The folds of garnet satin swept up at her side for a moment, revealing the long shapely glint of smoky black silk. Worth, up on the toes of his feet to gain height, was peering hungrily over her right shoulder. She turned her face toward him for a moment, gave him a roguish look, winked one eye, and the folds of her dress cascaded to the floor again, with a soft little plop.
Worth made a sudden convulsive move, and they had blended into one again, this time in full light of mid-room, not in the shadow of the vestibule.
Durand felt something heavy in his hand. Looked down and saw that he'd taken the pistol out. "I' 11 kill both of them," stencilled itself in white-hot lettering across his mind.
"And now--?" Worth said, lips blurred against her neck and shoulder. "Are you going to be kind--?"
Durand could see her head avert itself from his; smiling benevolently, yet avert itself. She twisted to face the door, and in turning, managed to get him to turn likewise; then somehow succeeded in leading him toward it, her face and shoulders still caught in his endless kiss. "No--" she said temperately, at intervals. "No-- No-- I am kind to you, Harry. No more kind than I've always been to you, no less-- Now that's a good boy--"
Durand gave a sigh of relief, put the gun away.
She was standing just within the gap of the door now, alone at last, her arm extended to the outside. Worth must have been kissing it repeatedly, the length of time she maintained it that way.
All he could hear was a subdued murmur of reluctant parting.
She withdrew her arm with effort, pressed the door closed.
He saw her face clearly as she came back into the full light. All the playfulness, coquetry, were wiped off it as with a sponge. It was shrewd and calculating, and a trifle pinched, as if with the long wearing of a mask.
"God Almighty!" he heard her groan wearily, and saw her strike herself a glancing blow against the temple.
She went first and looked out the window, as he had earlier; stood there motionless by it some time. Then when she'd had her fill of whatever thoughts the sight from there had managed to instill in her, she turned away suddenly, almost with abrupt impatience, causing her skirts to swirl and hiss out in the silence. She came back to the dresser, fetched out a drawer. No powdering at her nose, no primping at her hair, now. She had no look to spare for the mirror.
She withdrew the money from her stocking-top and flung it in, with a turn of the wrist that was almost derisive. But not of the money itself, possibly; of its source.
Reaching into some hiding place she had in there, she took out one of those same slender cigars Aunt Sarah had showed him in the St. Louis Street house in New Orleans.
To him there was something repugnant, almost obscene, in the sight of her bending to the lamp chimney with it until it had kindled; holding it tight-bitten, smoke sluicing from her miniature nostrils, as from a man's.
In a sickening phantasmagoric illusion, that lasted but a moment, she appeared to him as a fuming, horned devil, in her ruddy longtailed dress.
She set the cigar down, presently, in a hairpin tray, and seated herself by the mirror. She unfastened her hair and it came tumbling down in a molasses-colored cascade to the small of her back. Then she opened a vent in her dress at the side, separating a number of hooks from their eyes, but without unfastening or removing it farther than that. Leaving a gap through which her tightly laced side swelled and subsided again at each breath.
She took out the money now she had cast in only a moment before, but took out far more than she had flung in, and counted it over with close attention. Then she put it into a small lacquered casket, of the type used to hold jewels, and locked that, and gave it a commending little thump on its lid with her knuckles, as if in pleased finality.
She reclosed the drawer, stood up, moved over to the desk, took down its lid and seated herself at it. She drew out a sheet of notepaper from the rack. Took up a pen and dipped it, and squaring her other arm above the surface to be written on, began to write.
Durand moved out from behind the screen and slowly walked across the carpet toward her. It gave his tread no sound, though he wasn't trying for silence. He advanced undetected, until he was standing behind her, and could look down over her shoulder.
"Dear Billy," the paper said. "I--"
The pen had stopped, and she was nibbling for a moment at its end.
He put out his hand and let it come lightly to rest on her shoulder. Left it there, but lightly, lightly, as she had once put her hand to his shoulder, lightly, on the quayside at New Orleans; lightly, but crushing his life.
Her fright was the fright of guilt, and not innocence. Even before she could have known who it was. For she didn't turn to look, as the innocent of heart would have. She held her head rigidly as it was, turned the other way, neck taut with suspense. She was afraid to look. There must have been such guilt strewn behind her in her life, that anyone's sudden touch, in the stillness of the night, in the solitude of her room, she must have known could bode no good.
Her one hand dropped the pen lifelessly. Her other clawed secretively at the sheet of notepaper, sucking it up, causing it to disappear. Then dropping it, crumpled, over the desk side.
Still she didn't move; the sleek taffy-colored head held still, like something an axe was about to fall on.
Her eyes had found him in the mirror by now. It was over to the left of her, and when he looked at it himself, he could see, in the reflection of her talcum-white face, the pupils darkening the far corners of her eyes, giving her an ugly unnatural appearance, as though she had black eyeballs.
"Don't be afraid to look around, Julia," he said ironically. "It's only me. No one important. Merely me."
Suddenly she turned, so swiftly that the transpiacement of the silken back of her head by the plaster-white cast of her face was almost like that of an apparition.
"You act as though you don't remember me," he said softly. "Surely you haven't forgotten me, Julia. Me of all people."
"How'd you know I was here?" she demanded granularly.
"I didn't. I was the other man who was to have met you at the restaurant party tonight."
"How'd you get in here?"
"Through the door."
She had risen now, defensively, and was trying to reverse the desk chair to get it between them, reedy as it was, but there was no room to allow for its insertion.
He took it from her and set it to rest with his hand.
"How is it you don't order me from your room, Julia? How is it you don't threaten to scream for help? Or all those other things they usually do ?"
She said, summoning up a sort of desperate tractability, that he couldn't help but admire for an instant, "This is a matter that has to be settled between us, without screams or ordering you from the room." She stroked one arm, shiveringly, all the way up to the top. "Let's get it over with as soon as we can."
"It's taken me better than a year," he said. "You won't grudge a few added minutes, I hope ?"
She didn't answer.
"Were you going to marry the colonel, Julia? That would have been bigamous."
She shrugged irritably. "Oh, he's just a fool. I'm not accountable for him. The whole world is full of fools." And in this phrase, at least, there was unmistakable sincerity.
"And the biggest of them all is the one you're looking at right now1 Julia."
He kicked the crumpled tossball of notepaper leniently with the toe of his foot, moving it a little. But gently, as if it held somebody else's wracked hopes.
"Who's Billy ?"
"Oh, no one in particular. A chance acquaintance. A fellow I met somewhere." She flung out her hand, still with nervous irritability, as if causing the person to disappear from her ken in that way.
"The world must be full of Billys for you. Billys and Lous and Colonel Worths."