Immediately he raised it again, straight from the head, high in the air. Looking with brilliant eyes from a brilliant brougham, Violet Silverstairs was dashing by.
Coincidentally, unobserved but observant, Barouffski was also passing that way.
Leilah’s motor flew off and she sank back, wondering at herself, wondering rather what influence, malign and unhallowed, could possibly have prompted her to ask this man, whom she disliked as—in spite of a theory to the contrary—honest women do dislike a man of his type. But though, at the time, she could not understand what impelled her, later it seemed to her that it must have been fate.
Barouffski had a different interpretation. At the Joyeuses he had seen Leilah and d’Arcy together. Now, here they were again. The circumstance, of which the fortuitousness was unknown to him, irritated him for that very cause. But he could imagine and did. At once it was clear to him that the brute was after the blue eyes of her bankbook. The deduction, however erroneous, was easy. He was viewing the matter, not, as he fancied, from d’Arcy’s standpoint, but from his own. In spite of which, or rather precisely on that account, he told himself that d’Arcy was a damned scoundrel. The humour of this quite escaped him. But that perhaps was in the order of things.
Since the night at the Joyeuses, he had been measuring himself solely against Verplank. Twice he had failed with him, but he knew that soon they would be at each other again and for the next bout he had in view a coup which, he felt, would do for him definitely. Meanwhile, if in regard to Leilah he had been led into certain vivacities, he felt that with time, which is the great emollient, her memory of these vivacities would pass. Even otherwise, the law was with him. He proposed to see to it that she was also—she and with her her purse. The one menace to both had been Verplank. Here, now, apparently, was another. Here was d’Arcy with his pseudo-Pheidian air, that famous yet false appearance of a young and dissolute Olympian which made imbeciles turn and stare. Ragingly Barouffski reflected that canaille though d’Arcy were, he carried a great many guns, almost as many as Verplank, who, worse luck, had, in addition, the signal advantage of being Leilah’s first love—that love to which it is said one always returns.
But even as he sounded the stupidity of that aphorism, vaguely, for a dim second, he intercepted a gleam refracted from truth. The danger with which he had to contend, Verplank did not personify or d’Arcy either, it was himself. When the golden six was tossed him, had he but then known how to secure the box, there would now be no danger at all. But truth, when it does not console, confounds. Barouffski put it from him. It was too exasperating. “Bah!” he told himself, “if her attitude does not change, a sojourn in the solitudes of Lithuania may alter it.” Angrily he nodded. Things more surprising have occurred there.
On this day it was Leilah who surprised him.
Since he had called to her from the garden, she had encountered him only in the hazards of entrances and halls. On such occasions she had passed with an air of being unaware that there were anything save chairs and tables about.
In part, it was this attitude which he thought certain solitudes might change. Oddly enough, Leilah herself wished it altered. But to want to do one thing and to do something else, happens to all of us, even to the best. She despised Barouffski and yet in despising him knew that the one contemptible thing is contempt. For what he had done, she felt that no punishment could be too severe, yet in so feeling she knew that he was only the embodiment of past misdeeds of her own. Physically he had struck her. Spiritually, it was her own hand that had dealt the blow. He had loosed the dogs on Verplank and she had judged and condemned him for it, though she knew that not only she should not judge at all, but that never perhaps do useless events occur. Clearly these events were evil, but were not those which she planned evil too?