In its place was a smile, constant, equivocal, ambiguous, a smile such as the consciously damned may display. It gave Leilah little creeps. She dreaded it, dreaded him, dreaded both, what is worse she dreaded instinctively, without knowing why. The man was amiable, serviceable, gallant. He wore his domino not faultlessly perhaps but with the fine air of a bravo who, when the time comes, will knife you, yes, but who in so doing will rather require that you admire the chasing on the handle of the blade. As yet the knife was concealed. But Leilah felt that it was there. He knew it was. Occasionally he fingered the point.
Hitherto he had lived by expedients. A golden six had been tossed him. He had pocketed it. For him the economic problem of life was solved. He asked little else, merely that the solution should endure and that his dignity, of which he had a humorous conception, be outwardly preserved. In addition to his dignity, or to his idea of it, he had another attribute. He was not exacting. It is a great charm in any one. But with him it did not extend to money. Freely he demanded it, freely she gave and it was precisely when he demanded it that she felt, and he felt, too, the point of the knife.
On this evening when, after the usual din at the doors, the motor entered the court and she alighted at the perron, two footmen busied themselves in aiding her.
Leilah passed through the dining room to the garden where for a while she walked along the path that led from the house to the gate.
The garden was cloistered, the night serene. The influences of both affected her. The darkness put her thoughts into relief, the solitude relaxed the tension of her nerves.
Another thing was helpful, the determination which she had reached, though for that determination to be maintained there must, she saw, be further hostages, new barricades. But what further hostages could she give she wondered, what firmer barricades was it possible to erect? Barring flight or an appeal to Verplank, some message begging him to leave Paris, she could not imagine any. Flight she had already tried, but not flight to some one of the world’s far away places where any one may be lost forever. It was a miserably dismal thing to do, she reflected, a thing so dismal and so miserable that she doubted her ability to do it.
As she thought it over she wondered if in some former existence she could have injured Verplank and whether it were by way of retribution that he had the power to tempt and torture her now. Tenets of this character the Vidyâ advanced and as she had told Tempest, she had come to believe in that Scripture as many do in the Bible, though as many also do without being able to accept it entirely, without being able to accept for instance stories such as that of Jonah and the whale which none the less all would accept were it known how profound is the symbolism behind them. With like reservations, Leilah accepted the Vidyâ. She was very ignorant as women in her station generally are and the reservations were due to that ignorance and also to the demand which the doctrine made on her imagination. But though she was ignorant she was conscious of it and consciousness of ignorance is usually the condition precedent to enlightenment.
Now, in considering the episode of the evening, she asked herself whether she was warranted in accepting this creed of past lives. At the Joyeuses, during the announcements of resonant names, Tempest had said that unless we swallow the ridiculous dogma of a soul specially created at every birth and unless too we are indecent enough to fancy the Deity waiting for that purpose on the passions and caprices of man, we have to accept it, have to accept with it the corollary of past actions and their consequences, have to accept, too, the deduction that, in accordance with our past actions, it is we who reward or punish ourselves, we who become avenging furies or angels of light.
Leilah wished that she could have discussed the matter more fully with Tempest yet she felt that what he had said was logical, but if it were true, then the parallel doctrine that all misdeeds and with them all misfortunes spring from desire must be true also, in which case, before their consequences can be effaced, all misdeeds must be atoned. But how can they be atoned? she asked herself. Presently she remembered. According to the Vidyâ, any desire no matter what, desire for pleasure, for gain, for attainments, for honours, even the desire for spiritual perfection, even the desire for the lack of desire, must be extinguished before old scores are paid. That was the way she saw, the only way. The debtor must sacrifice himself to himself.