The Monster · Chapter 3 (2/2)

It was in these circumstances that Leilah listened to the Count Kasimiérz Barouffski, who, in telling her that he was poor, omitted to add that he had resources. These were women and cards. It is a business like another. But even to his nearest friends, to Tyszkiewicz, a compatriot, and Palencia, a Corsican, he did not boast of it. He had therefore some sense of shame, but not of honour, though with humour he was supplied. A man with some sense of humour and no sense of honour may go far. Barouffski intended to. After his volcanic introduction to Leilah, he beheld in her not the woman but the opportunity which chance had sent his way. To grasp that he displayed every art of which the Slav is capable. He did more. He impressed her not with the nobility of his name but of his nature. He was a good actor and though at first unsuccessful he was not discouraged. It was an axiom of his that among the dice of destiny there is always a golden six. It was axiomatic with him also that it is not tossed at once. To deserve it, one must wait. Barouffski waited. Presently fate shook the box before him. The golden six was his.

But not the box.

To Leilah the mere idea of matrimony was abhorrent. Yet she could not stop indefinitely with the Silverstairs. She had no relatives with whom she could reside. She felt that it would be awkward and perhaps equivocal for her to have an establishment of her own. But these considerations were minor beside another⁠—a sense, haunting and constant, that the excursion to Nevada had been inadequate, that the past needed a surer barricade.

It was not a husband that she wanted. Peace and security were the fleshpots that she craved. These Barouffski offered or seemed to⁠—and it was these finally and these only that she agreed to accept.

To the implied stipulation Barouffski consented with an air of high chivalry but also with an ambiguous smile. Given the golden six of her income, the box was a detail to him, and it was in these circumstances that over the perhaps insecurely locked door of her past, this mask mounted guard.

The news of the engagement, filtering through the press, was cabled to the States, together with the fact that Leilah was then stopping in the Rue François Premier with Lady Silverstairs, whose portrait, in addition to bogus presentments of the engaged couple, were printed in the minor sheets that circulate from New York to San Francisco.

On arriving from Australia at the latter city, Verplank happened on a belated copy. Since he had gone from Coronado, this, the first news of his wife, was her engagement to another man.

In his amazement his thoughts stuttered. Into his mind entered stretches of night. He looked at the sheet without seeing it. But the paragraph and the purport of it, already photographed on the films of the brain, were prompting him unconsciously, and it was without really knowing what he was saying that he exclaimed:

“Leilah! My wife! In Paris! Engaged to another man!”

The names, the words, the meaning of them all, beat on his brain like blows of a hammer.

“Leilah! My wife! In Paris! Engaged!”

Again he looked at the sheet. “What a damned lie!” he ragingly cried, and, rumpling the paper, threw it from him.

But now, the names, the words, the meaning of them all, well beaten into him, readjusted themselves, presenting a picture perfectly defined and possibly real.

He stooped, gathered the paper, smoothed it, read the account again.

After all, he reflected, it might be that she was in Paris and, if there, it was natural that she would be with Violet Silverstairs. These two items were, therefore, not improbably correct. That view reached, the deduction followed: If they are correct, the other may be. Yet, in that case, he argued, obviously she must think me dead. On the heels of this second deduction an impression trod⁠—the ease and dispatch with which she had become consoled.

Enraged at once, angered already by what he had taken for a lie and then infuriated by what he took for truth, the anterior incidents that had this supreme outrage for climax, leaped at him. At the onslaught the primitive passions flared, and it was with the impulse of the homicide that he determined to seek and overwhelm this woman who accepted men and matters with such entire sans-gêne.

On the morrow he left for New York. Before going he sent a cablegram to the address which the paper had supplied:

Am just apprised of the studied insult of your engagement to some foreign cad. Leaving for Paris at once.

As he signed it, deeply, beneath the breath, he swore. “That will show her,” he added.

It so happened that it showed her nothing. Leilah was not then in the Rue François Premier, but in the Rue de la Pompe, where the message followed, but only to be received by Barouffski, who read it with a curious smile.

Already he hated Verplank, who had not yet acquired a hatred for him. But though that hatred had not been acquired, it developed tumultuously when, on arriving in New York, he learned that not merely the report of the engagement was true, but that the engagement had since resulted in a marriage, which itself had been preceded by a Nevada divorce.

In comparison to all that had occurred, the divorce seemed at the time almost negligible. It was the crowning infamy of this marriage which, in renewing the primitive passions, aroused in Verplank a determination not merely to seek and overwhelm the woman, but to seek and destroy the man. The marriage, he decided could be but the result of an anterior affair, there was no other explanation of it. The idea that had come to him at Coronado, the possibility that she might have left him because informed of some affair of his own and which since then he had examined again and again, fell utterly away. It was not because of errors of his that she had gone, but for turpitudes of her own. Then to his anger at her was added a hatred of Barouffski, whom he had never seen, and who, without having seen Verplank, hated him also, hated him retrospectively and prospectively, hated him because clearly Leilah had been his and⁠—where women are concerned, all things being possible⁠—might be again.

But though Barouffski hated Verplank actively, he hated him vaguely, as one must when one hates the unknown. It was the cablegram which, in supplying the personal element, made the hate concrete.

“Foreign cad, eh?” he repeated, with a curious smile. “Eh bien, nous verrons, we shall see.”

Presently the opportunity occurred. For it was in these circumstances, a fortnight after the receipt of the cablegram, that, directed by the young Baronne de Fresnoy, he turned and saw Verplank entering the room where he stood.