With a small sigh of animal delight in the caress of fur and the chill,
sweet draught from the open window upon her face, as well as in the
sense of effortless power animating that luxurious fabric which the gods
had so thoughtfully provided for her ease, Lucinda Druce settled back in
the town-car, aware yet unmindful of the fluid nocturne of Fifth avenue,
a still, black river streaming beneath the car, its banks of soft fire
strung with linked globes of milky light, its burnished surface scoured
by the fleet gondolas of landsmen, in number beyond counting, skimming,
swooping, stopping, shoaling.
Bel had asked to be dropped at the Brook, alleging a rendezvous of one
sort or another, safely masculine of course. Beyond reflecting that Bel
was in all likelihood lying, Lucinda had paid slight heed to his
excuses. It didn't matter whether they were fair or false, so long as he
wanted to do whatever it was he wanted to do with the rest of his
evening. She had little faith in that theory with which too many are
infatuate, on which too many marriages are wrecked, that affection is to
be persuaded, that loyalty comes of being made to toe the mark.
Then, too, she was not ill-pleased with having herself all to herself,
in this thoughtful mood which had become hers since leaving the
Sedleys', not an unhappy mood, but one curiously mused. Besides, Bel had
been making too free with the Sedley cellar. Not that she was disposed
to hold this a grievance, thoroughgoing mondaine that she was, saturate
with the spirit of a day that was learning to look tolerantly upon
intemperateness as a fashionable form of protest against Prohibition.
No: it wasn't that, it was the fact, established by long observation,
that Bel seldom drank more than he could manage gracefully unless on the
verge of some new gallantry. A little wearily, Lucinda wondered why. Bel
assuredly didn't need anything to stimulate his enterprise. She fancied
it must be that alcohol served as a sort of anaesthetic for his
conscience.
She had a smile transiently bitter. Bel's conscience! The most
feather-headed, irresponsible of philanderers, the most incorrigible;
between whiles the most contrite....
That, she supposed, was why she had always found it in her heart to
forgive him, why she had never experienced any real pain because of his
perennial peccadilloes. He couldn't help himself, it was his nature so
to do. And somehow or other she always found him out, the poor boy was
singularly unfortunate in his efforts to keep her in the dark,
singularly clumsy and sanguine at one and the same time. Or else
cynical. Sometimes she was tempted to think Bel didn't care, or thought
she oughtn't to. Often his attitude seemed to be posed upon the
assumption that everybody was doing it; so why affect a virtuous
eccentricity?
On the other hand, his fits of penitence were terribly real, when she
caught him misbehaving. Or was that, too, merely part of the game with
Bel? Was it just a conventional gambit to make-believe repentance and
promise faithfully never, never to be naughty again?
A disquieting question was raised by the circumstance that she seemed to
be taking tonight's discovery less to heart than ever before. Somehow it
didn't seem to matter so much. Was she growing hardened, then, beginning
to care less for Bel than she had always cared? Or was it....
Between her dreaming eyes and the silhouetted backs of the footman and
chauffeur imagination made a memory momentarily real; she saw, as it
were limned darkly upon the plate-glass partition, the face of Dobbin,
Richard Daubeney as that night had reintroduced him: the bold, brown
face, lighted by clear eyes and an occasional gleam of teeth, of the
adventurer into whom exile had metamorphosed Dobbin. Understanding,
self-reliant, dependable: qualities that might have made Dobbin a rival
for Bellamy to reckon with had he been able to boast them of old. But in
those days he had been no more than ardent and eloquent and dear. He had
needed to go away to war to find what he had lacked to make him--well,
yes, dangerous. Dangerous, that is, to any but a woman well in love with
her husband....
She discovered that the car was already at a standstill. Immersed in
reverie, she hadn't noticed the turn off from the Avenue.
As always, her home enfolded her in its comfortable atmosphere of
security from every assault of adversity by virtue of the solid wealth
upon which it was founded, that formidable whole into which two great
fortunes had been fused by her marriage with Bellamy. Neither she nor
Bel had ever known one qualm of financial uneasiness, neither by chance
conceivable ever would. That irking insecurity which so largely poisons
the common lot was something wholly foreign to the ken of the Druces,
they must brew their own poisons to take its tonic place. None the less
the feeling of her home's stability was precious, Lucinda basked in it
like a cat on an accustomed hearth, wanting it she must have felt
hopelessly lost and forlorn.
She went slowly up to her rooms. And here, where so large a part of her
life was lived, the sense of completely satisfying personal environment
was more than ever strong.
Pensively giving herself into the hands of her maid, she stood opposite
a long mirror. A shade of concern tinged the regard she bent upon that
charming counterfeit, her interest grew meticulous as she observed that
slender and subtly fashioned body emerge from its silken sheaths. Where
were the signs of age, of fading charm? What was it Bel saw in other
women and failed to see in her? What could they give him that she had
not to give? Was her real rival only man's insatiable appetite for some
new thing?
She was as vain as any woman, if no more so than the next; and if she
failed to perceive flaws, she failed with more excuse than most could
claim.
Supple and young and fair, and slighted....
Her heart, too, she searched. But there was nothing wanting there that
the most exacting husband and lover could require. She had told Dobbin
the simple truth: she still loved Bel.
But love and beauty, it seemed, were not enough.
For a long time she lay awake in bed, the book unopened in her hands,
again a creature of unthinking gratification in the consciousness of
Home.
Dark and still but warm with the life she had breathed into it,
monolithic in the mass and firmness of its institution yet a web of her
own weaving, it endured about and around her, cradled her, dug its roots
deep into earth that it might sustain her, held its head up to the skies
that it might shield her from the elements, opposed the thickness of its
walls between her and the world of ungenerous passions: her Home, the
one thing in her life she could assert she had created.
Twenty-six, mistress of riches she had never needed to compute, safe at
anchor in an enviable station, idle but for an ordered round of duties
and diversions so stale it was hardly of more mental moment to her than
the running of her blood, not yet a mother....
At length she opened the book. But its lines of print ran and blended,
hypnogogic images, fugitive and fragmentary, formed and faded on the
type-dark pages: Dobbin's face again, so changed yet the same, with that
look at once disturbing and agreeable of curbed hunger in the eyes; the
face of Amelie Severn, with a stagey effect of shadows cast by
table-lights, piquant with mirthful mischief as she looked round, at
once challenging and apprehensive of Bel's next essay in amorous
impudence; and Bel's face with glimmering eyes and that tensity in the
set of the jaw which, in the sight of his wife, had but one meaning....
An echoless clap of sound penetrated the walls, the slam of a cab door.
Lucinda dropped her book. The front doors crashed resoundingly. She
turned out her light and lay listening, watchful.
Beneath the door that communicated with Bel's room a rim of gold shone
out. She heard him stumble against a chair and swear at it, turned
quietly on her side, away from the door, and composed herself to sleep.
Some minutes after, a yellow light splashed athwart her bed.
"Linda?" Bel's tongue, as thick as she had expected it to be, called
again, insistently: "Linda? 'Wake, Linda?"
She made no stir at all, and presently he closed the door and she heard
him grumbling, then a click as he switched off his bedside lamp.
Later he began to snore, something he never did unless he had been
drinking heavily.
Her drowsy time had passed, not to return. She lay for hours, looking
wide-eyed into darkness, thinking.
How had Dobbin known--or guessed--she was unhappy?
She wasn't, she was neither happy nor unhappy, she was just a little
lonely ... wasted....