Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
CHAPTER 13
Lily woke from happy dreams to find two notes at her bedside.
One was from Mrs. Trenor, who announced that she was coming to town that afternoon
for a flying visit, and hoped Miss Bart would be able to dine with her.
The other was from Selden.
He wrote briefly that an important case called him to Albany, whence he would be
unable to return till the evening, and asked Lily to let him know at what hour on
the following day she would see him.
Lily, leaning back among her pillows, gazed musingly at his letter.
The scene in the Brys' conservatory had been like a part of her dreams; she had not
expected to wake to such evidence of its reality.
Her first movement was one of annoyance: this unforeseen act of Selden's added
another complication to life. It was so unlike him to yield to such an
irrational impulse!
Did he really mean to ask her to marry him?
She had once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour
seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness somewhat
mortifying to her vanity.
It was all the more agreeable to find that this reasonableness was maintained only at
the cost of not seeing her; but, though nothing in life was as sweet as the sense
of her power over him, she saw the danger
of allowing the episode of the previous night to have a sequel.
Since she could not marry him, it would be kinder to him, as well as easier for
herself, to write a line amicably evading his request to see her: he was not the man
to mistake such a hint, and when next they
met it would be on their usual friendly footing.
Lily sprang out of bed, and went straight to her desk.
She wanted to write at once, while she could trust to the strength of her resolve.
She was still languid from her brief sleep and the exhilaration of the evening, and
the sight of Selden's writing brought back the culminating moment of her triumph: the
moment when she had read in his eyes that no philosophy was proof against her power.
It would be pleasant to have that sensation again...no one else could give it to her in
its fulness; and she could not bear to mar her mood of luxurious retrospection by an
act of definite refusal.
She took up her pen and wrote hastily: "TOMORROW AT FOUR;" murmuring to herself,
as she slipped the sheet into its envelope: "I can easily put him off when tomorrow
comes."
Judy Trenor's summons was very welcome to Lily.
It was the first time she had received a direct communication from Bellomont since
the close of her last visit there, and she was still visited by the dread of having
incurred Judy's displeasure.
But this characteristic command seemed to reestablish their former relations; and
Lily smiled at the thought that her friend had probably summoned her in order to hear
about the Brys' entertainment.
Mrs. Trenor had absented herself from the feast, perhaps for the reason so frankly
enunciated by her husband, perhaps because, as Mrs. Fisher somewhat differently put it,
she "couldn't bear new people when she hadn't discovered them herself."
At any rate, though she remained haughtily at Bellomont, Lily suspected in her a
devouring eagerness to hear of what she had missed, and to learn exactly in what
measure Mrs. Wellington Bry had surpassed
all previous competitors for social recognition.
Lily was quite ready to gratify this curiosity, but it happened that she was
dining out.
She determined, however, to see Mrs. Trenor for a few moments, and ringing for her maid
she despatched a telegram to say that she would be with her friend that evening at
ten.
She was dining with Mrs. Fisher, who had gathered at an informal feast a few of the
performers of the previous evening.
There was to be plantation music in the studio after dinner--for Mrs. Fisher,
despairing of the republic, had taken up modelling, and annexed to her small crowded
house a spacious apartment, which, whatever
its uses in her hours of plastic inspiration, served at other times for the
exercise of an indefatigable hospitality.
Lily was reluctant to leave, for the dinner was amusing, and she would have liked to
lounge over a cigarette and hear a few songs; but she could not break her
engagement with Judy, and shortly after ten
she asked her hostess to ring for a hansom, and drove up Fifth Avenue to the Trenors'.
She waited long enough on the doorstep to wonder that Judy's presence in town was not
signalized by a greater promptness in admitting her; and her surprise was
increased when, instead of the expected
footman, pushing his shoulders into a tardy coat, a shabby care-taking person in calico
let her into the shrouded hall.
Trenor, however, appeared at once on the threshold of the drawing-room, welcoming
her with unusual volubility while he relieved her of her cloak and drew her into
the room.
"Come along to the den; it's the only comfortable place in the house.
Doesn't this room look as if it was waiting for the body to be brought down?
Can't see why Judy keeps the house wrapped up in this awful slippery white stuff--it's
enough to give a fellow pneumonia to walk through these rooms on a cold day.
You look a little pinched yourself, by the way: it's rather a sharp night out.
I noticed it walking up from the club.
Come along, and I'll give you a nip of brandy, and you can toast yourself over the
fire and try some of my new Egyptians--that little Turkish chap at the Embassy put me
on to a brand that I want you to try, and
if you like 'em I'll get out a lot for you: they don't have 'em here yet, but I'll
cable."
He led her through the house to the large room at the back, where Mrs. Trenor usually
sat, and where, even in her absence, there was an air of occupancy.
Here, as usual, were flowers, newspapers, a littered writing-table, and a general
aspect of lamp-lit familiarity, so that it was a surprise not to see Judy's energetic
figure start up from the arm-chair near the fire.
It was apparently Trenor himself who had been occupying the seat in question, for it
was overhung by a cloud of cigar smoke, and near it stood one of those intricate
folding tables which British ingenuity has
devised to facilitate the circulation of tobacco and spirits.
The sight of such appliances in a drawing- room was not unusual in Lily's set, where
smoking and drinking were unrestricted by considerations of time and place, and her
first movement was to help herself to one
of the cigarettes recommended by Trenor, while she checked his loquacity by asking,
with a surprised glance: "Where's Judy?"
Trenor, a little heated by his unusual flow of words, and perhaps by prolonged
propinquity with the decanters, was bending over the latter to decipher their silver
labels.
"Here, now, Lily, just a drop of cognac in a little fizzy water--you do look pinched,
you know: I swear the end of your nose is red.
I'll take another glass to keep you company--Judy?--Why, you see, Judy's got a
devil of a head ache--quite knocked out with it, poor thing--she asked me to
explain--make it all right, you know--Do
come up to the fire, though; you look dead- beat, really.
Now do let me make you comfortable, there's a good girl."
He had taken her hand, half-banteringly, and was drawing her toward a low seat by
the hearth; but she stopped and freed herself quietly.
"Do you mean to say that Judy's not well enough to see me?
Doesn't she want me to go upstairs?"
Trenor drained the glass he had filled for himself, and paused to set it down before
he answered. "Why, no--the fact is, she's not up to
seeing anybody.
It came on suddenly, you know, and she asked me to tell you how awfully sorry she
was--if she'd known where you were dining she'd have sent you word."
"She did know where I was dining; I mentioned it in my telegram.
But it doesn't matter, of course.
I suppose if she's so poorly she won't go back to Bellomont in the morning, and I can
come and see her then." "Yes: exactly--that's capital.
I'll tell her you'll pop in tomorrow morning.
And now do sit down a minute, there's a dear, and let's have a nice quiet jaw
together.
You won't take a drop, just for sociability?
Tell me what you think of that cigarette. Why, don't you like it?
What are you chucking it away for?"
"I am chucking it away because I must go, if you'll have the goodness to call a cab
for me," Lily returned with a smile.
She did not like Trenor's unusual excitability, with its too evident
explanation, and the thought of being alone with him, with her friend out of reach
upstairs, at the other end of the great
empty house, did not conduce to a desire to prolong their TETE-A-TETE.
But Trenor, with a promptness which did not escape her, had moved between herself and
the door.
"Why must you go, I should like to know? If Judy'd been here you'd have sat
gossiping till all hours--and you can't even give me five minutes!
It's always the same story.
Last night I couldn't get near you--I went to that damned vulgar party just to see
you, and there was everybody talking about you, and asking me if I'd ever seen
anything so stunning, and when I tried to
come up and say a word, you never took any notice, but just went on laughing and
joking with a lot of *** who only wanted to be able to swagger about afterward, and
look knowing when you were mentioned."
He paused, flushed by his diatribe, and fixing on her a look in which resentment
was the ingredient she least disliked.
But she had regained her presence of mind, and stood composedly in the middle of the
room, while her slight smile seemed to put an ever increasing distance between herself
and Trenor.
Across it she said: "Don't be absurd, Gus. It's past eleven, and I must really ask you
to ring for a cab." He remained immovable, with the lowering
forehead she had grown to detest.
"And supposing I won't ring for one-- what'll you do then?"
"I shall go upstairs to Judy if you force me to disturb her."
Trenor drew a step nearer and laid his hand on her arm.
"Look here, Lily: won't you give me five minutes of your own accord?"
"Not tonight, Gus: you----"
"Very good, then: I'll take 'em. And as many more as I want."
He had squared himself on the threshold, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
He nodded toward the chair on the hearth.
"Go and sit down there, please: I've got a word to say to you."
Lily's quick temper was getting the better of her fears.
She drew herself up and moved toward the door.
"If you have anything to say to me, you must say it another time.
I shall go up to Judy unless you call a cab for me at once."
He burst into a laugh. "Go upstairs and welcome, my dear; but you
won't find Judy.
She ain't there." Lily cast a startled look upon him.
"Do you mean that Judy is not in the house- -not in town?" she exclaimed.
"That's just what I do mean," returned Trenor, his bluster sinking to sullenness
under her look. "Nonsense--I don't believe you.
I am going upstairs," she said impatiently.
He drew unexpectedly aside, letting her reach the threshold unimpeded.
"Go up and welcome; but my wife is at Bellomont."
But Lily had a flash of reassurance.
"If she hadn't come she would have sent me word----"
"She did; she telephoned me this afternoon to let you know."
"I received no message."
"I didn't send any." The two measured each other for a moment,
but Lily still saw her opponent through a blur of scorn that made all other
considerations indistinct.
"I can't imagine your object in playing such a stupid trick on me; but if you have
fully gratified your peculiar sense of humour I must again ask you to send for a
cab."
It was the wrong note, and she knew it as she spoke.
To be stung by irony it is not necessary to understand it, and the angry streaks on
Trenor's face might have been raised by an actual lash.
"Look here, Lily, don't take that high and mighty tone with me."
He had again moved toward the door, and in her instinctive shrinking from him she let
him regain command of the threshold.
"I DID play a trick on you; I own up to it; but if you think I'm ashamed you're
mistaken. Lord knows I've been patient enough--I've
hung round and looked like an ***.
And all the while you were letting a lot of other fellows make up to you...letting 'em
make fun of me, I daresay...I'm not sharp, and can't dress my friends up to look
funny, as you do...but I can tell when it's
being done to me...I can tell fast enough when I'm made a fool of ..."
"Ah, I shouldn't have thought that!" flashed from Lily; but her laugh dropped to
silence under his look.
"No; you wouldn't have thought it; but you'll know better now.
That's what you're here for tonight.
I've been waiting for a quiet time to talk things over, and now I've got it I mean to
make you hear me out."
His first rush of inarticulate resentment had been followed by a steadiness and
concentration of tone more disconcerting to Lily than the excitement preceding it.
For a moment her presence of mind forsook her.
She had more than once been in situations where a quick sword-play of wit had been
needful to cover her retreat; but her frightened heart-throbs told her that here
such skill would not avail.
To gain time she repeated: "I don't understand what you want."
Trenor had pushed a chair between herself and the door.
He threw himself in it, and leaned back, looking up at her.
"I'll tell you what I want: I want to know just where you and I stand.
Hang it, the man who pays for the dinner is generally allowed to have a seat at table."
She flamed with anger and abasement, and the sickening need of having to conciliate
where she longed to humble.
"I don't know what you mean--but you must see, Gus, that I can't stay here talking to
you at this hour----"
"Gad, you go to men's houses fast enough in broad day light--strikes me you're not
always so deuced careful of appearances."
The brutality of the thrust gave her the sense of dizziness that follows on a
physical blow.
Rosedale had spoken then--this was the way men talked of her--She felt suddenly weak
and defenceless: there was a throb of self- pity in her throat.
But all the while another self was sharpening her to vigilance, whispering the
terrified warning that every word and gesture must be measured.
"If you have brought me here to say insulting things----" she began.
Trenor laughed. "Don't talk stage-rot.
I don't want to insult you.
But a man's got his feelings--and you've played with mine too long.
I didn't begin this business--kept out of the way, and left the track clear for the
other chaps, till you rummaged me out and set to work to make an *** of me--and an
easy job you had of it, too.
That's the trouble--it was too easy for you--you got reckless--thought you could
turn me inside out, and chuck me in the gutter like an empty purse.
But, by gad, that ain't playing fair: that's dodging the rules of the game.
Of course I know now what you wanted--it wasn't my beautiful eyes you were after--
but I tell you what, Miss Lily, you've got to pay up for making me think so----"
He rose, squaring his shoulders aggressively, and stepped toward her with a
reddening brow; but she held her footing, though every nerve tore at her to retreat
as he advanced.
"Pay up?" she faltered. "Do you mean that I owe you money?"
He laughed again. "Oh, I'm not asking for payment in kind.
But there's such a thing as fair play--and interest on one's money--and hang me if
I've had as much as a look from you----" "Your money?
What have I to do with your money?
You advised me how to invest mine...you must have seen I knew nothing of business
... you told me it was all right----" "It WAS all right--it is, Lily: you're
welcome to all of it, and ten times more.
I'm only asking for a word of thanks from you."
He was closer still, with a hand that grew formidable; and the frightened self in her
was dragging the other down.
"I HAVE thanked you; I've shown I was grateful.
What more have you done than any friend might do, or any one accept from a friend?"
Trenor caught her up with a sneer.
"I don't doubt you've accepted as much before--and chucked the other chaps as
you'd like to chuck me.
I don't care how you settled your score with them--if you fooled 'em I'm that much
to the good.
Don't stare at me like that--I know I'm not talking the way a man is supposed to talk
to a girl--but, hang it, if you don't like it you can stop me quick enough--you know
I'm mad about you--damn the money, there's
plenty more of it--if THAT bothers you... I was a brute, Lily--Lily!--just look at
me----"
Over and over her the sea of humiliation broke--wave crashing on wave so close that
the moral shame was one with the physical dread.
It seemed to her that self-esteem would have made her invulnerable--that it was her
own dishonour which put a fearful solitude about her.
His touch was a shock to her drowning consciousness.
She drew back from him with a desperate assumption of scorn.
"I've told you I don't understand--but if I owe you money you shall be paid----"
Trenor's face darkened to rage: her recoil of abhorrence had called out the primitive
man.
"Ah--you'll borrow from Selden or Rosedale- -and take your chances of fooling them as
you've fooled me!
Unless--unless you've settled your other scores already--and I'm the only one left
out in the cold!" She stood silent, frozen to her place.
The words--the words were worse than the touch!
Her heart was beating all over her body--in her throat, her limbs, her helpless useless
hands.
Her eyes travelled despairingly about the room--they lit on the bell, and she
remembered that help was in call. Yes, but scandal with it--a hideous
mustering of tongues.
No, she must fight her way out alone. It was enough that the servants knew her to
be in the house with Trenor--there must be nothing to excite conjecture in her way of
leaving it.
She raised her head, and achieved a last clear look at him.
"I am here alone with you," she said. "What more have you to say?"
To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with a speechless stare.
With his last gust of words the flame had died out, leaving him chill and humbled.
It was as though a cold air had dispersed the fumes of his libations, and the
situation loomed before him black and naked as the ruins of a fire.
Old habits, old restraints, the hand of inherited order, plucked back the
bewildered mind which passion had jolted from its ruts.
Trenor's eye had the haggard look of the sleep-walker waked on a deathly ledge.
Go away from here"----he stammered, and turning his back on her walked toward the
hearth. The sharp release from her fears restored
Lily to immediate lucidity.
The collapse of Trenor's will left her in control, and she heard herself, in a voice
that was her own yet outside herself, bidding him ring for the servant, bidding
him give the order for a hansom, directing him to put her in it when it came.
Whence the strength came to her she knew not; but an insistent voice warned her that
she must leave the house openly, and nerved her, in the hall before the hovering care
taker, to exchange light words with Trenor,
and charge him with the usual messages for Judy, while all the while she shook with
inward loathing.
On the doorstep, with the street before her, she felt a mad throb of liberation,
intoxicating as the prisoner's first draught of free air; but the clearness of
brain continued, and she noted the mute
aspect of Fifth Avenue, guessed at the lateness of the hour, and even observed a
man's figure--was there something half- familiar in its outline?--which, as she
entered the hansom, turned from the
opposite corner and vanished in the obscurity of the side street.
But with the turn of the wheels reaction came, and shuddering darkness closed on
her.
"I can't think--I can't think," she moaned, and leaned her head against the rattling
side of the cab.
She seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves in her, the one she
had always known, and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained.
She had once picked up, in a house where she was staying, a translation of the
EUMENIDES, and her imagination had been seized by the high terror of the scene
where Orestes, in the cave of the oracle,
finds his implacable huntresses asleep, and snatches an hour's repose.
Yes, the Furies might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the dark
corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their wings was in her
brain...She opened her eyes and saw the
streets passing--the familiar alien streets.
All she looked on was the same and yet changed.
There was a great gulf fixed between today and yesterday.
Everything in the past seemed simple, natural, full of daylight--and she was
alone in a place of darkness and pollution.--Alone!
It was the loneliness that frightened her.
Her eyes fell on an illuminated clock at a street corner, and she saw that the hands
marked the half hour after eleven. Only half-past eleven--there were hours and
hours left of the night!
And she must spend them alone, shuddering sleepless on her bed.
Her soft nature recoiled from this ordeal, which had none of the stimulus of conflict
to goad her through it.
Oh, the slow cold drip of the minutes on her head!
She had a vision of herself lying on the black walnut bed--and the darkness would
frighten her, and if she left the light burning the dreary details of the room
would brand themselves forever on her brain.
She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston's--its ugliness, its
impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers.
To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms,
and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours,
expatriate everywhere.
Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as
superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs.
But even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think of Mrs.
Peniston's mind as offering shelter or comprehension to such misery as Lily's.
As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little
healing in its touch.
What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not
solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
She started up and looked forth on the passing streets.
Gerty!--they were nearing Gerty's corner.
If only she could reach there before this labouring anguish burst from her breast to
her lips--if only she could feel the hold of Gerty's arms while she shook in the
ague-fit of fear that was coming upon her!
She pushed up the door in the roof and called the address to the driver.
It was not so late--Gerty might still be waking.
And even if she were not, the sound of the bell would penetrate every recess of her
tiny apartment, and rouse her to answer her friend's call.