Jasper had been absorbed in the plot and had not noticed Jane, but
Yarnall for several minutes had been leaning forward, his hands
tightened on the arms of his chair. The instant Jasper stopped he held
up his hand.
"Quiet, Jane," he said softly as a man might speak to a plunging
horse. "Steady!"
Jane got to her feet. She was very white. She put up her hand and
pressed the back of it against her forehead and from under this hand
she looked at the two men with eyes of such astonished pain and beauty
as they could never forget.
"Yes," she said presently; "that's something I could do."
At once Jasper hastened to retrieve his error. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I've
been horribly clumsy. Do forgive me. Do let me explain. I didn't mean
that you were a wild--"
She let the hand fall and held it up to stop his speech. "I'm not
taking offense, Mr. Morena," she said. "You say you arrange plays and
that you have been seeking for some one to play that girl, that
lioness-girl who wasn't rightly tamed, though the man had done his
worst to break her?"
Jasper nodded with a puzzled, anxious air. For all his skill and
subtlety, he could not interpret her tone.
"And you think I'm beautiful?"
"My dear child, I know you are," said he. "You try to disguise it. And
I know that in many other ways you disguise yourself. I think you make
a great mistake. Your work is hard and rough--"
She smiled. "I'm not complaining of my work," she said. "It's rough
and so am I. Oh, yes, I'm real, true rough. I was born to roughness
and raised to it. I'm not anything I don't seem, Mr. Morena. I've had
rough travel all my days, only--only--" She sat down again, twisting
her hands painfully in her apron and bending her face down from the
sight of the two men. The line of her long, bent neck was a beautiful
thing to see. She spoke low and rapidly, holding down her emotion,
though she could not control all the exquisite modulations of her
voice. "There's only one part of my travel that I want to forget and
that's the one smooth bit. And it's hateful to me and you've been
reminding me of it. I must tell you now that I'd rather be burnt by a
white-hot iron"--here she gave him a wide and horrified look like a
child who speaks of some dreadful remembered punishment--"than do that
thing you've asked of me. I hate everything you've been telling me
about. I don't want to be beautiful. I don't want any one to be
telling me such things. I don't want to be any different from what I
am now. This is my real self. It is. I hate beauty. I hate it. I'm not
good enough to love it. Beauty and learning and--and music--"