Jake explained that he had all along intended to send her rabbinical divorce papers instead of a passage ticket, and that it had been his old mother who had pestered him, with her tear-stained letters, into acting contrary to his will.
“All right,” Mamie resumed, with a dubious smile; “but why don’t you go to Fanny, or Beckie, or Beilké the “Black Cat”? You used to care for them more than for me. Why should you just come to me?”
Jake answered by characterizing the girls she had mentioned in terms rather too high-scented for print, protesting his loathing for them. Whereupon she subjected him to a rigid cross-examination as to his past conduct toward herself and her rivals; and although he managed to explain matters to her inward satisfaction, owing, chiefly, to a predisposition on her own part to credit his assertions on the subject, she could not help continuing obdurate and in a spiteful, vindictive mood.
“All you say is not worth a penny, and it is too late, anyvay,” was her verdict. “You have a wife and a child; better go home and be a father to your boy.” Her last words were uttered with some approach to sincerity, and she was mentally beginning to give herself credit for magnanimity and pious self-denial. She would have regretted her exhortation, however, had she been aware of its effect on her listener; for her mention of the boy and appeal to Jake as a father aroused in him a lively sense of the wrong he was doing. Moreover, while she was speaking his attention had been attracted to a loosened pillowcase ominously fluttering and flapping a yard or two off. The figure of his dead father, attired in burial linen, uprose to his mind.
“You don’ vanted? Alla right, you be shorry,” he said half-heartedly, turning to go.
“Hol’ on!” she checked him, irritatedly. “How are you going to fix it? Are you sure she will take a divorce?”
“Will she have a choice then? She will have to take it. I won’t live with her anyhoy,” he replied, his passion once more welling up in his soul. “Mamie, my treasure, my glory!” he exclaimed, in tremulous accents. “Say that you are shatichfied; my heart will become lighter.” Saying which, he strained her to his bosom, and fell to raining fervent kisses on her face. At first she made a faint attempt at freeing herself, and then suddenly clasping him with mad force she pressed her lips to his in a fury of passion.
The pillowcase flapped aloud, ever more sternly, warningly, portentously.
Jake cast an involuntary side glance at it. His spell of passion was broken and supplanted by a spell of benumbing terror. He had an impulse to withdraw his arms from the girl; but, instead, he clung to her all the faster, as if for shelter from the ghostlike thing.
With a last frantic hug Mamie relaxed her hold. “Remember now, Jake!” she then said, in a queer hollow voice. “Now it is all settled. Maybe you are making fun of me? If you are, you are playing with fire. Death to me—death to you!” she added, menacingly.