"I see evidences of that on all sides of me," replied Leah, tartly. "Shouldn't you say that he is not lost but gone before? I believe that is one of the stock phrases of your profession."
Lionel moved uneasily. It was difficult to whitewash Jim, and he could not invent non-existing virtues on the spur of the moment. "He was your husband, remember," was his effort to parry this thrust.
"Oh, Lord, don't I know it? Would I put up with all this, else? Did you come to tell me that Queen Anne is dead?"
"I came to cheer you."
"Go on, then. Tell me a funny story."
The curate looked and felt shocked. "Lady James----"
"Lionel, if you preach I shall scream," cried Leah, developing whirlwind passion, and rising a veritable Bellona; "or else I'll--I'll--oh!" she ripped her handkerchief viciously, while sweeping tempestuously up and down. "I don't know what I'll do, if you play Job's comforter."
Her cheeks flamed, her eyes sparkled, and her voice leaped an octave as she flung the last words at him. Lionel started up, surprised at this sudden anger, and wondered if grief was bringing on hysteria.
"Won't you sit down?" said obtuse man, giving the worst possible advice to overstrung woman. "A little sal volatile----"
"I'm sick of sitting down, and lying down, and sal volatile, and listening to humbug, and wearing black, and being bothered. I've had more trouble over Jim in his death than I ever allowed him to give me in his life. You say the same silly things every one else says--you--you parrot! Can't you be original?"
"Death is such an old-established institution that it is difficult to be original," said Lionel, resuming his chair with a shrug.
"Then I shall talk myself. Yes; I wish to speak plainly, and to you I intend to speak plainly, since you are the only man I respect."
"Thank you!"
"I daresay you are priggish," went on Lady Jim, finding it a marvellous relief to speak loudly and without reserve; "but you are honest in spite of it, and you don't gossip, though youarea parson. In trouble I shall always come to you, padre."
"You are in trouble now," hinted Kaimes, smiling at her frankness.
"Eh! What? Yes, of course, Jim's dead." She choked over the lie, and returned to laugh at ease in her chair. "Where has he gone, Lionel?"
"Don't, Lady James! I admit that he had his faults."
"Be honest. He had nothing else but faults."
"No, no! We all have our good points."
"Give me a list of Jim's," she suggested derisively.
"For the moment, I can't think----"
"No; nor you wouldn't if you thought for a century. Jim is as bad as they make 'em."
"Was--if you will abuse him."
"Oh yes, I forgot. Well, then, Jimwasbad; and I don't know if you call telling the truth abuse."
"Of the most virulent sort, on occasions. Are we not all sinners?"
"Speak for yourself, Mr. Humility."
Lionel, amazed by this self-canonisation, became less Aaron the priest and more Adam the natural man. "You don't call yourself immaculate, surely," he observed sarcastically.
"Did I?"
"By inference; and if no sinner, you must be saint."
"Ah! I see. Lamp-black or snow-white; grey does not exist. Parsons see the horizon, the doorstep, but no middle distance. Woman is Lucrece or Jezebel, with you. I am neither; but a simple woman, as God made me."
"And as the devil has marred."
"Foh! In this very room, when we spoke last, I scouted that bogie's existence."
"If you don't believe in evil existing, you can't in good. No devil, no God, Lady James."
"I never knew that the Deity depended upon Satan for his being," said Leah, dryly; "and theology doesn't amuse me--it's cobwebs and spindrift. Talk sense, if you must talk."
Lionel, hoping to lead her by a side-path to further consideration of her spiritual needs, consented to diverge for the moment. "I'll talk money, if you call that sense."
"Of course I do; uncommon sense, as there is so little of it. Money?" She looked at him questioningly.
"The insurance on your late husband's life."
"Oh! Well?" She wondered what he was about to say.
"The Duke asked me to interview the lawyers."
"Very unnecessary. I know all about the twenty thousand pounds. Jim left it to me, by will."
"You underestimate by ten thousand."
"What! Thirty thousand pounds?" Then, in answer to a nod, "Oh, you--you must be--be mistaken." Leah was truthfully agitated. Had the golden goose laid two eggs instead of one?
"No; your husband's life was insured, when he was a child, for twenty thousand pounds with profits, at an annual premium. Mr. Jarvey Peel and his executors paid the money to keep the insurance in force----"
"Yes, yes; and the principal was payable to Jim at sixty, or to any one he might leave it to at death, I, as the widow, take all--all--all;" she repeated the word three times, in the purring voice of a cat over cream.
"Exactly," assented the curate, thinking she betrayed over-plainly horse-leech parentage; "and the extra ten thousand is the accumulation of an annual bonus of fifteen pounds on every thousand."
"That's three hundred a year," calculated Lady Jim, feverishly.
"Quite so. Jim was thirty-five when he died. So three hundred a year for thirty-four years comes to ten thousand."
"Two hundred," supplemented Lady Jim, correcting his arithmetic. "Oh, Lord! Thirty thousand two hundred pounds, and Jim never knew that he was worth his weight in this gold."
"He never inquired, since the money would not come to him till he attained the age of sixty."
"It would have been almost double then," commented the lady, pensively. "What a pity Jim did not live till---- But no; we should have both been old then, and there would have been no fun. I am content with thirty thousand--really I am, Lionel. It doesn't do to be greedy."
"You are not," said the curate, ironically, "else you would have again mentioned the odd hundreds."
Leah made a ball out of the torn handkerchief and tossed it gaily in the air. "That will do for lawyers' costs," said she, airily, "though I hope the bill won't be so extortionate. Thirty thousand pounds!" She sprang up, with dithyrambic utterance, scarcely refraining from a war-dance. "Thirty thousand golden sovereigns! Six thousand lovely, lovely Bank of England notes! Oh, Vanderbilt! Oh----" The sight of her relative's disgusted face curbed her ecstasy: "You think that my exultation over this money is vulgar."
"Heartless, at least, since it is the price of your husband's death. To you, apparently, Jim is more valuable dead than alive."
"I entirely agree with you," confessed Leah, candidly; then added with impatient anger, "Do you expect me to tell you lies?"
"You might show some grief."
"Heavens! What else have I been doing for the past three weeks?"
"Assuming a virtue which you have not."
"That remark is too clever to be original, my dear man. How impossible you are! I wear mourning and cry at the right time, and say things I don't believe about Jim to his father and the rest of them; while to you, who blame me for behaving decently outside, I speak as I feel, only to be condemned. What do you expect?"
"To see you exhibit some real grief," said Lionel, who was really angered by her callous behaviour. "You show more genuine emotion over this miserable money than over poor Jim."
"Poor Jim," she mocked scornfully; "are you going to cry up his virtues?"
"He was not so bad as you make him out to be," retorted Lionel, doggedly.
"Then he must have revealed a side of his nature to you which he never showed to me," snapped Leah, sharply. "Foh! what's the use of acting to empty benches? Go downstairs if you want an audience. We are behind the scenes here."
"Very allegorical and needless. Can't you be more womanly?"
"If I were, the sal volatile yon recommend would be needed, I can tell you. Being a parson you will not understand; being a man, you cannot. Womanly! womanly!--does that imply cant and shams? Am I to mourn with spurious lamentations that selfish profligate, who would have broken my heart had he ever possessed it? To be womanly is to excuse a man's faults, to lie down and be trodden upon, to condone unfaithfulness, and to be grateful for the shreds and patches of an egotistic life. Never! never!" Her lips twisted scornfully, her nostrils dilated, and she clenched her hands to restrain an outburst of that wrath which had consumed her during five years of holy matrimony. Lionel, astonished by her sudden transition from gay to grave, forbore interruption, and she declaimed her marital wrongs in a Boadicean vein. "I have read in that Bible of yours of the casting of pearls before swine. Jim was a Gadarene pig, who would have rent me had I loved him, as I admit a wife should love her husband. My coldness, and what you consider my selfishness, was my sole safeguard against ruin and sorrow and outrage. You know that I speak the truth--I defy you to say otherwise. Jim! oh, Jim," she laughed unpleasantly; "Jim--that rag doll of his family, who is placed on a pedestal and worshipped, as though he were the golden idol he never was and never could be! I respect the Duke much more than I ever respected my husband, for he is genuinely blind to Jim's faults and mourns honestly. But you--you, who knew the man, and rebuked the man--oh, it would be amusing were it not so shameful."
Her bosom heaved as she hurled this speech at him, with gibe and jeer and ironic laughter. "I thank God that the man is out of my life," was her passionate cry. "Yes--I thank God."
"Did you believe in God you would not say that."
"Bah! Theology again."
"And truth."
"Which is not theology and never will be."
"That depends upon belief. The science which treats of God, and of man's duty to God, cannot be understood by you, who have neither hope nor faith."
"At least I have charity, the greatest of the three, which you lack."
"Give me an example."
"I credit you with honesty, while you cry me down as a bad woman."
"Pardon me. I do not say that you are bad. Misguided, rather."
"And why--according to your lights? Because I do not put up Jim as a pig-idol, to worship with crocodile tears?"
She silenced Kaimes for the moment, as there was much truth in her overstated contention. No decent woman could have loved or honoured the dead man; and this outspoken condemnation, provable in the main, was assuredly more honest than pretended laudation and sham sorrow would have been. Yet the merciless indictment jarred on Lionel's sense of propriety, righteous as he knew it to be.
"The man is dead," said he, testily; "leave him to God."
Leah held her peace. It annoyed the ordinarily self-possessed woman, that for one fierce moment emotion should have overleaped judgment. Reining in her passions, she relapsed into the sober jog-trot necessary on the rutted road of conventionality. But Lionel's final speech provoked a laugh. Would his laudation of the dead, she wondered, change to criticism of the living, did he learn the truth? Feminine desire for the last word would have blurted out this final argument, but that an innate masculine discretion recommended silence. Therefore did she compromise with the laugh, which Lionel, misunderstanding, resented with the warmth of a generous nature.
"That is positively cruel," said he, indignantly.
"Very human, I think," said Lady Jim, yawning away the reaction.
Following his own line of thought, the curate did not traverse this statement. "A woman can make of a man what she pleases."
"Possibly; but I had a beast to deal with."
"Can't you think more kindly of him, now that he is gone?"
"No," said Leah, decisively. "I would not say so to every one, but I do to you, out of respect for your character."
"I am both flattered and grieved. Be lenient, Lady James. Are you so good yourself, that you can refuse charity to the dead?"
Leah shrugged her shoulders and crossed her feet. "That's a trifle personal, isn't it?" she asked good-humouredly; "like the rest of this futile conversation. Well, for the first time and the last, I shall pay you the compliment of defending myself. To begin with, my friend, your definition of good and bad depends upon dogma, so we disagree at the outset."
"Let us take the primary instincts of being, and----"
"Oh, I fear we have not the time to begin with Genesis. What is left of poor Jim arrives in charge of M. Demetrius within two hours, and I must prepare myself for the scene there is bound to be. To be brief in my defence, I can safely say that I am better than most women. I never gave Jim the chances he gave me of appearing in the divorce court. I keep my temper, even when most provoked. I don t say nasty things about those who run me down, and always help those I like. I avoid the use of slang and of excessively strong drink. I neither smoke, nor indulge in morphine. I invariably go to church, with half a crown for the plate; and--and--I think that includes all my virtues. What more would you have?"
"Unselfishness," responded Lionel, gravely; "egotism is your sin."
"And the world's. I might inquire with the Apostles, and I do inquire, with all curiosity, 'Who then can be saved?'"
"Those whose merits do not spring from the ego, as do yours. To you, Lady James, Satan comes in his favourite guise, as an angel of light, and only the Ithuriel spear of the Holy Spirit can unmask him. Virtuous! I grant you are--because you pamper self too much to sacrifice your position and comforts to a love that is willing to lose the world for love alone. Good-tempered!--why not, with a healthy body and an equable nature? That you do not gossip is certainly a point in your favour, although I suspect that this abstinence is again the ego, which does not permit you to be sufficiently interested in others to discuss their affairs. You help those you like--feed them, as it were, with the over-abundant crumbs from your table; in the words of our Lord I can say, 'Do not even the publicans so?' But would you help those you hate, and at a sacrifice?"
"Certainly not. Why should I? They would not be even grateful."
"Quite so. You expect a reward for your good deeds."
"In this world. You look for yours in the next."
"No; though I admit that the temptation is strong. I try to serve God out of love and gratitude."
"Ridiculous, even if true. Such self-abnegation is beyond me."
"Yes, that is what I call being really and truly good."
"I see--that is, I don't see. You are always so impossible."
"Nothing is impossible with God's help, as without it nothing is possible. Listen, Lady James;" and with his soul on fire to raise her from the material to the spiritual, Lionel attempted reasonable argument. For over half an hour did he preach, expound, warn, demonstrate, quote, deduce, persuade; but at the end of thirty-five rapid minutes he found her and himself again at the starting point.
Leah listened critically, and even with interest. Hindered by her limitations from seeing a satisfactory conclusion, she declined the tournament, and retired to watch her opponent tilt at giants which she mistook for windmills. Said the inversely deceived Donna Quixota: "How well you talk, Lionel! Why don't you leave the Church and go in for Parliament?"
The curate shook the cold water of this douche out of his ears, and rose, markedly discouraged. "I cannot make you understand," he said sadly; "only the Holy Spirit can convince you of your need."
"My need of what?"
"Of salvation."
"That would be adding sugar to honey, and I feel very contented with my honey. Good health, plenty of money, a tolerable position, and----"
"And you have yet to reckon with God. All these things come from Him, and all He can take away."
"I don't agree with you."
"Nor will you, until your pride is broken."
"That it never will be," said Leah, superbly.
"So you think in your insolence of beauty and health. But when you come to die?"
"Well, then, I shall die, and that's all about it."
"What is the glory of the rainbow to the colour-blind?" Lionel asked himself, and walked to the door. There he paused to deliver himself of a final warning: "Though you triumph in your own strength, and be at ease in the palace of sin, yet will the reckoning come. The Most High God--IS," and he departed.
"Word! words! words!" That was Lady Jim's summing up of the interview.
In that chilly hour preceding dawn, under the searching grey eye of earliest morning, the coffin was opened in the presence of Pentland and his family. The likeness between the lawful son and the unlawful, even more apparent in death than in life, startled the woman best prepared to countenance a gross deception. Leah could almost have imagined this waxen, awful face to be that of Jim; and an emotion of genuine fear shook her to the soul she had so deliberately burdened. Moreover, and not without reason, that haunting thought of anassisteddeath became appallingly obtrusive before these medicated remains. Was Demetrius--was she--guilty of----? Her will fought desperately against the suggested word, and this mental struggle still further compelled the revelation of elemental feelings. Streaming tears, trembling hands, furtive glances, testified to truthful terrors, breaking through calculated pretence. It needed a scornful look from Frith the sceptic, and an amazed stare on the part of Demetrius, to assure her that she beheld a corpse of no importance, save as a substitute for a living double. And even then this ironic inspection of the false seemed but a gruesome masquerade of Jim's lying in state, when his turn really came.
The actuality of her feelings afforded a welcome escape from further harrowings; and she left the room, clinging to the arm of Demetrius, careless whither he led her. The picture gallery was his goal, since its seclusion invited no eavesdroppers, and here he experimented with personally manufactured salts, pungent and rousing. These, it soon appeared, were scarcely needed. Lady Jim, released from the necessity of playing a grim comedy, recovered speedily, and with recuperation came the disposition to flick away the disagreeable.
"What a fool I am!" said Leah, enraged to discover she was but mortal.
"A woman, a woman," murmured Demetrius, cynically complacent.
"But no heroine. Ugh!" she shivered, and huddled in her chair. "I shall dream of that thing for the next year. It was so like Jim. Ugh! ugh! Horrible! horrible!"
"Why should the sight of an empty house so startle you, madame?"
"I am in no mood for metaphors. Go away; you will be needed to shut that thing up."
"My successor the undertaker will do that. I have done my share."
"I only hope you have not overdone it," muttered the woman.
"And the meaning of that remark, madame?"
Leah wanting to know, yet, fearing to know, evaded an answer and shirked a question. "Leave me for a time," she entreated.
"No--if you will pardon my rudeness. We have much to talk about."
"Cannot you wait till after the funeral?" she said crossly. "It will look so strange, your remaining here with me."
"Ah, but no, madame. To those who might speak I am but your doctor, who has brought you here to recover yourself."
"I am perfectly recovered--perfectly."
"In that case we can talk," he insisted.
She yielded, not being yet her old fighting self after the soul-shaking. It was dangerous to enter upon a contest with flawed armour, so she temporised. It would be best, she decided, to hear his story, without committing herself to comments. Later, when her nerves were steady, she could answer more cautiously the question he was about to ask at an inopportune moment. Her wary nature declined a consideration of marriage arrangements, to the extent of fixing a date for a ceremony in which she did not intend to take part. Still, he could plead, and she could, and would, procrastinate; therefore would the victory be with her when this unprepared interview ended.
"Talk on," she said languidly; then added, with a spite created by shattered nerves, "though I think it very disagreeable of you, to make me look on that horrid dead thing."
Demetrius was tolerant of feminine irrelevance. "Madame, to avert possible suspicion, it was necessary."
"Undoubtedly it was necessary," admitted self-contradicting woman. "But--what a risk!"
"Ah, pardon; in the dark, all cats are grey."
"I know nothing about cats, but the faces of the dead certainly vary, M. Demetrius. And dangers cannot be explained away by proverbs."
"In this case the danger has explained itself. We are now safe."
The plural struck disagreeably on Leah's ear, and reminded her somewhat pointedly of the readjusted relations between herself and the doctor. "Weare now safe," she echoed, with reproving emphasis.
"Assuredly," responded Demetrius, wilfully blind. "Monseigneur has been completely deceived; also M. le Marquis and Madame his wife; while your tears, my dear friend, have washed away any possible doubts which, for my part, I do not believe existed."
Again she was faced by positive circumstances, for the Russian's last words hinted a sarcasm which annoyed her. It might be that, with still quivering nerves, she looked too anxiously for causes of offence, but the familiar ease of his manner was unpalatable. A second implied rebuke would avail as little as had the first, and Leah, mindful of her dignity, abstained from indicating in words the Rubicon he was not to cross. Demetrius knew overmuch for her to speak authoritatively, so it was necessary to permit him the odious intimacy of an accomplice. But he should pay hereafter for his usurpation of such a position: that she vowed inwardly, even while smiling on his success. Smiling was possible now, as the prospect of an inevitable verbal duel braced her to abnormal self-control.