“Then, for the love of God, stop pleading and act! Look at yourself, look at me! We could not be more unlike if we came from different planets.”
She was making an effort to answer. He stopped her.
“Listen to this. If you can’t act, I shall. My mother is in London. Tomorrow she is to be here. Probably she can tell me the truth. If not, I will go to the States. There I will see your father. When I return it will be with proofs. I will bring them if I have to drag that old scoundrel with me.”
He paused. Though angry still, her story had pacified him. He felt it to be false, none the less she had believed it and the fact that she had, absolved her of much that she had done. However she had erred, she had at least tried to do right. He closed and opened a hand, looked at it and from it looked at her.
“But first I will see my mother. In any case I will be here tomorrow. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Why shouldn’t I come. Why not?”
Leilah did not answer. She did not believe he would come, except to cause fresh agony to them both there was no reason why he should do so. The horror which she had told him and to which incredulously he had listened was gospel to her, an evil gospel, yes, but none the less a true one. Besides if he did come as, in any case, he said he would, he might meet Barouffski, and affrightedly she foresaw blows, afterwards a duel—one which she was unaware was then impending.
“Why not?” Verplank repeated, fumbling her as he spoke with suspicious eyes and appearing to divine and to resent her forecast.
She caught at a straw. Usually, between four and seven, Barouffski was tabled at baccarat, gambling with her money. That straw she produced.
“Come at five.”
Verplank, appeased, nodded. “Very good, at five then.”
But at once she realised that other safeguards were needful. She hesitated, looked about her, looked at Verplank, gave him his hat, motioned to him. Then, preceding him, she passed into an adjoining salon, entered the dining room and moved from it to the garden below.
Passably mystified, he followed.
The air, freighted with fragrance, stirred by music from the church, the dogs, at sight of him, charged suddenly with menaces. Straining at their chains, viciously they clamoured.
Indifferently Verplank glanced from them to the gate beyond, to which Leilah was leading him.
When both reached it, she opened it and said: “Come this way tomorrow, will you?”
For a second he considered her. Her face was as a book in which he could read the reason. In view of many things, particularly of the duel, it seemed to him all very puerile.
But, replacing his hat, grimly he nodded. “Before then I have rather an idea that there may be a deficit among us.”
This expression, in itself perhaps overprecise, was too much for her and the fact that it was showed itself in her eyes.
Without heeding their inquiry he nodded again. “I will come this way but only that together we may leave by the other.”
Again he nodded. In a moment he had gone.
Leilah, closing the gate behind him watched him go. It was, she felt, her last earthly sight of him. There would be no going away together. He would never come back. Never. His mother, if she knew the truth, could only substantiate it. If she did not, another would. Helplessly she held at the gate. A vagrant passed, she did not see. A hawker called, she did not hear. She was not only helpless, she was hopeless. She wished that death really were, that it could beneficently come, take her, shroud her in blankness, in endless oblivion of what was and of what might have been. Long since the dogs, mollified by Verplank’s exit, had ceased to bark. Shrilly now from the church came boys’ fresh voices. The music of them stirred her a little and she turned.
Before her, framed in a window of the dining room, Barouffski stood. At sight of him she started. Amiably he smiled. When she looked again he had vanished.
But, in a moment, in the doorway beneath, smiling still, he reappeared.
“What a beautiful day, is it not?” Oilily he rubbed his hands. “You have been having visitors, cara mia?”
As he spoke he moved toward her. Urbanely he continued! “And what did they have to say?”
He was quite near her now and, with his head held a trifle to one side he was regarding her with affectionate indulgence, much as one would regard a child.
“They told you nothing new, cara mia?”
Without looking at him, Leilah shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at least that I did not know.”
Smiling still, indulgent as before, Barouffski plucked at his pointed beard. “And what is that, cara mia?”
Remotely, in a voice without colour, as though speaking not to him at all but only to herself, she answered:
“That I am the most miserable woman in the world.”
Barouffski’s smile broadened. “Bah! They exaggerated, cara mia. It is the way of the world. Mon Dieu, à qui se fier? You are not at all what they said. You are—how shall I put it—perhaps a bit indiscreet. That is it, a bit indiscreet.” He pointed to the bench. “Will you not seat yourself?”
He was still smiling, but the smile wholly muscular, was one in which the eyes have no part. The “visitors” whom he affected to ridicule, alarmed him. They were, he knew, quite capable of taking Leilah away. Her presence or absence was quite one to him. Only if she departed, so would her purse.
“Will you not?” he repeated.
“I am going in.”
“Certainly, cara mia. It is as it pleases you. But—”
At this Leilah, who had passed him, turned.
“Well, what?”
“You see, cara mia, supposing I had visitors. Supposing rather I had a visitor. We
