THAT they must see each other again before his departure, in someplace
less exposed than their usual haunts, was as clear to Lizzie as it
appeared to be to Deering. His expressing the wish seemed, indeed, the
sweetest testimony to the quality of his feeling, since, in the first
weeks of the most perfunctory widowerhood, a man of his stamp is
presumed to abstain from light adventures. If, then, at such a moment,
he wished so much to be quietly and gravely with her, it could be only
for reasons she did not call by name, but of which she felt the sacred
tremor in her heart; and it would have seemed incredibly vain and vulgar
to put forward, at such a crisis, the conventional objections by means
of which such little-exposed existences defend the treasure of their
freshness.
In such a mood as this one may descend from the Passy omnibus at the
corner of the Pont de la Concorde (she had not let him fetch her in a
cab) with a sense of dedication almost solemn, and may advance to meet
one’s fate, in the shape of a gentleman of melancholy elegance, with an
auto-taxi at his call, as one has advanced to the altar-steps in some
girlish bridal vision.
Even the experienced waiter ushering them into an upper room of the
quiet restaurant on the Seine could hardly have supposed their quest
for seclusion to be based on sentimental motives, so soberly did Deering
give his orders, while his companion sat small and grave at his side.
She did not, indeed, mean to let her private pang obscure their hour
together: she was already learning that Deering shrank from sadness.
He should see that she had courage and gaiety to face their coming
separation, and yet give herself meanwhile to this completer nearness;
but she waited, as always, for him to strike the opening note.
Looking back at it later, she wondered at the mild suavity of the hour.
Her heart was unversed in happiness, but he had found the tone to lull
her apprehensions, and make her trust her fate for any golden wonder.
Deepest of all, he gave her the sense of something tacit and confirmed
between them, as if his tenderness were a habit of the heart hardly
needing the support of outward proof.
Such proof as he offered came, therefore, as a kind of crowning
luxury, the flower of a profoundly rooted sentiment; and here again the
instinctive reserves and defenses would have seemed to vulgarize what
his trust ennobled. But if all the tender casuistries of her heart were
at his service, he took no grave advantage of them. Even when they sat
alone after dinner, with the lights of the river trembling through their
one low window, and the vast rumor of Paris inclosing them in a heart
of silence, he seemed, as much as herself, under the spell of
hallowing influences. She felt it most of all as she yielded to the arm
he presently put about her, to the long caress he laid on her lips and
eyes: not a word or gesture missed the note of quiet union, or cast a
doubt, in retrospect, on the pact they sealed with their last look.
That pact, as she reviewed it through a sleepless night, seemed to have
consisted mainly, on his part, in pleadings for full and frequent news
of her, on hers in the assurance that it should be given as often as
he asked it. She had felt an intense desire not to betray any undue
eagerness, any crude desire to affirm and define her hold on him. Her
life had given her a certain acquaintance with the arts of defense:
girls in her situation were commonly supposed to know them all, and
to use them as occasion called. But Lizzie’s very need of them had
intensified her disdain. Just because she was so poor, and had always,
materially, so to count her change and calculate her margin, she would
at least know the joy of emotional prodigality, would give her heart
as recklessly as the rich their millions. She was sure now that Deering
loved her, and if he had seized the occasion of their farewell to give
her some definitely worded sign of his feeling--if, more plainly, he
had asked her to marry him,--his doing so would have seemed less like
a proof of his sincerity than of his suspecting in her the need of a
verbal warrant. That he had abstained seemed to show that he trusted
her as she trusted him, and that they were one most of all in this deep
security of understanding.
She had tried to make him divine all this in the chariness of her
promise to write. She would write; of course she would. But he would be
busy, preoccupied, on the move: it was for him to let her know when he
wished a word, to spare her the embarrassment of ill-timed intrusions.
“Intrusions?” He had smiled the word away. “You can’t well intrude, my
darling, on a heart where you’re already established, to the complete
exclusion of other lodgers.” And then, taking her hands, and looking up
from them into her happy, dizzy eyes: “You don’t know much about being
in love, do you, Lizzie?” he laughingly ended.
It seemed easy enough to reject this imputation in a kiss; but she
wondered afterward if she had not deserved it. Was she really cold and
conventional, and did other women give more richly and recklessly? She
found that it was possible to turn about every one of her reserves
and delicacies so that they looked like selfish scruples and petty
pruderies, and at this game she came in time to exhaust all the
resources of an over-abundant casuistry.
Meanwhile the first days after Deering’s departure wore a soft,
refracted light like the radiance lingering after sunset. _He_, at any
rate, was taxable with no reserves, no calculations, and his letters
of farewell, from train and steamer, filled her with long murmurs and
echoes of his presence. How he loved her, how he loved her--and how he
knew how to tell her so!
She was not sure of possessing the same aptitude. Unused to the
expression of personal emotion, she fluctuated between the impulse to
pour out all she felt and the fear lest her extravagance should amuse or
even bore him. She never lost the sense that what was to her the central
crisis of experience must be a mere episode in a life so predestined as
his to romantic accidents. All that she felt and said would be subjected
to the test of comparison with what others had already given him: from
all quarters of the globe she saw passionate missives winging their way
toward Deering, for whom her poor little swallow-flight of devotion could
certainly not make a summer. But such moments were succeeded by others
in which she raised her head and dared inwardly to affirm her conviction
that no woman had ever loved him just as she had, and that none,
therefore, had probably found just such things to say to him. And this
conviction strengthened the other less solidly based belief that
_he_ also, for the same reason, had found new accents to express his
tenderness, and that the three letters she wore all day in her shabby
blouse, and hid all night beneath her pillow, surpassed not only in
beauty, but in quality, all he had ever penned for other eyes.
They gave her, at any rate, during the weeks that she wore them on her
heart, sensations even more complex and delicate than Deering’s actual
presence had ever occasioned. To be with him was always like breasting
a bright, rough sea, that blinded while it buoyed her: but his letters
formed a still pool of contemplation, above which she could bend, and
see the reflection of the sky, and the myriad movements of life
that flitted and gleamed below the surface. The wealth of his hidden
life--that was what most surprised her! It was incredible to her now
that she had had no inkling of it, but had kept on blindly along the
narrow track of habit, like a traveler climbing a road in a fog, who
suddenly finds himself on a sunlit crag between blue leagues of sky and
dizzy depths of valley. And the odd thing was that all the people about
her--the whole world of the Passy pension--were still plodding along the
same dull path, preoccupied with the pebbles underfoot, and unconscious
of the glory beyond the fog!
There were wild hours when she longed to cry out to them what one saw
from the summit--and hours of tremulous abasement when she asked herself
why _her_ happy feet had been guided there, while others, no doubt as
worthy, stumbled and blundered in obscurity. She felt, in particular,
a sudden urgent pity for the two or three other girls at Mme.
Clopin’s--girls older, duller, less alive than she, and by that very
token more appealingly flung upon her sympathy. Would they ever know?
Had they ever known?--those were the questions that haunted her as she
crossed her companions on the stairs, faced them at the dinner-table,
and listened to their poor, pining talk in the dim-lit slippery-seated
_salon_. One of the girls was Swiss, the other English; the third, Andora
Macy, was a young lady from the Southern States who was studying French
with the ultimate object of imparting it to the inmates of a girls’
school at Macon, Georgia.
Andora Macy was pale, faded, immature. She had a drooping Southern
accent, and a manner which fluctuated between arch audacity and fits of
panicky hauteur. She yearned to be admired, and feared to be insulted;
and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined to miss both
these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at second hand in the
experiences of her more privileged friends.
It was perhaps for this reason that she took a wistful interest in
Lizzie, who had shrunk from her at first, as the depressing image of her
own probable future, but to whom she had now suddenly become an object
of sentimental pity.