Of it all, Leilah heard but that. “Yes,” she answered, “another day.”
Then, presently, after more attentions, the première accompanied her to the door.
“Rue François Premier,” Leilah told the groom.
The machine shot ahead. Arrested shortly by a congestion of traffic, it halted before a window behind which Verplank and Silverstairs sat.
Leilah, unconscious of their presence, gazed at the murky cinematograph of the street, filled at this hour with faces sordid, petulant, indifferent, or frankly gay; with the passing forms of workmen, idlers, shopgirls, vagabonds; the swarming Parisian crowd which did not, she believed, contain one soul as miserable as her own.
The congestion relieved, the motor shot on. Leilah leaned back. It was not so long ago that she was on her way from New York to Coronado. She was happy then, happy with a happiness so perfect that it lifted her into the ultimate ecstasies which love and life comport. It was not so long ago, only six short months, only that brief eternity of sorrow which, unended yet, had been the damning penalty of that joy.
“In this life ye shall have tribulation,” the Christ had said, and truly said, and as she rememorated the significant menace, she wondered whether for such as she, tribulation ended here. But her creed assured her. From the Vidya she had acquired faith in fate, the belief rather that we make our own destiny, that it is by our own hands that our lives are cast in places pleasant or the reverse, that our conduct in one life creates the conditions of our existence in another, that anything experienced now is the effect of a cause set going in the past, that happiness is the recompense of beneficence, deformity the result of cruelty, melancholy the penalty of evil thoughts. But whether retribution pursued its victim into future planes or abandoned them when they died, depended, she also believed, on how they faced it here, and it was in this idea that, during the unended sorrow, she had found the strength to bear its coils.
The motor stopped. She told the groom to wait. Presently she was among the subdued tints and harmonised furnishings of the drawing room of her friend.
At once, clearly in her limpid voice, considering her with brilliant eyes, Violet Silverstairs aimed and fired.
“You’re a liar!”
At the shot Leilah attempted to smile, and though she failed, it was not because she fancied there could be any reproach in the term, but because latterly she had been unable to smile at all.
“You’re a liar,” Violet repeated. “Also, you are late.”
“I know I am late and I am sorry,” Leilah withdrawing her gloves, replied. “But how am I a liar?”
“Come to luncheon and you will precious soon find out. I had some eggs for you, eggs à l’Aurore Boréale. I had a sweetbread. I had—I have forgotten what else. Now I have nothing. Everything is spoiled.”
Violet Silverstairs was perhaps imaginative. There were eggs, very good eggs too, though whether prepared in the Aurora Borealis fashion is perhaps beside the issue. Moreover there was a sweetbread, one that had been germinated on salt meadows and which was not spoiled in the least. In addition there were the other things which she had forgotten and all of them appetising in the extreme. It was an excellent luncheon, perfectly served in a beautiful room. But it was a luncheon for Sybarites, not for the suffering. After the first morsel Leilah was unable to eat.
“Where is Silverstairs?” she asked when that morsel had been consumed.
“With your ex.”
Leilah put down her fork. “With Gulian?”
Violet laughed. “Have you more than one? But it was just through him that your lie cropped out. Last night he swore by bell, book and candle that you had never told him why you cut and ran.”
It was at this juncture that Leilah found herself unable to eat. Instantly her mind shot back. She was at Coronado again, in the sunshine and frippery of her sitting room. She could see Verplank as he left it, see the letters that had been brought, see herself as she opened one of them, that one which with its enclosures she had redirected and left for him. The possibility never before conjectured, that he had not received it girdled her with a zone of ice. For a moment she looked fixedly at one of the windows through which the pale daylight fell. In the beautiful room, companioned by her nearest friend, she felt that sense of utter loneliness which in the great crises of life is experienced by all. Yet was it true?
“Violet!” she cried. “You are jesting.”
But the lady, determined then or never to learn the truth, cocked an eye at her. “I am not, nor was he.”
At that, Leilah felt the girdle of ice sending its shivers through her. The plan she had made must, she saw, be foregone. If Verplank did not know why she had separated from him, never would he leave Paris until he did. But what must he have thought, she agonisedly reflected, and what must he think!
Violet, who had been watching her, said:
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Leilah taking up her fork again, tried for countenance sake, to affect to eat. The effort was beyond her. She put it down.
“I can’t,” she at last replied.
Violet, her brilliant eye still cocked, almost winked.
“Yes, you said that before. But you see, don’t you know, that whether you can or cannot tell me, you will have to tell him and, in the circumstances, would it not be best to have me do it for you? To be sure, if you had taken my advice and omitted to marry Barouffski, I would say, have it out with him yourself. But your marriage does not seem to have simplified matters, which, so far as I can make out, are now pretty thoroughly mixed.”
The lady spoke better than she knew. Matters were complicated though how profoundly she had no idea, nor was Leilah aware that the situation, already tortuous,
