One incident had the porters for agent; the other was effected by a maid who supervened. The porters, in removing the luggage, collided with the table. The inkstand, the tall vase with the taller lilies, were upset; the vase, spilling water and flowers, fell broken on the floor; from the stand, ink rippled on the red of the cloth, on the darker red of the tassels, on the envelope which Leilah had directed to Verplank. These things, a maid, summoned by the crash, removed.
When Verplank returned, the table was bare.
He did not notice. What he alone noticed was Leilah’s absence. She is below, he told himself. Then precisely as she had summoned her servants, he summoned his.
“Roberts,” he said presently to a man. “Find Mrs. Verplank. Then get my things together. We start at once.”
For a moment the man considered the master. At once civilly but stolidly he spoke:
“Mrs. Verplank has gone, sir.”
Verplank, who had turned on his heel, turned back.
“What?”
“The hotel is full of it, sir. When I found that Mrs. Verplank was leaving, I—”
“What!” Verplank, in angry amazement, repeated.
“Mrs. Verplank is taking the limited, sir. It was the clerk who told me.”
Then, for a moment, the master considered the man. At the simple statement his mind had become like a sea in a storm. A whirlwind tossed his thoughts.
But Leilah was still too near, her caresses were too recent for him to be able to realise that she had actually gone, and the fact that he could not realise it disclosed itself in those words which all have uttered, all at least before whom the inexplicable has sprung:
“It is impossible!”
“Yes, sir, it does seem most unusual.”
Verplank had spoken less to the man than to himself, and for a moment stood engrossed in that futilest of human endeavours, the effort to read a riddle of which the only Oedipus is time.
At once all the imaginable causes that could have contributed to it danced before him and vanished. He told himself that Leilah’s disappearance might be an attempt at some hide-and-go-seek which shortly would end. But he knew her to be incapable of such nonsense. Immediately he decided that his servant was in error, and that she was then on the yacht. If not, then, clearly she had gone mad, or else—
But there are certain hypotheses which certain intellects decline to stomach. Yet the letter from her father recurring to him, he did consider the possibility that she might have gone because of some secret of his bachelor life. Anything may be distorted. Unfolded by her father, these secrets, which in themselves were not very dark, might be made to look infernal, and could readily be so made by this man who was not only just the one to do it, but who would have an object in so doing. Always he had been inimical to Verplank, and this, the abandoned bridegroom then felt, not on his account, but because of his father.
The latter, Effingham Verplank, had been a great catch, and a great beau. His charm had been myrrh and cassia—and nightshade, as well—to many women, among others to an aunt of Leilah, Hilda Hemingway, whose husband had called him out, called him abroad, rather, where the too charming Verplank waited until Hemingway fired, and then shot in the air. He considered that the gentlemanly thing to do. He was, perhaps, correct. But perhaps, too, it was hardly worth while to go abroad to do it. Yet, however that may be, the attitude of the injured husband, while no doubt equally correct, was less debonair. He obtained a divorce.
The matter created an enormous scandal, in the sedater days when New York society was a small and early family party and scandals were passing rare. But, like everything else, it was forgotten, even, and perhaps particularly by the parties directly concerned. Hemingway married again; the precarious Hilda married also; the too charming Verplank vacated the planet, and his widow went a great deal into the world.
This lady had accepted the scandal, as she had accepted many another, with a serenity that was really beautiful. But, then, her seductive husband had always seemed to her so perfectly irresistible, so created to conquer, that—as their son afterward found it necessary to explain—it no more occurred to her to sit in judgment on his victims, than it occurred to her to sit on him. With not only philosophic wisdom, but in the true spirit of Christian charity, she overlooked it all.
The culminant episode in the matter—the death of the volatile Verplank—took place at an hour when his son was too young to be more than aware that his father had been taken away in a box. Leilah was even less advanced. It was years before she learned of her aunt’s delinquencies. When she did, that lady had also passed away, as had previously passed a child of hers, one that, perhaps, did not belong to her first husband, and, certainly not to her second, the result being that, in default of other heirs, she left a fortune to Leilah, whose mother had left her another.
When her mother died, Leilah was in the nursery. Her father, who thereafter abandoned her to servants and governesses, she seldom saw. When she did see him, he ignored her completely. It was a way he had. He ignored also and quite as completely the son of the deadly Verplank.
To make up for it, or it may be to make trouble, the boy’s mother never regarded Leilah otherwise than with that smile of sweet approbation with which she gratified all the world—all the world, that is, save those only who were not in hers. Among the gratified were the Arlington girls, two beauties, of whom the elder, Violet, was Leilah’s closest
