grew: the good sight of him, the good sound and sense of him, such
as they were, demolished at a stroke so blessedly much of the horrid
inconvenience of the past that she thought of him; she clutched at
him, for a _general_ saving use, an application as sanative, as
redemptive as some universal healing wash, precious even to the point
of perjury if perjury should be required. That was the terrible thing,
that had been the inward pang with which she watched Basil French
recede: perjury would have to come in somehow and somewhere--oh so
quite certainly!--before the so strange, so rare young man, truly
smitten though she believed him, could be made to rise to the
occasion, before her measureless prize could be assured. It was
present to her, it had been present a hundred times, that if there had
only been some one to (as it were) "deny everything" the situation
might yet be saved. She so needed some one to lie for her--ah, she so
need some one to lie! Her mother's version of everything, her mother's
version of anything, had been at the best, as they said, discounted;
and she herself could but show, of course, for an interested party,
however much she might claim to be none the less a decent girl--to
whatever point, that is, after all that had both remotely and recently
happened, presumptions of anything to be called decency could come in.
After what had recently happened--the two or three indirect but so
worrying questions Mr. French had put to her--it would only be some
thoroughly detached friend or witness who might effectively testify.
An odd form of detachment certainly would reside, for Mr. Pitman's
evidential character, in her mother's having so publicly and
so brilliantly--though, thank the powers, all off in North
Dakota!--severed their connection with him; and yet mightn't it do
_her_ some good, even if the harm it might do her mother were so
little ambiguous? The more her mother had got divorced--with her
dreadful cheap-and-easy second performance in that line and her
present extremity of alienation from Mr. Connery, which enfolded
beyond doubt the germ of a third petition on one side or the
other--the more her mother had distinguished herself in the field of
folly the worse for her own prospect with the Frenches, whose
minds she had guessed to be accessible, and with such an effect of
dissimulated suddenness, to some insidious poison.
It was very unmistakable, in other words, that the more dismissed and
detached Mr. Pitman should have come to appear, the more as divorced,
or at least as divorcing, his before-time wife would by the same
stroke figure--so that it was here poor Julia could but lose herself.
The crazy divorces only, or the half-dozen successive and still
crazier engagements only--gathered fruit, bitter fruit, of her own
incredibly allowed, her own insanely fostered frivolity--either of
these two groups of skeletons at the banquet might singly be dealt
with; but the combination, the fact of each party's having been so
mixed-up with whatever was least presentable for the other, the fact
of their having so shockingly amused themselves together, made all
present steering resemble the classic middle course between Scylla and
Charybdis.
It was not, however, that she felt wholly a fool in having obeyed this
impulse to pick up again her kind old friend. _She_ at least had never
divorced him, and her horrid little filial evidence in court had been
but the chatter of a parrakeet, of precocious plumage and croak,
repeating words earnestly taught her, and that she could scarce even
pronounce. Therefore, as far as steering went, he _must_ for the hour
take a hand. She might actually have wished in fact that he shouldn't
now have seemed so tremendously struck with her; since it was an
extraordinary situation for a girl, this crisis of her fortune, this
positive wrong that the flagrancy, what she would have been ready to
call the very vulgarity, of her good looks might do her at a moment
when it was vital she should hang as straight as a picture on the
wall. Had it ever yet befallen any young woman in the world to wish
with secret intensity that she might have been, for her convenience, a
shade less inordinately pretty? She had come to that, to this view of
the bane, the primal curse, of their lavish physical outfit, which had
included everything and as to which she lumped herself resentfully
with her mother. The only thing was that her mother was, thank
goodness, still so much prettier, still so assertively, so publicly,
so trashily, so ruinously pretty. Wonderful the small grimness with
which Julia Bride put off on this parent the middle-aged maximum of
their case and the responsibility of their defect. It cost her so
little to recognize in Mrs. Connery at forty-seven, and in spite, or
perhaps indeed just by reason, of the arranged silver tendrils which
were so like some rare bird's-nest in a morning frost, a facile
supremacy for the dazzling effect--it cost her so little that her view
even rather exaggerated the lustre of the different maternal items.
She would have put it _all_ off if possible, all off on other
shoulders and on other graces and other morals than her own, the
burden of physical charm that had made so easy a ground, such a native
favoring air, for the aberrations which, apparently inevitable and
without far consequences at the time, had yet at this juncture so much
better not have been.
She could have worked it out at her leisure, to the last link of the
chain, the way their prettiness had set them trap after trap, all
along--had foredoomed them to awful ineptitude. When you were as
pretty as that you could, by the whole idiotic consensus, be nothing
_but_ pretty; and when you were nothing "but" pretty you could get
into nothing but tight places, out of which you could then scramble by
nothing but masses of fibs. And there was no one, all the while, who
wasn't eager to egg you on, eager to make you pay to the last cent the
price of your beauty. What creature would ever for a moment help you
to behave as if something that dragged in its wake a bit less of a
lumbering train would, on the whole, have been better for you? The
consequences of being plain were only negative--you failed of this and
that; but the consequences of being as _they_ were, what were these
but endless? though indeed, as far as failing went, your beauty too
could let you in for enough of it. Who, at all events, would ever for
a moment credit you, in the luxuriance of that beauty, with the study,
on your own side, of such truths as these? Julia Bride could, at the
point she had reached, positively ask herself this even while lucidly
conscious of the inimitable, the triumphant and attested projection,
all round her, of her exquisite image. It was only Basil French who
had at last, in his doubtless dry, but all distinguished way--the
way surely, as it was borne in upon her, of all the blood of all the
Frenches--stepped out of the vulgar rank. It was only he who, by the
trouble she discerned in him, had made her see certain things. It was
only for him--and not a bit ridiculously, but just beautifully, almost
sublimely--that their being "nice," her mother and she between them,
had _not_ seemed to profit by their being so furiously handsome.
This had, ever so grossly and ever so tiresomely, satisfied every one
else; since every one had thrust upon them, had imposed upon them, as
by a great cruel conspiracy, their silliest possibilities; fencing
them in to these, and so not only shutting them out from others, but
mounting guard at the fence, walking round and round outside it, to
see they didn't escape, and admiring them, talking to them, through
the rails, in mere terms of chaff, terms of chucked cakes and
apples--as if they had been antelopes or zebras, or even some superior
sort of performing, of dancing, bear. It had been reserved for Basil
French to strike her as willing to let go, so to speak, a pound or two
of this fatal treasure if he might only have got in exchange for it
an ounce or so more of their so much less obvious and Jess published
personal history. Yes, it described him to say that, in addition to
all the rest of him, and of _his_ personal history, and of his family,
and of theirs, in addition to their social posture, as that of a
serried phalanx, and to their notoriously enormous wealth and crushing
respectability, she might have been ever so much less lovely for him
if she had been only--well, a little prepared to answer questions. And
it wasn't as if quiet, cultivated, earnest, public-spirited, brought
up in Germany, infinitely travelled, awfully like a high-caste
Englishman, and all the other pleasant things, it wasn't as if he
didn't love to be with her, to look at her, just as she was; for he
loved it exactly as much, so far as that footing simply went, as any
free and foolish youth who had ever made the last demonstration of
it. It was that marriage was, for him--and for them all, the serried
Frenches--a great matter, a goal to which a man of intelligence, a
real shy, beautiful man of the world, didn't hop on one foot, didn't
skip and jump, as if he were playing an urchins' game, but toward
which he proceeded with a deep and anxious, a noble and highly just
deliberation.
For it was one thing to stare at a girl till she was bored with it, it
was one thing to take her to the Horse Show and the Opera, and to
send her flowers by the stack, and chocolates by the ton, and "great"
novels, the very latest and greatest, by the dozen; but something
quite other to hold open for her, with eyes attached to eyes, the
gate, moving on such stiff silver hinges, of the grand square
forecourt of the palace of wedlock. The state of being "engaged"
represented to him the introduction to this precinct of some young
woman with whom his outside parley would have had the duration,
distinctly, of his own convenience. That might be cold-blooded if one
chose to think so; but nothing of another sort would equal the high
ceremony and dignity and decency, above all the grand gallantry and
finality, of their then passing in. Poor Julia could have blushed red,
before that view, with the memory of the way the forecourt, as she now
imagined it, had been dishonored by her younger romps. She had tumbled
over the wall with this, that, and the other raw playmate, and had
played "tag" and leap-frog, as she might say, from corner to corner.
That would be the "history" with which, in case of definite demand,
she should be able to supply Mr. French: that she had already, again
and again, any occasion offering, chattered and scuffled over ground
provided, according to his idea, for walking the gravest of minuets.
If that then had been all their _kind_ of history, hers and her
mother's, at least there was plenty of it: it was the superstructure
raised on the other group of facts, those of the order of their having
been always so perfectly pink and white, so perfectly possessed of
clothes, so perfectly splendid, so perfectly idiotic. These things had
been the "points" of antelope and zebra; putting Mrs. Connery for the
zebra, as the more remarkably striped or spotted. Such were the _data_
Basil French's inquiry would elicit: her own six engagements and her
mother's three nullified marriages--nine nice distinct little horrors
in all. What on earth was to be done about them?
It was notable, she was afterward to recognize, that there had been
nothing of the famous business slackness in the positive pounce with
which Mr. Pitman put it to her that, as soon as he had made her
out "for sure," identified her there as old Julia grown-up and
gallivanting with a new admirer, a smarter young fellow than ever yet,
he had had the inspiration of her being exactly the good girl to
help him. She certainly found him strike the hour again, with these
vulgarities of tone--forms of speech that her mother had anciently
described as by themselves, once he had opened the whole battery,
sufficient ground for putting him away. Full, however, of the use she
should have for him, she wasn't going to mind trifles. What she really
gasped at was that, so oddly, he was ahead of her at the start. "Yes,
I want something of you, Julia, and I want it right now: you can do me
a turn, and I'm blest if my luck--which has once or twice been
pretty good, you know--hasn't sent you to me." She knew the luck he
meant--that of her mother's having so enabled him to get rid of her;
but it was the nearest allusion of the merely invidious kind that he
would make. It had thus come to our young woman on the spot and by
divination: the service he desired of her matched with remarkable
closeness what she had so promptly taken into her head to name to
himself--to name in her own interest, though deterred as yet from
having brought it right out. She had been prevented by his speaking,
the first thing, in that way, as if he had known Mr. French--which
surprised her till he explained that every one in New York knew by
appearance a young man of his so-quoted wealth ("What did she take
them all in New York then _for_?") and of whose marked attention to
her he had moreover, for himself, round at clubs and places, lately
heard. This had accompanied the inevitable free question "Was she
engaged to _him_ now?"--which she had in fact almost welcomed as
holding out to her the perch of opportunity. She was waiting to deal
with it properly, but meanwhile he had gone on, and to such effect
that it took them but three minutes to turn out, on either side, like
a pair of pickpockets comparing, under shelter, their day's booty, the
treasures of design concealed about their persons.
"I want you to tell the truth for me--as you only can. I want you to
say that I was really all right--as right as you know; and that I
simply acted like an angel in a story-book, gave myself away to have
it over."
"Why, my dear man," Julia cried, "you take the wind straight out of my
sails! What I'm here to ask of _you_ is that you'll confess to having
been even a worse fiend than you were shown up for; to having made
it impossible mother should _not_ take proceedings." There!--she had
brought it out, and with the sense of their situation turning to high
excitement for her in the teeth of his droll stare, his strange grin,
his characteristic "Lordy, lordy! What good will that do you?" She
was prepared with her clear statement of reasons for her appeal, and
feared so he might have better ones for his own that all her story
came in a flash. "Well, Mr. Pitman, I want to get married this time,
by way of a change; but you see we've been such fools that, when
something really good at last comes up, it's too dreadfully awkward.
The fools we were capable of being--well, you know better than any
one: unless perhaps not quite so well as Mr. Connery. It has got to
be denied," said Julia ardently--"it has got to be denied flat. But I
can't get hold of Mr. Connery--Mr. Connery has gone to China. Besides,
if he were here," she had ruefully to confess, "he'd be no good--on
the contrary. He wouldn't deny anything--he'd only tell more. So thank
heaven he's away--there's _that_ amount of good! I'm not engaged yet,"
she went on--but he had already taken her up.
"You're not engaged to Mr. French?" It was all, clearly, a wondrous
show for him, but his immediate surprise, oddly, might have been
greatest for that.
"No, not to any one--for the seventh time!" She spoke as with her head
held well up both over the shame and the pride. "Yes, the next time
I'm engaged I want something to happen. But he's afraid; he's afraid
of what may be told him. He's dying to find out, and yet he'd die
if he did! He wants to be talked to, but he has got to be talked to
right. You could talk to him right, Mr. Pitman--if you only _would_!
He can't get over mother--that I feel: he loathes and scorns divorces,
and we've had first and last too many. So if he could hear from you
that you just made her life a hell--why," Julia concluded, "it would
be too lovely. If she _had_ to go in for another--after having
already, when I was little, divorced father--it would 'sort of' make,
don't you see? one less. You'd do the high-toned thing by her: you'd
say what a wretch you then were, and that she had had to save her
life. In that way he mayn't mind it. Don't you see, you sweet man?"
poor Julia pleaded. "Oh," she wound up as if his fancy lagged or his
scruple looked out, "of course I want you to _lie_ for me!"
It did indeed sufficiently stagger him. "It's a lovely idea for the
moment when I was just saying to myself--as soon as I saw you--that
you'd speak the truth for _me_!"
"Ah, what's the matter with 'you'?" Julia sighed with an impatience
not sensibly less sharp for her having so quickly scented some lion in
her path.
"Why, do you think there's no one in the world but you who has seen
the cup of promised affection, of something really to be depended on,
only, at the last moment, by the horrid jostle of your elbow, spilled
all over you? I want to provide for my future too as it happens; and
my good friend who's to help me to that--the most charming of women
this time--disapproves of divorce quite as much as Mr. French. Don't
you see," Mr. Pitman candidly asked, "what that by itself must have
done toward attaching me to her? _She_ has got to be talked to--to be
told how little I could help it."
"Oh, lordy, lordy!" the girl emulously groaned. It was such a
relieving cry. "Well, _I_ won't talk to her!" she declared.
"You _won't_, Julia?" he pitifully echoed. "And yet you ask of
_me_--!"
His pang, she felt, was sincere; and even more than she had guessed,
for the previous quarter of an hour he had been building up his hope,
building it with her aid for a foundation. Yet was he going to see how
their testimony, on each side, would, if offered, _have_ to conflict?
If he was to prove himself for her sake--or, more queerly still, for
that of Basil French's high conservatism--a person whom there had been
no other way of dealing with, how could she prove him, in this other
and so different interest, a mere gentle sacrifice to his wife's
perversity? She had, before him there, on the instant, all acutely, a
sense of rising sickness--a wan glimmer of foresight as to the end of
the fond dream. Everything else was against her, everything in her
dreadful past--just as if she had been a person represented by some
"emotional actress," some desperate erring lady "hunted down" in a
play; but was that going to be the case too with her own very decency,
the fierce little residuum deep within her, for which she was
counting, when she came to think, on so little glory or even credit?
Was this also going to turn against her and trip her up--just to show
she was really, under the touch and the test, as decent as any one;
and with no one but herself the wiser for it meanwhile, and no proof
to show but that, as a consequence, she should be unmarried to the
end? She put it to Mr. Pitman quite with resentment: "Do you mean to
say you're going to be married--?"
"Oh, my dear, I too must get engaged first!"--he spoke with his
inimitable grin. "But that, you see, is where you come in. I've told
her about you. She wants awfully to meet you. The way it happens is
too lovely--that I find you just in this place. She's coming," said
Mr. Pitman--and as in all the good faith of his eagerness now; "she's
coming in about three minutes."
"Coming here?"
"Yes, Julia--right here. It's where we usually meet"; and he was
wreathed again, this time as if for life, in his large slow smile.
"She loves this place--she's awfully keen on art. Like _you_, Julia,
if you haven't changed--I remember how you did love art." He looked
at her quite tenderly, as to keep her up to it. "You must still of
course--from the way you're here. Just let her _feel_ that," the poor
man fantastically urged. And then with his kind eyes on her and his
good ugly mouth stretched as for delicate emphasis from ear to ear:
"Every little helps!"
He made her wonder for him, ask herself, and with a certain intensity,
questions she yet hated the trouble of; as whether he were still as
moneyless as in the other time--which was certain indeed, for any
fortune he ever would have made. His slackness, on that ground, stuck
out of him almost as much as if he had been of rusty or "seedy"
aspect--which, luckily for him, he wasn't at all: he looked, in his
way, like some pleasant eccentric, ridiculous, but real gentleman,
whose taste might be of the queerest, but his credit with his tailor
none the less of the best. She wouldn't have been the least ashamed,
had their connection lasted, of going about with him: so that what
a fool, again, her mother had been--since Mr. Connery, sorry as one
might be for him, was irrepressibly vulgar. Julia's quickness was,
for the minute, charged with all this; but she had none the less her
feeling of the right thing to say and the right way to say it. If
he was after a future financially assured, even as she herself so
frantically was, she wouldn't cast the stone. But if he had talked
about her to strange women she couldn't be less than a little
majestic. "Who then is the person in question for you--?"
"Why, such a dear thing, Julia--Mrs. David E. Drack. Have you heard of
her?" he almost fluted.
New York was vast, and she had not had that advantage. "She's a
widow--?"
"Oh yes: she's not--" He caught himself up in time. "She's a real
one." It was as near as he came. But it was as if he had been looking
at her now so pathetically hard. "Julia, she has millions."
Hard, at any rate--whether pathetic or not--was the look she gave him
back. "Well, so has--or so _will_ have--Basil French. And more of them
than Mrs. Drack, I guess," Julia quavered.
"Oh, I know what _they've_ got!" He took it from her--with the effect
of a vague stir, in his long person, of unwelcome embarrassment. But
was she going to give up because he was embarrassed? He should know
at least what he was costing her. It came home to her own spirit more
than ever, but meanwhile he had found his footing. "I don't see how
your mother matters. It isn't a question of his marrying _her_."
"No; but, constantly together as we've always been, it's a question of
there being so disgustingly much to get over. If we had, for people
like them, but the one ugly spot and the one weak side; if we had
made, between us, but the one vulgar _kind_ of mistake: well, I don't
say!" She reflected with a wistfulness of note that was in itself a
touching eloquence. "To have our reward in this world we've had too
sweet a time. We've had it all right down here!" said Julia Bride. "I
should have taken the precaution to have about a dozen fewer lovers."
"Ah, my dear, 'lovers'--!" He ever so comically attenuated.
"Well they _were_!" She quite flared up. "When you've had a ring from
each (three diamonds, two pearls, and a rather bad sapphire: I've kept
them all, and they tell my story!) what are you to call them?"
"Oh, rings--!" Mr. Pitman didn't call rings anything. "I've given Mrs.
Drack a ring."
Julia stared. "Then aren't you her lover?"
"That, dear child," he humorously wailed, "is what I want you to find
out! But I'll handle your rings all right," he more lucidly added.
"You'll 'handle' them?"
"I'll fix your lovers. I'll lie about _them_, if that's all you want."
"Oh, about 'them'--!" She turned away with a sombre drop, seeing so
little in it. "That wouldn't count--from _you_!" She saw the great
shining room, with its mockery of art and "style" and security, all
the things she was vainly after, and its few scattered visitors who
had left them, Mr. Pitman and herself, in their ample corner, so
conveniently at ease. There was only a lady in one of the far
doorways, of whom she took vague note and who seemed to be looking at
them. "They'd have to lie for themselves!"
"Do you mean he's capable of putting it to them?"
Mr. Pitman's tone threw discredit on that possibility, but she knew
perfectly well what she meant. "Not of getting at them directly, not,
as mother says, of nosing round himself; but of listening--and small
blame to him!--to the horrible things other people say of me."
"But what other people?"
"Why, Mrs. George Maule, to begin with--who intensely loathes us, and
who talks to his sisters, so that they may talk to _him_: which they
do, all the while, I'm morally sure (hating me as they also must). But
it's she who's the real reason--I mean of his holding off. She poisons
the air he breathes."
"Oh well," said Mr. Pitman, with easy optimism, "if Mrs. George
Maule's a cat--!"
"If she's a cat she has kittens--four little spotlessly white ones,
among whom she'd give her head that Mr. French should make his pick.
He could do it with his eyes shut--you can't tell them apart. But she
has every name, every date, as you may say, for my dark 'record'--as
of course they all call it: she'll be able to give him, if he brings
himself to ask her, every fact in its order. And all the while, don't
you see? there's no one to speak _for_ me."
It would have touched a harder heart than her loose friend's to note
the final flush of clairvoyance witnessing this assertion and under
which her eyes shone as with the rush of quick tears. He stared at
her, and at what this did for the deep charm of her prettiness, as
in almost witless admiration. "But can't you--lovely as you are, you
beautiful thing!--speak for yourself?"