Again, but now appreciatively, Verplank nodded. “Yes. I know. It does seem queer. But then my mother is not the ordinary woman. She thought the governor so created to conquer that it no more occurred to her to sit in judgment on his victims than it occurred to her to sit on him. In the true spirit of Christian charity she overlooked it all.”
Verplank paused, opened and closed a hand. “It was not matrimony perhaps, but it was magnificent,” he obliging resumed, forgetting wholly that it was not in him to do likewise.
“Come,” he added. From the start, Leilah’s apparel, the fichu and wrap, had made him fancy that she was as ready to go as he was to take her and it all seemed very simple. “Come. Let’s be off. I have a cab for you.”
But at the suggestion which was a command she undid the lace, loosened the cloak.
“Gulian, I cannot.”
“Cannot!” he angrily repeated. “Why can’t you? Have you not heard what I said. You are not my sister, you are my wife. Come.”
“Gulian! You do not know what you ask!”
“I know perfectly well. If you hesitate it is because you do not believe me. But would I urge you if that malignity were true? Would I?”
“Gulian, no, you would not.”
“There! You see! You have to believe me.”
“It is not that.”
“It is the divorce then! But you are no more married to that dismal cad than I am to one of your maids. Except in Nevada the decree has no effect whatever. But without bothering to have it set aside, come with me and let this saurian get another.”
“Gulian, yes, but for the moment surely you can see that this is impossible.”
“Impossible! There is nothing impossible. Why do you say so? Why do you make so many objections? You should not make any. You hear a cock-and-bull story, take it for gospel, run away, get a divorce, marry a damned scoundrel and, when you find the story is a brutal lie, stick like a leech to him.”
“Gulian, if you but knew. My position is horrible – ”
She wanted to tell him that she was in a prison replete with tortures, one from which she was as eager to go as he was to take her, yet one from which she could not escape through the open door of sinning.
He gave her no time. Instantly he interrupted her.
“I know your position, it is all of your own making, too. By God, you can make up your mind to one thing. You’ll come, if I have to take you.”
As he spoke he looked so brutal that she shrank.
“Gulian, you will kill me. I thought so before. I know it now.”
“It is only what you deserve.”
“Gulian! And you said you loved me!”
“Yes, but you make me doubt it.”
The wrap which previously she had loosened she let fall on a chair beside her and put the fichu on the table.
“Gulian, you must give me time.”
The words were simple, plaintively uttered, but her action with the cloak and lace, gave them an emphasis which added to his irritation.
“Nonsense,” he retorted. “You have had time enough. Now you must act.” Roughly he considered her. “Anyone else might think you cared for that – ”
“Gulian, in all the world you know I love but you.”
Verplank raised the cloak, reached for the fichu.
“Put these on, then, and come.”
But Leilah, with a gesture that was less of resistance than of appeal, motioned them from her. The gesture infuriated him. He threw the cloak about her.
“By God! You shall put them on. What’s more, you will come whether or not you want to.”
As he spoke he seized her, lifted her.
To Leilah it seemed as though she were about to be carried off violently, like a prey. Unresistingly she raised her face to his.
“Gulian, kill me. It will be better; it will end it all.”
Something, the words, the tone in which they were uttered, the helplessness of them and of her; but, more than anything else perhaps, the fact that as he held her he felt her tremble, stayed him. He put her down. His arms fell from her.
Catching again at the chair she steadied herself, and added:
“But if I am to live and love you, be patient. Gulian, if you would stop to think, to realise, you would be patient, you – ”
He started from her. “You don’t mean – ”
At the question and its insinuation, hotly she flushed. Verplank saw but the flush. The day previous she had told him that she had taken Barouffski to serve as a barricade between them. Since then he had cajoled his imagination with the idea that the creature stood to her as husbands do on the stage, show entities who, the rôle performed, cease otherwise to be husbands. Now the idea seemed to him hideously naïf. The flush refuted it. It did more. It revealed not only other relations but the result of them. Instantly he divined that it was for this that she refused to go. At once within him waked the primitive, the aboriginal self that lurks always and, save in the high crises of the emotions, sleeps always within us all. He was in that condition in which men slay with bare hands and afterward consider them marvelingly, wondering at whose command they could have worked. Perspiration came to his forehead, started about his nose and mouth. With the fichu which he held he wiped them, but on the table from which he had taken it was a layer of dust and ashes, the refuse of the cendrier which Violet had overturned. It streaked his face, griming him with a mask comic and sinister.
With that mask, he called at her.
“Then may you be forever damned.”
The malediction passed from him, reached her, shook her. She held to the chair for support. Then indignantly she protested.
“Gulian!”
He did not hear. An idea had come to him, one that had visited him in Melbourne, again in New York, to desist from further effort, to leave her where she was, behind the barriers she had raised. At the moment he believed he desired her no longer, loved her no more, had never loved her at all. Occupied with the idea he looked at this woman who had ruined her life, ruined his own.
She had been saying something, what he did not know nor, self-centered in his anger, did he care.
In his pocket was a revolver. He felt of it and infuriatedly cried:
“You ought to be shot.”
“Gulian!”
“You are on a par with the beast you took up with.”
“I took his name, Gulian, his name alone.”
It was her turn to be angry. The flush had gone, she was pale again and she had abandoned the chair’s support. She stood upright, confronting him with that purity which was hers.
“I have no more been his wife than I was yours.”
“What!”
This time he heard. But her words, conflicting with his thoughts, rolled over together. In this mental confusion he stared.
“What!”
“It is as I tell you.”
“You swear it?”
“Do I need to?”
Still he stared. Truth which acts on us and in us like a chemical precipitate was disclosing to him her whiteness and its own.
“Do I?” she repeated.
“No, by God, you don’t. I believe you. I can’t help myself. It is in your eyes.”
He paused and awkwardly added:
“Forgive me.”
Faintly and sadly she smiled.
“Will you?” he asked.
“Kiss me.”
In the unique syllables of the words, which in a woman’s mouth are so fluid, there was a forgiveness so entire and a love so great that in passionate contrition he drew her to him. Longly their lips met. She closed her eyes, opened them, disengaged herself, moved back a step and looked at him. For the first time she noticed the grime on his face. It did not astonish. It seemed natural after what they had both been through and it occurred to her that her own appearance might be equally bizarre.
Briefly then, in this lull in the storm, she told him what Violet had suggested – the buying and divorce of Barouffski.
“That will take time,” he objected. “The shortest way ’round is the quickest way out. If you had not interfered in the garden – ”
A gesture completed the sentence.
“No matter,” he grimly added. “I haven’t done with him yet.”
In speaking he had crossed the room, now he recrossed it.
Imploringly Leilah approached him.
“Gulian, not that, not that! Don’t fight with him again. Don’t, I beseech you. It is not alone that anything of the kind is so horrible but he is one of the trickiest swordsmen here. Think what that means! Think what would become of me if – if – ”
From the pocket of his coat Verplank had taken the revolver. He looked at it, looked at her, replaced it.
“I am a trifle interested in the matter myself. Besides, there are other weapons than the foil. If I can shoot pigeons – and I believe I can – I ought to be able to land a buzzard.”
At sight of the revolver Leilah had winced. Now she cried:
“Give it to me!”
Verplank, amused at her simplicity, smiled.
“That isn’t a dueling pistol.”
“But you never carried one before.”
“In the States I did not need to. Here, in Paris, particularly at night, the streets are seldom sure. I have this thing for protection.”
“Promise me then – ”
Verplank looked her over.
“Don’t be a fool.”
But as he looked, suddenly she started and he saw that she was trembling.
“What the deuce is the matter?”
Trembling still, peeringly now she had turned to the portières.
“What is it?” he repeated.
“I am so frightened.”
“Frightened? What at?”
Uncertainly, her head drawn back as a deer’s is when surprised, she glanced about her. Slowly then her eyes returned to his.
“I am so frightened!”
“Yes, but at what?”
She motioned at the room. “Before you came there seemed to be something here, something around me and just now – ”
“Well?”
“I heard something.”
“Your maid probably.”
With an intake of the breath she raised a finger and for a moment both were silent.
“There is no one,” he presently told her. “And what if there were!”
At the idea, he laughed.
The laugh, succeeding the silence, while intended to reassure her, did not wholly succeed. She turned to him anew and in a low voice, said:
“You must go. To-morrow come to Violet’s.”
“I dine there to-night.”
“Yes, I know. Tell her that to-morrow, say at three, we will both be with her. Then she can tell us – ”
But Verplank had drawn her to him. Again her eyes closed.
“Go,” she said at last.
On the sofa was his hat. He reached for it. While he did so, she moved to the tapestry, raised it, disclosing the stair up which he had come.
“To-morrow, then,” he said, as he entered there.
She nodded at him. “At three!”
Dropping the tapestry she turned, but very quickly, for again she heard or thought she heard a noise.
Across the room the portières were parting. Through them Barouffski appeared.
“I might have known it,” she told herself, and realising that he had been listening, she realised also that the opportunity was as good as another for making an offer which she had in mind.
These ideas, instantaneous at sight of him, were for the moment stayed. On turning she had seen but the man. Now hastening toward her was a creature with an expression so venomous that instinctively, in search of help, with the idea of calling to Verplank, she turned to the tapestry again.
Quicker than she, he caught and tossed her spinning on the sofa. Then, running to the open window, he shouted from it:
“Emmanuel! The dogs!”
Leilah, falling backward on the lounge, was too stunned to hear. But she steadied herself, recovered, got to her feet and making again for the stair, called at Barouffski:
“Free me from you and you shall have half of what I have.”
“Half!” he repeated. At once he was upon her. “All,” he cried. “I want it all, all of yours and all of his.”
As he spoke he struck her, shoved her aside, raised the tapestry and vanished. For a second she heard him hastening down, while at once from without came the barking of dogs, the jar of oaths, the sound of cries.
What it meant she did not know. Her head was whirling. The fall, the blow, the indignity of both clouded and confused her. From without the uproar mounted and suddenly, the uproar prompting, into the turmoil that was her mind, a gleam of understanding shot. At the apperception of it she shrieked, ran to the window where she shrieked again. The loosened dogs had sprung at Verplank, who, overwhelmed had fallen.
Again she shrieked. Answering the shriek, mingling with it, were snarls, the gnashing of fangs, the din of great hounds ferociously struggling for blood, tearing vehemently at flesh, at a flesh, though, that rebelled.
Verplank rose up between them. With a kick he sent one of them sprawling. But, in the recoil, torn at by the other hound, he stumbled. The dog was at his throat. In protection he held his left arm against it. With his right hand he got at the revolver in his pocket, and, through the pocket, fired twice into the brute. Gnashing still, it rolled away.
But now, from the other side, the second hound was on him. He saw its eyes, felt its breath, felt its fangs. Again he fired. As he did so, his hand relaxed. He heard a woman shrieking, the sound of hurrying feet. The wall before him mounted. His senses scattered into night.
Suddenly the garden was filled with people. Through the gate, two sergents de ville had come. These, forms furtive and uncertain followed. From the house, led by Barouffski, the footmen ran. Above, from the window, still there issued a woman’s shrieks.
Barouffski stopped, and turned. He looked up at the window. He smiled. With one hand he tapped his breast, with the other he pointed at Verplank. Then, in French, reassuringly, he called:
“My dear! See! You may be tranquil. I, I am unharmed. It is the robber.”
At the ignominy of that flouting jeer, Leilah, impelled by the impulse to do something, though it were but to beat her head against a wall, rushed from the window, and, strangling with spasms, fled out of the room and down the stair, where horror so suffocatingly enveloped her that in it her brain tipped, and she fell.
XI
In the golden half light of the Opéra, a chorus, soprano voices on one side of the stage alternating with contralto on the other, vaporised the subtle sensuality of the scene.
Violet Silverstairs, turning to her husband, who was seated behind her, remarked:
“How much better the Italian school is than the French.”
Silverstairs, ignorant of either, and indifferent to both, promenaded his glass about the house.
“I wonder why Tempest doesn’t show up? There is Marie de Fresnoy! I saw de Fresnoy to-day for the first time since his duel with Barouffski. What a ridiculous affair that was! I suppose one of these days he will have another with d’Arcy.”
Violet turned to him again.
“Because of Marie? How absurd you are! D’Arcy doesn’t interest her. No man could unless he drove at her with a four-in-hand, and d’Arcy has nothing.”
Silverstairs, still promenading his glass, exclaimed:
“There he is now!”
“Who? D’Arcy?”
“Yes, with the Helley-Quetgens, in that box between the columns. Isn’t that your friend Leilah whom he is talking to? By Jove, it is, and Barouffski is there, also.”
Violet, who had also been promenading her glass, put it down.
“Well, he ought to be. I do think she has acted scandalously. What is said at the club?”
“About Verplank? It is forgotten already. Barouffski, you know, claimed that it was a mistake, and as it appears that Verplank agreed with him, as from neither the one nor the other any charge was forthcoming, the police could do nothing but get Verplank back to the Ritz.”
Impatiently Violet unfurled her fan.
“Yes, where she has been every day; every day, that is, when she has not been with d’Arcy.”
The statement was inexact. Leilah had indeed been at the Ritz but d’Arcy she had seen but once, momentarily, by accident – if there be such a thing, in any event through one of those seeming hazards which, however fortuitous at first, afterward appear to have been designed. It was a little, though, before Leilah took that view of things. Meanwhile, when, on recovering from her swoon, she learned that Verplank had also recovered she realised with thanksgiving that Destiny which has its tyrannies has its mercies as well. So soon then as she could get from the bed into which the horrors of the midspring nightmare had thrown her, she went to the Ritz where she found Verplank amply attended, abundantly bandaged, severely but not dangerously hurt.
“One of the brutes nearly chewed my arm off,” he told her. “If the other omitted to eat me entirely, it was not because he did not try. I did for them, though,” he added, and smiled as he said it. After the manner of man, he took comfort in the feat.
“But not for the worst brute,” Leilah answered wishing in spite of herself, wishing instinctively and even ungrammatically that some good fate might.
From beneath a bandage, Verplank laughed:
“Bah! I’ll do for him, too.”
But Leilah did not hear. She was speaking to the surgeon, whom – with a bravery which in itself was a little defiant, and which in any event might have been more discreet – thereafter, daily and openly, she supplied with that which every surgeon wants, a nurse obedient, attentive, skilful, alert, and who, in addition ministers for love.
Presently, Verplank was able to be up. The surgeon said that in a day he would be able to be out. Verplank, who knew as much without being told, asked Leilah to go with him on the morrow.
Leilah refused. Verplank, for an invalid, became then surprisingly demoniac. The demonism of him affected her less than a conception, feminine perhaps but erroneous, of her own selfishness. If she went, she knew beforehand that irremissibly she would be dishonoured. But she knew also that any sense of dishonour must, if it is to ashame, come not from without but from within. If she went, her conscience, she thought, would acquit her. She thought that she would not feel dishonoured, though she knew that she would be disgraced. To refuse on that account seemed to her selfish. As a result finally she consented. Yet in consenting she made one stipulation. Characteristic in itself, it was that there must be nothing clandestine, that he must come for her in the rue de la Pompe, and that from there, her boxes put on whatever vehicle he brought, they would leave for darkness by daylight.
The plan pleased Verplank. He agreed at once. He told her that he would come the next day.
When he had, she added: “To-night I go to the Opéra; the Helley-Quetgens have asked me. It is my last look at this world.”
Then, shortly, the arrangements for the evasion completed, she left the hotel.
Without, her motor waited. She told the groom to have it follow her. The air tempted, though the sky was dirty. She thought of the California glare, the eager glitter of New York. She wondered would they go back there. Perhaps, she told herself, we shall at last see Bora-Bora.
Her walk took her through the arcades of the rue de Rivoli to the fountains of the Place de la Concorde. From there she was about to enter the Champs Elysées when she became conscious of being accosted.
“Chère madame,” some one was saying, “I precipitate myself to renew the expression of my homage.”
D’Arcy, hat in hand, was before her. At once, with a view to what the French agreeably describe as the placing of landmarks —pour poser des jalons– he asked to be permitted to accompany her.
Leilah smiled.
“Not for the world!”
She motioned at the motor. Then, with that graciousness which is natural to the mondaine, with perhaps the desire also to attenuate whatever there were of brusqueness in her reply, she added, as she got in the car:
“I shall be at the Opéra with the Helley-Quetgens to-night. Could you not look in?”
D’Arcy, habituated to the abruptest victories, accustomed to inflame, with but a glance, by the mere exhibition of his Olympian good looks, and, therefore, indifferent when not bored by the celerity of his successes, but piqued by the tranquil air with which this woman had always regarded him, thanked her, assured her that he would not fail to be there, and replaced his hat.
Immediately he raised it again, straight from the head, high in the air. Looking with brilliant eyes from a brilliant brougham, Violet Silverstairs was dashing by.
Coincidentally, unobserved but observant, Barouffski was also passing that way.
Leilah’s motor flew off and she sank back, wondering at herself, wondering rather what influence, malign and unhallowed, could possibly have prompted her to ask this man, whom she disliked as – in spite of a theory to the contrary – honest women do dislike a man of his type. But though, at the time, she could not understand what impelled her, later it seemed to her that it must have been fate.
Barouffski had a different interpretation. At the Joyeuses he had seen Leilah and d’Arcy together. Now, here they were again. The circumstance, of which the fortuitousness was unknown to him, irritated him for that very cause. But he could imagine and did. At once it was clear to him that the brute was after the blue eyes of her bankbook. The deduction, however erroneous, was easy. He was viewing the matter, not, as he fancied, from d’Arcy’s standpoint, but from his own. In spite of which, or rather precisely on that account, he told himself that d’Arcy was a damned scoundrel. The humour of this quite escaped him. But that perhaps was in the order of things.
Since the night at the Joyeuses, he had been measuring himself solely against Verplank. Twice he had failed with him, but he knew that soon they would be at each other again and for the next bout he had in view a coup which, he felt, would do for him definitely. Meanwhile, if in regard to Leilah he had been led into certain vivacities, he felt that with time, which is the great emollient, her memory of these vivacities would pass. Even otherwise, the law was with him. He proposed to see to it that she was also – she and with her her purse. The one menace to both had been Verplank. Here, now, apparently, was another. Here was d’Arcy with his pseudo-Pheidian air, that famous yet false appearance of a young and dissolute Olympian which made imbeciles turn and stare. Ragingly Barouffski reflected that canaille though d’Arcy were, he carried a great many guns, almost as many as Verplank, who, worse luck, had, in addition, the signal advantage of being Leilah’s first love – that love to which it is said one always returns.
But even as he sounded the stupidity of that aphorism, vaguely, for a dim second, he intercepted a gleam refracted from truth. The danger with which he had to contend, Verplank did not personify or d’Arcy either, it was himself. When the golden six was tossed him, had he but then known how to secure the box, there would now be no danger at all. But truth, when it does not console, confounds. Barouffski put it from him. It was too exasperating. “Bah!” he told himself, “if her attitude does not change, a sojourn in the solitudes of Lithuania may alter it.” Angrily he nodded. Things more surprising have occurred there.
On this day it was Leilah who surprised him.
Since he had called to her from the garden, she had encountered him only in the hazards of entrances and halls. On such occasions she had passed with an air of being unaware that there were anything save chairs and tables about.
In part, it was this attitude which he thought certain solitudes might change. Oddly enough, Leilah herself wished it altered. But to want to do one thing and to do something else, happens to all of us, even to the best. She despised Barouffski and yet in despising him knew that the one contemptible thing is contempt. For what he had done, she felt that no punishment could be too severe, yet in so feeling she knew that he was only the embodiment of past misdeeds of her own. Physically he had struck her. Spiritually, it was her own hand that had dealt the blow. He had loosed the dogs on Verplank and she had judged and condemned him for it, though she knew that not only she should not judge at all, but that never perhaps do useless events occur. Clearly these events were evil, but were not those which she planned evil too?
In this dilemma there was some slight consolation for her in the knowledge that it was not her fault, at least not her present fault, that she had been born with a nature so problematic. But the Vidyâ, in teaching her that whatever we suffer is derived from our past; that the people who wrong us – or seem to – are mere puppets come to claim karmic debts which we owe; the Vidyâ, in teaching her that taught her also that every life we lead here is but a day in school. Her schooling, she felt, had as yet been insufficient. No doubt she would know better when she came here again.
