"Let them! What does it matter?"
"Everything matters, when people have tongues and eyes, and envious natures. Don't be silly. I promised the Duke to stop here for half an hour. And after all, it's amusing. I never knew such people existed outside Punch. Well--what now?" This because, with sudden recollection of an oversight, he brought out an envelope.
"This was waiting at Curzon Street," he explained, handing it across, "and the butler, thinking it might be important asked me to---- Why, what's the matter, Leah?"
It was his turn to inquire, for, reading while he talked, she had suddenly whitened. "Don't call me Leah," she snapped, with the irritation of a shaken woman, then re-read the cablegram, again and again.
"What is it?--what is it?"
"My husband is--dead!" She crushed the paper into a ball, rose to go, and dropped back, overwhelmingly faint. "Oh!" she moaned faintly. For once in her life of shams and sneering and playing with other-world fires she was moved to genuine emotion.
[ CHAPTER XIX]
Leah's emotion--as she felt--was almost cruelly genuine. It bore the trademark of sincerity; it made her heart hammer furiously against her ribs, and drove the blood from her cheeks. Yet she knew that Jim still lived; that the lying cablegram was but a necessary card to play for the winning of large stakes. For once, the expected had happened--that was all. Why then should she exhibit emotions which could not possibly have been caused by the excuse offered to the public. Her heart replied with brutal directness, that she had crossed the Old Bailey Rubicon, and was actually participating in a crime. The last word shook her out of cotton-wool wrappings into a naked world. Up to the receipt of the cablegram she could have drawn back. Now, fully committed to the adventure, she was compelled to tread a perilous path. A criminal! Yes: she had been one in intention, which mattered little; she was now criminal in fact, and that meant punishment. Her imagination conjured up visions of the possible. The judge spoke, the prison gaped, the bolts shot home, Curzon Street was exchanged for Wormwood Scrubbs. Ugh! But after all, such queasy thoughts were unnecessary. If she had broken the eighth commandment, she fully intended to keep the eleventh and unwritten one, "Thou shalt not be found out."
The truth to Mrs. Saracen, excusing a hasty departure, served to circulate the fiction of Jim's death, which the widow wished to be speedily and widely known. She could not have selected a bell with a better clapper. Promulgated by the "sauce queen," the sad invention shortly became town-talk, and, disseminated by myriad tongues, ran like a prairie fire throughout Society, with a capital letter. A more weighty bag on the postman's back resulted, and commiserating platitudes showered on Leah, as thick as the over-quoted leaves of Vallombrosa. She glanced through many, replied to a few, and burned--very wisely--the majority. Between-whiles her attention was given to parcels from Jay's, and considerations of widows' caps, and the recognition that the feminine uniform of woe clothed with marked distinction a really beautiful mourner. To women, grief has its consolations in crape millinery.
Seclusion was necessary in those days of lamentation, but none the less wearisome. To play the nun, while people scattered to Cowes and the Continent, chafed the chameleon woman. Some intimate sympathisers she received, and to these she matched mournful words with a mournful countenance. With the blinds half down and sal volatile at hand, in a becoming gown, and using a handkerchief, three inches black-bordered, to redden the driest of eyes, Lady Jim held funereal receptions, and spoke in low tones of her late husband's hitherto unknown good qualities. His palpable evils she cloaked with the "his-own-worst-enemy" phrase; and mentioned twice that, if not an angel, he at least had been a man. The visitor addressed made her exit expressing hopes that Lord James was an angel now, and the door closed in time to prevent her seeing Leah's enjoyment of the picture thus cashed on her amused mind. "Jim, an angel!" murmured the widow, wiping away real tears. "He'd bet on his flying."