessly as she had tried to reject the big man who just now started so violently as he watched her.

Look at that now! The stage direction had required Manning to take Marien in his arms for a minute. Hampstead ground his teeth.

Well, why didn't they separate? What was she clinging to him so long for? Why, indeed, if it were not for this same reason that to John, stewing in jealous rage, seemed despicable and base. This was not nice; it was not womanly; it was not a true reflection of Marien's character. It was, he assured himself hotly, one of the things from which he must save her.

But he had no opportunity to begin his work of salvation that afternoon, for rehearsal ended, Marien walked out with Charles Manning so closely in her company that Hampstead could not so much as catch her eye, and his emotions were in such a riot that he dared not trust himself to accost her.

When John had walked the streets for an hour, with the storm of his feelings rising instead of settling, he resolved upon a note to Marien and went to the office of the _Dramatic Review_ to dispatch it.

"Dear Marien," he wrote. "I must see you to-night. I will call at twelve. JOHN."

The brevity of this communication was deliberately calculated to express his headlong mood and the depths of his determination. He had not asked an answer, but waited for one, assuring himself that if none came he would call just the same. Yet the answer was ominously prompt. John tore it open with brutal strength and saw Marien's handwriting for the first time. It was vigorous and rectangular, but unmistakably feminine, and there was neither salutation nor signature.

"Stupid!" the note began abruptly. "I saw you in the box to-day. I will not have you spying upon me. You must not call. I have tried to make you understand. Why can you not accept the situation? Or are you mad enough to compel me to stage the scene and play it out for you?"

John read the note twice, crumpled it in his hand, and walked slowly down Geary Street to Market and down Market Street to the ferry.

In the second act that night he forgot to take on the knife with which he was to stab his victim, and nearly spoiled the scene, through having to strangle him instead.

"_Stage the scene and play it out for you?_" What could she mean by that.

Determined to find out, John hurried from the theater at the close of the performance, with his lips pursed stubbornly, and at exactly twelve o'clock Julie was answering his ring at the door of the little apartment on Turk Street.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, smiling cordially. "It is the big man again. No, Madame is not in. She is having supper out to-night. With whom? La! la! I should not tell you that," and Julie shrugged one shoulder only, after a way of hers, and made a movement to close the door; but something in John's eyes induced her to add, with both sympathy and chiding in her tone: "You must not come to see Madame when Madame does not want you."

"But I must see her, Julie!" John pleaded huskily, rather throwing himself upon the mercy of the little French woman.

Julie gazed at him doubtfully. She had fended off the attentions of many an importunate suitor from her beautiful mistress but never one who engaged at once so much of her sympathy and respect as he. In her mind she was weighing something; reflecting perhaps whether it was not kindness to this big, earnest man to let his own eyes serve him. Her decision was evidently in the affirmative.

"If you go quickly to the entrance of Antone's," she suggested hurriedly, "you will see Madame arriving presently in an automobile."

Stubborn as John was in his purpose, he nevertheless flushed that even Julie could think him capable of standing at the door of a French restaurant at midnight waiting to catch a glimpse of the woman he loved in the company of another man. Yet pride was so completely swallowed up in jealousy and passion that another five minutes found him loitering before the entrance to Antone's, resolving to go, to stay; to look and not to look; feeling now weakly ashamed of himself and now meanly resolute.

The place was half underground, with a gilded and illumined entrance that yawned like the mouth of a monster. John was sure from its outward look that Antone's was no more than half respectable. The fragrance of the food which assailed his nostrils was, he felt equally sure, an expensive fragrance. A meal there would cost as much as a week of meals where he was accustomed to take his food. Manning, of course, had a fine salary. He could afford to take Marien for an automobile ride and to Antone's for supper.

Hampstead's envious rage flamed again at this thought, but at the moment the flash of a headlight in his eyes called attention to an automobile just then sweeping in toward the curb. However, instead of the stalwart, graceful figure of Manning, there emerged from the car a squat, oily-faced man, huge of paunch, with thick lips, a heavy nose, pouched cheeks, and small, pig-like eyes, upon whose broad countenance hung an expression of bland self-complaisance. By an odd coincidence, this man was also connected with the stage. John knew him by sight as Gustav Litschi, and by reputation as a very swine among men, utterly without scruple, although endowed with an uncanny business sense; a man who had money and whose theatrical ventures always made money, though often their character was as doubtful as himself.

Disappointed, Hampstead nevertheless experienced a feeling of curiosity as to Litschi's companion, and before drawing back, followed the gross glance of the gimlet eyes within the car to where they rested gloatingly upon a woman in evening clothes, who was gathering her train and cloak about her preparatory to being helped from the car. To John's utter amazement the woman was Marien.

For a moment he stared as if confronted with a specter, then felt his great hands itching while he wavered between a desire to leap upon this coarse creature and tear him to pieces, and the impulse to accost Marien with reproaches and a warning. But the swift reflection that she probably knew the man's character perfectly well prompted John instead to the despicable expedient of deliberately spying upon her. Turning impetuously, he ran quickly down the steps in advance of the couple.

"One?" queried the headwaiter, with a keen estimating glance under which John ordinarily would have felt himself to shrivel; but now a frenzy of jealousy and a sense of outrage had made him bold.

"Yes," he replied brusquely; "that seat yonder in the corner where I can see the whole show."

It was a lonely and undesirable table, smack against the side of the wall, along which ran a row of curtained, box-like alcoves that served as tiny private dining rooms. John could have it and welcome. He got it, and as he turned to sit down, his eye scanned the interior swiftly for Marien and Litschi. To his surprise they were coming straight at him, Marien leading. Certain that she had seen him and was going to address him, John nevertheless determined to await a look of recognition before arising. To his further surprise, no such look came. Coldly, icily beautiful to-night, the glitter in her eyes was hard and desperate, with a suggestion of menace in it, reminding John of that momentary intuition he had once experienced, that this woman could be dangerous. Her note had warned him not to spy upon her, he recalled. It must be that her discovery of his presence had roused a devil in her now. So strong did this feeling become that he felt a relief as great as his surprise when she brushed by as if oblivious of his presence and passed from view into the nearest box, the curtain of which a waiter was holding aside obsequiously.

When the screening curtain dropped, swinging so near that John could have reached across his table and touched it with a hand, he had a sense of sudden escape, as if a tigress, sleekly beautiful and powerfully cruel, had over-leaped him to tear a richer prey beyond. The swine-like Litschi, waddling after her into the box, was the chosen victim. Yonder by the curb John had feared for Marien; now, repulsive as the creature was, he felt a kind of pity for Litschi.

Yet with the curtain drawn, Hampstead's emotion passed swiftly back to love and anxiety for her. She had not seen him, that was all. The supposed look of menace was the product of his imagination and his jealousy.

As the minutes passed unnoted, this anxiety grew again into sympathy and consideration. Marien had complained to him of the hard things she had to do. This supper with Litschi was merely one of them. That scene with Manning was another. He reflected triumphantly that she had not welcomed Litschi to her apartment; but compelled him to bring her to this public place. Poor, brave girl! She had to play with all these men; to warm them without herself getting burnt; to woo them desperately upon the chance: Manning that he might somewhere speak the fortunate word, Litschi that in some greedy hope of gain he might be induced to risk his money on the venture that would give Marien the opportunity for which she had been calculating indomitably for seven years.

But what was that?

John's hand reached out and clutched the table violently, while his body leaned forward as if to rise. What was that she had said so loudly he could hear, and so astonishing that he could not believe his ears?

He had been sitting there such a long, long time, thinking thoughts like these, stirred, soothed, and stirred again by the sound of her voice, heard intermittently between the numbers of the orchestra. He had ordered food and eaten, then ordered more and eaten that,--anything to think and wait, he did not know for what.

Waiters bearing trays had come and gone unceasingly from behind the curtain four feet from his eyes, and he knew that they had borne more bottles than food. Several times he had heard a sound like "shots off-stage." This sound always succeeded the entry of a gold sealed bottle. Evidently they were drinking heavily behind the curtain, Litschi's voice growing lower and less coherent, and Marien's louder and less reserved, till for some time he had been catching little snatches of her conversation. She had been talking about her future, painting a picture of the success she would make when her opportunity came; but now she had said the thing that staggered him.

"What?" he came near to saying aloud; and at the same time he heard the drink-smothered voice of Litschi also with interrogative inflection. Litschi, too, wanted to be sure that he had heard aright.

"I say," iterated the voice of Marien deliberately, as if with calculated carrying power, "that a woman who is ambitious must be prepared to pay the price demanded--her heart, her soul--if need be--_herself_!"

She plumped out the last word ruthlessly, and broke into a half-tipsy laugh that had in it a suggestion unmistakable as much as to say:

"You understand now, don't you, Gustav Litschi? You realize what I am offering to the man who buys me opportunity?"

Her heart--her soul--herself! Hampstead, having started up, sat down again weakly, the cold sweat of horror standing out upon his brow.

So this was what she had meant all the time in her speech about the calculating life. She could not give herself up to love him or any one, because she was dangling herself as a final lure to the man who would give her opportunity.

"Why, this woman was spiritually--morally--potentially, a--" he could barely let himself think the hateful word. To utter it was impossible.

Perhaps she was worse! A choking, burning sensation was in his throat. He tore at it with his hands, gasping for breath. He wanted to tear at the curtain--at the woman! How he hated her! She had no longer any fineness. She was a coarse, designing, reckless--_prostitute_! There! In his agony, the word was out. He sent it hurtling across the stage of his own brain. It flew straight. It found its mark upon the face of his love and stuck there blotched and quivering, biting into the picture like acid. It ate out the eyes of Marien Dounay from his mind; it ate away her pliant ruby lips, her cheeks and her soft round chin, and it left of that face only a grinning hideousness from which John Hampstead shrank with a horrible sickness in his heart.

At this moment the curtain rings clicked sharply under the sweep of an impetuous arm, and with the suddenness of an apparition, Marien stood just across the table from him. Her face was highly colored, but the preternatural brightness of the eyes had begun to dull, and there was a loose look, too, about the mouth, the lips of which were curled by a mocking smile.

"Well, John Hampstead!" she sneered, with a vindictive look in her eyes, insinuating scorn in her tones. "Now that I have played out the scene, do you think you understand?"

John had risen stiffly, every fiber of him in riot at the horror he had heard and was now seeing; but his self-control was perfect, and a kind of dignity invested him for the moment.

"Yes," he said, meeting her gaze unflinchingly, "I understand!"

The tone of finality that went into this latter word was unescapable. As it was uttered, Marien attempted one of her lightning changes of manner but failed, breaking instead into a fit of hysterical laughter, during which, with head thrown back, her body swayed, and she disappeared behind the curtain, where the laughter ended abruptly in something like a choke, or a fit of coughing.

But John's indignation and disgust were so great that he did not concern himself as to whether Miss Dounay's laughter might be choking her or not. Embarrassed, too, by the number of eyes turned curiously upon him from the nearer tables where the diners had observed the incident without gathering any of its purport, his only impulse was to pay his bill and escape, before the building and the world came clattering down upon him.

*CHAPTER XIV*

*THE METHOD OF A DREAM*

So paralyzing to a man of Hampstead's sensitive nature was the effect of Marien Dounay's startling disclosure that he experienced a partial arrest of consciousness, the symptoms of which hung on surprisingly.

Somehow that night he got back to Oakland, and the next morning was again about his work; but the days went by mechanically--days of risings and retirings, eatings and sleepings, memorizing of lines, mumbling of speeches, sliding into clothes, slipping into grease paint, walkings on and walkings off. Through all of these daily obligations the man moved with a certain absent-minded precision, like a person with a split consciousness, who does not let his right lobe know what his left lobe is thinking.

He knew, for instance, that a telegram came to him one day with the charges collect, and that he paid the charges and signed for the message, but he did not know that the message lay unopened on his dresser while he spent all his unoccupied time sunk in a stupor of meditation upon the thing which had befallen him.

Most astonishing to John was the fact that while he felt rage and humiliation at having so duped himself over Marien Dounay, he had no sense of pain. He was like a man run over by a railroad train who experiences no throb of anguish but only a sickish, numbing sensation in his mangled limbs.

Recognizing that his condition was not normal, Hampstead wondered if he could be going insane. He was eating little; he was taking no interest in his work. He went and came from the theater automatically, impatient of company, impatient of noise, of newspaper headlines, of interruptions of any sort, anxious only to get to his room, to throw himself into a chair or upon a bed, and relapse into a state of mental drooling. After several days he roused from one of these reveries with the clear impression that some presence had been there in the room, had breathed upon him, had touched his lips, and spoken to him. He leaped up and looked about him. He opened the door and scanned the corridor. No one was there,--no echo of corporeal footsteps resounded.

Realizing that it must have been his own dream that waked him, he came back sheepishly and tried again to induce that state of mental dusk in which the odd sensation had been experienced. Soon he roused again with the knowledge that the presence had been with him and had departed; but this time a clear picture of the vision remained. It was a woman,--it was like Marien. It was, he told himself, the image of his Love. He entertained it sadly, like an apparition from the grave. The vision came again, but with repeated visits, its form began to change, until it no longer resembled the form of Marien.

This was exciting; the image might change still further till it definitely resembled some one else.

This surmise proved correct. It did change more and more until identity was for a time completely lost, but as days passed, the features ceased to blur and jumble. The eyes were now constantly blue; the complexion was consistently pink and white; the hair was brown and began to appear crinkly; the lips grew shorter, and of a more youthful red; the chin broadened and appeared fuller and softer. One morning these rosier lips smiled with a rarer spontaneity than the vision had ever shown before, and with the smile came two dimples into the peach-blow cheeks.

"Bessie!" John cried, with a welcoming shout of incoherent joy. "Bessie!"

But his joy was speedily swallowed up in the gloom of mortifying reflections. Could it be that his love was so inconstant as to transfer itself in a few days from Marien Dounay to Bessie Mitchell, and if it did, what was such love worth? Besides, how could he love Bessie as he had loved Marien. There was no fire in her. As yet, she was only a girl. But at this juncture a memory came floating in of that day on the Cliff House rocks, when some vague impulse, which he thought to be sympathy, had made him draw Bessie's face up to his and kiss it. Now, as he recalled it, the touch of her lips was the touch of a woman; and her look that puzzled him then,--why, it was the look of love!

Hampstead leaped up excitedly. Bessie was a woman, and she loved him! And he loved her! But how could he have been such a fool as to think that he loved Marien?

"Passion," he told himself scornfully, "mere passion."

"She was the first ripe woman I ever touched, and I fell for her! That's all," he muttered. "But, how could I ever, ever, ever have done it?"

Heaping bitter self-reproaches, he took his bewildered head in his hands, while he wrestled with the humiliating chain of ruminations. Naturally enough, it was the memory of a speech of Marien's which afforded him his first clue.

"In what you have just been saying, you have given me a character," she had replied to one of his advances. "If I could play that part always, I should be what you are in love with, and you would love me always; but I cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it now for an hour and then perhaps never again."

This speech, vexatiously enigmatic then, sounded suddenly rational now. It meant that he had unconsciously bestowed upon her his idealized conception of womanhood. This was made comparatively easy because in the plays Marien almost invariably enacted the heroines, always sweet, always gentle, and almost always good; or, if erring, they were more sinned against than sinning. Most of these piled-up virtues of her roles John dotingly had ascribed to her, and his professional contacts afforded few glimpses of the real Marien by which his drawing could be corrected.

Atop of this had come those few hours of delicious intimacy in her apartment, when she had deliberately played the part she saw that he would like. This had sufficed to make his illusion complete.

Still John had no reproaches for the actress. Instead, he found within him a renascence of respect for her, particularly for her frankness. Most women--most men, too, for that matter, he thought--play the hypocrite with themselves and with others. He must do her full credit. She had not done so. She might have ruined him. He owed his escape to no discernment of his own. When he had not understood, she had resolutely played the scene out for him--to the uttermost. It must have cost a woman, any woman, something to do that, he reasoned. Under this interpretation, Marien was no longer repulsive to him. Instead, he found in her something to admire. Her courage was sublime. Her devotion to her god, ambition, if terrible, was also magnificent.

"Yet, why," he asked himself, "did she let me take her in my arms? Sympathy," he answered at last. "She never loved me. A woman who loved a man could not do what she did in the restaurant. She was very sorry for me, that was all. She let me kiss her as she would let a dog lick her hand." And then he remembered another speech of hers: "If a man is sometimes man, may not woman be also sometimes woman?"

This helped him finally and completely, as he thought, to understand; but it left him with a still deeper sense of his own weakness and humiliation.

Marien Dounay had roused the woman want in him and while she was near, her personality had been strong enough to center that want upon herself. But when she shook his passion free of her, it turned, after circling like a homing pigeon, due upon its course to Bessie. John saw that this was all logical and psychological. Patently, it was also biological.

But it was mortifying beyond words. He felt that he had dishonored himself and dishonored Bessie. He had supposed himself strong; he found himself weak. He had been swept off his feet and out of his head. He was ashamed of himself, heartily. Bessie, the good, the pure, the noble! Why, he could not think of her at all in the terms in which he thought of Marien Dounay. His instinct for Marien had been to possess. For Bessie it was to revere, to worship--and yet--and yet--he wanted her now with an urge that was stronger than ever he had felt for Marien.

Still, he had no impulse to rush to Bessie. He felt unworthy. He could not see himself taking her hand, touching her lips, declaring his love to her now. It seemed to him that he must test his love for Bessie before he declared it, and purify it by months--years, perhaps,--of waiting, as if to expiate the sin of his weakness.

But in the meantime, Bessie loved him, and would be loving him all the time. And he could write to her! Ah, what letters he would write, letters that would not only keep her love alive but fan it, while he punished himself for his insane disloyalty.

Disloyalty! Yes, that was the very word. He knew as he reflected that he had been disloyal ever to yield to the spell of Marien Dounay. He had been disloyal to Bessie, to his ideals, and to himself.

He turned to where a few days before he had pinned his old Los Angeles motto on the wall of his Oakland room: "Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success."

Hammering, he decided, was the wrong word. It was not high enough. He stepped over to the wall and changed it to the new word so that it read:

"Eternal _Loyalty_ is the Price of Success."

He liked that better; so well, in fact, that he lifted his hand dramatically and swore his life anew, not to hammering but to Loyalty,--loyalty to himself, to Bessie, to Dick and Tayna, and to God!

This gave him a feeling of new courage. He turned away as from a disagreeable experience now forever past. His eyes wandered about the room exactly as if he had returned from an absence, taking in detail by detail the familiar, scanty furniture, the hateful spring rocker, the washstand, the bed, the torn, smoke-soiled curtains at the window, the picture of Washington at Valley Forge upon the wall, and the dresser with its cheap speckled mirror.

His glance had just paused mystified at the sight of the unopened telegram upon the dresser when there was a knock at the door.

With a stride, John turned the key and swung open the door.

Bud, the fourteen-year-old call boy of the Sampson Theater, entered; a breathless, self-important youngster with freckles and a stubby pompadour.

"Mr. Cohen's says yer better write a letter ter yer sister," the lad blurted, while his eyes scanned the room and the actor, where he stood reaching in a dazed sort of way for the telegram.

"Hey," exclaimed Hampstead, looking up sharply, "my sister?"

"Ye-uh," affirmed Bud stoutly. "Mr. Cohen's got a letter from her, and she wants to know if yer sick 'r anything."

"By jove, that's right, Bud," confessed John with sudden conviction. "I've had my mind on something of late, and guess I've rather overlooked the folks at home. I'll write to-day. Awfully kind of you, old chap, to come over. Here!"

And Hampstead, now with the telegram in his hand, attempted to cover a feeling of confusion before these bright, peering eyes by a pilgrimage to the closet, from which he tossed Bud a quarter. The lad accepted the quarter thankfully.

"Say, Mr. Hampstead," he broke out impulsively, with an embarrassed note in his voice, "I'm sorry you got your notice!"

"Got my notice?" asked John a bit sharply.

"Yes. Yer let out," announced Bud, with unfeeling directness, though consideration was in his heart. "You been good to me, Mr. Hampstead, and I'm sorry you're goin'. Some of the others is, too."

But John was roused now, thoroughly.

"Why, Bud, what are you talking about?" he demanded, turning accusingly to the boy.

"For the love of Mike," exclaimed Bud, advancing a little fearsomely and studying the face of Hampstead with new curiosity, "Yer let out and don't know it! What'd I tell 'em? Why, there it is," and he snatched up a blue, thin-looking envelope from the dresser. "Y' got it a week ago when you got yer pay. Y' ain't opened it even."

Hampstead took the blue envelope from Bud's hand, an awful sense of weakness running through him as he read that his services would not be required after the customary two weeks.

"What did I get this for, Bud?" he asked, sensing the uselessness of dissimulation before this impertinent child.

"Y' got it fer bein' dopey," answered Bud reproachfully. "Y' ain't had no more sense than a wooden man fer ten days. Say, Mr. Hampstead," he ventured further with sympathetic friendliness, "yer a good actor when you let the hop alone. Why don't you cut it? You're young yet. You got a future, Mr. Cohen says, if you'll let the dope alone."

Hampstead's face took on a queer, half-amused look.

"Is that what he said?"

"That's what he said," affirmed Bud aggressively.

"Well, then, all right, Bud. I will cut it out. Here's my hand on it."

Bud took the hand, a trifle surprised and feeling a little more important than usual. "Say," he added confidentially, "wise me, will y'; what kind have you been takin'? Mr. Cohen says he's never seen nothin' like it, and he thought he'd seen 'em all."

"Oh, it's a little brand I mixed myself," confessed John. "But I'm done with it. Run along now, Bud. You've been a good pal," and he gave the lad a pat on the shoulder and a significant shove toward the door.

"Glad I came over," reflected Bud at the door, jingling the quarter in his pocket. "Better write yer sister, or she'll be comin' up here. Say," and Bud returned as if for a further confidence, "y' never know what a woman's goin' to do, do y'? Las' fall a woman shot our leadin' juvenile in the leg--because she loved him. Get that? Because she loved him!"

Bud's drawling scorn was inimitable.

"Y' can't figger 'em, can yuh? Some of 'em wants to be called, and some of 'em don't. Some of 'em wants their letters before the show, and some of 'em after. Some of 'em is one way one day and the other way the next day. If I ever get my notice,--if I ever lose my job it'll be about a woman. I never seen a man yet that I couldn't get his nannie. I never seen a woman yet that couldn't get mine and get it fresh every time I run a step fer her. Say! Mr. Hampstead--honest--ain't they the jinx?"

Bud had got his hand on the door, but getting no answer to this very direct and to him very important question, he turned and scrutinized the face of the big man curiously at first and then with amazement, as he exclaimed: "Fer the love of Mike! He ain't heard me. Say, Mr. Hampstead! Say!" Bud went back and shook the big man's arm, with a look of apprehension on his face, and shouted very loud, as if to the deaf: "Say! Come out of it, will y'? Don't write. Telegraph her. Gosh! She might blame me!"

After which parting gun in behalf of duty and of prudence, with a sigh and the air of having done a man's best, the lad got hastily through the door and slammed it after him very loudly.

*CHAPTER XV*

*THE CATASTROPHE*

Bud was right. John had not heard him. He stood with the telegram torn open in his hand.

"Charles fell from El Capitan," it ran. "Body brought here. ROSE."

For a moment the man gazed fixedly, deliberately but absently crushing the envelope in one hand, while the other held the open message before him. Then his lips moved slowly and without uttering a sound, they framed the words of his thought: "Charles!--Dead!--Merciful God!"

For a reflective interval the gray, startled eyes set themselves on distance and then turned again to the message. It was dated April 4.

April 4? What day was this?

On the dresser was an unopened newspaper. John remembered now he had bought it yesterday, or rather he assumed it was yesterday. The date upon the paper was April 14. If it were yesterday he bought that paper, to-day was the 15th, and Charles had been dead eleven days! What had they thought--what had they done without a word from him in this crisis? What had become of them?

And there were unopened letters on the dresser, three of them, all from Rose. John tore them open, lapping up their contents with his eyes.

"Poor, poor Rose!" he groaned. "What must she think of me?"

The first letter told of the death of Charles and the lucky sale of "Dawn in the Grand Canyon" which afforded money for the recovery of the body and its decent interment, but little more.

The second letter was briefer and expressed surprise at not hearing from him in response to her message, which the telegraph company assured her had been delivered to him in person. This letter showed Rose bearing up under her grief and stoutly making plans for taking up the support of her children.

The third letter was addressed by the hand of Rose, but the brief note enclosed was penned by the kind-hearted Doctor Morrison, the railroad's "company" physician, to whom, as a part of his outside practice, Rose would have applied in case of illness.

"Your sister," Doctor Morrison wrote, "has suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Long rest with complete relief from financial care is imperative."

This letter stirred John to immediate action. He rushed to the long-distance telephone. The telegraph was not quick enough.

"Please reassure my sister immediately," John telephoned to Doctor Morrison. "Every provision will be made for her care and that of the children." Not satisfied with this, John sent a telegram to his sister direct and to the same effect.

These messages were dispatched as the first and most natural impulses of the brother's heart, without pause to consider the responsibilities involved; and then, having no appetite for breakfast, John returned to his room to write to Rose.