When Lily woke she had the bed to herself, and the winter light was
in the room.
She sat up, bewildered by the strangeness of her surroundings;
then memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver.
In the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a
neighbouring building, she saw her evening dress and opera
cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a chair. Finery laid off is as
unappetizing as the remains of a feast, and it occurred to Lily
that, at home, her maid’s vigilance had always spared her the
sight of such incongruities. Her body ached with fatigue, and with
the constriction of her attitude in Gerty’s bed. All through her
troubled sleep she had been conscious of having no space to toss
in, and the long effort to remain motionless made her feel as if
she had spent her night in a train.
This sense of physical discomfort was the first to assert itself;
then she perceived, beneath it, a corresponding mental prostration,
a languor of horror more insufferable than the first rush of her
disgust. The thought of having to wake every morning with this
weight on her breast roused her tired mind to fresh effort. She
must find some way out of the slough into which she had stumbled:
it was not so much compunction as the dread of her morning thoughts
that pressed on her the need of action. But she was unutterably
tired; it was weariness to think connectedly. She lay back, looking
about the poor slit of a room with a renewal of physical distaste.
The outer air, penned between high buildings, brought no freshness
through the window; steam-heat was beginning to sing in a coil of
dingy pipes, and a smell of cooking penetrated the crack of the
door.
The door opened, and Gerty, dressed and hatted, entered with a cup
of tea. Her face looked sallow and swollen in the dreary light, and
her dull hair shaded imperceptibly into the tones of her skin.
She glanced shyly at Lily, asking in an embarrassed tone how she
felt; Lily answered with the same constraint, and raised herself up
to drink the tea.
“I must have been over-tired last night; I think I had a nervous
attack in the carriage,” she said, as the drink brought clearness
to her sluggish thoughts.
“You were not well; I am so glad you came here,” Gerty returned.
“But how am I to get home? And Aunt Julia—?”
“She knows; I telephoned early, and your maid has brought your
things. But won’t you eat something? I scrambled the eggs myself.”
Lily could not eat; but the tea strengthened her to rise and dress
under her maid’s searching gaze. It was a relief to her that Gerty
was obliged to hasten away: the two kissed silently, but without a
trace of the previous night’s emotion.
Lily found Mrs. Peniston in a state of agitation. She had sent for
Grace Stepney and was taking digitalis. Lily breasted the storm of
enquiries as best she could, explaining that she had had an attack
of faintness on her way back from Carry Fisher’s; that, fearing
she would not have strength to reach home, she had gone to Miss
Farish’s instead; but that a quiet night had restored her, and that
she had no need of a doctor.
This was a relief to Mrs. Peniston, who could give herself up
to her own symptoms, and Lily was advised to go and lie down,
her aunt’s panacea for all physical and moral disorders. In
the solitude of her own room she was brought back to a sharp
contemplation of facts. Her daylight view of them necessarily
differed from the cloudy vision of the night. The winged furies
were now prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea. But
her fears seemed the uglier, thus shorn of their vagueness; and
besides, she had to act, not rave. For the first time she forced
herself to reckon up the exact amount of her debt to Trenor; and
the result of this hateful computation was the discovery that she
had, in all, received nine thousand dollars from him. The flimsy
pretext on which it had been given and received shrivelled up
in the blaze of her shame: she knew that not a penny of it was
her own, and that to restore her self-respect she must at once
repay the whole amount. The inability thus to solace her outraged
feelings gave her a paralyzing sense of insignificance. She was
realizing for the first time that a woman’s dignity may cost more
to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral
attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world
appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it.
After luncheon, when Grace Stepney’s prying eyes had been
removed, Lily asked for a word with her aunt. The two ladies
went upstairs to the sitting-room, where Mrs. Peniston seated
herself in her black satin arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons,
beside a bead-work table bearing a bronze box with a miniature
of Beatrice Cenci in the lid. Lily felt for these objects the
same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings
of the court-room. It was here that her aunt received her rare
confidences, and the pink-eyed smirk of the turbaned Beatrice was
associated in her mind with the gradual fading of the smile from
Mrs. Peniston’s lips. That lady’s dread of a scene gave her an
inexorableness which the greatest strength of character could not
have produced, since it was independent of all considerations of
right or wrong; and knowing this, Lily seldom ventured to assail
it. She had never felt less like making the attempt than on the
present occasion; but she had sought in vain for any other means of
escape from an intolerable situation.
Mrs. Peniston examined her critically. “You’re a bad colour, Lily:
this incessant rushing about is beginning to tell on you,” she said.
Miss Bart saw an opening. “I don’t think it’s that, Aunt Julia;
I’ve had worries,” she replied.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with the snap of a
purse closing against a beggar.
“I’m sorry to bother you with them,” Lily continued, “but I really
believe my faintness last night was brought on partly by anxious
thoughts—”
“I should have said Carry Fisher’s cook was enough to account for
it. She has a woman who was with Maria Melson in 1891—the spring of
the year we went to Aix—and I remember dining there two days before
we sailed, and feeling SURE the coppers hadn’t been scoured.”
“I don’t think I ate much; I can’t eat or sleep.” Lily paused, and
then said abruptly: “The fact is, Aunt Julia, I owe some money.”
Mrs. Peniston’s face clouded perceptibly, but did not express the
astonishment her niece had expected. She was silent, and Lily was
forced to continue: “I have been foolish——”
“No doubt you have: extremely foolish,” Mrs. Peniston interposed.
“I fail to see how any one with your income, and no expenses—not to
mention the handsome presents I’ve always given you——”
“Oh, you’ve been most generous, Aunt Julia; I shall never forget
your kindness. But perhaps you don’t quite realize the expense a
girl is put to nowadays——”
“I don’t realize that YOU are put to any expense except for your
clothes and your railway fares. I expect you to be handsomely
dressed; but I paid Celeste’s bill for you last October.”
Lily hesitated: her aunt’s implacable memory had never been more
inconvenient. “You were as kind as possible; but I have had to get
a few things since——”
“What kind of things? Clothes? How much have you spent? Let me see
the bill—I daresay the woman is swindling you.”
“Oh, no, I think not: clothes have grown so frightfully expensive;
and one needs so many different kinds, with country visits, and
golf and skating, and Aiken and Tuxedo——”
“Let me see the bill,” Mrs. Peniston repeated.
Lily hesitated again. In the first place, Mme. Celeste had not yet
sent in her account, and secondly, the amount it represented was
only a fraction of the sum that Lily needed.
“She hasn’t sent in the bill for my winter things, but I KNOW it’s
large; and there are one or two other things; I’ve been careless
and imprudent—I’m frightened to think of what I owe——”
She raised the troubled loveliness of her face to Mrs. Peniston,
vainly hoping that a sight so moving to the other sex might not be
without effect upon her own. But the effect produced was that of
making Mrs. Peniston shrink back apprehensively.
“Really, Lily, you are old enough to manage your own affairs, and
after frightening me to death by your performance of last night you
might at least choose a better time to worry me with such matters.”
Mrs. Peniston glanced at the clock, and swallowed a tablet of
digitalis. “If you owe Celeste another thousand, she may send me
her account,” she added, as though to end the discussion at any
cost.
“I am very sorry, Aunt Julia; I hate to trouble you at such a time;
but I have really no choice—I ought to have spoken sooner—I owe a
great deal more than a thousand dollars.”
“A great deal more? Do you owe two? She must have robbed you!”
“I told you it was not only Celeste. I—there are other bills—more
pressing—that must be settled.”
“What on earth have you been buying? Jewelry? You must have gone
off your head,” said Mrs. Peniston with asperity. “But if you have
run into debt, you must suffer the consequences, and put aside your
monthly income till your bills are paid. If you stay quietly here
until next spring, instead of racing about all over the country,
you will have no expenses at all, and surely in four or five months
you can settle the rest of your bills if I pay the dress-maker now.”
Lily was again silent. She knew she could not hope to extract
even a thousand dollars from Mrs. Peniston on the mere plea of
paying Celeste’s bill: Mrs. Peniston would expect to go over the
dress-maker’s account, and would make out the cheque to her and not
to Lily. And yet the money must be obtained before the day was over!
“The debts I speak of are—different—not like tradesmen’s bills,”
she began confusedly; but Mrs. Peniston’s look made her almost
afraid to continue. Could it be that her aunt suspected anything?
The idea precipitated Lily’s avowal.
“The fact is, I’ve played cards a good deal—bridge; the women all
do it; girls too—it’s expected. Sometimes I’ve won—won a good
deal—but lately I’ve been unlucky—and of course such debts can’t be
paid off gradually——”
She paused: Mrs. Peniston’s face seemed to be petrifying as she
listened.
“Cards—you’ve played cards for money? It’s true, then: when I was
told so I wouldn’t believe it. I won’t ask if the other horrors
I was told were true too; I’ve heard enough for the state of my
nerves. When I think of the example you’ve had in this house! But I
suppose it’s your foreign bringing-up—no one knew where your mother
picked up her friends. And her Sundays were a scandal—that I know.”
Mrs. Peniston wheeled round suddenly. “You play cards on Sunday?”
Lily flushed with the recollection of certain rainy Sundays at
Bellomont and with the Dorsets.
“You’re hard on me, Aunt Julia: I have never really cared for
cards, but a girl hates to be thought priggish and superior, and
one drifts into doing what the others do. I’ve had a dreadful
lesson, and if you’ll help me out this time I promise you—”
Mrs. Peniston raised her hand warningly. “You needn’t make any
promises: it’s unnecessary. When I offered you a home I didn’t
undertake to pay your gambling debts.”
“Aunt Julia! You don’t mean that you won’t help me?”
“I shall certainly not do anything to give the impression that I
countenance your behaviour. If you really owe your dress-maker,
I will settle with her—beyond that I recognize no obligation to
assume your debts.”
Lily had risen, and stood pale and quivering before her aunt. Pride
stormed in her, but humiliation forced the cry from her lips: “Aunt
Julia, I shall be disgraced—I—” But she could go no farther. If her
aunt turned such a stony ear to the fiction of the gambling debts,
in what spirit would she receive the terrible avowal of the truth?
“I consider that you ARE disgraced, Lily: disgraced by your conduct
far more than by its results. You say your friends have persuaded
you to play cards with them; well, they may as well learn a lesson
too. They can probably afford to lose a little money—and at any
rate, I am not going to waste any of mine in paying them. And now I
must ask you to leave me—this scene has been extremely painful, and
I have my own health to consider. Draw down the blinds, please; and
tell Jennings I will see no one this afternoon but Grace Stepney.”
Lily went up to her own room and bolted the door. She was trembling
with fear and anger—the rush of the furies’ wings was in her ears.
She walked up and down the room with blind irregular steps. The
last door of escape was closed—she felt herself shut in with her
dishonour.
Suddenly her wild pacing brought her before the clock on the
chimney-piece. Its hands stood at half-past three, and she
remembered that Selden was to come to her at four. She had meant
to put him off with a word—but now her heart leaped at the
thought of seeing him. Was there not a promise of rescue in his
love? As she had lain at Gerty’s side the night before, she had
thought of his coming, and of the sweetness of weeping out her
pain upon his breast. Of course she had meant to clear herself of
its consequences before she met him—she had never really doubted
that Mrs. Peniston would come to her aid. And she had felt, even
in the full storm of her misery, that Selden’s love could not be
her ultimate refuge; only it would be so sweet to take a moment’s
shelter there, while she gathered fresh strength to go on.
But now his love was her only hope, and as she sat alone with her
wretchedness the thought of confiding in him became as seductive
as the river’s flow to the suicide. The first plunge would be
terrible—but afterward, what blessedness might come! She remembered
Gerty’s words: “I know him—he will help you”; and her mind clung
to them as a sick person might cling to a healing relic. Oh, if
he really understood—if he would help her to gather up her broken
life, and put it together in some new semblance in which no trace
of the past should remain! He had always made her feel that she
was worthy of better things, and she had never been in greater
need of such solace. Once and again she shrank at the thought of
imperilling his love by her confession: for love was what she
needed—it would take the glow of passion to weld together the
shattered fragments of her self-esteem. But she recurred to Gerty’s
words and held fast to them. She was sure that Gerty knew Selden’s
feeling for her, and it had never dawned upon her blindness that
Gerty’s own judgment of him was coloured by emotions far more
ardent than her own.
Four o’clock found her in the drawing-room: she was sure that
Selden would be punctual. But the hour came and passed—it moved
on feverishly, measured by her impatient heart-beats. She had
time to take a fresh survey of her wretchedness, and to fluctuate
anew between the impulse to confide in Selden and the dread of
destroying his illusions. But as the minutes passed the need of
throwing herself on his comprehension became more urgent: she could
not bear the weight of her misery alone. There would be a perilous
moment, perhaps: but could she not trust to her beauty to bridge it
over, to land her safe in the shelter of his devotion?
But the hour sped on and Selden did not come. Doubtless he had been
detained, or had misread her hurriedly scrawled note, taking the
four for a five. The ringing of the door-bell a few minutes after
five confirmed this supposition, and made Lily hastily resolve to
write more legibly in future. The sound of steps in the hall, and
of the butler’s voice preceding them, poured fresh energy into her
veins. She felt herself once more the alert and competent moulder
of emergencies, and the remembrance of her power over Selden
flushed her with sudden confidence. But when the drawing-room door
opened it was Rosedale who came in.
The reaction caused her a sharp pang, but after a passing
movement of irritation at the clumsiness of fate, and at her
own carelessness in not denying the door to all but Selden, she
controlled herself and greeted Rosedale amicably. It was annoying
that Selden, when he came, should find that particular visitor in
possession, but Lily was mistress of the art of ridding herself
of superfluous company, and to her present mood Rosedale seemed
distinctly negligible.
His own view of the situation forced itself upon her after a few
moments’ conversation. She had caught at the Brys’ entertainment as
an easy impersonal subject, likely to tide them over the interval
till Selden appeared, but Mr. Rosedale, tenaciously planted beside
the tea-table, his hands in his pockets, his legs a little too
freely extended, at once gave the topic a personal turn.
“Pretty well done—well, yes, I suppose it was: Welly Bry’s got his
back up and don’t mean to let go till he’s got the hang of the
thing. Of course, there were things here and there—things Mrs.
Fisher couldn’t be expected to see to—the champagne wasn’t cold,
and the coats got mixed in the coat-room. I would have spent more
money on the music. But that’s my character: if I want a thing I’m
willing to pay: I don’t go up to the counter, and then wonder if
the article’s worth the price. I wouldn’t be satisfied to entertain
like the Welly Brys; I’d want something that would look more easy
and natural, more as if I took it in my stride. And it takes just
two things to do that, Miss Bart: money, and the right woman to
spend it.”
He paused, and examined her attentively while she affected to
rearrange the tea-cups.
“I’ve got the money,” he continued, clearing his throat, “and what
I want is the woman—and I mean to have her too.”
He leaned forward a little, resting his hands on the head of his
walking-stick. He had seen men of Ned Van Alstyne’s type bring
their hats and sticks into a drawing-room, and he thought it added
a touch of elegant familiarity to their appearance.
Lily was silent, smiling faintly, with her eyes absently resting on
his face. She was in reality reflecting that a declaration would
take some time to make, and that Selden must surely appear before
the moment of refusal had been reached. Her brooding look, as of
a mind withdrawn yet not averted, seemed to Mr. Rosedale full of
a subtle encouragement. He would not have liked any evidence of
eagerness.
“I mean to have her too,” he repeated, with a laugh intended to
strengthen his self-assurance. “I generally HAVE got what I wanted
in life, Miss Bart. I wanted money, and I’ve got more than I know
how to invest; and now the money doesn’t seem to be of any account
unless I can spend it on the right woman. That’s what I want to do
with it: I want my wife to make all the other women feel small. I’d
never grudge a dollar that was spent on that. But it isn’t every
woman can do it, no matter how much you spend on her. There was a
girl in some history book who wanted gold shields, or something,
and the fellows threw ’em at her, and she was crushed under ’em:
they killed her. Well, that’s true enough: some women looked buried
under their jewelry. What I want is a woman who’ll hold her head
higher the more diamonds I put on it. And when I looked at you the
other night at the Brys’, in that plain white dress, looking as if
you had a crown on, I said to myself: ‘By gad, if she had one she’d
wear it as if it grew on her.’”
Still Lily did not speak, and he continued, warming with his theme:
“Tell you what it is, though, that kind of woman costs more than
all the rest of ’em put together. If a woman’s going to ignore her
pearls, they want to be better than anybody else’s—and so it is
with everything else. You know what I mean—you know it’s only the
showy things that are cheap. Well, I should want my wife to be able
to take the earth for granted if she wanted to. I know there’s one
thing vulgar about money, and that’s the thinking about it; and my
wife would never have to demean herself in that way.” He paused,
and then added, with an unfortunate lapse to an earlier manner: “I
guess you know the lady I’ve got in view, Miss Bart.”
Lily raised her head, brightening a little under the challenge.
Even through the dark tumult of her thoughts, the clink of Mr.
Rosedale’s millions had a faintly seductive note. Oh, for enough of
them to cancel her one miserable debt! But the man behind them grew
increasingly repugnant in the light of Selden’s expected coming.
The contrast was too grotesque: she could scarcely suppress the
smile it provoked. She decided that directness would be best.
“If you mean me, Mr. Rosedale, I am very grateful—very much
flattered; but I don’t know what I have ever done to make you
think—”
“Oh, if you mean you’re not dead in love with me, I’ve got sense
enough left to see that. And I ain’t talking to you as if you
were—I presume I know the kind of talk that’s expected under those
circumstances. I’m confoundedly gone on you—that’s about the size
of it—and I’m just giving you a plain business statement of the
consequences. You’re not very fond of me—YET—but you’re fond of
luxury, and style, and amusement, and of not having to worry about
cash. You like to have a good time, and not have to settle for it;
and what I propose to do is to provide for the good time and do the
settling.”
He paused, and she returned with a chilling smile: “You are
mistaken in one point, Mr. Rosedale: whatever I enjoy I am prepared
to settle for.”
She spoke with the intention of making him see that, if his words
implied a tentative allusion to her private affairs, she was
prepared to meet and repudiate it. But if he recognized her meaning
it failed to abash him, and he went on in the same tone: “I didn’t
mean to give offence; excuse me if I’ve spoken too plainly. But
why ain’t you straight with me—why do you put up that kind of
bluff? You know there’ve been times when you were bothered—damned
bothered—and as a girl gets older, and things keep moving along,
why, before she knows it, the things she wants are liable to move
past her and not come back. I don’t say it’s anywhere near that
with you yet; but you’ve had a taste of bothers that a girl like
yourself ought never to have known about, and what I’m offering you
is the chance to turn your back on them once for all.”
The colour burned in Lily’s face as he ended; there was no
mistaking the point he meant to make, and to permit it to pass
unheeded was a fatal confession of weakness, while to resent it too
openly was to risk offending him at a perilous moment. Indignation
quivered on her lip; but it was quelled by the secret voice which
warned her that she must not quarrel with him. He knew too much
about her, and even at the moment when it was essential that he
should show himself at his best, he did not scruple to let her
see how much he knew. How then would he use his power when her
expression of contempt had dispelled his one motive for restraint?
Her whole future might hinge on her way of answering him: she had
to stop and consider that, in the stress of her other anxieties, as
a breathless fugitive may have to pause at the cross-roads and try
to decide coolly which turn to take.
“You are quite right, Mr. Rosedale. I HAVE had bothers; and I am
grateful to you for wanting to relieve me of them. It is not always
easy to be quite independent and self-respecting when one is poor
and lives among rich people; I have been careless about money, and
have worried about my bills. But I should be selfish and ungrateful
if I made that a reason for accepting all you offer, with no better
return to make than the desire to be free from my anxieties. You
must give me time—time to think of your kindness—and of what I
could give you in return for it——”
She held out her hand with a charming gesture in which dismissal
was shorn of its rigour. Its hint of future leniency made Rosedale
rise in obedience to it, a little flushed with his unhoped-for
success, and disciplined by the tradition of his blood to accept
what was conceded, without undue haste to press for more. Something
in his prompt acquiescence frightened her; she felt behind it the
stored force of a patience that might subdue the strongest will.
But at least they had parted amicably, and he was out of the house
without meeting Selden—Selden, whose continued absence now smote
her with a new alarm. Rosedale had remained over an hour, and she
understood that it was now too late to hope for Selden. He would
write explaining his absence, of course; there would be a note
from him by the late post. But her confession would have to be
postponed; and the chill of the delay settled heavily on her fagged
spirit.
It lay heavier when the postman’s last ring brought no note for
her, and she had to go upstairs to a lonely night—a night as grim
and sleepless as her tortured fancy had pictured it to Gerty.
She had never learned to live with her own thoughts, and to be
confronted with them through such hours of lucid misery made the
confused wretchedness of her previous vigil seem easily bearable.
Daylight disbanded the phantom crew, and made it clear to her
that she would hear from Selden before noon; but the day passed
without his writing or coming. Lily remained at home, lunching and
dining alone with her aunt, who complained of flutterings of the
heart, and talked icily on general topics. Mrs. Peniston went to
bed early, and when she had gone Lily sat down and wrote a note to
Selden. She was about to ring for a messenger to despatch it when
her eye fell on a paragraph in the evening paper which lay at her
elbow: “Mr. Lawrence Selden was among the passengers sailing this
afternoon for Havana and the West Indies on the Windward Liner
Antilles.”
She laid down the paper and sat motionless, staring at her note.
She understood now that he was never coming—that he had gone away
because he was afraid that he might come. She rose, and walking
across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the
brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face
came out terribly—she looked old; and when a girl looks old to
herself, how does she look to other people? She moved away, and
began to wander aimlessly about the room, fitting her steps with
mechanical precision between the monstrous roses of Mrs. Peniston’s
Axminster. Suddenly she noticed that the pen with which she had
written to Selden still rested against the uncovered inkstand.
She seated herself again, and taking out an envelope, addressed
it rapidly to Rosedale. Then she laid out a sheet of paper, and
sat over it with suspended pen. It had been easy enough to write
the date, and “Dear Mr. Rosedale”—but after that her inspiration
flagged. She meant to tell him to come to her, but the words
refused to shape themselves. At length she began: “I have been
thinking——” then she laid the pen down, and sat with her elbows on
the table and her face hidden in her hands.
Suddenly she started up at the sound of the door-bell. It was
not late—barely ten o’clock—and there might still be a note from
Selden, or a message—or he might be there himself, on the other
side of the door! The announcement of his sailing might have been
a mistake—it might be another Lawrence Selden who had gone to
Havana—all these possibilities had time to flash through her mind,
and build up the conviction that she was after all to see or hear
from him, before the drawing-room door opened to admit a servant
carrying a telegram.
Lily tore it open with shaking hands, and read Bertha Dorset’s name
below the message: “Sailing unexpectedly tomorrow. Will you join us
on a cruise in Mediterranean?”
BOOK TWO
Chapter 1
It came vividly to Selden on the Casino steps that Monte Carlo
had, more than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating
itself to each man’s humour. His own, at the moment, lent it a
festive readiness of welcome that might well, in a disenchanted
eye, have turned to paint and facility. So frank an appeal for
participation—so outspoken a recognition of the holiday vein in
human nature—struck refreshingly on a mind jaded by prolonged
hard work in surroundings made for the discipline of the senses.
As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry of
architecture, the studied tropicality of the gardens, the groups
loitering in the foreground against mauve mountains which
suggested a sublime stage-setting forgotten in a hurried shifting
of scenes—as he took in the whole outspread effect of light and
leisure, he felt a movement of revulsion from the last few months
of his life.
The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of
snow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and
furious air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the
gritty wind ground into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work,
had told himself that external conditions did not matter to a man
in his state, and that cold and ugliness were a good tonic for
relaxed sensibilities. When an urgent case summoned him abroad
to confer with a client in Paris, he broke reluctantly with the
routine of the office; and it was only now that, having despatched
his business, and slipped away for a week in the south, he began to
feel the renewed zest of spectatorship that is the solace of those
who take an objective interest in life.
The multiplicity of its appeals—the perpetual surprise of its
contrasts and resemblances! All these tricks and turns of the
show were upon him with a spring as he descended the Casino steps
and paused on the pavement at its doors. He had not been abroad
for seven years—and what changes the renewed contact produced! If
the central depths were untouched, hardly a pin-point of surface
remained the same. And this was the very place to bring out the
completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the perpetuities,
might have left him as he was: but this tent pitched for a day’s
revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky.
It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its
climax and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens
would soon dissolve and reform in other scenes. Meanwhile the last
moments of the performance seemed to gain an added brightness
from the hovering threat of the curtain. The quality of the air,
the exuberance of the flowers, the blue intensity of sea and sky,
produced the effect of a closing TABLEAU, when all the lights are
turned on at once. This impression was presently heightened by the
way in which a consciously conspicuous group of people advanced
to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the air of the
chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the final
effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had
been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance
to one of those “costume-plays” in which the protagonists walk
through the passions without displacing a drapery. The ladies stood
in unrelated attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the
men hung about them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors
are named in the programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly
fused the group by arresting the attention of one of its members.
“Why, Mr. Selden!” Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise; and with a
gesture toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Bry, she added
plaintively: “We’re starving to death because we can’t decide where
to lunch.”
Welcomed into their group, and made the confidant of their
difficulty, Selden learned with amusement that there were several
places where one might miss something by not lunching, or forfeit
something by lunching; so that eating actually became a minor
consideration on the very spot consecrated to its rites.
“Of course one gets the best things at the TERRASSE—but that looks
as if one hadn’t any other reason for being there: the Americans
who don’t know any one always rush for the best food. And the
Duchess of Beltshire has taken up Becassin’s lately,” Mrs. Bry
earnestly summed up.
Mrs. Bry, to Mrs. Fisher’s despair, had not progressed beyond the
point of weighing her social alternatives in public. She could not
acquire the air of doing things because she wanted to, and making
her choice the final seal of their fitness.
Mr. Bry, a short pale man, with a business face and leisure
clothes, met the dilemma hilariously.
“I guess the Duchess goes where it’s cheapest, unless she can get
her meal paid for. If you offered to blow her off at the TERRASSE
she’d turn up fast enough.”
But Mrs. Jack Stepney interposed. “The Grand Dukes go to that
little place at the Condamine. Lord Hubert says it’s the only
restaurant in Europe where they can cook peas.”
Lord Hubert Dacey, a slender shabby-looking man, with a charming
worn smile, and the air of having spent his best years in piloting
the wealthy to the right restaurant, assented with gentle emphasis:
“It’s quite that.”
“PEAS?” said Mr. Bry contemptuously. “Can they cook terrapin? It
just shows,” he continued, “what these European markets are, when a
fellow can make a reputation cooking peas!”
Jack Stepney intervened with authority. “I don’t know that I quite
agree with Dacey: there’s a little hole in Paris, off the Quai
Voltaire—but in any case, I can’t advise the Condamine GARGOTE; at
least not with ladies.”
Stepney, since his marriage, had thickened and grown prudish, as
the Van Osburgh husbands were apt to do; but his wife, to his
surprise and discomfiture, had developed an earth-shaking fastness
of gait which left him trailing breathlessly in her wake.
“That’s where we’ll go then!” she declared, with a heavy toss of
her plumage. “I’m so tired of the TERRASSE: it’s as dull as one
of mother’s dinners. And Lord Hubert has promised to tell us who
all the awful people are at the other place—hasn’t he, Carry? Now,
Jack, don’t look so solemn!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Bry, “all I want to know is who their
dress-makers are.”
“No doubt Dacey can tell you that too,” remarked Stepney, with an
ironic intention which the other received with the light murmur,
“I can at least FIND OUT, my dear fellow”; and Mrs. Bry having
declared that she couldn’t walk another step, the party hailed
two or three of the light phaetons which hover attentively on the
confines of the gardens, and rattled off in procession toward the
Condamine.
Their destination was one of the little restaurants overhanging
the boulevard which dips steeply down from Monte Carlo to the low
intermediate quarter along the quay. From the window in which
they presently found themselves installed, they overlooked the
intense blue curve of the harbour, set between the verdure of twin
promontories: to the right, the cliff of Monaco, topped by the
mediaeval silhouette of its church and castle, to the left the
terraces and pinnacles of the gambling-house. Between the two,
the waters of the bay were furrowed by a light coming and going
of pleasure-craft, through which, just at the culminating moment
of luncheon, the majestic advance of a great steam-yacht drew the
company’s attention from the peas.
“By Jove, I believe that’s the Dorsets back!” Stepney exclaimed;
and Lord Hubert, dropping his single eye-glass, corroborated: “It’s
the Sabrina—yes.”
“So soon? They were to spend a month in Sicily,” Mrs. Fisher
observed.
“I guess they feel as if they had: there’s only one up-to-date
hotel in the whole place,” said Mr. Bry disparagingly.
“It was Ned Silverton’s idea—but poor Dorset and Lily Bart must
have been horribly bored.” Mrs. Fisher added in an undertone to
Selden: “I do hope there hasn’t been a row.”
“It’s most awfully jolly having Miss Bart back,” said Lord Hubert,
in his mild deliberate voice; and Mrs. Bry added ingenuously: “I
daresay the Duchess will dine with us, now that Lily’s here.”
“The Duchess admires her immensely: I’m sure she’d be charmed
to have it arranged,” Lord Hubert agreed, with the professional
promptness of the man accustomed to draw his profit from
facilitating social contacts: Selden was struck by the businesslike
change in his manner.
“Lily has been a tremendous success here,” Mrs. Fisher continued,
still addressing herself confidentially to Selden. “She looks ten
years younger—I never saw her so handsome. Lady Skiddaw took her
everywhere in Cannes, and the Crown Princess of Macedonia had her
to stop for a week at Cimiez. People say that was one reason why
Bertha whisked the yacht off to Sicily: the Crown Princess didn’t
take much notice of her, and she couldn’t bear to look on at Lily’s
triumph.”
Selden made no reply. He was vaguely aware that Miss Bart was
cruising in the Mediterranean with the Dorsets, but it had not
occurred to him that there was any chance of running across her on
the Riviera, where the season was virtually at an end. As he leaned
back, silently contemplating his filigree cup of Turkish coffee,
he was trying to put some order in his thoughts, to tell himself
how the news of her nearness was really affecting him. He had a
personal detachment enabling him, even in moments of emotional
high-pressure, to get a fairly clear view of his feelings, and
he was sincerely surprised by the disturbance which the sight
of the Sabrina had produced in him. He had reason to think that
his three months of engrossing professional work, following on
the sharp shock of his disillusionment, had cleared his mind of
its sentimental vapours. The feeling he had nourished and given
prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a
traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at
first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt
the latent ache, and realized that after all he had not come off
unhurt.
An hour later, at Mrs. Fisher’s side in the Casino gardens, he was
trying to find fresh reasons for forgetting the injury received in
the contemplation of the peril avoided. The party had dispersed
with the loitering indecision characteristic of social movements
at Monte Carlo, where the whole place, and the long gilded hours
of the day, seem to offer an infinity of ways of being idle. Lord
Hubert Dacey had finally gone off in quest of the Duchess of
Beltshire, charged by Mrs. Bry with the delicate negotiation of
securing that lady’s presence at dinner, the Stepneys had left for
Nice in their motor-car, and Mr. Bry had departed to take his place
in the pigeon shooting match which was at the moment engaging his
highest faculties.
Mrs. Bry, who had a tendency to grow red and stertorous after
luncheon, had been judiciously prevailed upon by Carry Fisher to
withdraw to her hotel for an hour’s repose; and Selden and his
companion were thus left to a stroll propitious to confidences.
The stroll soon resolved itself into a tranquil session on a bench
overhung with laurel and Banksian roses, from which they caught a
dazzle of blue sea between marble balusters, and the fiery shafts
of cactus-blossoms shooting meteor-like from the rock. The soft
shade of their niche, and the adjacent glitter of the air, were
conducive to an easy lounging mood, and to the smoking of many
cigarettes; and Selden, yielding to these influences, suffered Mrs.
Fisher to unfold to him the history of her recent experiences. She
had come abroad with the Welly Brys at the moment when fashion
flees the inclemency of the New York spring. The Brys, intoxicated
by their first success, already thirsted for new kingdoms, and
Mrs. Fisher, viewing the Riviera as an easy introduction to London
society, had guided their course thither. She had affiliations
of her own in every capital, and a facility for picking them up
again after long absences; and the carefully disseminated rumour
of the Brys’ wealth had at once gathered about them a group of
cosmopolitan pleasure-seekers.
“But things are not going as well as I expected,” Mrs. Fisher
frankly admitted. “It’s all very well to say that every body with
money can get into society; but it would be truer to say that
NEARLY everybody can. And the London market is so glutted with new
Americans that, to succeed there now, they must be either very
clever or awfully queer. The Brys are neither. HE would get on well
enough if she’d let him alone; they like his slang and his brag and
his blunders. But Louisa spoils it all by trying to repress him and
put herself forward. If she’d be natural herself—fat and vulgar and
bouncing—it would be all right; but as soon as she meets anybody
smart she tries to be slender and queenly. She tried it with the
Duchess of Beltshire and Lady Skiddaw, and they fled. I’ve done my
best to make her see her mistake—I’ve said to her again and again:
‘Just let yourself go, Louisa’; but she keeps up the humbug even
with me—I believe she keeps on being queenly in her own room, with
the door shut.
“The worst of it is,” Mrs. Fisher went on, “that she thinks it’s
all MY fault. When the Dorsets turned up here six weeks ago, and
everybody began to make a fuss about Lily Bart, I could see Louisa
thought that if she’d had Lily in tow instead of me she would have
been hob-nobbing with all the royalties by this time. She doesn’t
realize that it’s Lily’s beauty that does it: Lord Hubert tells me
Lily is thought even handsomer than when he knew her at Aix ten
years ago. It seems she was tremendously admired there. An Italian
Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to marry her; but just at
the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned up, and Lily
was silly enough to flirt with him while her marriage-settlements
with the step-father were being drawn up. Some people said the
young man did it on purpose. You can fancy the scandal: there was
an awful row between the men, and people began to look at Lily
so queerly that Mrs. Peniston had to pack up and finish her cure
elsewhere. Not that SHE ever understood: to this day she thinks
that Aix didn’t suit her, and mentions her having been sent there
as proof of the incompetence of French doctors. That’s Lily all
over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and
sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest
she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.”
Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of
sea between the cactus-flowers. “Sometimes,” she added, “I think
it’s just flightiness—and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart,
she despises the things she’s trying for. And it’s the difficulty
of deciding that makes her such an interesting study.” She glanced
tentatively at Selden’s motionless profile, and resumed with a
slight sigh: “Well, all I can say is, I wish she’d give ME some of
her discarded opportunities. I wish we could change places now,
for instance. She could make a very good thing out of the Brys
if she managed them properly, and I should know just how to look
after George Dorset while Bertha is reading Verlaine with Neddy
Silverton.”
She met Selden’s sound of protest with a sharp derisive glance.
“Well, what’s the use of mincing matters? We all know that’s what
Bertha brought her abroad for. When Bertha wants to have a good
time she has to provide occupation for George. At first I thought
Lily was going to play her cards well THIS time, but there are
rumours that Bertha is jealous of her success here and at Cannes,
and I shouldn’t be surprised if there were a break any day. Lily’s
only safeguard is that Bertha needs her badly—oh, very badly.
The Silverton affair is in the acute stage: it’s necessary that
George’s attention should be pretty continuously distracted. And
I’m bound to say Lily DOES distract it: I believe he’d marry her
tomorrow if he found out there was anything wrong with Bertha. But
you know him—he’s as blind as he’s jealous; and of course Lily’s
present business is to keep him blind. A clever woman might know
just the right moment to tear off the bandage: but Lily isn’t
clever in that way, and when George does open his eyes she’ll
probably contrive not to be in his line of vision.”
Selden tossed away his cigarette. “By Jove—it’s time for my train,”
he exclaimed, with a glance at his watch; adding, in reply to Mrs.
Fisher’s surprised comment—“Why, I thought of course you were at
Monte!”—a murmured word to the effect that he was making Nice his
head-quarters.
“The worst of it is, she snubs the Brys now,” he heard irrelevantly
flung after him.
Ten minutes later, in the high-perched bedroom of an hotel
overlooking the Casino, he was tossing his effects into a couple of
gaping portmanteaux, while the porter waited outside to transport
them to the cab at the door. It took but a brief plunge down the
steep white road to the station to land him safely in the afternoon
express for Nice; and not till he was installed in the corner of
an empty carriage, did he exclaim to himself, with a reaction of
self-contempt: “What the deuce am I running away from?”
The pertinence of the question checked Selden’s fugitive impulse
before the train had started. It was ridiculous to be flying like
an emotional coward from an infatuation his reason had conquered.
He had instructed his bankers to forward some important business
letters to Nice, and at Nice he would quietly await them. He was
already annoyed with himself for having left Monte Carlo, where he
had intended to pass the week which remained to him before sailing;
but it would now be difficult to return on his steps without an
appearance of inconsistency from which his pride recoiled. In his
inmost heart he was not sorry to put himself beyond the probability
of meeting Miss Bart. Completely as he had detached himself from
her, he could not yet regard her merely as a social instance;
and viewed in a more personal ways she was not likely to be a
reassuring object of study. Chance encounters, or even the repeated
mention of her name, would send his thoughts back into grooves
from which he had resolutely detached them; whereas, if she could
be entirely excluded from his life, the pressure of new and varied
impressions, with which no thought of her was connected, would soon
complete the work of separation. Mrs. Fisher’s conversation had,
indeed, operated to that end; but the treatment was too painful
to be voluntarily chosen while milder remedies were untried; and
Selden thought he could trust himself to return gradually to a
reasonable view of Miss Bart, if only he did not see her.
Having reached the station early, he had arrived at this point in
his reflections before the increasing throng on the platform warned
him that he could not hope to preserve his privacy; the next moment
there was a hand on the door, and he turned to confront the very
face he was fleeing.
Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of a precipitate descent upon the
train, headed a group composed of the Dorsets, young Silverton and
Lord Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring into the carriage,
and envelop Selden in ejaculations of surprise and welcome, before
the whistle of departure sounded. The party, it appeared, were
hastening to Nice in response to a sudden summons to dine with the
Duchess of Beltshire and to see the water-fete in the bay; a plan
evidently improvised—in spite of Lord Hubert’s protesting “Oh, I
say, you know,”—for the express purpose of defeating Mrs. Bry’s
endeavour to capture the Duchess.
During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre, Selden had time for
a rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seated herself opposite
to him in the golden afternoon light. Scarcely three months had
elapsed since he had parted from her on the threshold of the Brys’
conservatory; but a subtle change had passed over the quality
of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the
fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible; now
its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization
which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance.
The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation: to Selden it
seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity
of youth is chilled into its final shape.
He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and
competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she
took up the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had
not been snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such
facility sickened him—but he told himself that it was with the
pang which precedes recovery. Now he would really get well—would
eject the last drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt
himself calmer in her presence than he had learned to be in the
thought of her. Her assumptions and elisions, her short-cuts and
long DETOURS, the skill with which she contrived to meet him at a
point from which no inconvenient glimpses of the past were visible,
suggested what opportunities she had had for practising such arts
since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last arrived at
an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious
impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under
which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced
into the service of the state.
And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had adjusted
itself to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even
after Mrs. Fisher’s elucidating flashes, he still felt himself
agrope. Surely Mrs. Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with
neglecting her opportunities! To Selden’s exasperated observation
she was only too completely alive to them. She was “perfect”
to every one: subservient to Bertha’s anxious predominance,
good-naturedly watchful of Dorset’s moods, brightly companionable
to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her on an evident
footing of old admiration, while young Silverton, portentously
self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something vaguely
obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of
manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it
flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation
must indeed be desperate. She was on the edge of something—that was
the impression left with him. He seemed to see her poised on the
brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her
unconsciousness that the ground was failing her.
On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for
the half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the
general insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic pessimism.
How any one could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera—any
one with a grain of imagination—with the whole Mediterranean to
choose from: but then, if one’s estimate of a place depended on
the way they broiled a spring chicken! Gad! what a study might be
made of the tyranny of the stomach—the way a sluggish liver or
insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the
universe, overshadow everything in reach—chronic dyspepsia ought
to be among the “statutory causes”; a woman’s life might be ruined
by a man’s inability to digest fresh bread. Grotesque? Yes—and
tragic—like most absurdities. There’s nothing grimmer than the
tragedy that wears a comic mask.... Where was he? Oh—the reason
they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well—partly, no doubt, Miss
Bart’s desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a stone
to art and poetry—the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And
of course she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for
him. Oh, she could make him believe anything—ANYTHING! Mrs. Dorset
was aware of it—oh, perfectly: nothing SHE didn’t see! But she
could hold her tongue—she’d had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an
intimate friend—she wouldn’t hear a word against her. Only it hurts
a woman’s pride—there are some things one doesn’t get used to....
All this in confidence, of course? Ah—and there were the ladies
signalling from the balcony of the hotel.... He plunged across the
Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative cigar.
The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the evening,
by some of those faint corroborative hints that generate a light
of their own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Selden, stumbling on
a chance acquaintance, had dined with him, and adjourned, still
in his company, to the brightly lit Promenade, where a line of
crowded stands commanded the glittering darkness of the waters.
The night was soft and persuasive. Overhead hung a summer sky
furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon,
pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay
a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of
the illuminated boats. Down the lantern-hung Promenade, snatches
of band-music floated above the hum of the crowd and the soft
tossing of boughs in dusky gardens; and between these gardens and
the backs of the stands there flowed a stream of people in whom the
vociferous carnival mood seemed tempered by the growing languor of
the season.
Selden and his companion, unable to get seats on one of the stands
facing the bay, had wandered for a while with the throng, and
then found a point of vantage on a high garden-parapet above the
Promenade. Thence they caught but a triangular glimpse of the
water, and of the flashing play of boats across its surface; but
the crowd in the street was under their immediate view, and seemed
to Selden, on the whole, of more interest than the show itself.
After a while, however, he wearied of his perch and, dropping
alone to the pavement, pushed his way to the first corner and
turned into the moonlit silence of a side street. Long garden-walls
overhung by trees made a dark boundary to the pavement; an empty
cab trailed along the deserted thoroughfare, and presently Selden
saw two persons emerge from the opposite shadows, signal to the
cab, and drive off in it toward the centre of the town. The
moonlight touched them as they paused to enter the carriage, and he
recognized Mrs. Dorset and young Silverton.
Beneath the nearest lamp-post he glanced at his watch and saw
that the time was close on eleven. He took another cross street,
and without breasting the throng on the Promenade, made his way
to the fashionable club which overlooks that thoroughfare. Here,
amid the blaze of crowded baccarat tables, he caught sight of Lord
Hubert Dacey, seated with his habitual worn smile behind a rapidly
dwindling heap of gold. The heap being in due course wiped out,
Lord Hubert rose with a shrug, and joining Selden, adjourned with
him to the deserted terrace of the club. It was now past midnight,
and the throng on the stands was dispersing, while the long trails
of red-lit boats scattered and faded beneath a sky repossessed by
the tranquil splendour of the moon.
Lord Hubert looked at his watch. “By Jove, I promised to join the
Duchess for supper at the LONDON HOUSE; but it’s past twelve, and
I suppose they’ve all scattered. The fact is, I lost them in the
crowd soon after dinner, and took refuge here, for my sins. They
had seats on one of the stands, but of course they couldn’t stop
quiet: the Duchess never can. She and Miss Bart went off in quest
of what they call adventures—gad, it ain’t their fault if they
don’t have some queer ones!” He added tentatively, after pausing
to grope for a cigarette: “Miss Bart’s an old friend of yours,
I believe? So she told me.—Ah, thanks—I don’t seem to have one
left.” He lit Selden’s proffered cigarette, and continued, in his
high-pitched drawling tone: “None of my business, of course, but I
didn’t introduce her to the Duchess. Charming woman, the Duchess,
you understand; and a very good friend of mine; but RATHER a
liberal education.”
Selden received this in silence, and after a few puffs Lord Hubert
broke out again: “Sort of thing one can’t communicate to the young
lady—though young ladies nowadays are so competent to judge for
themselves; but in this case—I’m an old friend too, you know . . .
and there seemed no one else to speak to. The whole situation’s a
little mixed, as I see it—but there used to be an aunt somewhere, a
diffuse and innocent person, who was great at bridging over chasms
she didn’t see.... Ah, in New York, is she? Pity New York’s such a
long way off!”
Chapter 2
Miss Bart, emerging late the next morning from her cabin, found
herself alone on the deck of the Sabrina.
The cushioned chairs, disposed expectantly under the wide awning,
showed no signs of recent occupancy, and she presently learned
from a steward that Mrs. Dorset had not yet appeared, and that
the gentlemen—separately—had gone ashore as soon as they had
breakfasted. Supplied with these facts, Lily leaned awhile over the
side, giving herself up to a leisurely enjoyment of the spectacle
before her. Unclouded sunlight enveloped sea and shore in a bath
of purest radiancy. The purpling waters drew a sharp white line of
foam at the base of the shore; against its irregular eminences,
hotels and villas flashed from the greyish verdure of olive and
eucalyptus; and the background of bare and finely-pencilled
mountains quivered in a pale intensity of light.
How beautiful it was—and how she loved beauty! She had always
felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain
obtusenesses of feeling of which she was less proud; and during the
last three months she had indulged it passionately. The Dorsets’
invitation to go abroad with them had come as an almost miraculous
release from crushing difficulties; and her faculty for renewing
herself in new scenes, and casting off problems of conduct as
easily as the surroundings in which they had arisen, made the mere
change from one place to another seem, not merely a postponement,
but a solution of her troubles. Moral complications existed for her
only in the environment that had produced them; she did not mean
to slight or ignore them, but they lost their reality when they
changed their background. She could not have remained in New York
without repaying the money she owed to Trenor; to acquit herself
of that odious debt she might even have faced a marriage with
Rosedale; but the accident of placing the Atlantic between herself
and her obligations made them dwindle out of sight as if they had
been milestones and she had travelled past them.
Her two months on the Sabrina had been especially calculated to
aid this illusion of distance. She had been plunged into new
scenes, and had found in them a renewal of old hopes and ambitions.
The cruise itself charmed her as a romantic adventure. She was
vaguely touched by the names and scenes amid which she moved, and
had listened to Ned Silverton reading Theocritus by moonlight,
as the yacht rounded the Sicilian promontories, with a thrill
of the nerves that confirmed her belief in her intellectual
superiority. But the weeks at Cannes and Nice had really given
her more pleasure. The gratification of being welcomed in high
company, and of making her own ascendency felt there, so that she
found herself figuring once more as the “beautiful Miss Bart” in
the interesting journal devoted to recording the least movements
of her cosmopolitan companions—all these experiences tended to
throw into the extreme background of memory the prosaic and sordid
difficulties from which she had escaped.
If she was faintly aware of fresh difficulties ahead, she was
sure of her ability to meet them: it was characteristic of her to
feel that the only problems she could not solve were those with
which she was familiar. Meanwhile she could honestly be proud of
the skill with which she had adapted herself to somewhat delicate
conditions. She had reason to think that she had made herself
equally necessary to her host and hostess; and if only she had seen
any perfectly irreproachable means of drawing a financial profit
from the situation, there would have been no cloud on her horizon.
The truth was that her funds, as usual, were inconveniently low;
and to neither Dorset nor his wife could this vulgar embarrassment
be safely hinted. Still, the need was not a pressing one; she could
worry along, as she had so often done before, with the hope of some
happy change of fortune to sustain her; and meanwhile life was
gay and beautiful and easy, and she was conscious of figuring not
unworthily in such a setting.
She was engaged to breakfast that morning with the Duchess of
Beltshire, and at twelve o’clock she asked to be set ashore in the
gig. Before this she had sent her maid to enquire if she might see
Mrs. Dorset; but the reply came back that the latter was tired,
and trying to sleep. Lily thought she understood the reason of
the rebuff. Her hostess had not been included in the Duchess’s
invitation, though she herself had made the most loyal efforts in
that direction. But her grace was impervious to hints, and invited
or omitted as she chose. It was not Lily’s fault if Mrs. Dorset’s
complicated attitudes did not fall in with the Duchess’s easy gait.
The Duchess, who seldom explained herself, had not formulated her
objection beyond saying: “She’s rather a bore, you know. The only
one of your friends I like is that little Mr. Bry—HE’S funny—” but
Lily knew enough not to press the point, and was not altogether
sorry to be thus distinguished at her friend’s expense. Bertha
certainly HAD grown tiresome since she had taken to poetry and Ned
Silverton.
On the whole, it was a relief to break away now and then from
the Sabrina; and the Duchess’s little breakfast, organized by
Lord Hubert with all his usual virtuosity, was the pleasanter
to Lily for not including her travelling-companions. Dorset, of
late, had grown more than usually morose and incalculable, and
Ned Silverton went about with an air that seemed to challenge the
universe. The freedom and lightness of the ducal intercourse made
an agreeable change from these complications, and Lily was tempted,
after luncheon, to adjourn in the wake of her companions to the
hectic atmosphere of the Casino. She did not mean to play; her
diminished pocket-money offered small scope for the adventure; but
it amused her to sit on a divan, under the doubtful protection of
the Duchess’s back, while the latter hung above her stakes at a
neighbouring table.
The rooms were packed with the gazing throng which, in the
afternoon hours, trickles heavily between the tables, like the
Sunday crowd in a lion-house. In the stagnant flow of the mass,
identities were hardly distinguishable; but Lily presently saw
Mrs. Bry cleaving her determined way through the doors, and, in
the broad wake she left, the light figure of Mrs. Fisher bobbing
after her like a row-boat at the stern of a tug. Mrs. Bry pressed
on, evidently animated by the resolve to reach a certain point in
the rooms; but Mrs. Fisher, as she passed Lily, broke from her
towing-line, and let herself float to the girl’s side.
“Lose her?” she echoed the latter’s query, with an indifferent
glance at Mrs. Bry’s retreating back. “I daresay—it doesn’t matter:
I HAVE lost her already.” And, as Lily exclaimed, she added: “We
had an awful row this morning. You know, of course, that the
Duchess chucked her at dinner last night, and she thinks it was my
fault—my want of management. The worst of it is, the message—just a
mere word by telephone—came so late that the dinner HAD to be paid
for; and Becassin HAD run it up—it had been so drummed into him
that the Duchess was coming!” Mrs. Fisher indulged in a faint laugh
at the remembrance. “Paying for what she doesn’t get rankles so
dreadfully with Louisa: I can’t make her see that it’s one of the
preliminary steps to getting what you haven’t paid for—and as I was
the nearest thing to smash, she smashed me to atoms, poor dear!”
Lily murmured her commiseration. Impulses of sympathy came
naturally to her, and it was instinctive to proffer her help to
Mrs. Fisher.
“If there’s anything I can do—if it’s only a question of meeting
the Duchess! I heard her say she thought Mr. Bry amusing——”
But Mrs. Fisher interposed with a decisive gesture. “My dear,
I have my pride: the pride of my trade. I couldn’t manage the
Duchess, and I can’t palm off your arts on Louisa Bry as mine. I’ve
taken the final step: I go to Paris tonight with the Sam Gormers.
THEY’RE still in the elementary stage; an Italian Prince is a great
deal more than a Prince to them, and they’re always on the brink
of taking a courier for one. To save them from that is my present
mission.” She laughed again at the picture. “But before I go I want
to make my last will and testament—I want to leave you the Brys.”
“Me?” Miss Bart joined in her amusement. “It’s charming of you to
remember me, dear; but really——”
“You’re already so well provided for?” Mrs. Fisher flashed a sharp
glance at her. “ARE you, though, Lily—to the point of rejecting my
offer?”
Miss Bart coloured slowly. “What I really meant was, that the Brys
wouldn’t in the least care to be so disposed of.”
Mrs. Fisher continued to probe her embarrassment with an
unflinching eye. “What you really meant was that you’ve snubbed the
Brys horribly; and you know that they know——”
“Carry!”
“Oh, on certain sides Louisa bristles with perceptions. If you’d
even managed to have them asked once on the Sabrina—especially when
royalties were coming! But it’s not too late,” she ended earnestly,
“it’s not too late for either of you.”
Lily smiled. “Stay over, and I’ll get the Duchess to dine with
them.”
“I shan’t stay over—the Gormers have paid for my SALON-LIT,” said
Mrs. Fisher with simplicity. “But get the Duchess to dine with them
all the same.”
Lily’s smile again flowed into a slight laugh: her friend’s
importunity was beginning to strike her as irrelevant. “I’m sorry I
have been negligent about the Brys——” she began.
“Oh, as to the Brys—it’s you I’m thinking of,” said Mrs. Fisher
abruptly. She paused, and then, bending forward, with a lowered
voice: “You know we all went on to Nice last night when the Duchess
chucked us. It was Louisa’s idea—I told her what I thought of it.”
Miss Bart assented. “Yes—I caught sight of you on the way back, at
the station.”
“Well, the man who was in the carriage with you and George
Dorset—that horrid little Dabham who does ‘Society Notes from
the Riviera’—had been dining with us at Nice. And he’s telling
everybody that you and Dorset came back alone after midnight.”
“Alone—? When he was with us?” Lily laughed, but her laugh faded
into gravity under the prolonged implication of Mrs. Fisher’s look.
“We DID come back alone—if that’s so very dreadful! But whose fault
was it? The Duchess was spending the night at Cimiez with the Crown
Princess; Bertha got bored with the show, and went off early,
promising to meet us at the station. We turned up on time, but she
didn’t—she didn’t turn up at all!”
Miss Bart made this announcement in the tone of one who presents,
with careless assurance, a complete vindication; but Mrs. Fisher
received it in a manner almost inconsequent. She seemed to have
lost sight of her friend’s part in the incident: her inward vision
had taken another slant.
“Bertha never turned up at all? Then how on earth did she get back?”
“Oh, by the next train, I suppose; there were two extra ones for
the FETE. At any rate, I know she’s safe on the yacht, though I
haven’t yet seen her; but you see it was not my fault,” Lily summed
up.
“Not your fault that Bertha didn’t turn up? My poor child, if only
you don’t have to pay for it!” Mrs. Fisher rose—she had seen Mrs.
Bry surging back in her direction. “There’s Louisa, and I must
be off—oh, we’re on the best of terms externally; we’re lunching
together; but at heart it’s ME she’s lunching on,” she explained;
and with a last hand-clasp and a last look, she added: “Remember, I
leave her to you; she’s hovering now, ready to take you in.”
* * * * *
Lily carried the impression of Mrs. Fisher’s leave-taking away with
her from the Casino doors. She had accomplished, before leaving,
the first step toward her reinstatement in Mrs. Bry’s good graces.
An affable advance—a vague murmur that they must see more of each
other—an allusive glance to a near future that was felt to include
the Duchess as well as the Sabrina—how easily it was all done, if
one possessed the knack of doing it! She wondered at herself, as
she had so often wondered, that, possessing the knack, she did not
more consistently exercise it. But sometimes she was forgetful—and
sometimes, could it be that she was proud? Today, at any rate, she
had been vaguely conscious of a reason for sinking her pride, had
in fact even sunk it to the point of suggesting to Lord Hubert
Dacey, whom she ran across on the Casino steps, that he might
really get the Duchess to dine with the Brys, if SHE undertook to
have them asked on the Sabrina. Lord Hubert had promised his help,
with the readiness on which she could always count: it was his only
way of ever reminding her that he had once been ready to do so much
more for her. Her path, in short, seemed to smooth itself before
her as she advanced; yet the faint stir of uneasiness persisted.
Had it been produced, she wondered, by her chance meeting with
Selden? She thought not—time and change seemed so completely to
have relegated him to his proper distance. The sudden and exquisite
reaction from her anxieties had had the effect of throwing the
recent past so far back that even Selden, as part of it, retained
a certain air of unreality. And he had made it so clear that they
were not to meet again; that he had merely dropped down to Nice
for a day or two, and had almost his foot on the next steamer.
No—that part of the past had merely surged up for a moment on the
fleeing surface of events; and now that it was submerged again, the
uncertainty, the apprehension persisted.
They grew to sudden acuteness as she caught sight of George Dorset
descending the steps of the Hotel de Paris and making for her
across the square. She had meant to drive down to the quay and
regain the yacht; but she now had the immediate impression that
something more was to happen first.
“Which way are you going? Shall we walk a bit?” he began, putting
the second question before the first was answered, and not waiting
for a reply to either before he directed her silently toward the
comparative seclusion of the lower gardens.
She detected in him at once all the signs of extreme nervous
tension. The skin was puffed out under his sunken eyes, and its
sallowness had paled to a leaden white against which his irregular
eyebrows and long reddish moustache were relieved with a saturnine
effect. His appearance, in short, presented an odd mixture of the
bedraggled and the ferocious.
He walked beside her in silence, with quick precipitate steps, till
they reached the embowered slopes to the east of the Casino; then,
pulling up abruptly, he said: “Have you seen Bertha?”
“No—when I left the yacht she was not yet up.”
He received this with a laugh like the whirring sound in a disabled
clock. “Not yet up? Had she gone to bed? Do you know at what time
she came on board? This morning at seven!” he exclaimed.
“At seven?” Lily started. “What happened—an accident to the train?”
He laughed again. “They missed the train—all the trains—they had to
drive back.”
“Well——?” She hesitated, feeling at once how little even this
necessity accounted for the fatal lapse of hours.
“Well, they couldn’t get a carriage at once—at that time of night,
you know—” the explanatory note made it almost seem as though he
were putting the case for his wife—“and when they finally did, it
was only a one-horse cab, and the horse was lame!”
“How tiresome! I see,” she affirmed, with the more earnestness
because she was so nervously conscious that she did not; and after
a pause she added: “I’m so sorry—but ought we to have waited?”
“Waited for the one-horse cab? It would scarcely have carried the
four of us, do you think?”
She took this in what seemed the only possible way, with a laugh
intended to sink the question itself in his humorous treatment of
it. “Well, it would have been difficult; we should have had to walk
by turns. But it would have been jolly to see the sunrise.”
“Yes: the sunrise WAS jolly,” he agreed.
“Was it? You saw it, then?”
“I saw it, yes; from the deck. I waited up for them.”
“Naturally—I suppose you were worried. Why didn’t you call on me to
share your vigil?”
He stood still, dragging at his moustache with a lean weak hand. “I
don’t think you would have cared for its DENOUEMENT,” he said with
sudden grimness.
Again she was disconcerted by the abrupt change in his tone, and
as in one flash she saw the peril of the moment, and the need of
keeping her sense of it out of her eyes.
“DENOUEMENT—isn’t that too big a word for such a small incident?
The worst of it, after all, is the fatigue which Bertha has
probably slept off by this time.”
She clung to the note bravely, though its futility was now plain to
her in the glare of his miserable eyes.
“Don’t—don’t——!” he broke out, with the hurt cry of a child; and
while she tried to merge her sympathy, and her resolve to ignore
any cause for it, in one ambiguous murmur of deprecation, he
dropped down on the bench near which they had paused, and poured
out the wretchedness of his soul.
It was a dreadful hour—an hour from which she emerged shrinking
and seared, as though her lids had been scorched by its actual
glare. It was not that she had never had premonitory glimpses of
such an outbreak; but rather because, here and there throughout
the three months, the surface of life had shown such ominous
cracks and vapours that her fears had always been on the alert
for an upheaval. There had been moments when the situation had
presented itself under a homelier yet more vivid image—that of a
shaky vehicle, dashed by unbroken steeds over a bumping road, while
she cowered within, aware that the harness wanted mending, and
wondering what would give way first. Well—everything had given way
now; and the wonder was that the crazy outfit had held together so
long. Her sense of being involved in the crash, instead of merely
witnessing it from the road, was intensified by the way in which
Dorset, through his furies of denunciation and wild reactions of
self-contempt, made her feel the need he had of her, the place she
had taken in his life. But for her, what ear would have been open
to his cries? And what hand but hers could drag him up again to a
footing of sanity and self-respect? All through the stress of the
struggle with him, she had been conscious of something faintly
maternal in her efforts to guide and uplift him. But for the
present, if he clung to her, it was not in order to be dragged up,
but to feel some one floundering in the depths with him: he wanted
her to suffer with him, not to help him to suffer less.
Happily for both, there was little physical strength to sustain his
frenzy. It left him, collapsed and breathing heavily, to an apathy
so deep and prolonged that Lily almost feared the passers-by would
think it the result of a seizure, and stop to offer their aid. But
Monte Carlo is, of all places, the one where the human bond is
least close, and odd sights are the least arresting. If a glance
or two lingered on the couple, no intrusive sympathy disturbed
them; and it was Lily herself who broke the silence by rising from
her seat. With the clearing of her vision the sweep of peril had
extended, and she saw that the post of danger was no longer at
Dorset’s side.
“If you won’t go back, I must—don’t make me leave you!” she urged.
But he remained mutely resistant, and she added: “What are you
going to do? You really can’t sit here all night.”
“I can go to an hotel. I can telegraph my lawyers.” He sat up,
roused by a new thought. “By Jove, Selden’s at Nice—I’ll send for
Selden!”
Lily, at this, reseated herself with a cry of alarm. “No, no, NO!”
she protested.
He swung round on her distrustfully. “Why not Selden? He’s a lawyer
isn’t he? One will do as well as another in a case like this.”
“As badly as another, you mean. I thought you relied on ME to help
you.”
“You do—by being so sweet and patient with me. If it hadn’t been
for you I’d have ended the thing long ago. But now it’s got to
end.” He rose suddenly, straightening himself with an effort. “You
can’t want to see me ridiculous.”
She looked at him kindly. “That’s just it.” Then, after a moment’s
pondering, almost to her own surprise she broke out with a flash of
inspiration: “Well, go over and see Mr. Selden. You’ll have time to
do it before dinner.”
“Oh, DINNER——” he mocked her; but she left him with the smiling
rejoinder: “Dinner on board, remember; we’ll put it off till nine
if you like.”
It was past four already; and when a cab had dropped her at the
quay, and she stood waiting for the gig to put off for her,
she began to wonder what had been happening on the yacht. Of
Silverton’s whereabouts there had been no mention. Had he returned
to the Sabrina? Or could Bertha—the dread alternative sprang on
her suddenly—could Bertha, left to herself, have gone ashore to
rejoin him? Lily’s heart stood still at the thought. All her
concern had hitherto been for young Silverton, not only because,
in such affairs, the woman’s instinct is to side with the man, but
because his case made a peculiar appeal to her sympathies. He was
so desperately in earnest, poor youth, and his earnestness was of
so different a quality from Bertha’s, though hers too was desperate
enough. The difference was that Bertha was in earnest only about
herself, while he was in earnest about her. But now, at the actual
crisis, this difference seemed to throw the weight of destitution
on Bertha’s side, since at least he had her to suffer for, and
she had only herself. At any rate, viewed less ideally, all the
disadvantages of such a situation were for the woman; and it was
to Bertha that Lily’s sympathies now went out. She was not fond of
Bertha Dorset, but neither was she without a sense of obligation,
the heavier for having so little personal liking to sustain it.
Bertha had been kind to her, they had lived together, during the
last months, on terms of easy friendship, and the sense of friction
of which Lily had recently become aware seemed to make it the more
urgent that she should work undividedly in her friend’s interest.
It was in Bertha’s interest, certainly, that she had despatched
Dorset to consult with Lawrence Selden. Once the grotesqueness
of the situation accepted, she had seen at a glance that it was
the safest in which Dorset could find himself. Who but Selden
could thus miraculously combine the skill to save Bertha with the
obligation of doing so? The consciousness that much skill would
be required made Lily rest thankfully in the greatness of the
obligation. Since he would HAVE to pull Bertha through she could
trust him to find a way; and she put the fulness of her trust in
the telegram she managed to send him on her way to the quay.
Thus far, then, Lily felt that she had done well; and the
conviction strengthened her for the task that remained. She and
Bertha had never been on confidential terms, but at such a crisis
the barriers of reserve must surely fall: Dorset’s wild allusions
to the scene of the morning made Lily feel that they were down
already, and that any attempt to rebuild them would be beyond
Bertha’s strength. She pictured the poor creature shivering behind
her fallen defences and awaiting with suspense the moment when
she could take refuge in the first shelter that offered. If only
that shelter had not already offered itself elsewhere! As the gig
traversed the short distance between the quay and the yacht, Lily
grew more than ever alarmed at the possible consequences of her
long absence. What if the wretched Bertha, finding in all the long
hours no soul to turn to—but by this time Lily’s eager foot was on
the side-ladder, and her first step on the Sabrina showed the worst
of her apprehensions to be unfounded; for there, in the luxurious
shade of the after-deck, the wretched Bertha, in full command of
her usual attenuated elegance, sat dispensing tea to the Duchess of
Beltshire and Lord Hubert.
The sight filled Lily with such surprise that she felt that
Bertha, at least, must read its meaning in her look, and she was
proportionately disconcerted by the blankness of the look returned.
But in an instant she saw that Mrs. Dorset had, of necessity, to
look blank before the others, and that, to mitigate the effect
of her own surprise, she must at once produce some simple reason
for it. The long habit of rapid transitions made it easy for her
to exclaim to the Duchess: “Why, I thought you’d gone back to the
Princess!” and this sufficed for the lady she addressed, if it was
hardly enough for Lord Hubert.
At least it opened the way to a lively explanation of how the
Duchess was, in fact, going back the next moment, but had first
rushed out to the yacht for a word with Mrs. Dorset on the subject
of tomorrow’s dinner—the dinner with the Brys, to which Lord Hubert
had finally insisted on dragging them.
“To save my neck, you know!” he explained, with a glance that
appealed to Lily for some recognition of his promptness; and the
Duchess added, with her noble candour: “Mr. Bry has promised him a
tip, and he says if we go he’ll pass it onto us.”
This led to some final pleasantries, in which, as it seemed to
Lily, Mrs. Dorset bore her part with astounding bravery, and at the
close of which Lord Hubert, from half way down the side-ladder,
called back, with an air of numbering heads: “And of course we may
count on Dorset too?”
“Oh, count on him,” his wife assented gaily. She was keeping up
well to the last—but as she turned back from waving her adieux over
the side, Lily said to herself that the mask must drop and the soul
of fear look out.
Mrs. Dorset turned back slowly; perhaps she wanted time to steady
her muscles; at any rate, they were still under perfect control
when, dropping once more into her seat behind the tea-table, she
remarked to Miss Bart with a faint touch of irony: “I suppose I
ought to say good morning.”
If it was a cue, Lily was ready to take it, though with only
the vaguest sense of what was expected of her in return. There
was something unnerving in the contemplation of Mrs. Dorset’s
composure, and she had to force the light tone in which she
answered: “I tried to see you this morning, but you were not yet
up.”
“No—I got to bed late. After we missed you at the station I thought
we ought to wait for you till the last train.” She spoke very
gently, but with just the least tinge of reproach.
“You missed us? You waited for us at the station?” Now indeed Lily
was too far adrift in bewilderment to measure the other’s words or
keep watch on her own. “But I thought you didn’t get to the station
till after the last train had left!”
Mrs. Dorset, examining her between lowered lids, met this with the
immediate query: “Who told you that?”
“George—I saw him just now in the gardens.”
“Ah, is that George’s version? Poor George—he was in no state to
remember what I told him. He had one of his worst attacks this
morning, and I packed him off to see the doctor. Do you know if he
found him?”
Lily, still lost in conjecture, made no reply, and Mrs. Dorset
settled herself indolently in her seat. “He’ll wait to see him; he
was horribly frightened about himself. It’s very bad for him to be
worried, and whenever anything upsetting happens, it always brings
on an attack.”
This time Lily felt sure that a cue was being pressed on her;
but it was put forth with such startling suddenness, and with so
incredible an air of ignoring what it led up to, that she could
only falter out doubtfully: “Anything upsetting?”
“Yes—such as having you so conspicuously on his hands in the small
hours. You know, my dear, you’re rather a big responsibility in
such a scandalous place after midnight.”
At that—at the complete unexpectedness and the inconceivable
audacity of it—Lily could not restrain the tribute of an astonished
laugh.
“Well, really—considering it was you who burdened him with the
responsibility!”
Mrs. Dorset took this with an exquisite mildness. “By not having
the superhuman cleverness to discover you in that frightful rush
for the train? Or the imagination to believe that you’d take it
without us—you and he all alone—instead of waiting quietly in the
station till we DID manage to meet you?”
Lily’s colour rose: it was growing clear to her that Bertha was
pursuing an object, following a line she had marked out for
herself. Only, with such a doom impending, why waste time in these
childish efforts to avert it? The puerility of the attempt disarmed
Lily’s indignation: did it not prove how horribly the poor creature
was frightened?
“No; by our simply all keeping together at Nice,” she returned.
“Keeping together? When it was you who seized the first opportunity
to rush off with the Duchess and her friends? My dear Lily, you are
not a child to be led by the hand!”
“No—nor to be lectured, Bertha, really; if that’s what you are
doing to me now.”
Mrs. Dorset smiled on her reproachfully. “Lecture you—I? Heaven
forbid! I was merely trying to give you a friendly hint. But it’s
usually the other way round, isn’t it? I’m expected to take hints,
not to give them: I’ve positively lived on them all these last
months.”
“Hints—from me to you?” Lily repeated.
“Oh, negative ones merely—what not to be and to do and to see. And
I think I’ve taken them to admiration. Only, my dear, if you’ll let
me say so, I didn’t understand that one of my negative duties was
NOT to warn you when you carried your imprudence too far.”
A chill of fear passed over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered
treachery that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But
compassion, in a moment, got the better of her instinctive
recoil. What was this outpouring of senseless bitterness but the
tracked creature’s attempt to cloud the medium through which it
was fleeing? It was on Lily’s lips to exclaim: “You poor soul,
don’t double and turn—come straight back to me, and we’ll find a
way out!” But the words died under the impenetrable insolence of
Bertha’s smile. Lily sat silent, taking the brunt of it quietly,
letting it spend itself on her to the last drop of its accumulated
falseness; then, without a word, she rose and went down to her
cabin.
Chapter 3
Miss Bart’s telegram caught Lawrence Selden at the door of his
hotel; and having read it, he turned back to wait for Dorset. The
message necessarily left large gaps for conjecture; but all that he
had recently heard and seen made these but too easy to fill in. On
the whole he was surprised; for though he had perceived that the
situation contained all the elements of an explosion, he had often
enough, in the range of his personal experience, seen just such
combinations subside into harmlessness. Still, Dorset’s spasmodic
temper, and his wife’s reckless disregard of appearances, gave the
situation a peculiar insecurity; and it was less from the sense of
any special relation to the case than from a purely professional
zeal, that Selden resolved to guide the pair to safety. Whether, in
the present instance, safety for either lay in repairing so damaged
a tie, it was no business of his to consider: he had only, on
general principles, to think of averting a scandal, and his desire
to avert it was increased by his fear of its involving Miss Bart.
There was nothing specific in this apprehension; he merely wished
to spare her the embarrassment of being ever so remotely connected
with the public washing of the Dorset linen.
How exhaustive and unpleasant such a process would be, he saw
even more vividly after his two hours’ talk with poor Dorset. If
anything came out at all, it would be such a vast unpacking of
accumulated moral rags as left him, after his visitor had gone,
with the feeling that he must fling open the windows and have his
room swept out. But nothing should come out; and happily for his
side of the case, the dirty rags, however pieced together, could
not, without considerable difficulty, be turned into a homogeneous
grievance. The torn edges did not always fit—there were missing
bits, there were disparities of size and colour, all of which it
was naturally Selden’s business to make the most of in putting
them under his client’s eye. But to a man in Dorset’s mood the
completest demonstration could not carry conviction, and Selden saw
that for the moment all he could do was to soothe and temporize,
to offer sympathy and to counsel prudence. He let Dorset depart
charged to the brim with the sense that, till their next meeting,
he must maintain a strictly noncommittal attitude; that, in short,
his share in the game consisted for the present in looking on.
Selden knew, however, that he could not long keep such violences
in equilibrium; and he promised to meet Dorset, the next morning,
at an hotel in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile he counted not a little on
the reaction of weakness and self-distrust that, in such natures,
follows on every unwonted expenditure of moral force; and his
telegraphic reply to Miss Bart consisted simply in the injunction:
“Assume that everything is as usual.”
On this assumption, in fact, the early part of the following day
was lived through. Dorset, as if in obedience to Lily’s imperative
bidding, had actually returned in time for a late dinner on the
yacht. The repast had been the most difficult moment of the day.
Dorset was sunk in one of the abysmal silences which so commonly
followed on what his wife called his “attacks” that it was easy,
before the servants, to refer it to this cause; but Bertha herself
seemed, perversely enough, little disposed to make use of this
obvious means of protection. She simply left the brunt of the
situation on her husband’s hands, as if too absorbed in a grievance
of her own to suspect that she might be the object of one herself.
To Lily this attitude was the most ominous, because the most
perplexing, element in the situation. As she tried to fan the
weak flicker of talk, to build up, again and again, the crumbling
structure of “appearances,” her own attention was perpetually
distracted by the question: “What on earth can she be driving at?”
There was something positively exasperating in Bertha’s attitude
of isolated defiance. If only she would have given her friend a
hint they might still have worked together successfully; but how
could Lily be of use, while she was thus obstinately shut out from
participation? To be of use was what she honestly wanted; and not
for her own sake but for the Dorsets’. She had not thought of her
own situation at all: she was simply engrossed in trying to put a
little order in theirs. But the close of the short dreary evening
left her with a sense of effort hopelessly wasted. She had not
tried to see Dorset alone: she had positively shrunk from a renewal
of his confidences. It was Bertha whose confidence she sought, and
who should as eagerly have invited her own; and Bertha, as if in
the infatuation of self-destruction, was actually pushing away her
rescuing hand.
Lily, going to bed early, had left the couple to themselves; and
it seemed part of the general mystery in which she moved that
more than an hour should elapse before she heard Bertha walk down
the silent passage and regain her room. The morrow, rising on an
apparent continuance of the same conditions, revealed nothing of
what had occurred between the confronted pair. One fact alone
outwardly proclaimed the change they were all conspiring to
ignore; and that was the non-appearance of Ned Silverton. No one
referred to it, and this tacit avoidance of the subject kept
it in the immediate foreground of consciousness. But there was
another change, perceptible only to Lily; and that was that Dorset
now avoided her almost as pointedly as his wife. Perhaps he was
repenting his rash outpourings of the previous day; perhaps only
trying, in his clumsy way, to conform to Selden’s counsel to behave
“as usual.” Such instructions no more make for easiness of attitude
than the photographer’s behest to “look natural”; and in a creature
as unconscious as poor Dorset of the appearance he habitually
presented, the struggle to maintain a pose was sure to result in
queer contortions.
It resulted, at any rate, in throwing Lily strangely on her own
resources. She had learned, on leaving her room, that Mrs. Dorset
was still invisible, and that Dorset had left the yacht early; and
feeling too restless to remain alone, she too had herself ferried
ashore. Straying toward the Casino, she attached herself to a
group of acquaintances from Nice, with whom she lunched, and in
whose company she was returning to the rooms when she encountered
Selden crossing the square. She could not, at the moment, separate
herself definitely from her party, who had hospitably assumed that
she would remain with them till they took their departure; but she
found time for a momentary pause of enquiry, to which he promptly
returned: “I’ve seen him again—he’s just left me.”
She waited before him anxiously. “Well? what has happened? What
WILL happen?”
“Nothing as yet—and nothing in the future, I think.”
“It’s over, then? It’s settled? You’re sure?”
He smiled. “Give me time. I’m not sure—but I’m a good deal surer.”
And with that she had to content herself, and hasten on to the
expectant group on the steps.
Selden had in fact given her the utmost measure of his sureness,
had even stretched it a shade to meet the anxiety in her eyes. And
now, as he turned away, strolling down the hill toward the station,
that anxiety remained with him as the visible justification of
his own. It was not, indeed, anything specific that he feared:
there had been a literal truth in his declaration that he did not
think anything would happen. What troubled him was that, though
Dorset’s attitude had perceptibly changed, the change was not
clearly to be accounted for. It had certainly not been produced by
Selden’s arguments, or by the action of his own soberer reason.
Five minutes’ talk sufficed to show that some alien influence had
been at work, and that it had not so much subdued his resentment
as weakened his will, so that he moved under it in a state of
apathy, like a dangerous lunatic who has been drugged. Temporarily,
no doubt, however exerted, it worked for the general safety: the
question was how long it would last, and by what kind of reaction
it was likely to be followed. On these points Selden could gain no
light; for he saw that one effect of the transformation had been to
shut him off from free communion with Dorset. The latter, indeed,
was still moved by the irresistible desire to discuss his wrong;
but, though he revolved about it with the same forlorn tenacity,
Selden was aware that something always restrained him from full
expression. His state was one to produce first weariness and then
impatience in his hearer; and when their talk was over, Selden
began to feel that he had done his utmost, and might justifiably
wash his hands of the sequel.
It was in this mind that he had been making his way back to the
station when Miss Bart crossed his path; but though, after his
brief word with her, he kept mechanically on his course, he was
conscious of a gradual change in his purpose. The change had been
produced by the look in her eyes; and in his eagerness to define
the nature of that look, he dropped into a seat in the gardens,
and sat brooding upon the question. It was natural enough, in
all conscience, that she should appear anxious: a young woman
placed, in the close intimacy of a yachting-cruise, between a
couple on the verge of disaster, could hardly, aside from her
concern for her friends, be insensible to the awkwardness of her
own position. The worst of it was that, in interpreting Miss
Bart’s state of mind, so many alternative readings were possible;
and one of these, in Selden’s troubled mind, took the ugly form
suggested by Mrs. Fisher. If the girl was afraid, was she afraid
for herself or for her friends? And to what degree was her dread of
a catastrophe intensified by the sense of being fatally involved
in it? The burden of offence lying manifestly with Mrs. Dorset,
this conjecture seemed on the face of it gratuitously unkind; but
Selden knew that in the most one-sided matrimonial quarrel there
are generally counter-charges to be brought, and that they are
brought with the greater audacity where the original grievance
is so emphatic. Mrs. Fisher had not hesitated to suggest the
likelihood of Dorset’s marrying Miss Bart if “anything happened”;
and though Mrs. Fisher’s conclusions were notoriously rash, she
was shrewd enough in reading the signs from which they were drawn.
Dorset had apparently shown marked interest in the girl, and this
interest might be used to cruel advantage in his wife’s struggle
for rehabilitation. Selden knew that Bertha would fight to the
last round of powder: the rashness of her conduct was illogically
combined with a cold determination to escape its consequences.
She could be as unscrupulous in fighting for herself as she was
reckless in courting danger, and whatever came to her hand at such
moments was likely to be used as a defensive missile. He did not,
as yet, see clearly just what course she was likely to take, but
his perplexity increased his apprehension, and with it the sense
that, before leaving, he must speak again with Miss Bart. Whatever
her share in the situation—and he had always honestly tried to
resist judging her by her surroundings—however free she might be
from any personal connection with it, she would be better out of
the way of a possible crash; and since she had appealed to him for
help, it was clearly his business to tell her so.
This decision at last brought him to his feet, and carried him
back to the gambling rooms, within whose doors he had seen her
disappearing; but a prolonged exploration of the crowd failed
to put him on her traces. He saw instead, to his surprise, Ned
Silverton loitering somewhat ostentatiously about the tables; and
the discovery that this actor in the drama was not only hovering in
the wings, but actually inviting the exposure of the footlights,
though it might have seemed to imply that all peril was over,
served rather to deepen Selden’s sense of foreboding. Charged with
this impression he returned to the square, hoping to see Miss Bart
move across it, as every one in Monte Carlo seemed inevitably to do
at least a dozen times a day; but here again he waited vainly for
a glimpse of her, and the conclusion was slowly forced on him that
she had gone back to the Sabrina. It would be difficult to follow
her there, and still more difficult, should he do so, to contrive
the opportunity for a private word; and he had almost decided on
the unsatisfactory alternative of writing, when the ceaseless
diorama of the square suddenly unrolled before him the figures of
Lord Hubert and Mrs. Bry.
Hailing them at once with his question, he learned from Lord
Hubert that Miss Bart had just returned to the Sabrina in Dorset’s
company; an announcement so evidently disconcerting to him that
Mrs. Bry, after a glance from her companion, which seemed to act
like the pressure on a spring, brought forth the prompt proposal
that he should come and meet his friends at dinner that evening—“At
Becassin’s—a little dinner to the Duchess,” she flashed out before
Lord Hubert had time to remove the pressure.
Selden’s sense of the privilege of being included in such company
brought him early in the evening to the door of the restaurant,
where he paused to scan the ranks of diners approaching down the
brightly lit terrace. There, while the Brys hovered within over
the last agitating alternatives of the MENU, he kept watch for
the guests from the Sabrina, who at length rose on the horizon in
company with the Duchess, Lord and Lady Skiddaw and the Stepneys.
From this group it was easy for him to detach Miss Bart on the
pretext of a moment’s glance into one of the brilliant shops along
the terrace, and to say to her, while they lingered together in the
white dazzle of a jeweller’s window: “I stopped over to see you—to
beg of you to leave the yacht.”
The eyes she turned on him showed a quick gleam of her former fear.
“To leave—? What do you mean? What has happened?”
“Nothing. But if anything should, why be in the way of it?”
The glare from the jeweller’s window, deepening the pallor of her
face, gave to its delicate lines the sharpness of a tragic mask.
“Nothing will, I am sure; but while there’s even a doubt left, how
can you think I would leave Bertha?”
The words rang out on a note of contempt—was it possibly of
contempt for himself? Well, he was willing to risk its renewal
to the extent of insisting, with an undeniable throb of added
interest: “You have yourself to think of, you know—” to which, with
a strange fall of sadness in her voice, she answered, meeting his
eyes: “If you knew how little difference that makes!”
“Oh, well, nothing WILL happen,” he said, more for his own
reassurance than for hers; and “Nothing, nothing, of course!” she
valiantly assented, as they turned to overtake their companions.
In the thronged restaurant, taking their places about Mrs. Bry’s
illuminated board, their confidence seemed to gain support from
the familiarity of their surroundings. Here were Dorset and his
wife once more presenting their customary faces to the world, she
engrossed in establishing her relation with an intensely new gown,
he shrinking with dyspeptic dread from the multiplied solicitations
of the MENU. The mere fact that they thus showed themselves
together, with the utmost openness the place afforded, seemed
to declare beyond a doubt that their differences were composed.
How this end had been attained was still matter for wonder, but
it was clear that for the moment Miss Bart rested confidently in
the result; and Selden tried to achieve the same view by telling
himself that her opportunities for observation had been ampler than
his own.
Meanwhile, as the dinner advanced through a labyrinth of courses,
in which it became clear that Mrs. Bry had occasionally broken away
from Lord Hubert’s restraining hand, Selden’s general watchfulness
began to lose itself in a particular study of Miss Bart. It was
one of the days when she was so handsome that to be handsome was
enough, and all the rest—her grace, her quickness, her social
felicities—seemed the overflow of a bounteous nature. But what
especially struck him was the way in which she detached herself, by
a hundred undefinable shades, from the persons who most abounded
in her own style. It was in just such company, the fine flower
and complete expression of the state she aspired to, that the
differences came out with special poignancy, her grace cheapening
the other women’s smartness as her finely-discriminated silences
made their chatter dull. The strain of the last hours had restored
to her face the deeper eloquence which Selden had lately missed
in it, and the bravery of her words to him still fluttered in her
voice and eyes. Yes, she was matchless—it was the one word for
her; and he could give his admiration the freer play because so
little personal feeling remained in it. His real detachment from
her had taken place, not at the lurid moment of disenchantment,
but now, in the sober after-light of discrimination, where he saw
her definitely divided from him by the crudeness of a choice which
seemed to deny the very differences he felt in her. It was before
him again in its completeness—the choice in which she was content
to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness
of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit
and the freedom of act which never made for romance. The strident
setting of the restaurant, in which their table seemed set apart
in a special glare of publicity, and the presence at it of little
Dabham of the “Riviera Notes,” emphasized the ideals of a world
where conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society
column had become the roll of fame.
It was as the immortalizer of such occasions that little Dabham,
wedged in modest watchfulness between two brilliant neighbours,
suddenly became the centre of Selden’s scrutiny. How much did he
know of what was going on, and how much, for his purpose, was still
worth finding out? His little eyes were like tentacles thrown
out to catch the floating intimations with which, to Selden, the
air at moments seemed thick; then again it cleared to its normal
emptiness, and he could see nothing in it for the journalist
but leisure to note the elegance of the ladies’ gowns. Mrs.
Dorset’s, in particular, challenged all the wealth of Mr. Dabham’s
vocabulary: it had surprises and subtleties worthy of what he
would have called “the literary style.” At first, as Selden had
noticed, it had been almost too preoccupying to its wearer; but now
she was in full command of it, and was even producing her effects
with unwonted freedom. Was she not, indeed, too free, too fluent,
for perfect naturalness? And was not Dorset, to whom his glance
had passed by a natural transition, too jerkily wavering between
the same extremes? Dorset indeed was always jerky; but it seemed
to Selden that tonight each vibration swung him farther from his
centre.
The dinner, meanwhile, was moving to its triumphant close, to
the evident satisfaction of Mrs. Bry, who, throned in apoplectic
majesty between Lord Skiddaw and Lord Hubert, seemed in spirit to
be calling on Mrs. Fisher to witness her achievement. Short of
Mrs. Fisher her audience might have been called complete; for the
restaurant was crowded with persons mainly gathered there for the
purpose of spectatorship, and accurately posted as to the names and
faces of the celebrities they had come to see. Mrs. Bry, conscious
that all her feminine guests came under that heading, and that
each one looked her part to admiration, shone on Lily with all the
pent-up gratitude that Mrs. Fisher had failed to deserve. Selden,
catching the glance, wondered what part Miss Bart had played in
organizing the entertainment. She did, at least, a great deal to
adorn it; and as he watched the bright security with which she bore
herself, he smiled to think that he should have fancied her in
need of help. Never had she appeared more serenely mistress of the
situation than when, at the moment of dispersal, detaching herself
a little from the group about the table, she turned with a smile
and a graceful slant of the shoulders to receive her cloak from
Dorset.
The dinner had been protracted over Mr. Bry’s exceptional cigars
and a bewildering array of liqueurs, and many of the other tables
were empty; but a sufficient number of diners still lingered to
give relief to the leave-taking of Mrs. Bry’s distinguished guests.
This ceremony was drawn out and complicated by the fact that it
involved, on the part of the Duchess and Lady Skiddaw, definite
farewells, and pledges of speedy reunion in Paris, where they were
to pause and replenish their wardrobes on the way to England. The
quality of Mrs. Bry’s hospitality, and of the tips her husband
had presumably imparted, lent to the manner of the English ladies
a general effusiveness which shed the rosiest light over their
hostess’s future. In its glow Mrs. Dorset and the Stepneys were
also visibly included, and the whole scene had touches of intimacy
worth their weight in gold to the watchful pen of Mr. Dabham.
A glance at her watch caused the Duchess to exclaim to her sister
that they had just time to dash for their train, and the flurry
of this departure over, the Stepneys, who had their motor at the
door, offered to convey the Dorsets and Miss Bart to the quay. The
offer was accepted, and Mrs. Dorset moved away with her husband
in attendance. Miss Bart had lingered for a last word with Lord
Hubert, and Stepney, on whom Mr. Bry was pressing a final, and
still more expensive, cigar, called out: “Come on, Lily, if you’re
going back to the yacht.”
Lily turned to obey; but as she did so, Mrs. Dorset, who had paused
on her way out, moved a few steps back toward the table.
“Miss Bart is not going back to the yacht,” she said in a voice of
singular distinctness.
A startled look ran from eye to eye; Mrs. Bry crimsoned to the
verge of congestion, Mrs. Stepney slipped nervously behind her
husband, and Selden, in the general turmoil of his sensations, was
mainly conscious of a longing to grip Dabham by the collar and
fling him out into the street.
Dorset, meanwhile, had stepped back to his wife’s side. His
face was white, and he looked about him with cowed angry eyes.
“Bertha!—Miss Bart . . . this is some misunderstanding . . . some
mistake....”
“Miss Bart remains here,” his wife rejoined incisively. “And, I
think, George, we had better not detain Mrs. Stepney any longer.”
Miss Bart, during this brief exchange of words, remained in
admirable erectness, slightly isolated from the embarrassed group
about her. She had paled a little under the shock of the insult,
but the discomposure of the surrounding faces was not reflected in
her own. The faint disdain of her smile seemed to lift her high
above her antagonist’s reach, and it was not till she had given
Mrs. Dorset the full measure of the distance between them that she
turned and extended her hand to her hostess.
“I am joining the Duchess tomorrow,” she explained, “and it seemed
easier for me to remain on shore for the night.”
She held firmly to Mrs. Bry’s wavering eye while she gave this
explanation, but when it was over Selden saw her send a tentative
glance from one to another of the women’s faces. She read their
incredulity in their averted looks, and in the mute wretchedness
of the men behind them, and for a miserable half-second he thought
she quivered on the brink of failure. Then, turning to him with an
easy gesture, and the pale bravery of her recovered smile—“Dear Mr.
Selden,” she said, “you promised to see me to my cab.”
* * * * *
Outside, the sky was gusty and overcast, and as Lily and Selden
moved toward the deserted gardens below the restaurant, spurts of
warm rain blew fitfully against their faces. The fiction of the cab
had been tacitly abandoned; they walked on in silence, her hand on
his arm, till the deeper shade of the gardens received them, and
pausing beside a bench, he said: “Sit down a moment.”
She dropped to the seat without answering, but the electric lamp at
the bend of the path shed a gleam on the struggling misery of her
face. Selden sat down beside her, waiting for her to speak, fearful
lest any word he chose should touch too roughly on her wound, and
kept also from free utterance by the wretched doubt which had
slowly renewed itself within him. What had brought her to this
pass? What weakness had placed her so abominably at her enemy’s
mercy? And why should Bertha Dorset have turned into an enemy at
the very moment when she so obviously needed the support of her
sex? Even while his nerves raged at the subjection of husbands to
their wives, and at the cruelty of women to their kind, reason
obstinately harped on the proverbial relation between smoke and
fire. The memory of Mrs. Fisher’s hints, and the corroboration of
his own impressions, while they deepened his pity also increased
his constraint, since, whichever way he sought a free outlet for
sympathy, it was blocked by the fear of committing a blunder.
Suddenly it struck him that his silence must seem almost as
accusatory as that of the men he had despised for turning from her;
but before he could find the fitting word she had cut him short
with a question.
“Do you know of a quiet hotel? I can send for my maid in the
morning.”
“An hotel—HERE—that you can go to alone? It’s not possible.”
She met this with a pale gleam of her old playfulness. “What IS,
then? It’s too wet to sleep in the gardens.”
“But there must be some one——”
“Some one to whom I can go? Of course—any number—but at THIS hour?
You see my change of plan was rather sudden——”
“Good God—if you’d listened to me!” he cried, venting his
helplessness in a burst of anger.
She still held him off with the gentle mockery of her smile. “But
haven’t I?” she rejoined. “You advised me to leave the yacht, and
I’m leaving it.”
He saw then, with a pang of self-reproach, that she meant neither
to explain nor to defend herself; that by his miserable silence he
had forfeited all chance of helping her, and that the decisive hour
was past.
She had risen, and stood before him in a kind of clouded majesty,
like some deposed princess moving tranquilly to exile.
“Lily!” he exclaimed, with a note of despairing appeal; but—“Oh,
not now,” she gently admonished him; and then, in all the sweetness
of her recovered composure: “Since I must find shelter somewhere,
and since you’re so kindly here to help me——”
He gathered himself up at the challenge. “You will do as I tell
you? There’s but one thing, then; you must go straight to your
cousins, the Stepneys.”
“Oh—” broke from her with a movement of instinctive resistance;
but he insisted: “Come—it’s late, and you must appear to have gone
there directly.”
He had drawn her hand into his arm, but she held him back with a
last gesture of protest. “I can’t—I can’t—not that—you don’t know
Gwen: you mustn’t ask me!”
“I MUST ask you—you must obey me,” he persisted, though infected at
heart by her own fear.
Her voice sank to a whisper: “And if she refuses?”—but, “Oh, trust
me—trust me!” he could only insist in return; and yielding to his
touch, she let him lead her back in silence to the edge of the
square.
In the cab they continued to remain silent through the brief drive
which carried them to the illuminated portals of the Stepneys’
hotel. Here he left her outside, in the darkness of the raised
hood, while his name was sent up to Stepney, and he paced the showy
hall, awaiting the latter’s descent. Ten minutes later the two
men passed out together between the gold-laced custodians of the
threshold; but in the vestibule Stepney drew up with a last flare
of reluctance.
“It’s understood, then?” he stipulated nervously, with his hand on
Selden’s arm. “She leaves tomorrow by the early train—and my wife’s
asleep, and can’t be disturbed.”
Chapter 4
The blinds of Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room were drawn down against
the oppressive June sun, and in the sultry twilight the faces of
her assembled relatives took on a fitting shadow of bereavement.
They were all there: Van Alstynes, Stepneys and Melsons—even a
stray Peniston or two, indicating, by a greater latitude in dress
and manner, the fact of remoter relationship and more settled
hopes. The Peniston side was, in fact, secure in the knowledge that
the bulk of Mr. Peniston’s property “went back”; while the direct
connection hung suspended on the disposal of his widow’s private
fortune and on the uncertainty of its extent. Jack Stepney, in
his new character as the richest nephew, tacitly took the lead,
emphasizing his importance by the deeper gloss of his mourning
and the subdued authority of his manner; while his wife’s bored
attitude and frivolous gown proclaimed the heiress’s disregard of
the insignificant interests at stake. Old Ned Van Alstyne, seated
next to her in a coat that made affliction dapper, twirled his
white moustache to conceal the eager twitch of his lips; and Grace
Stepney, red-nosed and smelling of crape, whispered emotionally to
Mrs. Herbert Melson: “I couldn’t BEAR to see the Niagara anywhere
else!”
A rustle of weeds and quick turning of heads hailed the opening
of the door, and Lily Bart appeared, tall and noble in her black
dress, with Gerty Farish at her side. The women’s faces, as
she paused interrogatively on the threshold, were a study in
hesitation. One or two made faint motions of recognition, which
might have been subdued either by the solemnity of the scene, or by
the doubt as to how far the others meant to go; Mrs. Jack Stepney
gave a careless nod, and Grace Stepney, with a sepulchral gesture,
indicated a seat at her side. But Lily, ignoring the invitation, as
well as Jack Stepney’s official attempt to direct her, moved across
the room with her smooth free gait, and seated herself in a chair
which seemed to have been purposely placed apart from the others.
It was the first time that she had faced her family since her
return from Europe, two weeks earlier; but if she perceived any
uncertainty in their welcome, it served only to add a tinge of
irony to the usual composure of her bearing. The shock of dismay
with which, on the dock, she had heard from Gerty Farish of Mrs.
Peniston’s sudden death, had been mitigated, almost at once, by
the irrepressible thought that now, at last, she would be able to
pay her debts. She had looked forward with considerable uneasiness
to her first encounter with her aunt. Mrs. Peniston had vehemently
opposed her niece’s departure with the Dorsets, and had marked
her continued disapproval by not writing during Lily’s absence.
The certainty that she had heard of the rupture with the Dorsets
made the prospect of the meeting more formidable; and how should
Lily have repressed a quick sense of relief at the thought that,
instead of undergoing the anticipated ordeal, she had only to
enter gracefully on a long-assured inheritance? It had been, in
the consecrated phrase, “always understood” that Mrs. Peniston was
to provide handsomely for her niece; and in the latter’s mind the
understanding had long since crystallized into fact.
“She gets everything, of course—I don’t see what we’re here for,”
Mrs. Jack Stepney remarked with careless loudness to Ned Van
Alstyne; and the latter’s deprecating murmur—“Julia was always
a just woman”—might have been interpreted as signifying either
acquiescence or doubt.
“Well, it’s only about four hundred thousand,” Mrs. Stepney
rejoined with a yawn; and Grace Stepney, in the silence produced by
the lawyer’s preliminary cough, was heard to sob out: “They won’t
find a towel missing—I went over them with her the very day——”
Lily, oppressed by the close atmosphere, and the stifling odour
of fresh mourning, felt her attention straying as Mrs. Peniston’s
lawyer, solemnly erect behind the Buhl table at the end of the
room, began to rattle through the preamble of the will.
“It’s like being in church,” she reflected, wondering vaguely where
Gwen Stepney had got such an awful hat. Then she noticed how stout
Jack had grown—he would soon be almost as plethoric as Herbert
Melson, who sat a few feet off, breathing puffily as he leaned his
black-gloved hands on his stick.
“I wonder why rich people always grow fat—I suppose it’s because
there’s nothing to worry them. If I inherit, I shall have to be
careful of my figure,” she mused, while the lawyer droned on
through a labyrinth of legacies. The servants came first, then
a few charitable institutions, then several remoter Melsons and
Stepneys, who stirred consciously as their names rang out, and then
subsided into a state of impassiveness befitting the solemnity of
the occasion. Ned Van Alstyne, Jack Stepney, and a cousin or two
followed, each coupled with the mention of a few thousands: Lily
wondered that Grace Stepney was not among them. Then she heard her
own name—“to my niece Lily Bart ten thousand dollars—” and after
that the lawyer again lost himself in a coil of unintelligible
periods, from which the concluding phrase flashed out with
startling distinctness: “and the residue of my estate to my dear
cousin and name-sake, Grace Julia Stepney.”
There was a subdued gasp of surprise, a rapid turning of heads, and
a surging of sable figures toward the corner in which Miss Stepney
wailed out her sense of unworthiness through the crumpled ball of a
black-edged handkerchief.
Lily stood apart from the general movement, feeling herself for the
first time utterly alone. No one looked at her, no one seemed aware
of her presence; she was probing the very depths of insignificance.
And under her sense of the collective indifference came the acuter
pang of hopes deceived. Disinherited—she had been disinherited—and
for Grace Stepney! She met Gerty’s lamentable eyes, fixed on her
in a despairing effort at consolation, and the look brought her to
herself. There was something to be done before she left the house:
to be done with all the nobility she knew how to put into such
gestures. She advanced to the group about Miss Stepney, and holding
out her hand said simply: “Dear Grace, I am so glad.”