_did_ see me? Then my joining Jinny while he’s talking to her will
look--how will it look?” She began to regret not having had it out on
the spot with Sillerton Jackson, who could be trusted to hold his tongue
on occasion, especially if a pretty woman threw herself on his mercy.
She glanced over her shoulder as if to call him back; but he had turned
away, been absorbed into another group, and she found herself, instead,
abruptly face to face with Sabina Wesson. Well, perhaps that was better
still. After all, it all depended on how much Mrs. Wesson had seen, and
what line she meant to take, supposing she _had_ seen anything. She was
not likely to be as inscrutable as old Sillerton. Lizzie wished now that
she had not forgotten to go to Mrs. Wesson’s last party.
“Dear Mrs. Wesson, it was so kind of you--”
But Mrs. Wesson was not there. By the exercise of that mysterious
protective power which enables a woman desirous of not being waylaid to
make herself invisible, or to transport herself, by means imperceptible,
to another part of the earth’s surface, Mrs. Wesson, who, two seconds
earlier, appeared in all her hard handsomeness to be bearing straight
down on Mrs. Hazeldean, with a scant yard of clear _parquet_ between
them--Mrs. Wesson, as her animated back and her active red fan now
called on all the company to notice, had never been there at all, had
never seen Mrs. Hazeldean (“_Was_ she at Mrs. Struthers’s last Sunday?
How odd! I must have left before she got there--“), but was busily
engaged, on the farther side of the piano, in examining a picture to
which her attention appeared to have been called by the persons nearest
her.
“Ah, how _life-like_! That’s what I always feel when I see a
Meissonier,” she was heard to exclaim, with her well-known instinct for
the fitting epithet.
Lizzie Hazeldean stood motionless. Her eyes dazzled as if she had
received a blow on the forehead. “So _that’s_ what it feels like!” she
thought. She lifted her head very high, looked about her again, tried to
signal to Henry Prest, but saw him still engaged with the lovely Mrs.
Lyman, and at the same moment caught the glance of young Hubert Wesson,
Sabina’s eldest, who was standing in disengaged expectancy near the
supper-room door.
Hubert Wesson, as his eyes met Mrs. Hazeldean’s, crimsoned to the
forehead, hung back a moment, and then came forward, bowing low--again
that too low bow! “So _he_ saw me too,” she thought. She put her hand
on his arm with a laugh. “Dear me, how ceremonious you are! Really, I’m
not as old as that bow of yours implies. My dear boy, I hope you want to
take me in to supper at once. I was out in the cold all the afternoon,
gazing at the Fifth Avenue Hotel fire, and I’m simply dying of hunger
and fatigue.”
There, the die was cast--she had said it loud enough for all the people
nearest her to hear! And she was sure now that it was the right, the
“natural” thing to do.
Her spirits rose, and she sailed into the supper-room like a goddess,
steering Hubert to an unoccupied table in a flowery corner.
“No--I think we’re very well by ourselves, don’t you? Do you want that
fat old bore of a Lucy Vanderlow to join us? If you _do_, of course ...
I can see she’s dying to ... but then, I warn you, I shall ask a young
man! Let me see--shall I ask Henry Prest? You see he’s hovering! No, it
_is_ jollier with just you and me, isn’t it?” She leaned forward a
little, resting her chin on her clasped hands, her elbows on the table,
in an attitude which the older women thought shockingly free, but the
younger ones were beginning to imitate.
“And now, some champagne, please--and _hot_ terrapin!... But I suppose
you were at the fire yourself, weren’t you?” she leaned still a little
nearer to say.
The blush again swept over young Wesson’s face, rose to his forehead,
and turned the lobes of his large ears to balls of fire (“It looks,” she
thought, “as if he had on huge coral earrings.”). But she forced him to
look at her, laughed straight into his eyes, and went on: “Did you ever
see a funnier sight than all those dressed-up absurdities rushing out
into the cold? It looked like the end of an Inauguration Ball! I was so
fascinated that I actually pushed my way into the hall. The firemen were
furious, but they couldn’t stop me--nobody can stop me at a fire! You
should have seen the ladies scuttling downstairs--the fat ones! Oh, but
I beg your pardon; I’d forgotten that you admire ... avoirdupois. No?
But ... Mrs. Van ... so stupid of me! Why, you’re actually blushing! I
assure you, you’re as red as your mother’s fan--and visible from as
great a distance! Yes, please; a little more champagne....”
And then the inevitable began. She forgot the fire, forgot her
anxieties, forgot Mrs. Wesson’s affront, forgot everything but the
amusement, the passing childish amusement, of twirling around her little
finger this shy clumsy boy, as she had twirled so many others, old and
young, not caring afterward if she ever saw them again, but so absorbed
in the sport, and in her sense of knowing how to do it better than the
other women--more quietly, more insidiously, without ogling, bridling or
grimacing--that sometimes she used to ask herself with a shiver: “What
was the gift given to me for?” Yes; it always amused her at first: the
gradual dawn of attraction in eyes that had regarded her with
indifference, the blood rising to the face, the way she could turn and
twist the talk as though she had her victim on a leash, spinning him
after her down winding paths of sentimentality, irony, caprice ... and
leaving him, with beating heart and dazzled eyes, to visions of an
all-promising morrow.... “My only accomplishment!” she murmured to
herself as she rose from the table followed by young Wesson’s
fascinated gaze, while already, on her own lips, she felt the taste of
cinders.
“But at any rate,” she thought, “he’ll hold his tongue about having seen
me at the fire.”
V
She let herself in with her latch-key, glanced at the notes and letters
on the hall-table (the old habit of allowing nothing to escape her), and
stole up through the darkness to her room.
A fire still glowed in the chimney, and its light fell on two vases of
crimson roses. The room was full of their scent.
Mrs. Hazeldean frowned, and then shrugged her shoulders. It had been a
mistake, after all, to let it appear that she was indifferent to the
flowers; she must remember to thank Susan for rescuing them. She began
to undress, hastily yet clumsily, as if her deft fingers were all
thumbs; but first, detaching the two faded pink roses from her bosom,
she put them with a reverent touch into a glass on the toilet-table.
Then, slipping on her dressing-gown, she stole to her husband’s door. It
was shut, and she leaned her ear to the keyhole. After a moment she
caught his breathing, heavy, as it always was when he had a cold, but
regular, untroubled.... With a sigh of relief she tiptoed back. Her
uncovered bed, with its fresh pillows and satin coverlet, sent her a
rosy invitation; but she cowered down by the fire, hugging her knees and
staring into the coals.
“So _that’s_ what it feels like!” she repeated.
It was the first time in her life that she had ever been deliberately
“cut”; and the cut was a deadly injury in old New York. For Sabina
Wesson to have used it, consciously, deliberately--for there was no
doubt that she had purposely advanced toward her victim--she must have
done so with intent to kill. And to risk that, she must have been sure
of her facts, sure of corroborating witnesses, sure of being backed up
by all her clan.
Lizzie Hazeldean had her clan too--but it was a small and weak one, and
she hung on its outer fringe by a thread of little-regarded cousinship.
As for the Hazeldean tribe, which was larger and stronger (though
nothing like the great organized Wesson-Parrett _gens_, with half New
York and all Albany at its back)--well, the Hazeldeans were not much to
be counted on, and would even, perhaps, in a furtive negative way, be
not too sorry (“if it were not for poor Charlie”) that poor Charlie’s
wife should at last be made to pay for her good looks, her popularity,
above all for being, in spite of her origin, treated by poor Charlie as
if she were one of them!
Her origin was, of course, respectable enough. Everybody knew all about
the Winters--she had been Lizzie Winter. But the Winters were very small
people, and her father, the Reverend Arcadius Winter, the sentimental
over-popular Rector of a fashionable New York church, after a few
seasons of too great success as preacher and director of female
consciences, had suddenly had to resign and go to Bermuda for his
health--or was it France?--to some obscure watering-place, it was
rumoured. At any rate, Lizzie, who went with him (with a crushed
bed-ridden mother), was ultimately, after the mother’s death, fished out
of a girls’ school in Brussels--they seemed to have been in so many
countries at once!--and brought back to New York by a former
parishioner of poor Arcadius’s, who had always “believed in him,” in
spite of the Bishop, and who took pity on his lonely daughter.
The parishioner, Mrs. Mant, was “one of the Hazeldeans.” She was a rich
widow, given to generous gestures which she was often at a loss how to
complete; and when she had brought Lizzie Winter home, and sufficiently
celebrated her own courage in doing so, she did not quite know what step
to take next. She had fancied it would be pleasant to have a clever
handsome girl about the house; but her housekeeper was not of the same
mind. The spare-room sheets had not been out of lavender for twenty
years--and Miss Winter always left the blinds up in her room, and the
carpet and curtains, unused to such exposure, suffered accordingly. Then
young men began to call--they called in numbers. Mrs. Mant had not
supposed that the daughter of a clergyman--and a clergyman “under a
cloud”--would expect visitors. She had imagined herself taking Lizzie
Winter to Church Fairs, and having the stitches of her knitting picked
up by the young girl, whose “eyes were better” than her benefactress’s.
But Lizzie did not know how to knit--she possessed no useful
accomplishments--and she was visibly bored by Church Fairs, where her
presence was of little use, since she had no money to spend. Mrs. Mant
began to see her mistake; and the discovery made her dislike her
protégée, whom she secretly regarded as having intentionally misled her.
In Mrs. Mant’s life, the transition from one enthusiasm to another was
always marked by an interval of disillusionment, during which,
Providence having failed to fulfill her requirements, its existence was
openly called into question. But in this flux of moods there was one
fixed point: Mrs. Mant was a woman whose life revolved about a bunch of
keys. What treasures they gave access to, what disasters would have
ensued had they been forever lost, was not quite clear; but whenever
they were missed the household was in an uproar, and as Mrs. Mant would
trust them to no one but herself, these occasions were frequent. One of
them arose at the very moment when Mrs. Mant was recovering from her
enthusiasm for Miss Winter. A minute before, the keys had been there, in
a pocket of her work-table; she had actually touched them in hunting for
her buttonhole-scissors. She had been called away to speak to the
plumber about the bath-room leak, and when she left the room there was
no one in it but Miss Winter. When she returned, the keys were gone.
The house had been turned inside out; everyone had been, if not accused,
at least suspected; and in a rash moment Mrs. Mant had spoken of the
police. The housemaid had thereupon given warning, and her own maid
threatened to follow; when suddenly the Bishop’s hints recurred to Mrs.
Mant. The Bishop had always implied that there had been something
irregular in Dr. Winter’s accounts, besides the other unfortunate
business....
Very mildly, she had asked Miss Winter if she might not have seen the
keys, and “picked them up without thinking.” Miss Winter permitted
herself to smile in denying the suggestion; the smile irritated Mrs.
Mant; and in a moment the floodgates were opened. She saw nothing to
smile at in her question--unless it was of a kind that Miss Winter was
already used to, prepared for ... with that sort of background ... her
unfortunate father....
“Stop!” Lizzie Winter cried. She remembered now, as if it had happened
yesterday, the abyss suddenly opening at her feet. It was her first
direct contact with human cruelty. Suffering, weakness, frailties other
than Mrs. Mant’s restricted fancy could have pictured, the girl had
known, or at least suspected; but she had found as much kindness as
folly in her path, and no one had ever before attempted to visit upon
her the dimly-guessed shortcomings of her poor old father. She shook
with horror as much as with indignation, and her “Stop!” blazed out so
violently that Mrs. Mant, turning white, feebly groped for the bell.
And it was then, at that very moment, that Charles Hazeldean came
in--Charles Hazeldean, the favourite nephew, the pride of the tribe.
Lizzie had seen him only once or twice, for he had been absent since her
return to New York. She had thought him distinguished-looking, but
rather serious and sarcastic; and he had apparently taken little notice
of her--which perhaps accounted for her opinion.
“Oh, Charles, dearest Charles--that you should be here to hear such
things said to me!” his aunt gasped, her hand on her outraged heart.
“What things? Said by whom? I see no one here to say them but Miss
Winter,” Charles had laughed, taking the girl’s icy hand.
“Don’t shake hands with her! She has insulted me! She has ordered me to
keep silence--in my own house. ‘Stop!’ she said, when I was trying, in
the kindness of my heart, to get her to admit privately.... Well, if
she prefers to have the police....”
“I do! I ask you to send for them!” Lizzie cried.
How vividly she remembered all that followed: the finding of the keys,
Mrs. Mant’s reluctant apologies, her own cold acceptance of them, and
the sense on both sides of the impossibility of continuing their life
together! She had been wounded to the soul, and her own plight first
revealed to her in all its destitution. Before that, despite the ups and
downs of a wandering life, her youth, her good looks, the sense of a
certain bright power over people and events, had hurried her along on a
spring tide of confidence; she had never thought of herself as the
dependent, the beneficiary, of the persons who were kind to her. Now she
saw herself, at twenty, a penniless girl, with a feeble discredited
father carrying his snowy head, his unctuous voice, his edifying manner
from one cheap watering-place to another, through an endless succession
of sentimental and pecuniary entanglements. To him she could be of no
more help than he to her; and save for him she was alone. The Winter
cousins, as much humiliated by his disgrace as they had been puffed-up
by his triumphs, let it be understood, when the breach with Mrs. Mant
became known, that they were not in a position to interfere; and among
Dr. Winter’s former parishioners none was left to champion him. Almost
at the same time, Lizzie heard that he was about to marry a Portuguese
opera-singer and be received into the Church of Rome; and this crowning
scandal too promptly justified his family.
The situation was a grave one, and called for energetic measures.
Lizzie understood it--and a week later she was engaged to Charles
Hazeldean.
She always said afterward that but for the keys he would never have
thought of marrying her; while he laughingly affirmed that, on the
contrary, but for the keys she would never have looked at _him_.
But what did it all matter, in the complete and blessed understanding
which was to follow on their hasty union? If all the advantages on both
sides had been weighed and found equal by judicious advisers, harmony
more complete could hardly have been predicted. As a matter of fact, the
advisers, had they been judicious, would probably have found only
elements of discord in the characters concerned. Charles Hazeldean was
by nature an observer and a student, brooding and curious of mind:
Lizzie Winter (as she looked back at herself)--what was she, what would
she ever be, but a quick, ephemeral creature, in whom a perpetual and
adaptable activity simulated mind, as her grace, her swiftness, her
expressiveness simulated beauty? So others would have judged her; so,
now, she judged herself. And she knew that in fundamental things she was
still the same. And yet she had satisfied him: satisfied him, to all
appearances, as completely in the quiet later years as in the first
flushed hours. As completely, or perhaps even more so. In the early
months, dazzled gratitude made her the humbler, fonder worshipper; but
as her powers expanded in the warm air of comprehension, as she felt
herself grow handsomer, cleverer, more competent and more companionable
than he had hoped, or she had dreamed herself capable of becoming, the
balance was imperceptibly reversed, and the triumph in his eyes when
they rested on her.
The Hazeldeans were conquered; they had to admit it. Such a brilliant
recruit to the clan was not to be disowned. Mrs. Mant was left to nurse
her grievance in solitude, till she too fell into line, carelessly but
handsomely forgiven.
Ah, those first years of triumph! They frightened Lizzie now as she
looked back. One day, the friendless defenceless daughter of a
discredited man; the next, almost, the wife of Charlie Hazeldean, the
popular successful young lawyer, with a good practice already assured,
and the best of professional and private prospects. His own parents were
dead, and had died poor; but two or three childless relatives were
understood to be letting their capital accumulate for his benefit, and
meanwhile in Lizzie’s thrifty hands his earnings were largely
sufficient.
Ah, those first years! There had been barely six; but even now there
were moments when their sweetness drenched her to the soul.... Barely
six; and then the sharp re-awakening of an inherited weakness of the
heart that Hazeldean and his doctors had imagined to be completely
cured. Once before, for the same cause, he had been sent off, suddenly,
for a year of travel in mild climates and distant scenes; and his first
return had coincided with the close of Lizzie’s sojourn at Mrs. Mant’s.
The young man felt sure enough of the future to marry and take up his
professional duties again, and for the following six years he had led,
without interruption, the busy life of a successful lawyer; then had
come a second breakdown, more unexpectedly, and with more alarming
symptoms. The “Hazeldean heart” was a proverbial boast in the family;
the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the
Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had
permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old
age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean
had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.
One by one, hopes and plans faded. The Hazeldeans went south for a
winter; he lay on a deck-chair in a Florida garden, and read and
dreamed, and was happy with Lizzie beside him. So the months passed; and
by the following autumn he was better, returned to New York, and took up
his profession. Intermittently but obstinately, he had continued the
struggle for two more years; but before they were over husband and wife
understood that the good days were done.
He could be at his office only at lengthening intervals; he sank
gradually into invalidism without submitting to it. His income dwindled;
and, indifferent for himself, he fretted ceaselessly at the thought of
depriving Lizzie of the least of her luxuries.
At heart she was indifferent to them too; but she could not convince him
of it. He had been brought up in the old New York tradition, which
decreed that a man, at whatever cost, must provide his wife with what
she had always “been accustomed to”; and he had gloried too much in her
prettiness, her elegance, her easy way of wearing her expensive dresses,
and his friends’ enjoyment of the good dinners she knew how to order,
not to accustom her to everything which could enhance such graces. Mrs.
Mant’s secret satisfaction rankled in him. She sent him Baltimore
terrapin, and her famous clam broth, and a dozen of the old Hazeldean
port, and said “I told you so” to her confidants when Lizzie was
mentioned; and Charles Hazeldean knew it, and swore at it.
“I won’t be pauperized by her!” he declared; but Lizzie smiled away his
anger, and persuaded him to taste the terrapin and sip the port.
She was smiling faintly at the memory of the last passage between him
and Mrs. Mant when the turning of the bedroom door-handle startled her.
She jumped up, and he stood there. The blood rushed to her forehead; his
expression frightened her; for an instant she stared at him as if he had
been an enemy. Then she saw that the look in his face was only the
remote lost look of excessive physical pain.
She was at his side at once, supporting him, guiding him to the nearest
armchair. He sank into it, and she flung a shawl over him, and knelt at
his side while his inscrutable eyes continued to repel her.
“Charles ... Charles,” she pleaded.
For a while he could not speak; and she said to herself that she would
perhaps never know whether he had sought her because he was ill, or
whether illness had seized him as he entered her room to question,
accuse, or reveal what he had seen or heard that afternoon.
Suddenly he lifted his hand and pressed back her forehead, so that her
face lay bare under his eyes.
“Love, love--you’ve been happy?”
“_Happy?_” The word choked her. She clung to him, burying her anguish
against his knees. His hand stirred weakly in her hair, and gathering
her whole strength into the gesture, she raised her head again, looked
into his eyes, and breathed back: “And you?”
He gave her one full look; all their life together was in it, from the
first day to the last. His hand brushed her once more, like a blessing,
and then dropped. The moment of their communion was over; the next she
was preparing remedies, ringing for the servants, ordering the doctor to
be called. Her husband was once more the harmless helpless captive that
sickness makes of the most dreaded and the most loved.
VI
It was in Mrs. Mant’s drawing-room that, some half-year later, Mrs.
Charles Hazeldean, after a moment’s hesitation, said to the servant
that, yes, he might show in Mr. Prest.
Mrs. Mant was away. She had been leaving for Washington to visit a new
protégée when Mrs. Hazeldean arrived from Europe, and after a rapid
consultation with the clan had decided that it would not be “decent” to
let poor Charles’s widow go to an hotel. Lizzie had therefore the
strange sensation of returning, after nearly nine years, to the house
from which her husband had triumphantly rescued her; of returning
there, to be sure, in comparative independence, and without danger of
falling into her former bondage, yet with every nerve shrinking from all
that the scene revived.
Mrs. Mant, the next day, had left for Washington; but before starting
she had tossed a note across the breakfast-table to her visitor.
“Very proper--he was one of Charlie’s oldest friends, I believe?” she
said, with her mild frosty smile. Mrs. Hazeldean glanced at the note,
turned it over as if to examine the signature, and restored it to her
hostess.
“Yes. But I don’t think I care to see anyone just yet.”
There was a pause, during which the butler brought in fresh
griddle-cakes, replenished the hot milk, and withdrew. As the door
closed on him, Mrs. Mant said, with a dangerous cordiality: “No one
would misunderstand your receiving an old friend of your husband’s ...
like Mr. Prest.”
Lizzie Hazeldean cast a sharp glance at the large empty mysterious face
across the table. They _wanted_ her to receive Henry Prest, then? Ah,
well ... perhaps she understood....
“Shall I answer this for you, my dear? Or will you?” Mrs. Mant pursued.
“Oh, as you like. But don’t fix a day, please. Later--”