"Word! words! words!" That was Lady Jim's summing up of the interview.
[ CHAPTER XXI]
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 an assisted death 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."