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CHAPTER 4
The blinds of Mrs. Peniston's drawing-room were drawn down against the oppressive June
sun, and in the sultry twilight the faces of her assembled relatives took on a
fitting shadow of bereavement.
They were all there: Van Alstynes, Stepneys and Melsons--even a stray Peniston or two,
indicating, by a greater latitude in dress and manner, the fact of remoter
relationship and more settled hopes.
The Peniston side was, in fact, secure in the knowledge that the bulk of Mr.
Peniston's property "went back"; while the direct connection hung suspended on the
disposal of his widow's private fortune and on the uncertainty of its extent.
Jack Stepney, in his new character as the richest nephew, tacitly took the lead,
emphasizing his importance by the deeper gloss of his mourning and the subdued
authority of his manner; while his wife's
bored attitude and frivolous gown proclaimed the heiress's disregard of the
insignificant interests at stake.
Old Ned Van Alstyne, seated next to her in a coat that made affliction dapper, twirled
his white moustache to conceal the eager twitch of his lips; and Grace Stepney, red-
nosed and smelling of crape, whispered
emotionally to Mrs. Herbert Melson: "I couldn't BEAR to see the Niagara anywhere
else!"
A rustle of weeds and quick turning of heads hailed the opening of the door, and
Lily Bart appeared, tall and noble in her black dress, with Gerty Farish at her side.
The women's faces, as she paused interrogatively on the threshold, were a
study in hesitation.
One or two made faint motions of recognition, which might have been subdued
either by the solemnity of the scene, or by the doubt as to how far the others meant to
go; Mrs. Jack Stepney gave a careless nod,
and Grace Stepney, with a sepulchral gesture, indicated a seat at her side.
But Lily, ignoring the invitation, as well as Jack Stepney's official attempt to
direct her, moved across the room with her smooth free gait, and seated herself in a
chair which seemed to have been purposely placed apart from the others.
It was the first time that she had faced her family since her return from Europe,
two weeks earlier; but if she perceived any uncertainty in their welcome, it served
only to add a tinge of irony to the usual composure of her bearing.
The shock of dismay with which, on the dock, she had heard from Gerty Farish of
Mrs. Peniston's sudden death, had been mitigated, almost at once, by the
irrepressible thought that now, at last, she would be able to pay her debts.
She had looked forward with considerable uneasiness to her first encounter with her
aunt.
Mrs. Peniston had vehemently opposed her niece's departure with the Dorsets, and had
marked her continued disapproval by not writing during Lily's absence.
The certainty that she had heard of the rupture with the Dorsets made the prospect
of the meeting more formidable; and how should Lily have repressed a quick sense of
relief at the thought that, instead of
undergoing the anticipated ordeal, she had only to enter gracefully on a long-assured
inheritance?
It had been, in the consecrated phrase, "always understood" that Mrs. Peniston was
to provide handsomely for her niece; and in the latter's mind the understanding had
long since crystallized into fact.
"She gets everything, of course--I don't see what we're here for," Mrs. Jack Stepney
remarked with careless loudness to Ned Van Alstyne; and the latter's deprecating
murmur--"Julia was always a just woman"--
might have been interpreted as signifying either acquiescence or doubt.
"Well, it's only about four hundred thousand," Mrs. Stepney rejoined with a
yawn; and Grace Stepney, in the silence produced by the lawyer's preliminary cough,
was heard to sob out: "They won't find a
towel missing--I went over them with her the very day----"
Lily, oppressed by the close atmosphere, and the stifling odour of fresh mourning,
felt her attention straying as Mrs. Peniston's lawyer, solemnly erect behind
the Buhl table at the end of the room,
began to rattle through the preamble of the will.
"It's like being in church," she reflected, wondering vaguely where Gwen Stepney had
got such an awful hat.
Then she noticed how stout Jack had grown-- he would soon be almost as plethoric as
Herbert Melson, who sat a few feet off, breathing puffily as he leaned his black-
gloved hands on his stick.
"I wonder why rich people always grow fat-- I suppose it's because there's nothing to
worry them.
If I inherit, I shall have to be careful of my figure," she mused, while the lawyer
droned on through a labyrinth of legacies.
The servants came first, then a few charitable institutions, then several
remoter Melsons and Stepneys, who stirred consciously as their names rang out, and
then subsided into a state of impassiveness befitting the solemnity of the occasion.
Ned Van Alstyne, Jack Stepney, and a cousin or two followed, each coupled with the
mention of a few thousands: Lily wondered that Grace Stepney was not among them.
Then she heard her own name--"to my niece Lily Bart ten thousand dollars--" and after
that the lawyer again lost himself in a coil of unintelligible periods, from which
the concluding phrase flashed out with
startling distinctness: "and the residue of my estate to my dear cousin and name-sake,
Grace Julia Stepney."
There was a subdued gasp of surprise, a rapid turning of heads, and a surging of
sable figures toward the corner in which Miss Stepney wailed out her sense of
unworthiness through the crumpled ball of a black-edged handkerchief.
Lily stood apart from the general movement, feeling herself for the first time utterly
alone.
No one looked at her, no one seemed aware of her presence; she was probing the very
depths of insignificance.
And under her sense of the collective indifference came the acuter pang of hopes
deceived. Disinherited--she had been disinherited--
and for Grace Stepney!
She met Gerty's lamentable eyes, fixed on her in a despairing effort at consolation,
and the look brought her to herself.
There was something to be done before she left the house: to be done with all the
nobility she knew how to put into such gestures.
She advanced to the group about Miss Stepney, and holding out her hand said
simply: "Dear Grace, I am so glad."
The other ladies had fallen back at her approach, and a space created itself about
her. It widened as she turned to go, and no one
advanced to fill it up.
She paused a moment, glancing about her, calmly taking the measure of her situation.
She heard some one ask a question about the date of the will; she caught a fragment of
the lawyer's answer--something about a sudden summons, and an "earlier
instrument."
Then the tide of dispersal began to drift past her; Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs.
Herbert Melson stood on the doorstep awaiting their motor; a sympathizing group
escorted Grace Stepney to the cab it was
felt to be fitting she should take, though she lived but a street or two away; and
Miss Bart and Gerty found themselves almost alone in the purple drawing-room, which
more than ever, in its stuffy dimness,
resembled a well-kept family vault, in which the last corpse had just been
decently deposited.
In Gerty Farish's sitting-room, whither a hansom had carried the two friends, Lily
dropped into a chair with a faint sound of laughter: it struck her as a humorous
coincidence that her aunt's legacy should
so nearly represent the amount of her debt to Trenor.
The need of discharging that debt had reasserted itself with increased urgency
since her return to America, and she spoke her first thought in saying to the
anxiously hovering Gerty: "I wonder when the legacies will be paid."
But Miss Farish could not pause over the legacies; she broke into a larger
indignation.
"Oh, Lily, it's unjust; it's cruel--Grace Stepney must FEEL she has no right to all
that money!"
"Any one who knew how to please Aunt Julia has a right to her money," Miss Bart
rejoined philosophically.
"But she was devoted to you--she led every one to think--" Gerty checked herself in
evident embarrassment, and Miss Bart turned to her with a direct look.
"Gerty, be honest: this will was made only six weeks ago.
She had heard of my break with the Dorsets?"
"Every one heard, of course, that there had been some disagreement--some
misunderstanding----" "Did she hear that Bertha turned me off the
yacht?"
"Lily!" "That was what happened, you know.
She said I was trying to marry George Dorset.
She did it to make him think she was jealous.
Isn't that what she told Gwen Stepney?" "I don't know--I don't listen to such
horrors."
"I MUST listen to them--I must know where I stand."
She paused, and again sounded a faint note of derision.
"Did you notice the women?
They were afraid to snub me while they thought I was going to get the money--
afterward they scuttled off as if I had the plague."
Gerty remained silent, and she continued: "I stayed on to see what would happen.
They took their cue from Gwen Stepney and Lulu Melson--I saw them watching to see
what Gwen would do.--Gerty, I must know just what is being said of me."
"I tell you I don't listen----"
"One hears such things without listening." She rose and laid her resolute hands on
Miss Farish's shoulders. "Gerty, are people going to cut me?"
"Your FRIENDS, Lily--how can you think it?"
"Who are one's friends at such a time? Who, but you, you poor trustful darling?
And heaven knows what YOU suspect me of!" She kissed Gerty with a whimsical murmur.
"You'd never let it make any difference-- but then you're fond of criminals, Gerty!
How about the irreclaimable ones, though? For I'm absolutely impenitent, you know."
She drew herself up to the full height of her slender majesty, towering like some
dark angel of defiance above the troubled Gerty, who could only falter out: "Lily,
Lily--how can you laugh about such things?"
"So as not to weep, perhaps. But no--I'm not of the tearful order.
I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me
through several painful episodes."
She took a restless turn about the room, and then, reseating herself, lifted the
bright mockery of her eyes to Gerty's anxious countenance.
"I shouldn't have minded, you know, if I'd got the money--" and at Miss Farish's
protesting "Oh!" she repeated calmly: "Not a straw, my dear; for, in the first place,
they wouldn't have quite dared to ignore
me; and if they had, it wouldn't have mattered, because I should have been
independent of them. But now--!"
The irony faded from her eyes, and she bent a clouded face upon her friend.
"How can you talk so, Lily?
Of course the money ought to have been yours, but after all that makes no
difference.
The important thing----" Gerty paused, and then continued firmly: "The important thing
is that you should clear yourself--should tell your friends the whole truth."
"The whole truth?"
Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth?
Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe.
In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine,
because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good
terms with her."
Miss Farish still fixed her with an anxious gaze.
"But what IS your story, Lily? I don't believe any one knows it yet."
"My story?--I don't believe I know it myself.
You see I never thought of preparing a version in advance as Bertha did--and if I
had, I don't think I should take the trouble to use it now."
But Gerty continued with her quiet reasonableness: "I don't want a version
prepared in advance--but I want you to tell me exactly what happened from the
beginning."
"From the beginning?" Miss Bart gently mimicked her.
"Dear Gerty, how little imagination you good people have!
Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose--in the way I was brought up, and
the things I was taught to care for.
Or no--I won't blame anybody for my faults: I'll say it was in my blood, that I got it
from some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress, who reacted against the homely
virtues of New Amsterdam, and wanted to be back at the court of the Charleses!"
And as Miss Farish continued to press her with troubled eyes, she went on
impatiently: "You asked me just now for the truth--well, the truth about any girl is
that once she's talked about she's done
for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.--My good Gerty, you don't
happen to have a cigarette about you?"
In her stuffy room at the hotel to which she had gone on landing, Lily Bart that
evening reviewed her situation. It was the last week in June, and none of
her friends were in town.
The few relatives who had stayed on, or returned, for the reading of Mrs.
Peniston's will, had taken flight again that afternoon to Newport or Long Island;
and not one of them had made any proffer of hospitality to Lily.
For the first time in her life she found herself utterly alone except for Gerty
Farish.
Even at the actual moment of her break with the Dorsets she had not had so keen a sense
of its consequences, for the Duchess of Beltshire, hearing of the catastrophe from
Lord Hubert, had instantly offered her
protection, and under her sheltering wing Lily had made an almost triumphant progress
to London.
There she had been sorely tempted to linger on in a society which asked of her only to
amuse and charm it, without enquiring too curiously how she had acquired her gift for
doing so; but Selden, before they parted,
had pressed on her the urgent need of returning at once to her aunt, and Lord
Hubert, when he presently reappeared in London, abounded in the same counsel.
Lily did not need to be told that the Duchess's championship was not the best
road to social rehabilitation, and as she was besides aware that her noble defender
might at any moment drop her in favour of a
new PROTEGEE, she reluctantly decided to return to America.
But she had not been ten minutes on her native shore before she realized that she
had delayed too long to regain it.
The Dorsets, the Stepneys, the Brys--all the actors and witnesses in the miserable
drama--had preceded her with their version of the case; and, even had she seen the
least chance of gaining a hearing for her
own, some obscure disdain and reluctance would have restrained her.
She knew it was not by explanations and counter-charges that she could ever hope to
recover her lost standing; but even had she felt the least trust in their efficacy, she
would still have been held back by the
feeling which had kept her from defending herself to Gerty Farish--a feeling that was
half pride and half humiliation.
For though she knew she had been ruthlessly sacrificed to Bertha Dorset's determination
to win back her husband, and though her own relation to Dorset had been that of the
merest good-fellowship, yet she had been
perfectly aware from the outset that her part in the affair was, as Carry Fisher
brutally put it, to distract Dorset's attention from his wife.
That was what she was "there for": it was the price she had chosen to pay for three
months of luxury and freedom from care.
Her habit of resolutely facing the facts, in her rare moments of introspection, did
not now allow her to put any false gloss on the situation.
She had suffered for the very faithfulness with which she had carried out her part of
the tacit compact, but the part was not a handsome one at best, and she saw it now in
all the ugliness of failure.
She saw, too, in the same uncompromising light, the train of consequences resulting
from that failure; and these became clearer to her with every day of her weary
lingering in town.
She stayed on partly for the comfort of Gerty Farish's nearness, and partly for
lack of knowing where to go. She understood well enough the nature of
the task before her.
She must set out to regain, little by little, the position she had lost; and the
first step in the tedious task was to find out, as soon as possible, on how many of
her friends she could count.
Her hopes were mainly centred on Mrs. Trenor, who had treasures of easy-going
tolerance for those who were amusing or useful to her, and in the noisy rush of
whose existence the still small voice of detraction was slow to make itself heard.
But Judy, though she must have been apprised of Miss Bart's return, had not
even recognized it by the formal note of condolence which her friend's bereavement
demanded.
Any advance on Lily's side might have been perilous: there was nothing to do but to
trust to the happy chance of an accidental meeting, and Lily knew that, even so late
in the season, there was always a hope of
running across her friends in their frequent passages through town.
To this end she assiduously showed herself at the restaurants they frequented, where,
attended by the troubled Gerty, she lunched luxuriously, as she said, on her
expectations.
"My dear Gerty, you wouldn't have me let the head-waiter see that I've nothing to
live on but Aunt Julia's legacy?
Think of Grace Stepney's satisfaction if she came in and found us lunching on cold
mutton and tea! What sweet shall we have today, dear--COUPE
JACQUES or PECHES A LA MELBA?"
She dropped the MENU abruptly, with a quick heightening of colour, and Gerty, following
her glance, was aware of the advance, from an inner room, of a party headed by Mrs.
Trenor and Carry Fisher.
It was impossible for these ladies and their companions--among whom Lily had at
once distinguished both Trenor and Rosedale--not to pass, in going out, the
table at which the two girls were seated;
and Gerty's sense of the fact betrayed itself in the helpless trepidation of her
manner.
Miss Bart, on the contrary, borne forward on the wave of her buoyant grace, and
neither shrinking from her friends nor appearing to lie in wait for them, gave to
the encounter the touch of naturalness
which she could impart to the most strained situations.
Such embarrassment as was shown was on Mrs. Trenor's side, and manifested itself in the
mingling of exaggerated warmth with imperceptible reservations.
Her loudly affirmed pleasure at seeing Miss Bart took the form of a nebulous
generalization, which included neither enquiries as to her future nor the
expression of a definite wish to see her again.
Lily, well-versed in the language of these omissions, knew that they were equally
intelligible to the other members of the party: even Rosedale, flushed as he was
with the importance of keeping such
company, at once took the temperature of Mrs. Trenor's cordiality, and reflected it
in his off-hand greeting of Miss Bart.
Trenor, red and uncomfortable, had cut short his salutations on the pretext of a
word to say to the head-waiter; and the rest of the group soon melted away in Mrs.
Trenor's wake.
It was over in a moment--the waiter, MENU in hand, still hung on the result of the
choice between COUPE JACQUES and PECHES A LA MELBA--but Miss Bart, in the interval,
had taken the measure of her fate.
Where Judy Trenor led, all the world would follow; and Lily had the doomed sense of
the castaway who has signalled in vain to fleeing sails.
In a flash she remembered Mrs. Trenor's complaints of Carry Fisher's rapacity, and
saw that they denoted an unexpected acquaintance with her husband's private
affairs.
In the large tumultuous disorder of the life at Bellomont, where no one seemed to
have time to observe any one else, and private aims and personal interests were
swept along unheeded in the rush of
collective activities, Lily had fancied herself sheltered from inconvenient
scrutiny; but if Judy knew when Mrs. Fisher borrowed money of her husband, was she
likely to ignore the same transaction on Lily's part?
If she was careless of his affections she was plainly jealous of his pocket; and in
that fact Lily read the explanation of her rebuff.
The immediate result of these conclusions was the passionate resolve to pay back her
debt to Trenor.
That obligation discharged, she would have but a thousand dollars of Mrs. Peniston's
legacy left, and nothing to live on but her own small income, which was considerably
less than Gerty Farish's wretched pittance;
but this consideration gave way to the imperative claim of her wounded pride.
She must be quits with the Trenors first; after that she would take thought for the
future.
In her ignorance of legal procrastinations she had supposed that her legacy would be
paid over within a few days of the reading of her aunt's will; and after an interval
of anxious suspense, she wrote to enquire the cause of the delay.
There was another interval before Mrs. Peniston's lawyer, who was also one of the
executors, replied to the effect that, some questions having arisen relative to the
interpretation of the will, he and his
associates might not be in a position to pay the legacies till the close of the
twelvemonth legally allotted for their settlement.
Bewildered and indignant, Lily resolved to try the effect of a personal appeal; but
she returned from her expedition with a sense of the powerlessness of beauty and
charm against the unfeeling processes of the law.
It seemed intolerable to live on for another year under the weight of her debt;
and in her extremity she decided to turn to Miss Stepney, who still lingered in town,
immersed in the delectable duty of "going over" her benefactress's effects.
It was bitter enough for Lily to ask a favour of Grace Stepney, but the
alternative was bitterer still; and one morning she presented herself at Mrs.
Peniston's, where Grace, for the
facilitation of her pious task, had taken up a provisional abode.
The strangeness of entering as a suppliant the house where she had so long commanded,
increased Lily's desire to shorten the ordeal; and when Miss Stepney entered the
darkened drawing-room, rustling with the
best quality of crape, her visitor went straight to the point: would she be willing
to advance the amount of the expected legacy?
Grace, in reply, wept and wondered at the request, bemoaned the inexorableness of the
law, and was astonished that Lily had not realized the exact similarity of their
positions.
Did she think that only the payment of the legacies had been delayed?
Why, Miss Stepney herself had not received a penny of her inheritance, and was paying
rent--yes, actually!--for the privilege of living in a house that belonged to her.
She was sure it was not what poor dear cousin Julia would have wished--she had
told the executors so to their faces; but they were inaccessible to reason, and there
was nothing to do but to wait.
Let Lily take example by her, and be patient--let them both remember how
beautifully patient cousin Julia had always been.
Lily made a movement which showed her imperfect assimilation of this example.
"But you will have everything, Grace--it would be easy for you to borrow ten times
the amount I am asking for."
"Borrow--easy for me to borrow?" Grace Stepney rose up before her in sable
wrath.
"Do you imagine for a moment that I would raise money on my expectations from cousin
Julia, when I know so well her unspeakable horror of every transaction of the sort?
Why, Lily, if you must know the truth, it was the idea of your being in debt that
brought on her illness--you remember she had a slight attack before you sailed.
Oh, I don't know the particulars, of course--I don't WANT to know them--but
there were rumours about your affairs that made her most unhappy--no one could be with
her without seeing that.
I can't help it if you are offended by my telling you this now--if I can do anything
to make you realize the folly of your course, and how deeply SHE disapproved of
it, I shall feel it is the truest way of making up to you for her loss."