The Monster. Saltus Edgar
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The signature startled. At once, as she turned to the initial sentences, she experienced the curious and unenviable sensation of falling from an inordinate height, and it was not with any idea that the sensation would cease, but rather with the craving to know, which in certain crises of the emotions becomes more unendurable than any uncertainty can be, that she read the rest of the first letter; after it, the second letter, and the third.
Then, as truth stared at her and she at truth, so monstrous was its aspect that, with one shuddering intake of the breath, life withered within her, light vanished without.
When ultimately, without knowing who she was; when, conscious only of an objective self struggling in darkness with the intangible and the void, when then life and light returned, she was on the floor, the monster peering at her.
She disowned it, disavowed it. But beside her on the floor the letters lay. There was its lair. It had sprung from them, and always from them it would be peering at her, driving her mad with its blighting eyes, unless——
She got on her hands and knees, and from them to her feet. Her body ached from the fall, and her head was throbbing. With the idea that smelling salts, or some cologne water which she had, might help her, she went and fetched them from an adjoining room. They were not of much use, she found, though presently she could think more clearly, and in a little while she was considering the possibility that had loomed.
In certain conditions the soul gets used to monsters. It makes itself at home with what it must. Her soul, she thought, might also. But even as she thought it, she knew she never could. She knew that even were she able to succeed in blinding herself to this thing by day, at night it would crawl to her, sit at her side, pluck at her sleeve, wake her, and cry: “Behold me!”
It would cry it at her until she cried it at him. Then inevitably it would kill her.
She had been seated, bathing her head with cologne. Now fear, helplessness, the consciousness of both possessed her. They impelled her to act. She stood up. She looked about the room. Filled with flowers and sunshine, it said nothing. Beyond was the sea. It called to her. It told her that in a rowboat she could drift and be lost. It told her that that night she could throw herself from the yacht. The blue expanse, the high white waves, the little mauve ripples invited.
The room, though, with its flowers and sunshine, deterred. To throw herself from the yacht meant that she would have to wait. It meant more. It meant that she would have to see him. It meant that she would have to feign and pretend. These things she could not do.
There remained the rowboat. Yet, in some way, now, the sea seemed less inviting. At the thought of its embrace and of its depths she shrank. To die, to cease any more to be, to succumb like the heroines of the old tragedies to fate, at the idea of that, her young soul revolted. There must be some other course.
She looked from the window. Beneath, before the ocean, a motor was passing. The whirr of it prompting, flight occurred to her, an escape to some spot that would engulf her as surely as the waves. Hesitatingly she considered it. But there was nothing else. Moreover, if she were to go, she must go at once.
She turned, crossed the room, stooped, gathered the letters, and seated herself at the table. There she put the letters in another envelope which she addressed to Verplank. While writing his name, her hand trembled, it shook on the paper drops of ink. These she tried to blot, and made a smear.
Trembling still, she got up, went to the telephone, and attempted to speak. At first, too overcome to do so, she leaned against the wall. It did not seem possible that she could do this thing. But she must, she knew. At last, with an effort, she spoke.
“When does the next train leave San Diego? One moment. Have my servants sent to me; my servants, yes, and—and order a motor.”
Again she leaned against the wall. The room had become intolerable. Into the languors of the air a suffocation had entered, and it was unconsciously, in a condition semi-somnambulistic that she found herself considering the pink of the ceiling, then the rose-leaves woven in the green of the carpet, the dull red of the table-cover, the darker red of a tassel, the tall vase that stood on the table and in which were taller lilies.
There, beneath them was the monster. Its vibrations, disseminating through the room, were silhouetted on the walls. She could not see them, but she could feel them. They choked her.
But now her servants appeared. Nervously, with an irritability so foreign to her, that they eyed each other uncertainly, she gave them hurried commands. These obeyed and the porters summoned, she passed, choking still, from this room, the secrets of which the walls detained.
It was perhaps preordered that they should do so. Long later, in looking back, she realised that destiny then was having its say with her, and realised also why. At the time, however, she was ignorant of two incidents, which, after the fashion of the apparently insignificant, subsequently became the reverse.
One incident had the porters for agent; the other was effected by a maid who supervened. The porters, in removing the luggage, collided with the table. The inkstand, the tall vase with the taller lilies, were upset; the vase, spilling water and flowers, fell broken on the floor; from the stand, ink rippled on the red of the cloth, on the darker red of the tassels, on the envelope which Leilah had directed to Verplank. These things, a maid, summoned by the crash, removed.
When Verplank returned, the table was bare.
He did not notice. What he alone noticed was Leilah’s absence. She is below, he told himself. Then precisely as she had summoned her servants, he summoned his.
“Roberts,” he said presently to a man. “Find Mrs. Verplank. Then get my things together. We start at once.”
For a moment the man considered the master. At once civilly but stolidly he spoke:
“Mrs. Verplank has gone, sir.”
Verplank, who had turned on his heel, turned back.
“What?”
“The hotel is full of it, sir. When I found that Mrs. Verplank was leaving, I——”
“What!” Verplank, in angry amazement, repeated.
“Mrs. Verplank is taking the limited, sir. It was the clerk who told me.”
Then, for a moment, the master considered the man. At the simple statement his mind had become like a sea in a storm. A whirlwind tossed his thoughts.
But Leilah was still too near, her caresses were too recent for him to be able to realise that she had actually gone, and the fact that he could not realise it disclosed itself in those words which all have uttered, all at least before whom the inexplicable has sprung:
“It is impossible!”
“Yes, sir, it does seem most unusual.”
Verplank had spoken less to the man than to himself, and for a moment stood engrossed in that futilest of human endeavours, the effort to read a riddle of which the only Œdipus is time.
At once all the imaginable causes that could have contributed to it danced before him and vanished. He told himself that Leilah’s disappearance might be an attempt at some hide-and-go-seek which shortly would end. But he knew her to be incapable of such nonsense. Immediately he decided that his servant was in error, and that she was then on the yacht. If not, then, clearly she had gone mad, or else——
But there are certain hypotheses which certain intellects decline to stomach. Yet the letter from her father recurring to him, he did consider the possibility that she might have gone because of some secret of his bachelor life. Anything may be distorted. Unfolded by her father, these secrets, which in themselves were not very dark, might be made to look infernal, and could readily be so made by this man who was not only just the one to do it, but who would have an object in so doing. Always he had been inimical to Verplank, and this, the abandoned bridegroom then felt, not on his account, but because of his father.
The latter, Effingham Verplank, had been a great catch, and a great beau. His charm had been myrrh and cassia—and nightshade,