The House of Mirth (40 page)

It was no surprise to Lily to find that he had been selected as her only fellow-guest. Though she and her hostess had not met since the latter's tentative discussion of her future, Lily knew that the acuteness which enabled Mrs. Fisher to lay a safe and pleasant course through a world of antagonistic forces was not infrequently exercised for the benefit of her friends. It was, in fact, characteristic of Carry that, while she actively gleaned her own stores from the fields of affluence, her real sympathies were on the other side—with the unlucky, the unpopular, the unsuccessful, with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the shorn stubble of success.

Mrs. Fisher's experience guarded her against the mistake of exposing Lily, for the first evening, to the unmitigated impression of Rosedale's personality. Kate Corby and two or three men dropped in to dinner, and Lily, alive to every detail of her friend's method, saw that such opportunities as had been contrived for her were to be deferred till she had, as it were, gained courage to make effectual use of them. She had a sense of acquiescing in this plan with the passiveness of a sufferer resigned to the surgeon's touch; and this feeling of almost lethargic helplessness continued when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs. Fisher followed her upstairs.

“May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire? If we talk in my room, we shall disturb the child.” Mrs. Fisher looked about her with the eye of the solicitous hostess. “I hope you've managed to make yourself comfortable, dear? Isn't it a jolly little house? It's such a blessing to have a few quiet weeks with the baby.”

Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get time and money enough, she would not end by devoting them both to her daughter.

“It's a well-earned rest; I'll say that for myself,” she continued, sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire. “Louisa Bry is a stern task-master; I often used to wish myself back with the Gormers. Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious—it's nothing to social ambition! Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering whether the women who called on us called on
me
because I was with her, or on
her
because she was with me; and she was always laying traps to find out what I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends rather than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single acquaintance—when, all the while, that was what she had me there for and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season was over!”

Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial moments, the purpose of the juggler's chatter while he shifts the contents of his sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet-table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair.

“Your hair's wonderful, Lily. Thinner—? What does that matter when it's so light and alive? So many women's worries seem to go straight to their hair, but yours looks as if there had never been an anxious thought under it. I never saw you look better than you did this evening. Mattie Gormer told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you; why don't you let him?”

Miss Bart's immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she said with a slight touch of irritation: “I don't care to accept a portrait from Paul Morpeth.”

Mrs. Fisher mused. “N—no. And just now, especially—well, he can do you after you're married.” She waited a moment, and then went on: “By the way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day. She turned up here last Sunday, and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the world!”

She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart's lifted hand maintained its unwavering stroke from brow to nape.

“I never was more astonished,” Mrs. Fisher pursued. “I don't know two women less predestined to intimacy—from Bertha's standpoint, that is; for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that she should be singled out; I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda. Well, you know I've always told you that Mattie secretly longed to bore herself with the really fashionable; and now that the chance has come, I see that she's capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it.”

Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her friend. “Including
me
?” she suggested.

“Ah, my dear,” murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from the hearth.

“That's what Bertha means, isn't it?” Miss Bart went on steadily. “For of course she always means something; and before I left Long Island I saw that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie.”

Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. “She has her fast now, at any rate. To think of that loud independence of Mattie's being only a subtler form of snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe anything she pleases; and I'm afraid she's begun, my poor child, by insinuating horrors about you.”

Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. “The world is too vile,” she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher's anxious scrutiny.

“It's not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms—and above all, my dear, not alone!” Mrs. Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp. “You've told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening; but in the rush we all live in, there's no time to keep on hating any one without a cause, and if Bertha is still nasty enough to want to injure you with other people, it must be because she's still afraid of you. From her standpoint there's only one reason for being afraid of you; and my own idea is that if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your hand. I believe you can marry George Dorset to-morrow; but if you don't care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from Bertha is to marry somebody else.”

T
he light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the cheerless distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with a cold precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as it were, from the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she had opened windows from which no sky was ever visible. But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop; and it was easier for Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her case than to put it plainly to herself. Once confronted with it, however, she went the full length of its consequences; and these had never been more clearly present to her than when, the next afternoon, she set out for a walk with Rosedale.

It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted with the light of summer, and something in the lines of the landscape and in the golden haze which bathed them recalled to Miss Bart the September afternoon when she had climbed the slopes of Bellomont with Selden. The importunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her present situation, since her walk with Selden had represented an irresistible flight from just such a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring about. But other memories importuned her also; the recollection of similar situations, as skilfully led up to, but through some malice of fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always failing of the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady enough now. She saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again, and against far greater odds if Bertha Dorset should succeed in breaking up her friendship with the Gormers; and her longing for shelter and security was intensified by the passionate desire to triumph over Bertha, as only wealth and predominance could triumph over her. As the wife of Rosedale—the Rosedale she felt it in her power to create—she would at least present an invulnerable front to her enemy.

She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant, to keep up her part in the scene toward which Rosedale was too frankly tending. As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from the way in which his look and tone made free of her, yet telling herself that this momentary endurance of his mood was the price she must pay for her ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate the exact point at which concession must turn to resistance, and the price
he
would have to pay be made equally clear to him. But his dapper self-confidence seemed impenetrable to such hints, and she had a sense of something hard and self-contained behind the superficial warmth of his manner.

They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen above the lake when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an impassioned period by turning upon him the grave loveliness of her gaze.

“I
do
believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale,” she said quietly; “and I am ready to marry you whenever you wish.”

Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he halted before her in an attitude of almost comic discomfiture.

“For I suppose that is what you do wish,” she continued in the same quiet tone. “And though I was unable to consent when you spoke to me in this way before, I am ready, now that I know you so much better, to trust my happiness to your hands.”

She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on such occasions, and which was like a large, steady light thrown across the tortuous darkness of the situation. In its inconvenient brightness Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as though conscious that every avenue of escape was unpleasantly illuminated.

Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in which, with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped cigarette. Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment before saying: “My dear Miss Lily, I'm sorry if there's been any little misapprehension between us—but you made me feel my suit was so hopeless that I had really no intention of renewing it.”

Lily's blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she checked the first leap of her anger and said in a tone of gentle dignity: “I have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the impression that my decision was final.”

Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him in puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the faintest inflection of sadness in her voice: “Before we bid each other good-bye, I want at least to thank you for having once thought of me as you did.”

The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled a vulnerable fibre in Rosedale. It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without a hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up.

“Why do you talk of saying good-bye? Ain't we going to be good friends all the same?” he urged without releasing her hand.

She drew it away quietly. “What is your idea of being good friends?” she returned with a slight smile. “Making love to me without asking me to marry you?”

Rosedale laughed with a recovered sense of ease. “Well, that's about the size of it, I suppose. I can't help making love to you—I don't see how any man could; but I don't mean to ask you to marry me as long as I can keep out of it.”

She continued to smile. “I like your frankness, but I am afraid our friendship can hardly continue on those terms.”

She turned away as though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and he followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having after all kept the game in her own hands.

“Miss Lily—” he began impulsively, but she walked on without seeming to hear him.

He overtook her in a few quick strides and laid an entreating hand on her arm. “Miss Lily, don't hurry away like that. You're beastly hard on a fellow; but if you don't mind speaking the truth, I don't see why you shouldn't allow me to do the same.”

She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away instinctively from his touch, though she made no effort to evade his words.

“I was under the impression,” she rejoined, “that you had done so without waiting for my permission.”

“Well—why shouldn't you hear my reasons for doing it, then? We're neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going to hurt us. I'm all broken up on you; there's nothing new in that. I'm more in love with you than I was this time last year; but I've got to face the fact that the situation is changed.”

She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic composure. “You mean to say that I'm not as desirable a match as you thought me?”

“Yes, that's what I do mean,” he answered resolutely. “I won't go into what's happened. I don't believe the stories about you; I don't
want
to believe them. But they're there, and my not believing them ain't going to alter the situation.”

She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked the retort on her lip, and she continued to face him composedly. “If they are not true,” she said, “doesn't
that
alter the situation?”

He met this with a steady gaze of his small, stock-taking eyes, which made her feel herself no more than some super-fine human merchandise. “I believe it does in novels, but I'm certain it don't in real life. You know that as well as I do; if we're speaking the truth, let's speak the whole truth. Last year I was wild to marry you, and you wouldn't look at me; this year—well, you appear to be willing. Now, what has changed in the interval? Your situation, that's all. Then you thought you could do better; now—”