"Is it ?" she said. "No, there was only one Lou. It may be a little late to say it now. But I didn't marry the Bfflys and the Colonel Worths. I married Lou."
"You acted it," he agreed mordantly.
"Well, it's late," she said. "What's the good now?"
"We agree on that, at least."
She went over to the lamp, and thoughtfully spanned her hand against it, so that her flesh glowed translucent brick-red, and watched that effect for a while. Then she turned toward him.
"What is it, Lou? What are your plans for me ?"
His hand rose slowly to that part of his coat which covered where the gun was resting against him. Remained there a moment. Then crept around to the inside and found it, by the handle. Then drew it out, so slowly, so slowly, the bone handle, the nickelled chambers and fluted barrel seemed never to stop coming, like something pulled on an endless train.
"I came here to kill you, Julia."
A single glance was all she gave it. Just enough to identify it, to see that he had the means to do it on his person. Then after that, her eyes were for his alone, never left them from then on. Knowing where the signal would lie: in his eyes and not on the gun. Knowing where the only place to appeal lay: in his eyes.
She looked at him for a long time, as if measuring his ability to do it: what he'd said. What she saw there, only she could have told. Whether full purpose, hopeless to deflect, or half-purpose, waiting only to be crumbled.
He didn't point it, he didn't raise it to her; he simply held it, on the flat side, muzzle offside. But his face was white with the long pain she'd given him, and whatever she'd read in his look, still all that was needed was a turn of his hand.
Perhaps she was a gambler, and instinctively liked the odds, they appealed to her, whetted her; she hated to bet on a sure thing. Or perhaps the reverse: she was no gambler, she only banked upon a certainty, never anything else, in men or in cards; and this was a certainty now, though he didn't know it himself yet. Or perhaps, again it was solely vanity, self-esteem, that prompted her, and she must put her power over him to the test, even though to lose meant to die. Perhaps, even, if she were to lose, she would want to die, vanity being the thing it is.
She smiled at him. But in brittle challenge, not in anything else.
She suddenly wrenched at the shoulder of her dress, tore it down. Then pulled at it, farther down and still farther down, withdrawing her arm from the bedraggled loop it now made, until at last the whiteness of her side was revealed all but to the waist. On the left, the side of the heart. Moving toward him all the while, closer step by step. White as milk and pliable as China silk, flesh flexing as she walked.
Then halted as the cold gun touched her, holding her ravaged dress-bodice clear and looked deep into his eyes.
"All right, Lou," she whispered.
He withdrew the gun from between them.
She came a step closer with its removal.
"Don't hesitate, Lou," she breathed. "I'm waiting."
His heel edged backward, carrying him a hair's breadth off. He stuffed the gun into his side pocket, to be rid of it, hastily, fumblingly, careless how he did so, leaving the hilt projecting.
"Cover yourself up, Julia," he said. "You're all exposed."
And there was the answer. If she'd been a gambler, she'd won. If she'd been no gambler, she'd read his eyes right the first time. If it was vanity that had led her to the brink of destruction, it had triumphed, it was intact, undamaged.
She gave no sign. Not even of having triumphed; which is the way of the triumphant when they are clever as well. His face was bedewed with accumulated moisture, as though it were he who had taken the risk.
She drew her clothes upward again, never to where they had originally been but at least in partial restoration.
"Then if you won't kill me, what do you want of me?"
"To take you back to New Orleans and hand you over to the police." As if uneasy at their close confrontation, he sundered it, shifted aside. "Get yourself ready," he said over his shoulder.
Suddenly his head inclined, to stare downward at his own chest, as if in involuntary astonishment. Her arms had crept downward past his shoulders, soft as white ribbons, and were trying to join together before him in supplicating embrace. He could feel the softness of her hair as it came to rest against him just below the nape of his neck.
He parted them, flung them off, sending her backward from him. "Get yourself ready," he said grimly.
"If it's the money, wait--I have some here, I'll give it to you. And if it's not enough, I'll make it up--I swear I will--"
"Not for that. You were my wife, in law, and there was no crime committed, in law."
"Then for what?"
"To answer what became of Julia Russell. The real one. You're not Julia Russell and you never were. Do you pretend you are?"
She didn't answer. He thought he could detect more real fright now than at the time of the gun. Her eyes were wider, more strained, at any rate.
She quitted the drawer she had thrown open and been crouched beside, where the money was, and came toward him.
"To tell them what you did with her," he said. "And there's a name for that. Would you like to hear it?"
"No, no!" she protested, and even held her palms fronted toward him as she came close, but whether her protest was for the thought he had suggested, or for the very sound itself of the word he had threatened to utter, he could not tell. Almost, it seemed, the latter.
"Mur--" he began.
And then her palms had found his mouth and stopped it, terrifledly. "No, no! Lou, don't say that! I had nothing to do with it. I don't know what became of her. Only listen to me, hear me; Lou, you must listen to me!"
He tried to cast her off as he had before, but this time she clung, she would not be rejected. Though his arms flung her, she came back upon them again, carried by them.
"Listen to what? More lies? Our whole marriage was a lie. Every word you spoke to me, every breath you drew, in all that time was a lie. You'll tell them to the police, not to me any longer. I want no more of them!"
That word, just as the one she'd stifled before, seemed to have a particular terror for her. She quailed, and gave a little inchoate moan, the first sound of weakness she'd made yet. Or if it was artifice, calculation pretending to be weakness for its effect upon him, it succeeded by that much, for he took it to be weakness, and thus its purpose was gained.
Still clinging in desperation to the wings of his coat, she dropped to her knees before him, grovelling in posture of utmost supplication the human figure is capable of.
"No, no, the truth this time!" she sobbed drily. "Only the truth, and nothing else! If you'll only listen to me, let me speak--"
He stopped trying to rid himself of her at last, and stood there stolid.
"Would you know it?" he said contemptuously.
But she'd gained her hearing.
Her arms dropped from him, and she turned her head away for a moment and backed her hand to her own mouth. Whether in hurried search of inspiration, or whether steeling herself for the honest unburdening about to come, he could not tell.
"There's no train a while yet," he said grudgingly. "And I can't take you to the railroad station as you are now and keep you dawdling about there with me half the night--so speak if you want to." He dropped back into a chair, pulled at his collar as if exhausted by the emotional stress they had both just been through. "It will do you no good. I warn you before you begin, the outcome will be the same. You are coming back to New Orleans with me to face justice. And all your tears and all your kneeling and all your pleas are thrown away!"
Without rising, she inched toward him, crept as it were, on her very knees, so that the distance between them was again lessened, and she was at his very feet, penitent, abject, her hands to the arm of the chair he was in.
"It wasn't I. I didn't do it. He must have done something to her, for I never saw her again. But what it was, I don't know. I didn't see it done. He only came to me afterward and said she'd had a mishap, and I was afraid to question him any further than--"