I
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her
unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in
the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation
that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place,
moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed
cloth that gave at once--she had tried it--the sense of the slippery
and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and
at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in
coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness,
to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she
had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small
balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar
little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar
little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow
black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low
even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such
privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room--the
hundred like it or worse--in the street. Each time she turned in again,
each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a
deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the
failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was
really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of
individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the
street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece
and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at least, of neither
shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet--as
including, in particular, the interview for which she had prepared
herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be
sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn't be
sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and
chalk-marked by fate like a "lot" at a common auction, if not in these
merciless signs of mere mean, stale feelings?
Her father's life, her sister's, her own, that of her two lost
brothers--the whole history of their house had the effect of some fine
florid, voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into
words, into notes, without sense, and then, hanging unfinished, into no
words, no notes at all. Why should a set of people have been put in
motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a
profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch
themselves in the wayside dust without a reason? The answer to these
questions was not in Chirk Street, but the questions themselves
bristled there, and the girl's repeated pause before the mirror and the
chimney-place might have represented her nearest approach to an escape
from them. Was it not in fact the partial escape from this "worst" in
which she was steeped to be able to make herself out again as agreeable
to see? She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be
staring at her beauty alone. She readjusted the poise of her black,
closely-feathered hat; retouched, beneath it, the thick fall of her
dusky hair; kept her eyes, aslant, no less on her beautiful averted
than on her beautiful presented oval. She was dressed altogether in
black, which gave an even tone, by contrast, to her clear face and made
her hair more harmoniously dark. Outside, on the balcony, her eyes
showed as blue; within, at the mirror, they showed almost as black. She
was handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items and aids;
a circumstance moreover playing its part at almost any time in the
impression she produced. The impression was one that remained, but as
regards the sources of it no sum in addition would have made up the
total. She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence
without mass. Slender and simple, frequently soundless, she was somehow
always in the line of the eye--she counted singularly for its pleasure.
More "dressed," often, with fewer accessories, than other women, or
less dressed, should occasion require, with more, she probably could
not have given the key to these felicities. They were mysteries of
which her friends were conscious--those friends whose general
explanation was to say that she was clever, whether or no it were taken
by the world as the cause or as the effect of her charm. If she saw
more things than her fine face in the dull glass of her father's
lodgings, she might have seen that, after all, she was not herself a
fact in the collapse. She didn't judge herself cheap, she didn't make
for misery. Personally, at least, she was not chalk-marked for the
auction. She hadn't given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was
the last word, would end with a sort of meaning. There was a minute
during which, though her eyes were fixed, she quite visibly lost
herself in the thought of the way she might still pull things round had
she only been a man. It was the name, above all, she would take in
hand--the precious name she so liked and that, in spite of the harm her
wretched father had done it, was not yet past praying for. She loved it
in fact the more tenderly for that bleeding wound. But what could a
penniless girl do with it but let it go?
When her father at last appeared she became, as usual, instantly aware
of the futility of any effort to hold him to anything. He had written
her that he was ill, too ill to leave his room, and that he must see
her without delay; and if this had been, as was probable, the sketch of
a design, he was indifferent even to the moderate finish required for
deception. He had clearly wanted, for perversities that he called
reasons, to see her, just as she herself had sharpened for a talk; but
she now again felt, in the inevitability of the freedom he used with
her, all the old ache, her poor mother's very own, that he couldn't
touch you ever so lightly without setting up. No relation with him
could be so short or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt;
and this, in the strangest way in the world, not because he desired it
to be--feeling often, as he surely must, the profit for him of its not
being--but because there was never a mistake for you that he could
leave unmade or a conviction of his impossibility in you that he could
approach you without strengthening. He might have awaited her on the
sofa in his sitting-room, or might have stayed in bed and received her
in that situation. She was glad to be spared the sight of such
_penetralia,_ but it would have reminded her a little less that there
was no truth in him. This was the weariness of every fresh meeting; he
dealt out lies as he might the cards from the greasy old pack for the
game of diplomacy to which you were to sit down with him. The
inconvenience--as always happens in such cases--was not that you minded
what was false, but that you missed what was true. He might be ill, and
it might suit you to know it, but no contact with him, for this, could
ever be straight enough. Just so he even might die, but Kate fairly
wondered on what evidence of his own she would some day have to believe
it.
He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be
above the one they were in: he had already been out of the house,
though he would either, should she challenge him, deny it or present it
as a proof of his extremity. She had, however, by this time, quite
ceased to challenge him; not only, face to face with him, vain
irritation dropped, but he breathed upon the tragic consciousness in
such a way that after a moment nothing of it was left. The difficulty
was not less that he breathed in the same way upon the comic: she
almost believed that with this latter she might still have found a
foothold for clinging to him. He had ceased to be amusing--he was
really too inhuman. His perfect look, which had floated him so long,
was practically perfect still; but one had long since for every
occasion taken it for granted. Nothing could have better shown than the
actual how right one had been. He looked exactly as much as usual--all
pink and silver as to skin and hair, all straitness and starch as to
figure and dress--the man in the world least connected with anything
unpleasant. He was so particularly the English gentleman and the
fortunate, settled, normal person. Seen at a foreign _table d'hôte,_
he suggested but one thing: "In what perfection England produces them!"
He had kind, safe eyes, and a voice which, for all its clean fulness,
told, in a manner, the happy history of its having never had once to
raise itself. Life had met him so, half-way, and had turned round so to
walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to
choose the pace. Those who knew him a little said, "How he does
dress!"--those who knew him better said, "How _does_ he?" The one stray
gleam of comedy just now in his daughter's eyes was the funny feeling
he momentarily made her have of being herself "looked up" by him in
sordid lodgings. For a minute after he came in it was as if the place
were her own and he the visitor with susceptibilities. He gave you
funny feelings, he had indescribable arts, that quite turned the
tables: that had been always how he came to see her mother so long as
her mother would see him. He came from places they had often not known
about, but he patronised Lexham Gardens. Kate's only actual expression
of impatience, however, was "I'm glad you're so much better!"
"I'm not so much better, my dear--I'm exceedingly unwell; the proof of
which is, precisely, that I've been out to the chemist's--that beastly
fellow at the corner." So Mr. Croy showed he could qualify the humble
hand that assuaged him. "I'm taking something he has made up for me.
It's just why I've sent for you--that you may see me as I really am."
"Oh papa, it's long since I've ceased to see you otherwise than as you
really are! I think we've all arrived by this time at the right word
for that: 'You're beautiful--_n'en parlons plus.'_ You're as beautiful
as ever--you look lovely." He judged meanwhile her own appearance, as
she knew she could always trust him to do; recognising, estimating,
sometimes disapproving, what she wore, showing her the interest he
continued to take in her. He might really take none at all, yet she
virtually knew herself the creature in the world to whom he was least
indifferent. She had often enough wondered what on earth, at the pass
he had reached, could give him pleasure, and she had come back, on
these occasions, to that. It gave him pleasure that she was handsome,
that she was, in her way, a sensible value. It was at least as marked,
nevertheless, that he derived none from similar conditions, so far as
they _were_ similar, in his other child. Poor Marian might be handsome,
but he certainly didn't care. The hitch here, of course, was that, with
whatever beauty, her sister, widowed and almost in want, with four
bouncing children, was not a sensible value. She asked him, the next
thing, how long he had been in his actual quarters, though aware of how
little it mattered, how little any answer he might make would probably
have in common with the truth. She failed in fact to notice his answer,
truthful or not, already occupied as she was with what she had on her
own side to say to him. This was really what had made her wait--what
superseded the small remainder of her resentment at his constant
practical impertinence; the result of all of which was that, within a
minute, she had brought it out. "Yes--even now I'm willing to go with
you. I don't know what you may have wished to say to me, and even if
you hadn't written you would within a day or two have heard from me.
Things have happened, and I've only waited, for seeing you, till I
should be quite sure. I _am_ quite sure. I'll go with you."