Kaimes looked aimlessly round the room, and noted the pattern of the window-curtains. Only the whistling of the coals, spouting smoke and jetting flame, broke the stillness. His eyes returned to her face, fair and stainless. "Impos--s--sible!" he jerked, his voice entirely beyond control. "Im----" then his nerves vibrated and his skin crept.
"Three doctors in London, five doctors abroad, assured me that it is not impossible--unfortunately."
They were like two pale ghosts sitting in the shadows. Said one ghost to the other: "But have you--are you a----?" His tongue refused to form either terrible word.
Leah unexpectedly flung up her arms with a scream, then brought two shaking hands across her mouth to stifle that wild note of human pain. Right and left, up and down, did she look, as though to be certain that no one was within earshot but the vicar. "It will never do to let the servants hear," said the rapid action. Lionel's benumbed brain could not yet take in wholly the appalling truth--if truth it was. The leper dropped her hands and looked at him heavily.
"You lying devil," said Leah, slowly.
"What? what? what?" babbled Kaimes, incoherently.
She groaned and rocked with hands palm to palm between her knee. "I will, be thou clean; I will, be thou clean." Over and over again did she moan the words, till they bored into the listener's brain.
"God have mercy!" murmured the man, trying to be a man. The creeping paralysis of the horror almost struck him dumb. But he managed by a violent effort to wet his lips with a stiff tongue, and made it form certain words: "Are you sure of this?"
"Three doctors," went on the Duchess, rocking and droning as Demetrius did aforetime--"three doctors, five doctors, eight doctors in all. They said the same thing--ugh!--such a beastly thing! It was the truth, though. Doctors never lie like parsons. And that Book with its falsehoods--that----" She lunged forward without rising, and grabbing the Bible pitched it into the fire. Lionel snatched it from the flames; Leah struck it from his hands; and then ensued a silent struggle, uncanny, savage, in which some leaves were torn. All at once she relaxed her grip and lay back crying quietly. "It's a shame, a shame!" she wept softly; "just when everything was going on so well. And it can't be cured; all the money in the world can't cure me. I must die--in bits;" her voice soared shrilly, and she crouched, as though being beaten. "Ugh! That kiss, that beastly kiss!"
"Leah, how did you get this disease?"