yourself up too much. It will not do to be morbid. I’m sorry to have to
leave you here alone--”
Lizzie’s eyes filled: Mrs. Mant’s sympathy seemed more cruel than her
cruelty. Every word that she used had a veiled taunt for its
counterpart.
“Oh, you mustn’t think of giving up your visit--”
“My dear, how can I? It’s a _duty_. I’ll send a line to Henry Prest,
then.... If you would sip a little port at luncheon and dinner we should
have you looking less like a ghost....”
* * * * *
Mrs. Mant departed; and two days later--the interval was “decent”--Mr.
Henry Prest was announced. Mrs. Hazeldean had not seen him since the
previous New Year’s day. Their last words had been exchanged in Mrs.
Struthers’s crimson boudoir, and since then half a year had elapsed.
Charles Hazeldean had lingered for a fortnight; but though there had
been ups and downs, and intervals of hope when none could have
criticised his wife for seeing her friends, her door had been barred
against everyone. She had not excluded Henry Prest more rigorously than
the others; he had simply been one of the many who received, day by day,
the same answer: “Mrs. Hazeldean sees no one but the family.”
Almost immediately after her husband’s death she had sailed for Europe
on a long-deferred visit to her father, who was now settled at Nice; but
from this expedition she had presumably brought back little comfort, for
when she arrived in New York her relations were struck by her air of
ill-health and depression. It spoke in her favour, however; they were
agreed that she was behaving with propriety.
She looked at Henry Prest as if he were a stranger: so difficult was it,
at the first moment, to fit his robust and splendid person into the
region of twilight shades which, for the last months, she had inhabited.
She was beginning to find that everyone had an air of remoteness; she
seemed to see people and life through the confusing blur of the long
crape veil in which it was a widow’s duty to shroud her affliction. But
she gave him her hand without perceptible reluctance.
He lifted it toward his lips, in an obvious attempt to combine gallantry
with condolence, and then, half-way up, seemed to feel that the occasion
required him to release it.
“Well--you’ll admit that I’ve been patient!” he exclaimed.
“Patient? Yes. What else was there to be?” she rejoined with a faint
smile, as he seated himself beside her, a little too near.
“Oh, well ... of course! I understood all that, I hope you’ll believe.
But mightn’t you at least have answered my letters--one or two of them?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t write.”
“Not to anyone? Or not to me?” he queried, with ironic emphasis.
“I wrote only the letters I had to--no others.”
“Ah, I see.” He laughed slightly. “And you didn’t consider that letters
to _me_ were among them?”
She was silent, and he stood up and took a turn across the room. His
face was redder than usual, and now and then a twitch passed over it.
She saw that he felt the barrier of her crape, and that it left him
baffled and resentful. A struggle was still perceptibly going on in him
between his traditional standard of behaviour at such a meeting, and
primitive impulses renewed by the memory of their last hours together.
When he turned back and paused before her his ruddy flush had paled, and
he stood there, frowning, uncertain, and visibly resenting the fact that
she made him so.
“You sit there like a stone!” he said.
“I feel like a stone.”
“Oh, come--!”
She knew well enough what he was thinking: that the only way to bridge
over such a bad beginning was to get the woman into your arms--and talk
afterward. It was the classic move. He had done it dozens of times, no
doubt, and was evidently asking himself why the deuce he couldn’t do it
now.... But something in her look must have benumbed him. He sat down
again beside her.
“What you must have been through, dearest!” He waited and coughed. “I
can understand your being--all broken up. But I know nothing; remember,
I know nothing as to what actually happened....”
“Nothing happened.”
“As to--what we feared? No hint--?”
She shook her head.
He cleared his throat before the next question. “And you don’t think
that in your absence he may have spoken--to anyone?”
“Never!”
“Then, my dear, we seem to have had the most unbelievable good luck; and
I can’t see--”
He had edged slowly nearer, and now laid a large ringed hand on her
sleeve. How well she knew those rings--the two dull gold snakes with
malevolent jewelled eyes! She sat as motionless as if their coils were
about her, till slowly his tentative grasp relaxed.
“Lizzie, you know”--his tone was discouraged--“this is morbid....”
“Morbid?”
“When you’re safe out of the worst scrape ... and free, my darling,
_free_! Don’t you realize it? I suppose the strain’s been too much for
you; but I want you to feel that now--”
She stood up suddenly, and put half the length of the room between them.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she almost screamed, as she had screamed long ago at
Mrs. Mant.
He stood up also, darkly red under his rich sunburn, and forced a smile.
“Really,” he protested, “all things considered--and after a separation
of six months!” She was silent. “My dear,” he continued mildly, “will
you tell me what you expect me to think?”
“Oh, don’t take that tone,” she murmured.
“What tone?”
“As if--as if--you still imagined we could go back--”
She saw his face fall. Had he ever before, she wondered, stumbled upon
an obstacle in that smooth walk of his? It flashed over her that this
was the danger besetting men who had a “way with women”--the day came
when they might follow it too blindly.
The reflection evidently occurred to him almost as soon as it did to
her. He summoned another propitiatory smile, and drawing near, took her
hand gently. “But I don’t want to go back.... I want to go forward,
dearest.... Now that at last you’re free.”
She seized on the word as if she had been waiting for her cue. “Free!
Oh, that’s it--_free_! Can’t you see, can’t you understand, that I mean
to stay free?”
Again a shadow of distrust crossed his face, and the smile he had begun
for her reassurance seemed to remain on his lips for his own.
“But of course! Can you imagine that I want to put you in chains? I want
you to be as free as you please--free to love me as much as you choose!”
He was visibly pleased with the last phrase.
She drew away her hand, but not unkindly. “I’m sorry--I _am_ sorry,
Henry. But you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“That what you ask is quite impossible--ever. I can’t go on ... in the
old way....”
She saw his face working nervously. “In the old way? You mean--?”
Before she could explain he hurried on with an increasing majesty of
manner: “Don’t answer! I see--I understand. When you spoke of freedom
just now I was misled for a moment--I frankly own I was--into thinking
that, after your wretched marriage, you might prefer discreeter ties ...
an apparent independence which would leave us both.... I say _apparent_,
for on my side there has never been the least wish to conceal.... But if
I was mistaken, if on the contrary what you wish is ... is to take
advantage of your freedom to regularize our ... our attachment....”
She said nothing, not because she had any desire to have him complete
the phrase, but because she found nothing to say. To all that concerned
their common past she was aware of offering a numbed soul. But her
silence evidently perplexed him, and in his perplexity he began to lose
his footing, and to flounder in a sea of words.
“Lizzie! Do you hear me? If I was mistaken, I say--and I hope I’m not
above owning that at times I _may_ be mistaken; if I was--why, by God,
my dear, no woman ever heard me speak the words before; but here I am to
have and to hold, as the Book says! Why, hadn’t you realized it? Lizzie,
look up--! _I’m asking you to marry me._”
Still, for a moment, she made no reply, but stood gazing about her as if
she had the sudden sense of unseen presences between them. At length she
gave a faint laugh. It visibly ruffled her visitor.
“I’m not conscious,” he began again, “of having said anything
particularly laughable--” He stopped and scrutinized her narrowly, as
though checked by the thought that there might be something not quite
normal.... Then, apparently reassured, he half-murmured his only French
phrase: “_La joie fait peur_ ... eh?”
She did not seem to hear. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said, “but
only at the coincidences of life. It was in this room that my husband
asked me to marry him.”
“Ah?” Her suitor appeared politely doubtful of the good taste, or the
opportunity, of producing this reminiscence. But he made another call on
his magnanimity. “Really? But, I say, my dear, I couldn’t be expected to
know it, could I? If I’d guessed that such a painful association--”
“Painful?” She turned upon him. “A painful association? Do you think
that was what I meant?” Her voice sank. “This room is sacred to me.”
She had her eyes on his face, which, perhaps because of its
architectural completeness, seemed to lack the mobility necessary to
follow such a leap of thought. It was so ostensibly a solid building,
and not a nomad’s tent. He struggled with a ruffled pride, rose again to
playful magnanimity, and murmured: “Compassionate angel!”
“Oh, compassionate? To whom? Do you imagine--did I ever say anything to
make you doubt the truth of what I’m telling you?”
His brows fretted: his temper was up. “_Say_ anything? No,” he
insinuated ironically; then, in a hasty plunge after his lost
forbearance, added with exquisite mildness: “Your tact was perfect ...
always. I’ve invariably done you that justice. No one could have been
more thoroughly the ... the lady. I never failed to admire your
good-breeding in avoiding any reference to your ... your other life.”
She faced him steadily. “Well, that other life _was_ my life--my only
life! Now you know.”
There was a silence. Henry Prest drew out a monogrammed handkerchief and
passed it over his dry lips. As he did so, a whiff of his eau de Cologne
reached her, and she winced a little. It was evident that he was seeking
what to say next; wondering, rather helplessly, how to get back his lost
command of the situation. He finally induced his features to break again
into a persuasive smile.
“Not your _only_ life, dearest,” he reproached her.
She met it instantly. “Yes; so you thought--because I chose you
should.”
“You chose--?” The smile became incredulous.
“Oh, deliberately. But I suppose I’ve no excuse that you would not
dislike to hear.... Why shouldn’t we break off now?”
“Break off ... this conversation?” His tone was aggrieved. “Of course
I’ve no wish to force myself--”
She interrupted him with a raised hand. “Break off for good, Henry.”
“For good?” He stared, and gave a quick swallow, as though the dose were
choking him. “For good? Are you really--? You and I? Is this serious,
Lizzie?”
“Perfectly. But if you prefer to hear ... what can only be painful....”
He straightened himself, threw back his shoulders, and said in an
uncertain voice: “I hope you don’t take me for a coward.”
She made no direct reply, but continued: “Well, then, you thought I
loved you, I suppose--”
He smiled again, revived his moustache with a slight twist, and gave a
hardly perceptible shrug. “You ... ah ... managed to produce the
illusion....”
“Oh, well, yes: a woman _can_--so easily! That’s what men often forget.
You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive
prostitute.”
“Elizabeth!” he gasped, pale now to the ruddy eyelids. She saw that the
word had wounded more than his pride, and that, before realizing the
insult to his love, he was shuddering at the offence to his taste.
Mistress! Prostitute! Such words were banned. No one reproved coarseness
of language in women more than Henry Prest; one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s
greatest charms (as he had just told her) had been her way of
remaining, “through it all,” so ineffably “the lady.” He looked at her
as if a fresh doubt of her sanity had assailed him.
“Shall I go on?” she smiled.
He bent his head stiffly. “I am still at a loss to imagine for what
purpose you made a fool of me.”
“Well, then, it was as I say. I wanted money--money for my husband.”
He moistened his lips. “For your husband?”
“Yes; when he began to be so ill; when he needed comforts, luxury, the
opportunity to get away. He saved me, when I was a girl, from untold
humiliation and wretchedness. No one else lifted a finger to help
me--not one of my own family. I hadn’t a penny or a friend. Mrs. Mant
had grown sick of me, and was trying to find an excuse to throw me over.
Oh, you don’t know what a girl has to put up with--a girl alone in the
world--who depends for her clothes, and her food, and the roof over her
head, on the whims of a vain capricious old woman! It was because _he_
knew, because he understood, that he married me.... He took me out of
misery into blessedness. He put me up above them all ... he put me
beside himself. I didn’t care for anything but that; I didn’t care for
the money or the freedom; I cared only for him. I would have followed
him into the desert--I would have gone barefoot to be with him. I would
have starved, begged, done anything for him--_anything_.” She broke off,
her voice lost in a sob. She was no longer aware of Prest’s
presence--all her consciousness was absorbed in the vision she had
evoked. “It was _he_ who cared--who wanted me to be rich and independent
and admired! He wanted to heap everything on me--during the first years
I could hardly persuade him to keep enough money for himself.... And
then he was taken ill; and as he got worse, and gradually dropped out of
affairs, his income grew smaller, and then stopped altogether; and all
the while there were new expenses piling up--nurses, doctors, travel;
and he grew frightened; frightened not for himself but for me.... And
what was I to do? I had to pay for things somehow. For the first year I
managed to put off paying--then I borrowed small sums here and there.
But that couldn’t last. And all the while I had to keep on looking
pretty and prosperous, or else he began to worry, and think we were
ruined, and wonder what would become of me if he didn’t get well. By the
time you came I was desperate--I would have done anything, anything! He
thought the money came from my Portuguese stepmother. She really was
rich, as it happens. Unluckily my poor father tried to invest her money,
and lost it all; but when they were first married she sent a thousand
dollars--and all the rest, all you gave me, I built on that.”
She paused pantingly, as if her tale were at an end. Gradually her
consciousness of present things returned, and she saw Henry Prest, as if
far off, a small indistinct figure looming through the mist of her
blurred eyes. She thought to herself: “He doesn’t believe me,” and the
thought exasperated her.
“You wonder, I suppose,” she began again, “that a woman should dare
confess such things about herself--”
He cleared his throat. “About herself? No; perhaps not. But about her
husband.”
The blood rushed to her forehead. “About her husband? But you don’t dare
to imagine--?”
“You leave me,” he rejoined icily, “no other inference that I can see.”
She stood dumbfounded, and he added: “At any rate, it certainly explains
your extraordinary coolness--pluck, I used to think it. I perceive that
I needn’t have taken such precautions.”
She considered this. “You think, then, that he knew? You think, perhaps,
that I knew he did?” She pondered again painfully, and then her face lit
up. “He never knew--never! That’s enough for me--and for you it doesn’t
matter. Think what you please. He was happy to the end--that’s all I
care for.”
“There can be no doubt about your frankness,” he said with pinched
lips.
“There’s no longer any reason for not being frank.”
He picked up his hat, and studiously considered its lining; then he took
the gloves he had laid in it, and drew them thoughtfully through his
hands. She thought: “Thank God, he’s going!”
But he set the hat and gloves down on a table, and moved a little nearer
to her. His face looked as ravaged as a reveller’s at daybreak.
“You--leave positively nothing to the imagination!” he murmured.
“I told you it was useless--” she began; but he interrupted her:
“Nothing, that is--if I believed you.” He moistened his lips again, and
tapped them with his handkerchief. Again she had a whiff of the eau de
Cologne. “But I don’t!” he proclaimed. “Too many memories ... too many
... proofs, my dearest ...” He stopped, smiling somewhat convulsively.
She saw that he imagined the smile would soothe her.
She remained silent, and he began once more, as if appealing to her
against her own verdict: “I know better, Lizzie. In spite of everything,
_I know you’re not that kind of woman_.”
“I took your money--”
“As a favour. I knew the difficulties of your position.... I understood
completely. I beg of you never again to allude to--all that.” It dawned
on her that anything would be more endurable to him than to think he had
been a dupe--and one of two dupes! The part was not one that he could
conceive of having played. His pride was up in arms to defend her, not
so much for her sake as for his own. The discovery gave her a baffling
sense of helplessness; against that impenetrable self-sufficiency all
her affirmations might spend themselves in vain.
“No man who has had the privilege of being loved by you could ever for a
moment....”
She raised her head and looked at him. “You have never had that
privilege,” she interrupted.
His jaw fell. She saw his eyes pass from uneasy supplication to a cold
anger. He gave a little inarticulate grunt before his voice came back to
him.
“You spare no pains in degrading yourself in my eyes.”
“I am not degrading myself. I am telling you the truth. I needed money.
I knew no way of earning it. You were willing to give it ... for what
you call the privilege....”
“Lizzie,” he interrupted solemnly, “don’t go on! I believe I enter into
all your feelings--I believe I always have. In so sensitive, so
hypersensitive a nature, there are moments when every other feeling is
swept away by scruples.... For those scruples I only honour you the
more. But I won’t hear another word now. If I allowed you to go on in
your present state of ... nervous exaltation ... you might be the first
to deplore.... I wish to forget everything you have said.... I wish to
look forward, not back....” He squared his shoulders, took a deep
breath, and fixed her with a glance of recovered confidence. “How little
you know me if you believe that I could fail you _now_!”
She returned his look with a weary steadiness. “You are kind--you mean
to be generous, I’m sure. But don’t you see that I _can’t_ marry you?”
“I only see that, in the natural rush of your remorse--”
“Remorse? Remorse?” She broke in with a laugh. “Do you imagine I feel
any remorse? I’d do it all over again tomorrow--for the same object! I
got what I wanted--I gave him that last year, that last good year. It
was the relief from anxiety that kept him alive, that kept him happy.
Oh, he _was_ happy--I know that!” She turned to Prest with a strange
smile. “I do thank you for that--I’m not ungrateful.”
“You ... you ... _ungrateful_? This ... is really ... indecent....” He
took up his hat again, and stood in the middle of the room as if waiting
to be waked from a bad dream.
“You are--rejecting an opportunity--” he began.
She made a faint motion of assent.
“You do realize it? I’m still prepared to--to help you, if you
should....” She made no answer, and he continued: “How do you expect to
live--since you have chosen to drag in such considerations?”
“I don’t care how I live. I never wanted the money for myself.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “Oh, don’t--_again_! The woman I had meant
to....” Suddenly, to her surprise, she saw a glitter of moisture on his
lower lids. He applied his handkerchief to them, and the waft of scent
checked her momentary impulse of compunction. That Cologne water! It
called up picture after picture with a hideous precision. “Well, it was
worth it,” she murmured doggedly.
Henry Prest restored his handkerchief to his pocket. He waited, glanced
about the room, turned back to her.
“If your decision is final--”
“Oh, final!”
He bowed. “There is one thing more--which I should have mentioned if you
had ever given me the opportunity of seeing you after--after last New
Year’s day. Something I preferred not to commit to writing--”
“Yes?” she questioned indifferently.
“Your husband, you are positively convinced, had no idea ... that day
...?”
“None.”
“Well, others, it appears, had.” He paused. “Mrs. Wesson saw us.”
“So I supposed. I remember now that she went out of her way to cut me
that evening at Mrs. Struthers’s.”
“Exactly. And she was not the only person who saw us. If people had not
been disarmed by your husband’s falling ill that very day you would have
found yourself--ostracized.”
She made no comment, and he pursued, with a last effort: “In your grief,
your solitude, you haven’t yet realized what your future will be--how
difficult. It is what I wished to guard you against--it was my purpose
in asking you to marry me.” He drew himself up and smiled as if he were
looking at his own reflection in a mirror, and thought favourably of it.
“A man who has had the misfortune to compromise a woman is bound in
honour--Even if my own inclination were not what it is, I should
consider....”
She turned to him with a softened smile. Yes, he had really brought
himself to think that he was proposing to marry her to save her
reputation. At this glimpse of the old hackneyed axioms on which he
actually believed that his conduct was based, she felt anew her
remoteness from the life he would have drawn her back to.
“My poor Henry, don’t you see how far I’ve got beyond the Mrs. Wessons?
If all New York wants to ostracize me, let it! I’ve had my day ... no
woman has more than one. Why shouldn’t I have to pay for it? I’m ready.”
“Good heavens!” he murmured.
She was aware that he had put forth his last effort. The wound she had
inflicted had gone to the most vital spot; she had prevented his being
magnanimous, and the injury was unforgivable. He was glad, yes, actually
glad now, to have her know that New York meant to cut her; but, strive
as she might, she could not bring herself to care either for the fact,
or for his secret pleasure in it. Her own secret pleasures were beyond
New York’s reach and his.
“I’m sorry,” she reiterated gently. He bowed, without trying to take
her hand, and left the room.
As the door closed she looked after him with a dazed stare. “He’s right,
I suppose; I don’t realize yet--” She heard the shutting of the outer
door, and dropped to the sofa, pressing her hands against her aching
eyes. At that moment, for the first time, she asked herself what the
next day, and the next, would be like....
“If only I cared more about reading,” she moaned, remembering how vainly
she had tried to acquire her husband’s tastes, and how gently and
humorously he had smiled at her efforts. “Well--there are always cards;
and when I get older, knitting and patience, I suppose. And if everybody
cuts me I shan’t need any evening dresses. That will be an economy, at
any rate,” she concluded with a little shiver.
VII
“She was _bad_ ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
I must go back now to this phrase of my mother’s--the phrase from which,
at the opening of my narrative, I broke away for a time in order to
project more vividly on the scene that anxious moving vision of Lizzie
Hazeldean: a vision in which memories of my one boyish glimpse of her
were pieced together with hints collected afterward.
When my mother uttered her condemnatory judgment I was a young man of
twenty-one, newly graduated from Harvard, and at home again under the
family roof in New York. It was long since I had heard Mrs. Hazeldean
spoken of. I had been away, at school and at Harvard, for the greater
part of the interval, and in the holidays she was probably not
considered a fitting subject of conversation, especially now that my
sisters came to the table.
At any rate, I had forgotten everything I might ever have picked up
about her when, on the evening after my return, my cousin Hubert
Wesson--now towering above me as a pillar of the Knickerbocker Club, and
a final authority on the ways of the world--suggested our joining her at
the opera.