MISS MACY’s room was next to Miss West’s, and the Southerner’s knock
often appealed to Lizzie’s hospitality when Mme. Clopin’s early curfew
had driven her boarders from the _salon_. It sounded thus one evening
just as Lizzie, tired from an unusually long day of tuition, was in the
act of removing her dress. She was in too indulgent a mood to withhold
her “Come in,” and as Miss Macy crossed the threshold, Lizzie felt that
Vincent Deering’s first letter--the letter from the train--had slipped
from her loosened bodice to the floor.
Miss Macy, as promptly noting the fact, darted forward to recover the
letter. Lizzie stooped also, fiercely jealous of her touch; but the
other reached the precious paper first, and as she seized it, Lizzie knew
that she had seen whence it fell, and was weaving round the incident a
rapid web of romance.
Lizzie blushed with annoyance. “It’s too stupid, having no pockets! If
one gets a letter as she is going out in the morning, she has to carry
it in her blouse all day.”
Miss Macy looked at her with swimming eyes. “It’s warm from your heart!”
she breathed, reluctantly yielding up the missive.
Lizzie laughed, for she knew better: she knew it was the letter that had
warmed her heart. Poor Andora Macy! _She_ would never know. Her bleak
bosom would never take fire from such a contact. Lizzie looked at her
with kind eyes, secretly chafing at the injustice of fate.
The next evening, on her return home, she found Andora hovering in the
entrance hall.
“I thought you’d like me to put this in your own hand,” Miss Macy
whispered significantly, pressing a letter upon Lizzie. “I couldn’t
_bear_ to see it lying on the table with the others.”
It was Deering’s letter from the steamer. Lizzie blushed to the forehead,
but without resenting Andora’s divination. She could not have breathed
a word of her bliss, but she was not altogether sorry to have it guessed,
and pity for Andora’s destitution yielded to the pleasure of using it
as a mirror for her own abundance. DEERING wrote again on reaching New
York, a long, fond, dissatisfied letter, vague in its indication of his
own projects, specific in the expression of his love. Lizzie brooded
over every syllable of it till they formed the undercurrent of all
her waking thoughts, and murmured through her midnight dreams; but
she would have been happier if they had shed some definite light on the
future.
That would come, no doubt, when he had had time to look about and
get his bearings. She counted up the days that must elapse before she
received his next letter, and stole down early to peep at the papers,
and learn when the next American mail was due. At length the happy date
arrived, and she hurried distractedly through the day’s work, trying to
conceal her impatience by the endearments she bestowed upon her pupils.
It was easier, in her present mood, to kiss them than to keep them at
their grammars.
That evening, on Mme. Clopin’s threshold, her heart beat so wildly that
she had to lean a moment against the door-post before entering. But on
the hall table, where the letters lay, there was none for her.
She went over them with a feverish hand, her heart dropping down
and down, as she had sometimes fallen down an endless stairway in a
dream--the very same stairway up which she had seemed to fly when she
climbed the long hill to Deering’s door. Then it suddenly struck her
that Andora might have found and secreted her letter, and with a spring
she was on the actual stairs and rattling Miss Macy’s door-handle.
“You’ve a letter for me, haven’t you?” she panted.
Miss Macy, turning from the toilet-table, inclosed her in attenuated
arms. “Oh, darling, did you expect one to-day?”
“Do give it to me!” Lizzie pleaded with burning eyes.
“But I haven’t any! There hasn’t been a sign of a letter for you.”
“I know there is. There _must_ be,” Lizzie persisted, stamping her foot.
“But, dearest, I’ve _watched_ for you, and there’s been nothing,
absolutely nothing.”
Day after day, for the ensuing weeks, the same scene reenacted itself
with endless variations. Lizzie, after the first sharp spasm of
disappointment, made no effort to conceal her anxiety from Miss Macy,
and the fond Andora was charged to keep a vigilant eye upon the postman’s
coming, and to spy on the _bonne_ for possible negligence or perfidy.
But these elaborate precautions remained fruitless, and no letter from
Deering came.
During the first fortnight of silence Lizzie exhausted all the
ingenuities of explanation. She marveled afterward at the reasons she
had found for Deering’s silence: there were moments when she almost
argued herself into thinking it more natural than his continuing to
write. There was only one reason which her intelligence consistently
rejected, and that was the possibility that he had forgotten her, that
the whole episode had faded from his mind like a breath from a mirror.
From that she resolutely turned her thoughts, aware that if she suffered
herself to contemplate it, the motive power of life would fail, and she
would no longer understand why she rose up in the morning and laydown at
night.
If she had had leisure to indulge her anguish she might have been unable
to keep such speculations at bay. But she had to be up and working: the
_blanchisseuse_ had to be paid, and Mme. Clopin’s weekly bill, and all
the little “extras” that even her frugal habits had to reckon with.
And in the depths of her thought dwelt the dogging fear of illness and
incapacity, goading her to work while she could. She hardly remembered
the time when she had been without that fear; it was second nature now,
and it kept her on her feet when other incentives might have failed. In
the blankness of her misery she felt no dread of death; but the horror of
being ill and “dependent” was in her blood.
In the first weeks of silence she wrote again and again to Deering,
entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. From the first she
had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in
her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been
too possessive, too exacting in her tone. She told herself that his
fastidiousness shrank from any but a “light touch,” and that hers had
not been light enough. She should have kept to the character of the
“little friend,” the artless consciousness in which tormented genius may
find an escape from its complexities; and instead, she had dramatized
their relation, exaggerated her own part in it, presumed, forsooth, to
share the front of the stage with him, instead of being content to serve
as scenery or chorus.
But though to herself she admitted, and even insisted on, the episodical
nature of the experience, on the fact that for Deering it could be no
more than an incident, she was still convinced that his sentiment for
her, however fugitive, had been genuine.
His had not been the attitude of the unscrupulous male seeking a vulgar
“advantage.” For a moment he had really needed her, and if he was silent
now, it was perhaps because he feared that she had mistaken the nature
of the need and built vain hopes on its possible duration.
It was of the very essence of Lizzie’s devotion that it sought
instinctively the larger freedom of its object; she could not conceive
of love under any form of exaction or compulsion. To make this clear
to Deering became an overwhelming need, and in a last short letter
she explicitly freed him from whatever sentimental obligation its
predecessors might have seemed to impose. In this studied communication
she playfully accused herself of having unwittingly sentimentalized
their relation, affirming, in self-defense, a retrospective astuteness,
a sense of the impermanence of the tenderer sentiments, that almost
put Deering in the fatuous position of having mistaken coquetry for
surrender. And she ended gracefully with a plea for the continuance of
the friendly regard which she had “always understood” to be the basis of
their sympathy. The document, when completed, seemed to her worthy of
what she conceived to be Deering’s conception of a woman of the world,
and she found a spectral satisfaction in the thought of making her final
appearance before him in that distinguished character. But she was never
destined to learn what effect the appearance produced; for the letter,
like those it sought to excuse, remained unanswered.
V
THE fresh spring sunshine which had so often attended Lizzie Weston
her dusty climb up the hill of St.-Cloud beamed on her, some two years
later, in a scene and a situation of altered import.
The horse-chestnuts of the Champs-Elysees filtered its rays through
the symmetrical umbrage inclosing the graveled space about Daurent’s
restaurant, and Miss West, seated at a table within that privileged
circle, presented to the light a hat much better able to sustain its
scrutiny than those which had sheltered the brow of Juliet Deering’s
instructress.
Her dress was in keeping with the hat, and both belonged to a situation
rich in such possibilities as the act of a leisurely luncheon at
Daurent’s in the opening week of the Salon. Her companions, of both
sexes, confirmed and emphasized this impression by an elaborateness of
garb and an ease of attitude implying the largest range of selection
between the forms of Parisian idleness; and even Andora Macy, seated
opposite, as in the place of co-hostess or companion, reflected, in coy
grays and mauves, the festal note of the occasion.
This note reverberated persistently in the ears of a solitary gentleman
straining for glimpses of the group from a table wedged in the remotest
corner of the garden; but to Miss West herself the occurrence did not
rise above the usual. For nearly a year she had been acquiring the habit
of such situations, and the act of offering a luncheon at Daurent’s
to her cousins, the Harvey Mearses of Providence, and their friend Mr.
Jackson Benn, produced in her no emotion beyond the languid glow which
Mr. Benn’s presence was beginning to impart to such scenes.
“It’s frightful, the way you’ve got used to it,” Andora Macy had wailed
in the first days of her friend’s transfigured fortune, when Lizzie
West had waked one morning to find herself among the heirs of an old
and miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had formed, since her
earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and conjecture in her own
improvident family. Old Hezron Mears had never given any sign of life to
the luckless Wests; had perhaps hardly been conscious of including
them in the carefully drawn will which, following the old American
convention, scrupulously divided his hoarded millions among his kin. It
was by a mere genealogical accident that Lizzie, falling just within
the golden circle, found herself possessed of a pittance sufficient to
release her from the prospect of a long gray future in Mme. Clopin’s
pension.
The release had seemed wonderful at first; yet she presently found that
it had destroyed her former world without giving her anew one. On the
ruins of the old pension life bloomed the only flower that had ever
sweetened her path; and beyond the sense of present ease, and the
removal of anxiety for the future, her reconstructed existence
blossomed with no compensating joys. She had hoped great things from the
opportunity to rest, to travel, to look about her, above all, in
various artful feminine ways, to be “nice” to the companions of her less
privileged state; but such widenings of scope left her, as it were, but
the more conscious of the empty margin of personal life beyond them. It
was not till she woke to the leisure of her new days that she had the
full sense of what was gone from them.
Their very emptiness made her strain to pack them with transient
sensations: she was like the possessor of an unfurnished house, with
random furniture and bric-a-brac perpetually pouring in “on approval.”
It was in this experimental character that Mr. Jackson Benn had fixed
her attention, and the languid effort of her imagination to adjust him
to her requirements was seconded by the fond complicity of Andora and
the smiling approval of her cousins. Lizzie did not discourage these
demonstrations: she suffered serenely Andora’s allusions to Mr. Benn’s
infatuation, and Mrs. Mears’s casual boast of his business standing.
All the better if they could drape his narrow square-shouldered frame and
round unwinking countenance in the trailing mists of sentiment: Lizzie
looked and listened, not unhopeful of the miracle.
“I never saw anything like the way these Frenchmen stare! Doesn’t it
make you nervous, Lizzie?” Mrs. Mears broke out suddenly, ruffling her
feather boa about an outraged bosom. Mrs. Mears was still in that stage
of development when her countrywomen taste to the full the peril of
being exposed to the gaze of the licentious Gaul.
Lizzie roused herself from the contemplation of Mr. Benn’s round baby
cheeks and the square blue jaw resting on his perpendicular collar. “Is
some one staring at me?” she asked with a smile.
“Don’t turn round, whatever you do! There--just over there, between the
rhododendrons--the tall fair man alone at that table. Really, Harvey,
I think you ought to speak to the head-waiter, or something; though I
suppose in one of these places they’d only laugh at you,” Mrs. Mears
shudderingly concluded.
Her husband, as if inclining to this probability, continued the
undisturbed dissection of his chicken wing; but Mr. Benn, perhaps
aware that his situation demanded a more punctilious attitude, sternly
revolved upon the parapet of his high collar in the direction of Mrs.
Mears’s glance.
“What, that fellow all alone over there? Why, _he’s_ not French; he’s an
American,” he then proclaimed with a perceptible relaxing of the facial
muscles.
“Oh!” murmured Mrs. Mears, as perceptibly disappointed, and Mr. Benn
continued carelessly: “He came over on the steamer with me. He’s some
kind of an artist--a fellow named Deering. He was staring at _me_, I
guess: wondering whether I was going to remember him. Why, how d’ ‘e do?
How are you? Why, yes, of course; with pleasure--my friends, Mrs. Harvey
Mears--Mr. Mears; my friends Miss Macy and Miss West.”
“I have the pleasure of knowing Miss West,” said Vincent Deering with a
smile.