Leilah’s face spoke for her. From the bewilderment there, it was obvious that of it all she was ignorant.
With an uplift of the chin Verplank considered her.
“That’s odd, girls generally only hear what they ought not to. However, Hemingway became suspicious—for very good reasons, no doubt, or, if you prefer, for very bad ones—the result being that his wife turned the letters over for safekeeping to your mother. When she died your father found them. He did not stop there, he showed them to my mother. My mother knew the facts, but she said your father was so convinced of your mother’s infidelity that it seemed a pity to disabuse him. Those were her very words to me today.”
“Gulian!” Still Leilah found but that. Visibly the light was there. As yet she could not credit it.
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 role 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
