The House of Mirth (28 page)

After luncheon, when Grace Stepney's prying eyes had been removed, Lily asked for a word with her aunt. The two ladies went upstairs to the sitting-room, where Mrs. Peniston seated herself in her black satin arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons, beside a bead-work table bearing a bronze box with a miniature of Beatrice Cenci in the lid. Lily felt for these objects the same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings of the court-room. It was here that her aunt received her rare confidences, and the pink-eyed smirk of the turbaned Beatrice was associated in her mind with the gradual fading of the smile from Mrs. Peniston's lips. That lady's dread of a scene gave her an inexorableness which the greatest strength of character could not have produced, since it was independent of all considerations of right or wrong; and knowing this, Lily seldom ventured to assail it. She had never felt less like making the attempt than on the present occasion; but she had sought in vain for any other means of escape from an intolerable situation.

Mrs. Peniston examined her critically. “You're a bad colour, Lily; this incessant rushing about is beginning to tell on you,” she said.

Miss Bart saw an opening. “I don't think it's that, Aunt Julia; I've had worries,” she replied.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with the snap of a purse closing against a beggar.

“I'm sorry to bother you with them,” Lily continued, “but I really believe my faintness last night was brought on partly by anxious thoughts—”

“I should have said Carry Fisher's cook was enough to account for it. She has a woman who was with Maria Melson in 1891—the spring of the year we went to Aix—and I remember dining there two days before we sailed, and feeling
sure
the coppers hadn't been scoured.”

“I don't think I ate much; I can't eat or sleep.” Lily paused, and then said abruptly: “The fact is, Aunt Julia, I owe some money.”

Mrs. Peniston's face clouded perceptibly but did not express the astonishment her niece had expected. She was silent, and Lily was forced to continue: “I have been foolish—”

“No doubt you have: extremely foolish,” Mrs. Peniston interposed. “I fail to see how any one with your income, and no expenses—not to mention the handsome presents I've always given you—”

“Oh, you've been most generous, Aunt Julia; I shall never forget your kindness. But perhaps you don't quite realize the expense a girl is put to now-a-days—”

“I don't realize that
you
are put to any expense except for your clothes and your railway fares. I expect you to be handsomely dressed; but I paid Céleste's bill for you last October.”

Lily hesitated; her aunt's implacable memory had never been more inconvenient. “You were as kind as possible; but I have had to get a few things since—”

“What kind of things? Clothes? How much have you spent? Let me see the bill—I daresay the woman is swindling you.”

“Oh, no, I think not; clothes have grown so frightfully expensive, and one needs so many different kinds, with country visits, and golf and skating, and Aiken and Tuxedo—”

“Let me see the bill,” Mrs. Peniston repeated.

Lily hesitated again. In the first place, Mme. Céleste had not yet sent in her account, and secondly, the amount it represented was only a fraction of the sum that Lily needed.

“She hasn't sent in the bill for my winter things, but I
know
it's large; and there are one or two other things; I've been careless and imprudent—I'm frightened to think of what I owe—”

She raised the troubled loveliness of her face to Mrs. Peniston, vainly hoping that a sight so moving to the other sex might not be without effect upon her own. But the effect produced was that of making Mrs. Peniston shrink back apprehensively.

“Really, Lily, you are old enough to manage your own affairs, and after frightening me to death by your performance of last night you might at least choose a better time to worry me with such matters.” Mrs. Peniston glanced at the clock and swallowed a tablet of digitalis. “If you owe Céleste another thousand, she may send me her account,” she added, as though to end the discussion at any cost.

“I am very sorry, Aunt Julia; I hate to trouble you at such a time, but I have really no choice—I ought to have spoken sooner—I owe a great deal more than a thousand dollars.”

“A great deal more? Do you owe two? She must have robbed you!”

“I told you it was not only Céleste. I—there are other bills—more pressing—that must be settled.”

“What on earth have you been buying? Jewellery? You must have gone off your head,” said Mrs. Peniston with asperity. “But if you have run into debt, you must suffer the consequences, and put aside your monthly income till your bills are paid. If you stay quietly here until next spring instead of racing about all over the country, you will have no expenses at all, and surely in four or five months you can settle the rest of your bills if I pay the dress-maker now.”

Lily was again silent. She knew she could not hope to extract even a thousand dollars from Mrs. Peniston on the mere plea of paying Céleste's bill; Mrs. Peniston would expect to go over the dress-maker's account and would make out the cheque to her and not to Lily. And yet the money must be obtained before the day was over!

“The debts I speak of are—different—not like tradesmen's bills,” she began confusedly; but Mrs. Peniston's look made her almost afraid to continue. Could it be that her aunt suspected anything? The idea precipitated Lily's avowal.

“The fact is, I've played cards a good deal—bridge; the women all do it; girls too—it's expected. Sometimes I've won—won a good deal—but lately I've been unlucky—and of course such debts can't be paid off gradually—”

She paused: Mrs. Peniston's face seemed to be petrifying as she listened.

“Cards—you've played cards for money? It's true, then; when I was told so I wouldn't believe it. I won't ask if the other horrors I was told were true too; I've heard enough for the state of my nerves. When I think of the example you've had in this house! But I suppose it's your foreign bringing-up—no one knew where your mother picked up her friends. And her Sundays were a scandal—that I know.” Mrs. Peniston wheeled round suddenly. “You play cards on Sunday?”

Lily flushed with the recollection of certain rainy Sundays at Bellomont and with the Dorsets.

“You're hard on me, Aunt Julia; I have never really cared for cards, but a girl hates to be thought priggish and superior, and one drifts into doing what the others do. I've had a dreadful lesson, and if you'll help me out this time I promise you—”

Mrs. Peniston raised her hand warningly. “You needn't make any promises; it's unnecessary. When I offered you a home I didn't undertake to pay your gambling debts.”

“Aunt Julia! You don't mean that you won't help me?”

“I shall certainly not do anything to give the impression that I countenance your behaviour. If you really owe your dress-maker, I will settle with her; beyond that I recognize no obligation to assume your debts.”

Lily had risen and stood pale and quivering before her aunt. Pride stormed in her, but humiliation forced the cry from her lips: “Aunt Julia, I shall be disgraced—I—” But she could go no farther. If her aunt turned such a stony ear to the fiction of the gambling debts, in what spirit would she receive the terrible avowal of the truth?

“I consider that you
are
disgraced, Lily, disgraced by your conduct far more than by its results. You say your friends have persuaded you to play cards with them; well, they may as well learn a lesson too. They can probably afford to lose a little money, and at any rate, I am not going to waste any of mine in paying them. And now I must ask you to leave me; this scene has been extremely painful, and I have my own health to consider. Draw down the blinds, please, and tell Jennings I will see no one this afternoon but Grace Stepney.”

Lily went up to her own room and bolted the door. She was trembling with fear and anger; the rush of the Furies' wings was in her ears. She walked up and down the room with blind, irregular steps. The last door of escape was closed—she felt herself shut in with her dishonour.

Suddenly her wild pacing brought her before the clock on the chimney-piece. Its hands stood at half-past three, and she remembered that Selden was to come to her at four. She had meant to put him off with a word, but now her heart leaped at the thought of seeing him. Was there not a promise of rescue in his love? As she had lain at Gerty's side the night before, she had thought of his coming and of the sweetness of weeping out her pain upon his breast. Of course she had meant to clear herself of its consequences before she met him; she had never really doubted that Mrs. Peniston would come to her aid. And she had felt, even in the full storm of her misery, that Selden's love could not be her ultimate refuge; only it would be so sweet to take a moment's shelter there while she gathered fresh strength to go on.

But now his love was her only hope, and as she sat alone with her wretchedness, the thought of confiding in him became as seductive as the river's flow to the suicide. The first plunge would be terrible, but afterward, what blessedness might come! She remembered Gerty's words: “I know him; he will help you”; and her mind clung to them as a sick person might cling to a healing relic. Oh, if he really understood; if he would help her to gather up her broken life and put it together in some new semblance in which no trace of the past should remain! He had always made her feel that she was worthy of better things, and she had never been in greater need of such solace. Once and again she shrank at the thought of imperilling his love by her confession, for love was what she needed; it would take the glow of passion to weld together the shattered fragments of her self-esteem. But she recurred to Gerty's words and held fast to them. She was sure that Gerty knew Selden's feeling for her, and it had never dawned upon her blindness that Gerty's own judgement of him was coloured by emotions far more ardent than her own.

Four o'clock found her in the drawing-room; she was sure that Selden would be punctual. But the hour came and passed; it moved on feverishly, measured by her impatient heart-beats. She had time to take a fresh survey of her wretchedness and to fluctuate anew between the impulse to confide in Selden and the dread of destroying his illusions. But as the minutes passed, the need of throwing herself on his comprehension became more urgent: she could not bear the weight of her misery alone. There would be a perilous moment, perhaps; but could she not trust to her beauty to bridge it over, to land her safe in the shelter of his devotion?

But the hour sped on, and Selden did not come. Doubtless he had been detained or had misread her hurriedly scrawled note, taking the four for a five. The ringing of the door-bell a few minutes after five confirmed this supposition and made Lily hastily resolve to write more legibly in future. The sound of steps in the hall and of the butler's voice preceding them poured fresh energy into her veins. She felt herself once more the alert and competent moulder of emergencies, and the remembrance of her power over Selden flushed her with sudden confidence. But when the drawing-room door opened, it was Rosedale who came in.

The reaction caused her a sharp pang, but after a passing movement of irritation at the clumsiness of fate and at her own carelessness in not denying the door to all but Selden, she controlled herself and greeted Rosedale amicably. It was annoying that Selden, when he came, should find that particular visitor in possession, but Lily was mistress of the art of ridding herself of superfluous company, and to her present mood Rosedale seemed distinctly negligible.

His own view of the situation forced itself upon her after a few moments' conversation. She had caught at the Brys' entertainment as an easy, impersonal subject, likely to tide them over the interval till Selden appeared, but Mr. Rosedale, tenaciously planted beside the tea-table, his hands in his pockets, his legs a little too freely extended, at once gave the topic a personal turn.

“Pretty well done—well, yes, I suppose it was: Welly Bry's got his back up and don't mean to let go till he's got the hang of the thing. Of course, there were things here and there—things Mrs. Fisher couldn't be expected to see to—the champagne wasn't cold, and the coats got mixed in the coat-room. I would have spent more money on the music. But that's my character: if I want a thing I'm willing to pay, I don't go up to the counter and then wonder if the article's worth the price. I wouldn't be satisfied to entertain like the Welly Brys; I'd want something that would look more easy and natural, more as if I took it in my stride. And it takes just two things to do that, Miss Bart: money and the right woman to spend it.”

He paused, and examined her attentively while she affected to rearrange the tea-cups.

“I've got the money,” he continued, clearing his throat, “and what I want is the woman—and I mean to have her too.”

He leaned forward a little, resting his hands on the head of his walking-stick. He had seen men of Ned Van Alstyne's type bring their hats and sticks into a drawing-room, and he thought it added a touch of elegant familiarity to their appearance.

Lily was silent, smiling faintly, with her eyes absently resting on his face. She was in reality reflecting that a declaration would take some time to make and that Selden must surely appear before the moment of refusal had been reached. Her brooding look, as of a mind withdrawn yet not averted, seemed to Mr. Rosedale full of a subtle encouragement. He would not have liked any evidence of eagerness.

“I mean to have her too,” he repeated with a laugh intended to strengthen his self-assurance. “I generally
have
got what I wanted in life, Miss Bart. I wanted money, and I've got more than I know how to invest; and now the money doesn't seem to be of any account unless I can spend it on the right woman. That's what I want to do with it: I want my wife to make all the other women feel small. I'd never grudge a dollar that was spent on that. But it isn't every woman can do it, no matter how much you spend on her. There was a girl in some history book who wanted gold shields or something, and the fellows threw 'em at her, and she was crushed under 'em: they killed her. Well, that's true enough: some women looked buried under their jewellery. What I want is a woman who'll hold her head higher the more diamonds I put on it. And when I looked at you the other night at the Brys', in that plain white dress, looking as if you had a crown on, I said to myself: ‘By gad, if she had one she'd wear it as if it grew on her.' ”