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Title: New Year's Day (The 'Seventies)
Author: Wharton, Edith
Language: English
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OLD NEW YORK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(_The ’Seventies_)
By EDITH WHARTON
OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN
THE OLD MAID
THE SPARK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
SUMMER
THE REEF
THE MARNE
FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING
OLD NEW YORK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(_The ’Seventies_)
BY
EDITH WHARTON
AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC.
DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL
[Illustration: colophon]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Copyright, 1923, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporation_
(_The Red Book Magazine_)
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(_The ’Seventies_)
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(_The ’Seventies_)
I
“She was _bad_ ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,”
said my mother, as if the scene of the offence added to the guilt of the
couple whose past she was revealing. Her spectacles slanted on her
knitting, she dropped the words in a hiss that might have singed the
snowy baby-blanket which engaged her indefatigable fingers. (It was
typical of my mother to be always employed in benevolent actions while
she uttered uncharitable words.)
“_They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel_”; how the precision of
the phrase characterized my old New York! A generation later, people
would have said, in reporting an affair such as Lizzie Hazeldean’s with
Henry Prest: “They met in hotels”--and today who but a few superannuated
spinsters, still feeding on the venom secreted in their youth, would
take any interest in the tracing of such topographies?
Life has become too telegraphic for curiosity to linger on any given
point in a sentimental relation; as old Sillerton Jackson, in response
to my mother, grumbled through his perfect “china set”: “Fifth Avenue
Hotel? They might meet in the middle of Fifth Avenue nowadays, for all
that anybody cares.”
But what a flood of light my mother’s tart phrase had suddenly focussed
on an unremarked incident of my boyhood!
The Fifth Avenue Hotel ... Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest ... the
conjunction of these names had arrested her darting talk on a single
point of my memory, as a search-light, suddenly checked in its
gyrations, is held motionless while one notes each of the unnaturally
sharp and lustrous images it picks out.
At the time I was a boy of twelve, at home from school for the holidays.
My mother’s mother, Grandmamma Parrett, still lived in the house in West
Twenty-third Street which Grandpapa had built in his pioneering youth,
in days when people shuddered at the perils of living north of Union
Square--days that Grandmamma and my parents looked back to with a joking
incredulity as the years passed and the new houses advanced steadily
Park-ward, outstripping the Thirtieth Streets, taking the Reservoir at a
bound, and leaving us in what, in my school-days, was already a dullish
back-water between Aristocracy to the south and Money to the north.
Even then fashion moved quickly in New York, and my infantile memory
barely reached back to the time when Grandmamma, in lace lappets and
creaking “_moiré_” used to receive on New Year’s day, supported by her
handsome married daughters. As for old Sillerton Jackson, who, once a
social custom had dropped into disuse, always affected never to have
observed it, he stoutly maintained that the New Year’s day ceremonial
had never been taken seriously except among families of Dutch descent,
and that that was why Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had clung to it, in a
reluctant half-apologetic way, long after her friends had closed their
doors on the first of January, and the date had been chosen for those
out-of-town parties which are so often used as a pretext for absence
when the unfashionable are celebrating their rites.
Grandmamma, of course, no longer received. But it would have seemed to
her an exceedingly odd thing to go out of town in winter, especially now
that the New York houses were luxuriously warmed by the new hot-air
furnaces, and searchingly illuminated by gas chandeliers. No, thank
you--no country winters for the chilblained generation of prunella
sandals and low-necked sarcenet, the generation brought up in unwarmed
and unlit houses, and shipped off to die in Italy when they proved
unequal to the struggle of living in New York! Therefore Grandmamma,
like most of her contemporaries, remained in town on the first of
January, and marked the day by a family reunion, a kind of supplementary
Christmas--though to us juniors the absence of presents and plum-pudding
made it but a pale and moonlike reflection of the Feast.
Still, the day was welcome as a lawful pretext for over-eating,
dawdling, and looking out of the window: a Dutch habit still extensively
practised in the best New York circles. On the day in question, however,
we had not yet placed ourselves behind the plate-glass whence it would
presently be so amusing to observe the funny gentlemen who trotted
about, their evening ties hardly concealed behind their overcoat
collars, darting in and out of chocolate-coloured house-fronts on their
sacramental round of calls. We were still engaged in placidly digesting
around the ravaged luncheon table when a servant dashed in to say that
the Fifth Avenue Hotel was on fire.
Oh, then the fun began--and what fun it was! For Grandmamma’s house was
just opposite the noble edifice of white marble which I associated with
such deep-piled carpets, and such a rich sultry smell of anthracite and
coffee, whenever I was bidden to “step across” for a messenger-boy, or
to buy the evening paper for my elders.
The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable. No one,
in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented
by “politicians” and “Westerners,” two classes of citizens whom my
mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking
them with illiterates and criminals.
But for that very reason there was all the more fun to be expected from
the calamity in question; for had we not, with infinite amusement,
watched the arrival, that morning, of monumental “floral pieces” and
towering frosted cakes for the New Year’s day reception across the way?
The event was a communal one. All the ladies who were the hotel’s
“guests” were to receive together in the densely lace-curtained and
heavily chandeliered public parlours, and gentlemen with long hair,
imperials and white gloves had been hastening since two o’clock to the
scene of revelry. And now, thanks to the opportune conflagration, we
were going to have the excitement not only of seeing the Fire Brigade in
action (supreme joy of the New York youngster), but of witnessing the
flight of the ladies and their visitors, staggering out through the
smoke in gala array. The idea that the fire might be dangerous did not
mar these pleasing expectations. The house was solidly built; New York’s
invincible Brigade was already at the door, in a glare of polished
brass, coruscating helmets and horses shining like table-silver; and my
tall cousin Hubert Wesson, dashing across at the first alarm, had
promptly returned to say that all risk was over, though the two lower
floors were so full of smoke and water that the lodgers, in some
confusion, were being transported to other hotels. How then could a
small boy see in the event anything but an unlimited lark?
Our elders, once reassured, were of the same mind. As they stood behind
us in the windows, looking over our heads, we heard chuckles of
amusement mingled with ironic comment.
“Oh, my dear, look--here they all come! The New Year ladies! Low neck
and short sleeves in broad daylight, every one of them! Oh, and the fat
one with the paper roses in her hair ... they _are_ paper, my dear ...
off the frosted cake, probably! Oh! Oh! Oh! _Oh!_”
Aunt Sabina Wesson was obliged to stuff her lace handkerchief between
her lips, while her firm poplin-cased figure rocked with delight.
“Well, my dear,” Grandmamma gently reminded her, “in my youth we wore
low-necked dresses all day long and all the year round.”
No one listened. My cousin Kate, who always imitated Aunt Sabina, was
pinching my arm in an agony of mirth. “Look at them scuttling! The
parlours must be full of smoke. Oh, but this one is still funnier; the
one with the tall feather in her hair! Granny, did you wear feathers in
your hair in the daytime? Oh, don’t ask me to believe it! And the one
with the diamond necklace! And all the gentlemen in white ties! Did
Grandpapa wear a white tie at two o’clock in the afternoon?” Nothing was
sacred to Kate, and she feigned not to notice Grandmamma’s mild frown of
reproval.
“Well, they do in Paris, to this day, at weddings--wear evening clothes
and white ties,” said Sillerton Jackson with authority. “When Minnie
Transome of Charleston was married at the Madeleine to the Duc de....”
But no one listened even to Sillerton Jackson. One of the party had
abruptly exclaimed: “Oh, there’s a lady running out of the hotel who’s
not in evening dress!”
The exclamation caused all our eyes to turn toward the person indicated,
who had just reached the threshold; and someone added, in an odd voice:
“Why, her figure looks like Lizzie Hazeldean’s--”
A dead silence followed. The lady who was not in evening dress paused.
Standing on the door-step with lifted veil, she faced our window. Her
dress was dark and plain--almost conspicuously plain--and in less time
than it takes to tell she had put her hand to her closely-patterned veil
and pulled it down over her face. But my young eyes were keen and
farsighted; and in that hardly perceptible interval I had seen a vision.
Was she beautiful--or was she only someone apart? I felt the shock of a
small pale oval, dark eyebrows curved with one sure stroke, lips made
for warmth, and now drawn up in a grimace of terror; and it seemed as if
the mysterious something, rich, secret and insistent, that broods and
murmurs behind a boy’s conscious thoughts, had suddenly peered out at
me.... As the dart reached me her veil dropped.
“But it _is_ Lizzie Hazeldean!” Aunt Sabina gasped. She had stopped
laughing, and her crumpled handkerchief fell to the carpet.
“Lizzie--_Lizzie_?” The name was echoed over my head with varying
intonations of reprobation, dismay and half-veiled malice.
Lizzie Hazeldean? Running out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel on New Year’s
day with all those dressed-up women? But what on earth could she have
been doing there? No; nonsense! It was impossible....
“There’s Henry Prest with her,” continued Aunt Sabina in a precipitate
whisper.
“With her?” someone gasped; and “_Oh_--” my mother cried with a
shudder.
The men of the family said nothing, but I saw Hubert Wesson’s face
crimson with surprise. Henry Prest! Hubert was forever boring us
youngsters with his Henry Prest! That was the kind of chap Hubert meant
to be at thirty: in his eyes Henry Prest embodied all the manly graces.
Married? No, thank you! That kind of man wasn’t made for the domestic
yoke. Too fond of ladies’ society, Hubert hinted with his undergraduate
smirk; and handsome, rich, independent--an all-round sportsman, good
horseman, good shot, crack yachtsman (had his pilot’s certificate, and
always sailed his own sloop, whose cabin was full of racing trophies);
gave the most delightful little dinners, never more than six, with
cigars that beat old Beaufort’s; was awfully decent to the younger men,
chaps of Hubert’s age included--and combined, in short, all the
qualities, mental and physical, which make up, in such eyes as Hubert’s,
that oracular and irresistible figure, the man of the world. “Just the
fellow,” Hubert always solemnly concluded, “that I should go straight to
if ever I got into any kind of row that I didn’t want the family to know
about”; and our blood ran pleasantly cold at the idea of our old
Hubert’s ever being in such an unthinkable predicament.
I felt sorry to have missed a glimpse of this legendary figure; but my
gaze had been enthralled by the lady, and now the couple had vanished in
the crowd.
The group in our window continued to keep an embarrassed silence. They
looked almost frightened; but what struck me even more deeply was that
not one of them looked surprised. Even to my boyish sense it was clear
that what they had just seen was only the confirmation of something they
had long been prepared for. At length one of my uncles emitted a
whistle, was checked by a severe glance from his wife, and muttered:
“I’ll be damned”; another uncle began an unheeded narrative of a fire at
which he had been present in his youth, and my mother said to me
severely: “You ought to be at home preparing your lessons--a big boy
like you!”--a remark so obviously unfair that it served only to give the
measure of her agitation.
“I don’t believe it,” said Grandmamma, in a low voice of warning,
protest and appeal. I saw Hubert steal a grateful look at her.
But nobody else listened: every eye still strained through the window.
Livery-stable “hacks,” of the old blue-curtained variety, were driving
up to carry off the fair fugitives; for the day was bitterly cold, and
lit by one of those harsh New York suns of which every ray seems an
icicle. Into these ancient vehicles the ladies, now regaining their
composure, were being piled with their removable possessions, while
their kid-gloved callers (“So like the White Rabbit!” Kate exulted)
appeared and reappeared in the doorway, gallantly staggering after them
under bags, reticules, bird-cages, pet dogs and heaped-up finery. But to
all this--as even I, a little boy, was aware--nobody in Grandmamma’s
window paid the slightest attention. The thoughts of one and all, with a
mute and guarded eagerness, were still following the movements of those
two who were so obviously unrelated to the rest. The whole
business--discovery, comment, silent visual pursuit--could hardly, all
told, have filled a minute, perhaps not as much; before the sixty
seconds were over, Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest had been lost in the
crowd, and, while the hotel continued to empty itself into the street,
had gone their joint or separate ways. But in my grandmother’s window
the silence continued unbroken.
“Well, it’s over: here are the firemen coming out again,” someone said
at length.
We youngsters were all alert at that; yet I felt that the grown-ups lent
but a half-hearted attention to the splendid sight which was New York’s
only pageant: the piling of scarlet ladders on scarlet carts, the
leaping up on the engine of the helmeted flame-fighters, and the
disciplined plunge forward of each pair of broadchested black steeds,
as one after another the chariots of fire rattled off.
Silently, almost morosely, we withdrew to the drawing-room hearth;
where, after an interval of languid monosyllables, my mother, rising
first, slipped her knitting into its bag, and turning on me with renewed
severity, said: “This racing after fire-engines is what makes you too
sleepy to prepare your lessons”--a comment so wide of the mark that once
again I perceived, without understanding, the extent of the havoc
wrought in her mind by the sight of Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest
coming out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel together.
It was not until many years later that chance enabled me to relate this
fugitive impression to what had preceded and what came after it.
II
Mrs. Hazeldean paused at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square.
The crowd attracted by the fire still enveloped her; it was safe to halt
and take breath.
Her companion, she knew, had gone in the opposite direction. Their
movements, on such occasions, were as well-ordered and as promptly
executed as those of the New York Fire Brigade; and after their
precipitate descent to the hall, the discovery that the police had
barred their usual exit, and the quick: “You’re all right?” to which her
imperceptible nod had responded, she was sure he had turned down
Twenty-third Street toward Sixth Avenue.
“The Parretts’ windows were full of people,” was her first thought.
She dwelt on it a moment, and then reflected: “Yes, but in all that
crowd and excitement nobody would have been thinking of _me_!”
Instinctively she put her hand to her veil, as though recalling that her
features had been exposed when she ran out, and unable to remember
whether she had covered them in time or not.
“What a fool I am! It can’t have been off my face for more than a
second--” but immediately afterward another disquieting possibility
assailed her. “I’m almost sure I saw Sillerton Jackson’s head in one of
the windows, just behind Sabina Wesson’s. No one else has that
particularly silvery gray hair.” She shivered, for everyone in New York
knew that Sillerton Jackson saw everything, and could piece together
seemingly unrelated fragments of fact with the art of a skilled
china-mender.
Meanwhile, after sending through her veil the circular glance which she
always shot about her at that particular corner, she had begun to walk
up Broadway. She walked well--fast, but not too fast; easily, assuredly,
with the air of a woman who knows that she has a good figure, and
expects rather than fears to be identified by it. But under this
external appearance of ease she was covered with cold beads of sweat.
Broadway, as usual at that hour, and on a holiday, was nearly deserted;
the promenading public still slowly poured up and down Fifth Avenue.
“Luckily there was such a crowd when we came out of the hotel that no
one could possibly have noticed me,” she murmured over again, reassured
by the sense of having the long thoroughfare to herself. Composure and
presence of mind were so necessary to a woman in her situation that they
had become almost a second nature to her, and in a few minutes her thick
uneven heart-beats began to subside and to grow steadier. As if to test
their regularity, she paused before a florist’s window, and looked
appreciatively at the jars of roses and forced lilac, the compact
bunches of lilies-of-the-valley and violets, the first pots of
close-budded azaleas. Finally she opened the shop-door, and after
examining the Jacqueminots and Marshal Niels, selected with care two
perfect specimens of a new silvery-pink rose, waited for the florist to
wrap them in cotton-wool, and slipped their long stems into her muff
for more complete protection.
“It’s so simple, after all,” she said to herself as she walked on. “I’ll
tell him that as I was coming up Fifth Avenue from Cousin Cecilia’s I
heard the fire-engines turning into Twenty-third Street, and ran after
them. Just what _he_ would have done ... once ...” she ended on a sigh.
At Thirty-first Street she turned the corner with a quicker step. The
house she was approaching was low and narrow; but the Christmas holly
glistening between frilled curtains, the well-scrubbed steps, the
shining bell and door-knob, gave it a welcoming look. From garret to
basement it beamed like the abode of a happy couple.
As Lizzie Hazeldean reached the door a curious change came over her. She
was conscious of it at once--she had so often said to herself, when her
little house rose before her: “It makes me feel younger as soon as I
turn the corner.” And it was true even today. In spite of her agitation
she was aware that the lines between her eyebrows were smoothing
themselves out, and that a kind of inner lightness was replacing the
heavy tumult of her breast. The lightness revealed itself in her
movements, which grew as quick as a girl’s as she ran up the steps. She
rang twice--it was her signal--and turned an unclouded smile on her
elderly parlourmaid.
“Is Mr. Hazeldean in the library, Susan? I hope you’ve kept up the fire
for him.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. But Mr. Hazeldean’s not in,” said Susan, returning the
smile respectfully.
“Not _in_? With his cold--and in this weather?”
“That’s what I told him, ma’am. But he just laughed--”
“Just laughed? What do you mean, Susan?” Lizzie Hazeldean felt herself
turning pale. She rested her hand quickly on the hall table.
“Well, ma’am, the minute he heard the fire-engine, off he rushed like a
boy. It seems the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s on fire: there’s where he’s
gone.”
The blood left Mrs. Hazeldean’s lips; she felt it shuddering back to her
heart. But a second later she spoke in a tone of natural and
good-humoured impatience.
“What madness! How long ago--can you remember?” Instantly, she felt the
possible imprudence of the question, and added: “The doctor said he
ought not to be out more than a quarter of an hour, and only at the
sunniest time of the day.”
“I know that, ma’am, and so I reminded him. But he’s been gone nearly an
hour, I should say.”
A sense of deep fatigue overwhelmed Mrs. Hazeldean. She felt as if she
had walked for miles against an icy gale: her breath came laboriously.
“How could you let him go?” she wailed; then, as the parlourmaid again
smiled respectfully, she added: “Oh, I know--sometimes one can’t stop
him. He gets so restless, being shut up with these long colds.”
“That’s what I _do_ feel, ma’am.”
Mistress and maid exchanged a glance of sympathy, and Susan felt herself
emboldened to suggest: “Perhaps the outing will do him good,” with the
tendency of her class to encourage favoured invalids in disobedience.
Mrs. Hazeldean’s look grew severe. “Susan! I’ve often warned you against
talking to him in that way--”
Susan reddened, and assumed a pained expression. “How can you think it,
ma’am?--me that never say anything to anybody, as all in the house will
bear witness.”
Her mistress made an impatient movement. “Oh, well, I daresay he won’t
be long. The fire’s over.”
“Ah--you knew of it too, then, ma’am?”
“Of the fire? Why, of course. I _saw_ it, even--” Mrs. Hazeldean smiled.
“I was walking home from Washington Square--from Miss Cecilia
Winter’s--and at the corner of Twenty-third Street there was a huge
crowd, and clouds of smoke.... It’s very odd that I shouldn’t have run
across Mr. Hazeldean.” She looked limpidly at the parlourmaid. “But,
then, of course, in all that crowd and confusion....”
Half-way up the stairs she turned to call back: “Make up a good fire in
the library, please, and bring the tea up. It’s too cold in the
drawing-room.”
The library was on the upper landing. She went in, drew the two roses
from her muff, tenderly unswathed them, and put them in a slim glass on
her husband’s writing-table. In the doorway she paused to smile at this
touch of summer in the firelit wintry room; but a moment later her frown
of anxiety reappeared. She stood listening intently for the sound of a
latch-key; then, hearing nothing, passed on to her bedroom.
It was a rosy room, hung with one of the new English chintzes, which
also covered the deep sofa, and the bed with its rose-lined
pillow-covers. The carpet was cherry red, the toilet-table ruffled and
looped like a ball-dress. Ah, how she and Susan had ripped and sewn and
hammered, and pieced together old scraps of lace and ribbon and muslin,
in the making of that airy monument! For weeks after she had done over
the room her husband never came into it without saying: “I can’t think
how you managed to squeeze all this loveliness out of that last cheque
of your stepmother’s.”
On the dressing-table Lizzie Hazeldean noticed a long florist’s box, one
end of which had been cut open to give space to the still longer stems
of a bunch of roses. She snipped the string, and extracted from the box
an envelope which she flung into the fire without so much as a glance at
its contents. Then she pushed the flowers aside, and after rearranging
her dark hair before the mirror, carefully dressed herself in a loose
garment of velvet and lace which lay awaiting her on the sofa, beside
her high-heeled slippers and stockings of open-work silk.
She had been one of the first women in New York to have tea every
afternoon at five, and to put off her walking-dress for a tea-gown.
III
She returned to the library, where the fire was beginning to send a
bright blaze through the twilight. It flashed on the bindings of
Hazeldean’s many books, and she smiled absently at the welcome it held
out. A latch-key rattled, and she heard her husband’s step, and the
sound of his cough below in the hall.
“What madness--what madness!” she murmured.
Slowly--how slowly for a young man!--he mounted the stairs, and still
coughing came into the library. She ran to him and took him in her
arms.
“Charlie! How could you? In this weather? It’s nearly dark!”
His long thin face lit up with a deprecating smile. “I suppose Susan’s
betrayed me, eh? Don’t be cross. You’ve missed such a show! The Fifth
Avenue Hotel’s been on fire.”
“Yes; I know.” She paused, just perceptibly. “I _didn’t_ miss it,
though--I rushed across Madison Square for a look at it myself.”
“You did? You were there too? What fun!” The idea appeared to fill him
with boyish amusement.
“Naturally I was! On my way home from Cousin Cecilia’s....”
“Ah, of course. I’d forgotten you were going there. But how odd, then,
that we didn’t meet!”
“If we _had_ I should have dragged you home long ago. I’ve been in at
least half an hour, and the fire was already over when I got there.
What a baby you are to have stayed out so long, staring at smoke and a
fire-engine!”
He smiled, still holding her, and passing his gaunt hand softly and
wistfully over her head. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ve been indoors, safely
sheltered, and drinking old Mrs. Parrett’s punch. The old lady saw me
from her window, and sent one of the Wesson boys across the street to
fetch me in. They had just finished a family luncheon. And Sillerton
Jackson, who was there, drove me home. So you see,--”
He released her, and moved toward the fire, and she stood motionless,
staring blindly ahead, while the thoughts spun through her mind like a
mill-race.
“Sillerton Jackson--” she echoed, without in the least knowing what she
said.
“Yes; he has the gout again--luckily for me!--and his sister’s brougham
came to the Parretts’ to fetch him.”
She collected herself. “You’re coughing more than you did yesterday,”
she accused him.
“Oh, well--the air’s sharpish. But I shall be all right presently....
Oh, those roses!” He paused in admiration before his writing-table.
Her face glowed with a reflected pleasure, though all the while the
names he had pronounced--“The Parretts, the Wessons, Sillerton
Jackson”--were clanging through her brain like a death-knell.
“They _are_ lovely, aren’t they?” she beamed.
“Much too lovely for me. You must take them down to the drawing-room.”
“No; we’re going to have tea up here.”
“That’s jolly--it means there’ll be no visitors, I hope?”
She nodded, smiling.
“Good! But the roses--no, they mustn’t be wasted on this desert air.
You’ll wear them in your dress this evening?”
She started perceptibly, and moved slowly back toward the hearth.
“This evening?... Oh, I’m not going to Mrs. Struthers’s,” she said,
remembering.
“Yes, you are. Dearest--I want you to!”
“But what shall you do alone all the evening? With that cough, you won’t
go to sleep till late.”
“Well, if I don’t, I’ve a lot of new books to keep me busy.”
“Oh, your books--!” She made a little gesture, half teasing, half
impatient, in the direction of the freshly cut volumes stacked up
beside his student lamp. It was an old joke between them that she had
never been able to believe anyone could really “care for reading.” Long
as she and her husband had lived together, this passion of his remained
for her as much of a mystery as on the day when she had first surprised
him, mute and absorbed, over what the people she had always lived with
would have called “a deep book.” It was her first encounter with a born
reader; or at least, the few she had known had been, like her
stepmother, the retired opera-singer, feverish devourers of circulating
library fiction: she had never before lived in a house with books in it.
Gradually she had learned to take a pride in Hazeldean’s reading, as if
it had been some rare accomplishment; she had perceived that it
reflected credit on him, and was even conscious of its adding to the
charm of his talk, a charm she had always felt without being able to
define it. But still, in her heart of hearts she regarded books as a
mere expedient, and felt sure that they were only an aid to patience,
like jackstraws or a game of patience, with the disadvantage of
requiring a greater mental effort.
“Shan’t you be too tired to read tonight?” she questioned wistfully.
“Too tired? Why, you goose, reading is the greatest rest in the
world!--I want you to go to Mrs. Struthers’s, dear; I want to see you
again in that black velvet dress,” he added with his coaxing smile.
The parlourmaid brought in the tray, and Mrs. Hazeldean busied herself
with the tea-caddy. Her husband had stretched himself out in the deep
armchair which was his habitual seat. He crossed his arms behind his
neck, leaning his head back wearily against them, so that, as she
glanced at him across the hearth, she saw the salient muscles in his
long neck, and the premature wrinkles about his ears and chin. The lower
part of his face was singularly ravaged; only the eyes, those quiet
ironic grey eyes, and the white forehead above them, reminded her of
what he had been seven years before. Only seven years!
She felt a rush of tears: no, there were times when fate was too cruel,
the future too horrible to contemplate, and the past--the past, oh, how
much worse! And there he sat, coughing, coughing--and thinking God knows
what, behind those quiet half-closed lids. At such times he grew so
mysteriously remote that she felt lonelier than when he was not in the
room.
“Charlie!”
He roused himself. “Yes?”
“Here’s your tea.”
He took it from her in silence, and she began, nervously, to wonder why
he was not talking. Was it because he was afraid it might make him cough
again, afraid she would be worried, and scold him? Or was it because he
was thinking--thinking of things he had heard at old Mrs. Parrett’s, or
on the drive home with Sillerton Jackson ... hints they might have
dropped ... insinuations ... she didn’t know what ... or of something he
had _seen_, perhaps, from old Mrs. Parrett’s window? She looked across
at his white forehead, so smooth and impenetrable in the lamplight, and
thought: “Oh, God, it’s like a locked door. I shall dash my brains out
against it some day!”
For, after all, it was not impossible that he had actually seen her,
seen her from Mrs. Parrett’s window, or even from the crowd around the
door of the hotel. For all she knew, he might have been near enough, in
that crowd, to put out his hand and touch her. And he might have held
back, benumbed, aghast, not believing his own eyes.... She couldn’t
tell. She had never yet made up her mind how he would look, how he would
behave, what he would say, if ever he _did_ see or hear anything....
No! That was the worst of it. They had lived together for nearly nine
years--and how closely!--and nothing that she knew of him, or had
observed in him, enabled her to forecast exactly what, in that
particular case, his state of mind and his attitude would be. In his
profession, she knew, he was celebrated for his shrewdness and insight;
in personal matters he often seemed, to her alert mind, oddly
absent-minded and indifferent. Yet that might be merely his instinctive
way of saving his strength for things he considered more important.
There were times when she was sure he was quite deliberate and
self-controlled enough to feel in one way and behave in another: perhaps
even to have thought out a course in advance--just as, at the first bad
symptoms of illness, he had calmly made his will, and planned everything
about her future, the house and the servants.... No, she couldn’t tell;
there always hung over her the thin glittering menace of a danger she
could neither define nor localize--like that avenging lightning which
groped for the lovers in the horrible poem he had once read aloud to her
(what a choice!) on a lazy afternoon of their wedding journey, as they
lay stretched under Italian stone-pines.
The maid came in to draw the curtains and light the lamps. The fire
glowed, the scent of the roses drifted on the warm air, and the clock
ticked out the minutes, and softly struck a half hour, while Mrs.
Hazeldean continued to ask herself, as she so often had before: “Now,
what would be the _natural_ thing for me to say?”
And suddenly the words escaped from her, she didn’t know how: “I wonder
you didn’t see me coming out of the hotel--for I actually squeezed my
way in.”
Her husband made no answer. Her heart jumped convulsively; then she
lifted her eyes and saw that he was asleep. How placid his face
looked--years younger than when he was awake! The immensity of her
relief rushed over her in a warm glow, the counterpart of the icy sweat
which had sent her chattering homeward from the fire. After all, if he
could fall asleep, fall into such a peaceful sleep as that--tired, no
doubt, by his imprudent walk, and the exposure to the cold--it meant,
beyond all doubt, beyond all conceivable dread, that he knew nothing,
had seen nothing, suspected nothing: that she was safe, safe, safe!
The violence of the reaction made her long to spring to her feet and
move about the room. She saw a crooked picture that she wanted to
straighten, she would have liked to give the roses another tilt in their
glass. But there he sat, quietly sleeping, and the long habit of
vigilance made her respect his rest, watching over it as patiently as if
it had been a sick child’s.
She drew a contented breath. Now she could afford to think of his outing
only as it might affect his health; and she knew that this sudden
drowsiness, even if it were a sign of extreme fatigue, was also the
natural restorative for that fatigue. She continued to sit behind the
tea-tray, her hands folded, her eyes on his face, while the peace of the
scene entered into her, and held her under brooding wings.
IV
At Mrs. Struthers’s, at eleven o’clock that evening, the long over-lit
drawing-rooms were already thronged with people.
Lizzie Hazeldean paused on the threshold and looked about her. The habit
of pausing to get her bearings, of sending a circular glance around any
assemblage of people, any drawing-room, concert-hall or theatre that she
entered, had become so instinctive that she would have been surprised
had anyone pointed out to her the unobservant expression and careless
movements of the young women of her acquaintance, who also looked about
them, it is true, but with the vague unseeing stare of youth, and of
beauty conscious only of itself.
Lizzie Hazeldean had long since come to regard most women of her age as
children in the art of life. Some savage instinct of self-defence,
fostered by experience, had always made her more alert and perceiving
than the charming creatures who passed from the nursery to marriage as
if lifted from one rose-lined cradle into another. “Rocked to
sleep--that’s what they’ve always been,” she used to think sometimes,
listening to their innocuous talk during the long after-dinners in hot
drawing-rooms, while their husbands, in the smoking-rooms below,
exchanged ideas which, if no more striking, were at least based on more
direct experiences.
But then, as all the old ladies said, Lizzie Hazeldean had always
preferred the society of men.
The man she now sought was not visible, and she gave a little sigh of
ease. “If only he has had the sense to stay away!” she thought.
She would have preferred to stay away herself; but it had been her
husband’s whim that she should come. “You know you always enjoy yourself
at Mrs. Struthers’s--everybody does. The old girl somehow manages to
have the most amusing house in New York. Who is it who’s going to sing
tonight?... If you don’t go, I shall know it’s because I’ve coughed two
or three times oftener than usual, and you’re worrying about me. My dear
girl, it will take more than the Fifth Avenue Hotel fire to kill
_me_.... My heart’s feeling unusually steady.... Put on your black
velvet, will you?--with these two roses....”
So she had gone. And here she was, in her black velvet, under the
glitter of Mrs. Struthers’s chandeliers, amid all the youth and good
looks and gaiety of New York; for, as Hazeldean said, Mrs. Struthers’s
house was more amusing than anybody else’s, and whenever she opened her
doors the world flocked through them.
As Mrs. Hazeldean reached the inner drawing-room the last notes of a
rich tenor were falling on the attentive silence. She saw Campanini’s
low-necked throat subside into silence above the piano, and the clapping
of many tightly-fitting gloves was succeeded by a general movement, and
the usual irrepressible outburst of talk.
In the breaking-up of groups she caught a glimpse of Sillerton Jackson’s
silvery crown. Their eyes met across bare shoulders, he bowed
profoundly, and she fancied that a dry smile lifted his moustache. “He
doesn’t usually bow to me as low as that,” she thought apprehensively.
But as she advanced into the room her self-possession returned. Among
all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing
almost everything better than they did, from the way of doing her hair
to the art of keeping a secret! She felt a thrill of pride in the slope
of her white shoulders above the black velvet, in the one curl escaping
from her thick chignon, and the slant of the gold arrow tipped with
diamonds which she had thrust in to retain it. And she had done it all
without a maid, with no one cleverer than Susan to help her! Ah, as a
woman she knew her business....
* * * * *
Mrs. Struthers, plumed and ponderous, with diamond stars studding her
black wig like a pin-cushion, had worked her resolute way back to the
outer room. More people were coming in; and with her customary rough
skill she was receiving, distributing, introducing them. Suddenly her
smile deepened; she was evidently greeting an old friend. The group
about her scattered, and Mrs. Hazeldean saw that, in her cordial
absent-minded way, and while her wandering hostess-eye swept the rooms,
she was saying a confidential word to a tall man whose hand she
detained. They smiled at each other; then Mrs. Struthers’s glance turned
toward the inner room, and her smile seemed to say: “You’ll find her
there.”
The tall man nodded. He looked about him composedly, and began to move
toward the centre of the throng, speaking to everyone, appearing to have
no object beyond that of greeting the next person in his path, yet
quietly, steadily pursuing that path, which led straight to the inner
room.
Mrs. Hazeldean had found a seat near the piano. A good-looking youth,
seated beside her, was telling her at considerable length what he was
going to wear at the Beauforts’ fancy-ball. She listened, approved,
suggested; but her glance never left the advancing figure of the tall
man.
Handsome? Yes, she said to herself; she had to admit that he was
handsome. A trifle too broad and florid, perhaps; though his air and his
attitude so plainly denied it that, on second thoughts, one agreed that
a man of his height had, after all, to carry some ballast. Yes; his
assurance made him, as a rule, appear to people exactly as he chose to
appear; that is, as a man over forty, but carrying his years carelessly,
an active muscular man, whose blue eyes were still clear, whose fair
hair waved ever so little less thickly than it used to on a low sunburnt
forehead, over eyebrows almost silvery in their blondness, and blue eyes
the bluer for their thatch. Stupid-looking? By no means. His smile
denied that. Just self-sufficient enough to escape fatuity, yet so cool
that one felt the fundamental coldness, he steered his way through life
as easily and resolutely as he was now working his way through Mrs.
Struthers’s drawing-rooms.
Half-way, he was detained by a tap of Mrs. Wesson’s red fan. Mrs.
Wesson--surely, Mrs. Hazeldean reflected, Charles had spoken of Mrs.
Sabina Wesson’s being with her mother, old Mrs. Parrett, while they
watched the fire? Sabina Wesson was a redoubtable woman, one of the few
of her generation and her clan who had broken with tradition, and gone
to Mrs. Struthers’s almost as soon as the Shoe-Polish Queen had bought
her house in Fifth Avenue, and issued her first challenge to society.
Lizzie Hazeldean shut her eyes for an instant; then, rising from her
seat, she joined the group about the singer. From there she wandered on
to another knot of acquaintances.
“Look here: the fellow’s going to sing again. Let’s get into that corner
over there.”
She felt ever so slight a touch on her arm, and met Henry Prest’s
composed glance.
A red-lit and palm-shaded recess divided the drawing-rooms from the
dining-room, which ran across the width of the house at the back. Mrs.
Hazeldean hesitated; then she caught Mrs. Wesson’s watchful glance,
lifted her head with a smile and followed her companion.
They sat down on a small sofa under the palms, and a couple, who had
been in search of the same retreat, paused on the threshold, and with an
interchange of glances passed on. Mrs. Hazeldean smiled more vividly.
“Where are my roses? Didn’t you get them?” Prest asked. He had a way of
looking her over from beneath lowered lids, while he affected to be
examining a glove-button or contemplating the tip of his shining boot.
“Yes, I got them,” she answered.
“You’re not wearing them. I didn’t order those.”
“No.”
“Whose are they, then?”
She unfolded her mother-of-pearl fan, and bent above its complicated
traceries.
“Mine,” she pronounced.
“Yours? Well, obviously. But I suppose someone sent them to you?”
“_I_ did.” She hesitated a second. “I sent them to myself.”
He raised his eyebrows a little. “Well, they don’t suit you--that washy
pink! May I ask why you didn’t wear mine?”
“I’ve already told you.... I’ve often asked you never to send flowers
... on the day....”
“Nonsense. That’s the very day.... What’s the matter? Are you still
nervous?”
She was silent for a moment; then she lowered her voice to say: “You
ought not to have come here tonight.”
“My dear girl, how unlike you! You _are_ nervous.”
“Didn’t you see all those people in the Parretts’ window?”
“What, opposite? Lord, no; I just took to my heels! It was the deuce,
the back way being barred. But what of it? In all that crowd, do you
suppose for a moment--”
“My husband was in the window with them,” she said, still lower.
His confident face fell for a moment, and then almost at once regained
its look of easy arrogance.
“Well--?”
“Oh, nothing--as yet. Only I ask you ... to go away now.”
“Just as you asked me not to come! Yet _you_ came, because you had the
sense to see that if you didn’t ... and I came for the same reason. Look
here, my dear, for God’s sake don’t lose your head!”
The challenge seemed to rouse her. She lifted her chin, glanced about
the thronged room which they commanded from their corner, and nodded and
smiled invitingly at several acquaintances, with the hope that some one
of them might come up to her. But though they all returned her greetings
with a somewhat elaborate cordiality, not one advanced toward her
secluded seat.
She turned her head slightly toward her companion. “I ask you again to
go,” she repeated.
“Well, I will then, after the fellow’s sung. But I’m bound to say you’re
a good deal pleasanter--”
The first bars of “_Salve, Dimora_” silenced him, and they sat side by
side in the meditative rigidity of fashionable persons listening to
expensive music. She had thrown herself into a corner of the sofa, and
Henry Prest, about whom everything was discreet but his eyes, sat apart
from her, one leg crossed over the other, one hand holding his folded
opera-hat on his knee, while the other hand rested beside him on the
sofa. But an end of her tulle scarf lay in the space between them; and
without looking in his direction, without turning her glance from the
singer, she was conscious that Prest’s hand had reached and drawn the
scarf toward him. She shivered a little, made an involuntary motion as
though to gather it about her--and then desisted. As the song ended, he
bent toward her slightly, said: “Darling” so low that it seemed no more
than a breath on her cheek, and then, rising, bowed, and strolled into
the other room.
She sighed faintly, and, settling herself once more in her corner,
lifted her brilliant eyes to Sillerton Jackson, who was approaching. “It
_was_ good of you to bring Charlie home from the Parretts’ this
afternoon.” She held out her hand, making way for him at her side.
“Good of me?” he laughed. “Why, I was glad of the chance of getting him
safely home; it was rather naughty of _him_ to be where he was, I
suspect.” She fancied a slight pause, as if he waited to see the effect
of this, and her lashes beat her cheeks. But already he was going on:
“Do you encourage him, with that cough, to run about town after
fire-engines?”
She gave back the laugh.
“I don’t discourage him--ever--if I can help it. But it _was_ foolish of
him to go out today,” she agreed; and all the while she kept on asking
herself, as she had that afternoon, in her talk with her husband: “Now,
what would be the _natural_ thing for me to say?”
Should she speak of having been at the fire herself--or should she not?
The question dinned in her brain so loudly that she could hardly hear
what her companion was saying; yet she had, at the same time, a queer
feeling of his never having been so close to her, or rather so closely
intent on her, as now. In her strange state of nervous lucidity, her
eyes seemed to absorb with a new precision every facial detail of
whoever approached her; and old Sillerton Jackson’s narrow mask, his
withered pink cheeks, the veins in the hollow of his temples, under the
carefully-tended silvery hair, and the tiny blood-specks in the white of
his eyes as he turned their cautious blue gaze on her, appeared as if
presented under some powerful lens. With his eyeglasses dangling over
one white-gloved hand, the other supporting his opera-hat on his knee,
he suggested, behind that assumed carelessness of pose, the patient
fixity of a naturalist holding his breath near the crack from which some
tiny animal might suddenly issue--if one watched long enough, or gave
it, completely enough, the impression of not looking for it, or dreaming
it was anywhere near. The sense of that tireless attention made Mrs.
Hazeldean’s temples ache as if she sat under a glare of light even
brighter than that of the Struthers’ chandeliers--a glare in which each
quiver of a half-formed thought might be as visible behind her forehead
as the faint lines wrinkling its surface into an uncontrollable frown of
anxiety. Yes, Prest was right; she was losing her head--losing it for
the first time in the dangerous year during which she had had such
continual need to keep it steady.
“What is it? What has happened to me?” she wondered.
There had been alarms before--how could it be otherwise? But they had
only stimulated her, made her more alert and prompt; whereas tonight
she felt herself quivering away into she knew not what abyss of
weakness. What was different, then? Oh, she knew well enough! It was
Charles ... that haggard look in his eyes, and the lines of his throat
as he had leaned back sleeping. She had never before admitted to herself
how ill she thought him; and now, to have to admit it, and at the same
time not to have the complete certainty that the look in his eyes was
caused by illness only, made the strain unbearable.
She glanced about her with a sudden sense of despair. Of all the people
in those brilliant animated groups--of all the women who called her
Lizzie, and the men who were familiars at her house--she knew that not
one, at that moment, guessed, or could have understood, what she was
feeling.... Her eyes fell on Henry Prest, who had come to the surface a
little way off, bending over the chair of the handsome Mrs. Lyman. “And
_you_ least of all!” she thought. “Yet God knows,” she added with a
shiver, “they all have their theories about me!”
“My dear Mrs. Hazeldean, you look a little pale. Are you cold? Shall I
get you some champagne?” Sillerton Jackson was officiously suggesting.
“If you think the other women look blooming! My dear man, it’s this
hideous vulgar overhead lighting....” She rose impatiently. It had
occurred to her that the thing to do--the “natural” thing--would be to
stroll up to Jinny Lyman, over whom Prest was still attentively bending.
_Then_ people would see if she was nervous, or ill--or afraid!
But half-way she stopped and thought: “Suppose the Parretts and Wessons
_did_ see me? Then my joining Jinny while he’s talking to her will
look--how will it look?” She began to regret not having had it out on
the spot with Sillerton Jackson, who could be trusted to hold his tongue
on occasion, especially if a pretty woman threw herself on his mercy.
She glanced over her shoulder as if to call him back; but he had turned
away, been absorbed into another group, and she found herself, instead,
abruptly face to face with Sabina Wesson. Well, perhaps that was better
still. After all, it all depended on how much Mrs. Wesson had seen, and
what line she meant to take, supposing she _had_ seen anything. She was
not likely to be as inscrutable as old Sillerton. Lizzie wished now that
she had not forgotten to go to Mrs. Wesson’s last party.
“Dear Mrs. Wesson, it was so kind of you--”
But Mrs. Wesson was not there. By the exercise of that mysterious
protective power which enables a woman desirous of not being waylaid to
make herself invisible, or to transport herself, by means imperceptible,
to another part of the earth’s surface, Mrs. Wesson, who, two seconds
earlier, appeared in all her hard handsomeness to be bearing straight
down on Mrs. Hazeldean, with a scant yard of clear _parquet_ between
them--Mrs. Wesson, as her animated back and her active red fan now
called on all the company to notice, had never been there at all, had
never seen Mrs. Hazeldean (“_Was_ she at Mrs. Struthers’s last Sunday?
How odd! I must have left before she got there--“), but was busily
engaged, on the farther side of the piano, in examining a picture to
which her attention appeared to have been called by the persons nearest
her.
“Ah, how _life-like_! That’s what I always feel when I see a
Meissonier,” she was heard to exclaim, with her well-known instinct for
the fitting epithet.
Lizzie Hazeldean stood motionless. Her eyes dazzled as if she had
received a blow on the forehead. “So _that’s_ what it feels like!” she
thought. She lifted her head very high, looked about her again, tried to
signal to Henry Prest, but saw him still engaged with the lovely Mrs.
Lyman, and at the same moment caught the glance of young Hubert Wesson,
Sabina’s eldest, who was standing in disengaged expectancy near the
supper-room door.
Hubert Wesson, as his eyes met Mrs. Hazeldean’s, crimsoned to the
forehead, hung back a moment, and then came forward, bowing low--again
that too low bow! “So _he_ saw me too,” she thought. She put her hand
on his arm with a laugh. “Dear me, how ceremonious you are! Really, I’m
not as old as that bow of yours implies. My dear boy, I hope you want to
take me in to supper at once. I was out in the cold all the afternoon,
gazing at the Fifth Avenue Hotel fire, and I’m simply dying of hunger
and fatigue.”
There, the die was cast--she had said it loud enough for all the people
nearest her to hear! And she was sure now that it was the right, the
“natural” thing to do.
Her spirits rose, and she sailed into the supper-room like a goddess,
steering Hubert to an unoccupied table in a flowery corner.
“No--I think we’re very well by ourselves, don’t you? Do you want that
fat old bore of a Lucy Vanderlow to join us? If you _do_, of course ...
I can see she’s dying to ... but then, I warn you, I shall ask a young
man! Let me see--shall I ask Henry Prest? You see he’s hovering! No, it
_is_ jollier with just you and me, isn’t it?” She leaned forward a
little, resting her chin on her clasped hands, her elbows on the table,
in an attitude which the older women thought shockingly free, but the
younger ones were beginning to imitate.
“And now, some champagne, please--and _hot_ terrapin!... But I suppose
you were at the fire yourself, weren’t you?” she leaned still a little
nearer to say.
The blush again swept over young Wesson’s face, rose to his forehead,
and turned the lobes of his large ears to balls of fire (“It looks,” she
thought, “as if he had on huge coral earrings.”). But she forced him to
look at her, laughed straight into his eyes, and went on: “Did you ever
see a funnier sight than all those dressed-up absurdities rushing out
into the cold? It looked like the end of an Inauguration Ball! I was so
fascinated that I actually pushed my way into the hall. The firemen were
furious, but they couldn’t stop me--nobody can stop me at a fire! You
should have seen the ladies scuttling downstairs--the fat ones! Oh, but
I beg your pardon; I’d forgotten that you admire ... avoirdupois. No?
But ... Mrs. Van ... so stupid of me! Why, you’re actually blushing! I
assure you, you’re as red as your mother’s fan--and visible from as
great a distance! Yes, please; a little more champagne....”
And then the inevitable began. She forgot the fire, forgot her
anxieties, forgot Mrs. Wesson’s affront, forgot everything but the
amusement, the passing childish amusement, of twirling around her little
finger this shy clumsy boy, as she had twirled so many others, old and
young, not caring afterward if she ever saw them again, but so absorbed
in the sport, and in her sense of knowing how to do it better than the
other women--more quietly, more insidiously, without ogling, bridling or
grimacing--that sometimes she used to ask herself with a shiver: “What
was the gift given to me for?” Yes; it always amused her at first: the
gradual dawn of attraction in eyes that had regarded her with
indifference, the blood rising to the face, the way she could turn and
twist the talk as though she had her victim on a leash, spinning him
after her down winding paths of sentimentality, irony, caprice ... and
leaving him, with beating heart and dazzled eyes, to visions of an
all-promising morrow.... “My only accomplishment!” she murmured to
herself as she rose from the table followed by young Wesson’s
fascinated gaze, while already, on her own lips, she felt the taste of
cinders.
“But at any rate,” she thought, “he’ll hold his tongue about having seen
me at the fire.”
V
She let herself in with her latch-key, glanced at the notes and letters
on the hall-table (the old habit of allowing nothing to escape her), and
stole up through the darkness to her room.
A fire still glowed in the chimney, and its light fell on two vases of
crimson roses. The room was full of their scent.
Mrs. Hazeldean frowned, and then shrugged her shoulders. It had been a
mistake, after all, to let it appear that she was indifferent to the
flowers; she must remember to thank Susan for rescuing them. She began
to undress, hastily yet clumsily, as if her deft fingers were all
thumbs; but first, detaching the two faded pink roses from her bosom,
she put them with a reverent touch into a glass on the toilet-table.
Then, slipping on her dressing-gown, she stole to her husband’s door. It
was shut, and she leaned her ear to the keyhole. After a moment she
caught his breathing, heavy, as it always was when he had a cold, but
regular, untroubled.... With a sigh of relief she tiptoed back. Her
uncovered bed, with its fresh pillows and satin coverlet, sent her a
rosy invitation; but she cowered down by the fire, hugging her knees and
staring into the coals.
“So _that’s_ what it feels like!” she repeated.
It was the first time in her life that she had ever been deliberately
“cut”; and the cut was a deadly injury in old New York. For Sabina
Wesson to have used it, consciously, deliberately--for there was no
doubt that she had purposely advanced toward her victim--she must have
done so with intent to kill. And to risk that, she must have been sure
of her facts, sure of corroborating witnesses, sure of being backed up
by all her clan.
Lizzie Hazeldean had her clan too--but it was a small and weak one, and
she hung on its outer fringe by a thread of little-regarded cousinship.
As for the Hazeldean tribe, which was larger and stronger (though
nothing like the great organized Wesson-Parrett _gens_, with half New
York and all Albany at its back)--well, the Hazeldeans were not much to
be counted on, and would even, perhaps, in a furtive negative way, be
not too sorry (“if it were not for poor Charlie”) that poor Charlie’s
wife should at last be made to pay for her good looks, her popularity,
above all for being, in spite of her origin, treated by poor Charlie as
if she were one of them!
Her origin was, of course, respectable enough. Everybody knew all about
the Winters--she had been Lizzie Winter. But the Winters were very small
people, and her father, the Reverend Arcadius Winter, the sentimental
over-popular Rector of a fashionable New York church, after a few
seasons of too great success as preacher and director of female
consciences, had suddenly had to resign and go to Bermuda for his
health--or was it France?--to some obscure watering-place, it was
rumoured. At any rate, Lizzie, who went with him (with a crushed
bed-ridden mother), was ultimately, after the mother’s death, fished out
of a girls’ school in Brussels--they seemed to have been in so many
countries at once!--and brought back to New York by a former
parishioner of poor Arcadius’s, who had always “believed in him,” in
spite of the Bishop, and who took pity on his lonely daughter.
The parishioner, Mrs. Mant, was “one of the Hazeldeans.” She was a rich
widow, given to generous gestures which she was often at a loss how to
complete; and when she had brought Lizzie Winter home, and sufficiently
celebrated her own courage in doing so, she did not quite know what step
to take next. She had fancied it would be pleasant to have a clever
handsome girl about the house; but her housekeeper was not of the same
mind. The spare-room sheets had not been out of lavender for twenty
years--and Miss Winter always left the blinds up in her room, and the
carpet and curtains, unused to such exposure, suffered accordingly. Then
young men began to call--they called in numbers. Mrs. Mant had not
supposed that the daughter of a clergyman--and a clergyman “under a
cloud”--would expect visitors. She had imagined herself taking Lizzie
Winter to Church Fairs, and having the stitches of her knitting picked
up by the young girl, whose “eyes were better” than her benefactress’s.
But Lizzie did not know how to knit--she possessed no useful
accomplishments--and she was visibly bored by Church Fairs, where her
presence was of little use, since she had no money to spend. Mrs. Mant
began to see her mistake; and the discovery made her dislike her
protégée, whom she secretly regarded as having intentionally misled her.
In Mrs. Mant’s life, the transition from one enthusiasm to another was
always marked by an interval of disillusionment, during which,
Providence having failed to fulfill her requirements, its existence was
openly called into question. But in this flux of moods there was one
fixed point: Mrs. Mant was a woman whose life revolved about a bunch of
keys. What treasures they gave access to, what disasters would have
ensued had they been forever lost, was not quite clear; but whenever
they were missed the household was in an uproar, and as Mrs. Mant would
trust them to no one but herself, these occasions were frequent. One of
them arose at the very moment when Mrs. Mant was recovering from her
enthusiasm for Miss Winter. A minute before, the keys had been there, in
a pocket of her work-table; she had actually touched them in hunting for
her buttonhole-scissors. She had been called away to speak to the
plumber about the bath-room leak, and when she left the room there was
no one in it but Miss Winter. When she returned, the keys were gone.
The house had been turned inside out; everyone had been, if not accused,
at least suspected; and in a rash moment Mrs. Mant had spoken of the
police. The housemaid had thereupon given warning, and her own maid
threatened to follow; when suddenly the Bishop’s hints recurred to Mrs.
Mant. The Bishop had always implied that there had been something
irregular in Dr. Winter’s accounts, besides the other unfortunate
business....
Very mildly, she had asked Miss Winter if she might not have seen the
keys, and “picked them up without thinking.” Miss Winter permitted
herself to smile in denying the suggestion; the smile irritated Mrs.
Mant; and in a moment the floodgates were opened. She saw nothing to
smile at in her question--unless it was of a kind that Miss Winter was
already used to, prepared for ... with that sort of background ... her
unfortunate father....
“Stop!” Lizzie Winter cried. She remembered now, as if it had happened
yesterday, the abyss suddenly opening at her feet. It was her first
direct contact with human cruelty. Suffering, weakness, frailties other
than Mrs. Mant’s restricted fancy could have pictured, the girl had
known, or at least suspected; but she had found as much kindness as
folly in her path, and no one had ever before attempted to visit upon
her the dimly-guessed shortcomings of her poor old father. She shook
with horror as much as with indignation, and her “Stop!” blazed out so
violently that Mrs. Mant, turning white, feebly groped for the bell.
And it was then, at that very moment, that Charles Hazeldean came
in--Charles Hazeldean, the favourite nephew, the pride of the tribe.
Lizzie had seen him only once or twice, for he had been absent since her
return to New York. She had thought him distinguished-looking, but
rather serious and sarcastic; and he had apparently taken little notice
of her--which perhaps accounted for her opinion.
“Oh, Charles, dearest Charles--that you should be here to hear such
things said to me!” his aunt gasped, her hand on her outraged heart.
“What things? Said by whom? I see no one here to say them but Miss
Winter,” Charles had laughed, taking the girl’s icy hand.
“Don’t shake hands with her! She has insulted me! She has ordered me to
keep silence--in my own house. ‘Stop!’ she said, when I was trying, in
the kindness of my heart, to get her to admit privately.... Well, if
she prefers to have the police....”
“I do! I ask you to send for them!” Lizzie cried.
How vividly she remembered all that followed: the finding of the keys,
Mrs. Mant’s reluctant apologies, her own cold acceptance of them, and
the sense on both sides of the impossibility of continuing their life
together! She had been wounded to the soul, and her own plight first
revealed to her in all its destitution. Before that, despite the ups and
downs of a wandering life, her youth, her good looks, the sense of a
certain bright power over people and events, had hurried her along on a
spring tide of confidence; she had never thought of herself as the
dependent, the beneficiary, of the persons who were kind to her. Now she
saw herself, at twenty, a penniless girl, with a feeble discredited
father carrying his snowy head, his unctuous voice, his edifying manner
from one cheap watering-place to another, through an endless succession
of sentimental and pecuniary entanglements. To him she could be of no
more help than he to her; and save for him she was alone. The Winter
cousins, as much humiliated by his disgrace as they had been puffed-up
by his triumphs, let it be understood, when the breach with Mrs. Mant
became known, that they were not in a position to interfere; and among
Dr. Winter’s former parishioners none was left to champion him. Almost
at the same time, Lizzie heard that he was about to marry a Portuguese
opera-singer and be received into the Church of Rome; and this crowning
scandal too promptly justified his family.
The situation was a grave one, and called for energetic measures.
Lizzie understood it--and a week later she was engaged to Charles
Hazeldean.
She always said afterward that but for the keys he would never have
thought of marrying her; while he laughingly affirmed that, on the
contrary, but for the keys she would never have looked at _him_.
But what did it all matter, in the complete and blessed understanding
which was to follow on their hasty union? If all the advantages on both
sides had been weighed and found equal by judicious advisers, harmony
more complete could hardly have been predicted. As a matter of fact, the
advisers, had they been judicious, would probably have found only
elements of discord in the characters concerned. Charles Hazeldean was
by nature an observer and a student, brooding and curious of mind:
Lizzie Winter (as she looked back at herself)--what was she, what would
she ever be, but a quick, ephemeral creature, in whom a perpetual and
adaptable activity simulated mind, as her grace, her swiftness, her
expressiveness simulated beauty? So others would have judged her; so,
now, she judged herself. And she knew that in fundamental things she was
still the same. And yet she had satisfied him: satisfied him, to all
appearances, as completely in the quiet later years as in the first
flushed hours. As completely, or perhaps even more so. In the early
months, dazzled gratitude made her the humbler, fonder worshipper; but
as her powers expanded in the warm air of comprehension, as she felt
herself grow handsomer, cleverer, more competent and more companionable
than he had hoped, or she had dreamed herself capable of becoming, the
balance was imperceptibly reversed, and the triumph in his eyes when
they rested on her.
The Hazeldeans were conquered; they had to admit it. Such a brilliant
recruit to the clan was not to be disowned. Mrs. Mant was left to nurse
her grievance in solitude, till she too fell into line, carelessly but
handsomely forgiven.
Ah, those first years of triumph! They frightened Lizzie now as she
looked back. One day, the friendless defenceless daughter of a
discredited man; the next, almost, the wife of Charlie Hazeldean, the
popular successful young lawyer, with a good practice already assured,
and the best of professional and private prospects. His own parents were
dead, and had died poor; but two or three childless relatives were
understood to be letting their capital accumulate for his benefit, and
meanwhile in Lizzie’s thrifty hands his earnings were largely
sufficient.
Ah, those first years! There had been barely six; but even now there
were moments when their sweetness drenched her to the soul.... Barely
six; and then the sharp re-awakening of an inherited weakness of the
heart that Hazeldean and his doctors had imagined to be completely
cured. Once before, for the same cause, he had been sent off, suddenly,
for a year of travel in mild climates and distant scenes; and his first
return had coincided with the close of Lizzie’s sojourn at Mrs. Mant’s.
The young man felt sure enough of the future to marry and take up his
professional duties again, and for the following six years he had led,
without interruption, the busy life of a successful lawyer; then had
come a second breakdown, more unexpectedly, and with more alarming
symptoms. The “Hazeldean heart” was a proverbial boast in the family;
the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the
Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had
permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old
age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean
had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.
One by one, hopes and plans faded. The Hazeldeans went south for a
winter; he lay on a deck-chair in a Florida garden, and read and
dreamed, and was happy with Lizzie beside him. So the months passed; and
by the following autumn he was better, returned to New York, and took up
his profession. Intermittently but obstinately, he had continued the
struggle for two more years; but before they were over husband and wife
understood that the good days were done.
He could be at his office only at lengthening intervals; he sank
gradually into invalidism without submitting to it. His income dwindled;
and, indifferent for himself, he fretted ceaselessly at the thought of
depriving Lizzie of the least of her luxuries.
At heart she was indifferent to them too; but she could not convince him
of it. He had been brought up in the old New York tradition, which
decreed that a man, at whatever cost, must provide his wife with what
she had always “been accustomed to”; and he had gloried too much in her
prettiness, her elegance, her easy way of wearing her expensive dresses,
and his friends’ enjoyment of the good dinners she knew how to order,
not to accustom her to everything which could enhance such graces. Mrs.
Mant’s secret satisfaction rankled in him. She sent him Baltimore
terrapin, and her famous clam broth, and a dozen of the old Hazeldean
port, and said “I told you so” to her confidants when Lizzie was
mentioned; and Charles Hazeldean knew it, and swore at it.
“I won’t be pauperized by her!” he declared; but Lizzie smiled away his
anger, and persuaded him to taste the terrapin and sip the port.
She was smiling faintly at the memory of the last passage between him
and Mrs. Mant when the turning of the bedroom door-handle startled her.
She jumped up, and he stood there. The blood rushed to her forehead; his
expression frightened her; for an instant she stared at him as if he had
been an enemy. Then she saw that the look in his face was only the
remote lost look of excessive physical pain.
She was at his side at once, supporting him, guiding him to the nearest
armchair. He sank into it, and she flung a shawl over him, and knelt at
his side while his inscrutable eyes continued to repel her.
“Charles ... Charles,” she pleaded.
For a while he could not speak; and she said to herself that she would
perhaps never know whether he had sought her because he was ill, or
whether illness had seized him as he entered her room to question,
accuse, or reveal what he had seen or heard that afternoon.
Suddenly he lifted his hand and pressed back her forehead, so that her
face lay bare under his eyes.
“Love, love--you’ve been happy?”
“_Happy?_” The word choked her. She clung to him, burying her anguish
against his knees. His hand stirred weakly in her hair, and gathering
her whole strength into the gesture, she raised her head again, looked
into his eyes, and breathed back: “And you?”
He gave her one full look; all their life together was in it, from the
first day to the last. His hand brushed her once more, like a blessing,
and then dropped. The moment of their communion was over; the next she
was preparing remedies, ringing for the servants, ordering the doctor to
be called. Her husband was once more the harmless helpless captive that
sickness makes of the most dreaded and the most loved.
VI
It was in Mrs. Mant’s drawing-room that, some half-year later, Mrs.
Charles Hazeldean, after a moment’s hesitation, said to the servant
that, yes, he might show in Mr. Prest.
Mrs. Mant was away. She had been leaving for Washington to visit a new
protégée when Mrs. Hazeldean arrived from Europe, and after a rapid
consultation with the clan had decided that it would not be “decent” to
let poor Charles’s widow go to an hotel. Lizzie had therefore the
strange sensation of returning, after nearly nine years, to the house
from which her husband had triumphantly rescued her; of returning
there, to be sure, in comparative independence, and without danger of
falling into her former bondage, yet with every nerve shrinking from all
that the scene revived.
Mrs. Mant, the next day, had left for Washington; but before starting
she had tossed a note across the breakfast-table to her visitor.
“Very proper--he was one of Charlie’s oldest friends, I believe?” she
said, with her mild frosty smile. Mrs. Hazeldean glanced at the note,
turned it over as if to examine the signature, and restored it to her
hostess.
“Yes. But I don’t think I care to see anyone just yet.”
There was a pause, during which the butler brought in fresh
griddle-cakes, replenished the hot milk, and withdrew. As the door
closed on him, Mrs. Mant said, with a dangerous cordiality: “No one
would misunderstand your receiving an old friend of your husband’s ...
like Mr. Prest.”
Lizzie Hazeldean cast a sharp glance at the large empty mysterious face
across the table. They _wanted_ her to receive Henry Prest, then? Ah,
well ... perhaps she understood....
“Shall I answer this for you, my dear? Or will you?” Mrs. Mant pursued.
“Oh, as you like. But don’t fix a day, please. Later--”
Mrs. Mant’s face again became vacuous. She murmured: “You must not shut
yourself up too much. It will not do to be morbid. I’m sorry to have to
leave you here alone--”
Lizzie’s eyes filled: Mrs. Mant’s sympathy seemed more cruel than her
cruelty. Every word that she used had a veiled taunt for its
counterpart.
“Oh, you mustn’t think of giving up your visit--”
“My dear, how can I? It’s a _duty_. I’ll send a line to Henry Prest,
then.... If you would sip a little port at luncheon and dinner we should
have you looking less like a ghost....”
* * * * *
Mrs. Mant departed; and two days later--the interval was “decent”--Mr.
Henry Prest was announced. Mrs. Hazeldean had not seen him since the
previous New Year’s day. Their last words had been exchanged in Mrs.
Struthers’s crimson boudoir, and since then half a year had elapsed.
Charles Hazeldean had lingered for a fortnight; but though there had
been ups and downs, and intervals of hope when none could have
criticised his wife for seeing her friends, her door had been barred
against everyone. She had not excluded Henry Prest more rigorously than
the others; he had simply been one of the many who received, day by day,
the same answer: “Mrs. Hazeldean sees no one but the family.”
Almost immediately after her husband’s death she had sailed for Europe
on a long-deferred visit to her father, who was now settled at Nice; but
from this expedition she had presumably brought back little comfort, for
when she arrived in New York her relations were struck by her air of
ill-health and depression. It spoke in her favour, however; they were
agreed that she was behaving with propriety.
She looked at Henry Prest as if he were a stranger: so difficult was it,
at the first moment, to fit his robust and splendid person into the
region of twilight shades which, for the last months, she had inhabited.
She was beginning to find that everyone had an air of remoteness; she
seemed to see people and life through the confusing blur of the long
crape veil in which it was a widow’s duty to shroud her affliction. But
she gave him her hand without perceptible reluctance.
He lifted it toward his lips, in an obvious attempt to combine gallantry
with condolence, and then, half-way up, seemed to feel that the occasion
required him to release it.
“Well--you’ll admit that I’ve been patient!” he exclaimed.
“Patient? Yes. What else was there to be?” she rejoined with a faint
smile, as he seated himself beside her, a little too near.
“Oh, well ... of course! I understood all that, I hope you’ll believe.
But mightn’t you at least have answered my letters--one or two of them?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t write.”
“Not to anyone? Or not to me?” he queried, with ironic emphasis.
“I wrote only the letters I had to--no others.”
“Ah, I see.” He laughed slightly. “And you didn’t consider that letters
to _me_ were among them?”
She was silent, and he stood up and took a turn across the room. His
face was redder than usual, and now and then a twitch passed over it.
She saw that he felt the barrier of her crape, and that it left him
baffled and resentful. A struggle was still perceptibly going on in him
between his traditional standard of behaviour at such a meeting, and
primitive impulses renewed by the memory of their last hours together.
When he turned back and paused before her his ruddy flush had paled, and
he stood there, frowning, uncertain, and visibly resenting the fact that
she made him so.
“You sit there like a stone!” he said.
“I feel like a stone.”
“Oh, come--!”
She knew well enough what he was thinking: that the only way to bridge
over such a bad beginning was to get the woman into your arms--and talk
afterward. It was the classic move. He had done it dozens of times, no
doubt, and was evidently asking himself why the deuce he couldn’t do it
now.... But something in her look must have benumbed him. He sat down
again beside her.
“What you must have been through, dearest!” He waited and coughed. “I
can understand your being--all broken up. But I know nothing; remember,
I know nothing as to what actually happened....”
“Nothing happened.”
“As to--what we feared? No hint--?”
She shook her head.
He cleared his throat before the next question. “And you don’t think
that in your absence he may have spoken--to anyone?”
“Never!”
“Then, my dear, we seem to have had the most unbelievable good luck; and
I can’t see--”
He had edged slowly nearer, and now laid a large ringed hand on her
sleeve. How well she knew those rings--the two dull gold snakes with
malevolent jewelled eyes! She sat as motionless as if their coils were
about her, till slowly his tentative grasp relaxed.
“Lizzie, you know”--his tone was discouraged--“this is morbid....”
“Morbid?”
“When you’re safe out of the worst scrape ... and free, my darling,
_free_! Don’t you realize it? I suppose the strain’s been too much for
you; but I want you to feel that now--”
She stood up suddenly, and put half the length of the room between them.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she almost screamed, as she had screamed long ago at
Mrs. Mant.
He stood up also, darkly red under his rich sunburn, and forced a smile.
“Really,” he protested, “all things considered--and after a separation
of six months!” She was silent. “My dear,” he continued mildly, “will
you tell me what you expect me to think?”
“Oh, don’t take that tone,” she murmured.
“What tone?”
“As if--as if--you still imagined we could go back--”
She saw his face fall. Had he ever before, she wondered, stumbled upon
an obstacle in that smooth walk of his? It flashed over her that this
was the danger besetting men who had a “way with women”--the day came
when they might follow it too blindly.
The reflection evidently occurred to him almost as soon as it did to
her. He summoned another propitiatory smile, and drawing near, took her
hand gently. “But I don’t want to go back.... I want to go forward,
dearest.... Now that at last you’re free.”
She seized on the word as if she had been waiting for her cue. “Free!
Oh, that’s it--_free_! Can’t you see, can’t you understand, that I mean
to stay free?”
Again a shadow of distrust crossed his face, and the smile he had begun
for her reassurance seemed to remain on his lips for his own.
“But of course! Can you imagine that I want to put you in chains? I want
you to be as free as you please--free to love me as much as you choose!”
He was visibly pleased with the last phrase.
She drew away her hand, but not unkindly. “I’m sorry--I _am_ sorry,
Henry. But you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“That what you ask is quite impossible--ever. I can’t go on ... in the
old way....”
She saw his face working nervously. “In the old way? You mean--?”
Before she could explain he hurried on with an increasing majesty of
manner: “Don’t answer! I see--I understand. When you spoke of freedom
just now I was misled for a moment--I frankly own I was--into thinking
that, after your wretched marriage, you might prefer discreeter ties ...
an apparent independence which would leave us both.... I say _apparent_,
for on my side there has never been the least wish to conceal.... But if
I was mistaken, if on the contrary what you wish is ... is to take
advantage of your freedom to regularize our ... our attachment....”
She said nothing, not because she had any desire to have him complete
the phrase, but because she found nothing to say. To all that concerned
their common past she was aware of offering a numbed soul. But her
silence evidently perplexed him, and in his perplexity he began to lose
his footing, and to flounder in a sea of words.
“Lizzie! Do you hear me? If I was mistaken, I say--and I hope I’m not
above owning that at times I _may_ be mistaken; if I was--why, by God,
my dear, no woman ever heard me speak the words before; but here I am to
have and to hold, as the Book says! Why, hadn’t you realized it? Lizzie,
look up--! _I’m asking you to marry me._”
Still, for a moment, she made no reply, but stood gazing about her as if
she had the sudden sense of unseen presences between them. At length she
gave a faint laugh. It visibly ruffled her visitor.
“I’m not conscious,” he began again, “of having said anything
particularly laughable--” He stopped and scrutinized her narrowly, as
though checked by the thought that there might be something not quite
normal.... Then, apparently reassured, he half-murmured his only French
phrase: “_La joie fait peur_ ... eh?”
She did not seem to hear. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said, “but
only at the coincidences of life. It was in this room that my husband
asked me to marry him.”
“Ah?” Her suitor appeared politely doubtful of the good taste, or the
opportunity, of producing this reminiscence. But he made another call on
his magnanimity. “Really? But, I say, my dear, I couldn’t be expected to
know it, could I? If I’d guessed that such a painful association--”
“Painful?” She turned upon him. “A painful association? Do you think
that was what I meant?” Her voice sank. “This room is sacred to me.”
She had her eyes on his face, which, perhaps because of its
architectural completeness, seemed to lack the mobility necessary to
follow such a leap of thought. It was so ostensibly a solid building,
and not a nomad’s tent. He struggled with a ruffled pride, rose again to
playful magnanimity, and murmured: “Compassionate angel!”
“Oh, compassionate? To whom? Do you imagine--did I ever say anything to
make you doubt the truth of what I’m telling you?”
His brows fretted: his temper was up. “_Say_ anything? No,” he
insinuated ironically; then, in a hasty plunge after his lost
forbearance, added with exquisite mildness: “Your tact was perfect ...
always. I’ve invariably done you that justice. No one could have been
more thoroughly the ... the lady. I never failed to admire your
good-breeding in avoiding any reference to your ... your other life.”
She faced him steadily. “Well, that other life _was_ my life--my only
life! Now you know.”
There was a silence. Henry Prest drew out a monogrammed handkerchief and
passed it over his dry lips. As he did so, a whiff of his eau de Cologne
reached her, and she winced a little. It was evident that he was seeking
what to say next; wondering, rather helplessly, how to get back his lost
command of the situation. He finally induced his features to break again
into a persuasive smile.
“Not your _only_ life, dearest,” he reproached her.
She met it instantly. “Yes; so you thought--because I chose you
should.”
“You chose--?” The smile became incredulous.
“Oh, deliberately. But I suppose I’ve no excuse that you would not
dislike to hear.... Why shouldn’t we break off now?”
“Break off ... this conversation?” His tone was aggrieved. “Of course
I’ve no wish to force myself--”
She interrupted him with a raised hand. “Break off for good, Henry.”
“For good?” He stared, and gave a quick swallow, as though the dose were
choking him. “For good? Are you really--? You and I? Is this serious,
Lizzie?”
“Perfectly. But if you prefer to hear ... what can only be painful....”
He straightened himself, threw back his shoulders, and said in an
uncertain voice: “I hope you don’t take me for a coward.”
She made no direct reply, but continued: “Well, then, you thought I
loved you, I suppose--”
He smiled again, revived his moustache with a slight twist, and gave a
hardly perceptible shrug. “You ... ah ... managed to produce the
illusion....”
“Oh, well, yes: a woman _can_--so easily! That’s what men often forget.
You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive
prostitute.”
“Elizabeth!” he gasped, pale now to the ruddy eyelids. She saw that the
word had wounded more than his pride, and that, before realizing the
insult to his love, he was shuddering at the offence to his taste.
Mistress! Prostitute! Such words were banned. No one reproved coarseness
of language in women more than Henry Prest; one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s
greatest charms (as he had just told her) had been her way of
remaining, “through it all,” so ineffably “the lady.” He looked at her
as if a fresh doubt of her sanity had assailed him.
“Shall I go on?” she smiled.
He bent his head stiffly. “I am still at a loss to imagine for what
purpose you made a fool of me.”
“Well, then, it was as I say. I wanted money--money for my husband.”
He moistened his lips. “For your husband?”
“Yes; when he began to be so ill; when he needed comforts, luxury, the
opportunity to get away. He saved me, when I was a girl, from untold
humiliation and wretchedness. No one else lifted a finger to help
me--not one of my own family. I hadn’t a penny or a friend. Mrs. Mant
had grown sick of me, and was trying to find an excuse to throw me over.
Oh, you don’t know what a girl has to put up with--a girl alone in the
world--who depends for her clothes, and her food, and the roof over her
head, on the whims of a vain capricious old woman! It was because _he_
knew, because he understood, that he married me.... He took me out of
misery into blessedness. He put me up above them all ... he put me
beside himself. I didn’t care for anything but that; I didn’t care for
the money or the freedom; I cared only for him. I would have followed
him into the desert--I would have gone barefoot to be with him. I would
have starved, begged, done anything for him--_anything_.” She broke off,
her voice lost in a sob. She was no longer aware of Prest’s
presence--all her consciousness was absorbed in the vision she had
evoked. “It was _he_ who cared--who wanted me to be rich and independent
and admired! He wanted to heap everything on me--during the first years
I could hardly persuade him to keep enough money for himself.... And
then he was taken ill; and as he got worse, and gradually dropped out of
affairs, his income grew smaller, and then stopped altogether; and all
the while there were new expenses piling up--nurses, doctors, travel;
and he grew frightened; frightened not for himself but for me.... And
what was I to do? I had to pay for things somehow. For the first year I
managed to put off paying--then I borrowed small sums here and there.
But that couldn’t last. And all the while I had to keep on looking
pretty and prosperous, or else he began to worry, and think we were
ruined, and wonder what would become of me if he didn’t get well. By the
time you came I was desperate--I would have done anything, anything! He
thought the money came from my Portuguese stepmother. She really was
rich, as it happens. Unluckily my poor father tried to invest her money,
and lost it all; but when they were first married she sent a thousand
dollars--and all the rest, all you gave me, I built on that.”
She paused pantingly, as if her tale were at an end. Gradually her
consciousness of present things returned, and she saw Henry Prest, as if
far off, a small indistinct figure looming through the mist of her
blurred eyes. She thought to herself: “He doesn’t believe me,” and the
thought exasperated her.
“You wonder, I suppose,” she began again, “that a woman should dare
confess such things about herself--”
He cleared his throat. “About herself? No; perhaps not. But about her
husband.”
The blood rushed to her forehead. “About her husband? But you don’t dare
to imagine--?”
“You leave me,” he rejoined icily, “no other inference that I can see.”
She stood dumbfounded, and he added: “At any rate, it certainly explains
your extraordinary coolness--pluck, I used to think it. I perceive that
I needn’t have taken such precautions.”
She considered this. “You think, then, that he knew? You think, perhaps,
that I knew he did?” She pondered again painfully, and then her face lit
up. “He never knew--never! That’s enough for me--and for you it doesn’t
matter. Think what you please. He was happy to the end--that’s all I
care for.”
“There can be no doubt about your frankness,” he said with pinched
lips.
“There’s no longer any reason for not being frank.”
He picked up his hat, and studiously considered its lining; then he took
the gloves he had laid in it, and drew them thoughtfully through his
hands. She thought: “Thank God, he’s going!”
But he set the hat and gloves down on a table, and moved a little nearer
to her. His face looked as ravaged as a reveller’s at daybreak.
“You--leave positively nothing to the imagination!” he murmured.
“I told you it was useless--” she began; but he interrupted her:
“Nothing, that is--if I believed you.” He moistened his lips again, and
tapped them with his handkerchief. Again she had a whiff of the eau de
Cologne. “But I don’t!” he proclaimed. “Too many memories ... too many
... proofs, my dearest ...” He stopped, smiling somewhat convulsively.
She saw that he imagined the smile would soothe her.
She remained silent, and he began once more, as if appealing to her
against her own verdict: “I know better, Lizzie. In spite of everything,
_I know you’re not that kind of woman_.”
“I took your money--”
“As a favour. I knew the difficulties of your position.... I understood
completely. I beg of you never again to allude to--all that.” It dawned
on her that anything would be more endurable to him than to think he had
been a dupe--and one of two dupes! The part was not one that he could
conceive of having played. His pride was up in arms to defend her, not
so much for her sake as for his own. The discovery gave her a baffling
sense of helplessness; against that impenetrable self-sufficiency all
her affirmations might spend themselves in vain.
“No man who has had the privilege of being loved by you could ever for a
moment....”
She raised her head and looked at him. “You have never had that
privilege,” she interrupted.
His jaw fell. She saw his eyes pass from uneasy supplication to a cold
anger. He gave a little inarticulate grunt before his voice came back to
him.
“You spare no pains in degrading yourself in my eyes.”
“I am not degrading myself. I am telling you the truth. I needed money.
I knew no way of earning it. You were willing to give it ... for what
you call the privilege....”
“Lizzie,” he interrupted solemnly, “don’t go on! I believe I enter into
all your feelings--I believe I always have. In so sensitive, so
hypersensitive a nature, there are moments when every other feeling is
swept away by scruples.... For those scruples I only honour you the
more. But I won’t hear another word now. If I allowed you to go on in
your present state of ... nervous exaltation ... you might be the first
to deplore.... I wish to forget everything you have said.... I wish to
look forward, not back....” He squared his shoulders, took a deep
breath, and fixed her with a glance of recovered confidence. “How little
you know me if you believe that I could fail you _now_!”
She returned his look with a weary steadiness. “You are kind--you mean
to be generous, I’m sure. But don’t you see that I _can’t_ marry you?”
“I only see that, in the natural rush of your remorse--”
“Remorse? Remorse?” She broke in with a laugh. “Do you imagine I feel
any remorse? I’d do it all over again tomorrow--for the same object! I
got what I wanted--I gave him that last year, that last good year. It
was the relief from anxiety that kept him alive, that kept him happy.
Oh, he _was_ happy--I know that!” She turned to Prest with a strange
smile. “I do thank you for that--I’m not ungrateful.”
“You ... you ... _ungrateful_? This ... is really ... indecent....” He
took up his hat again, and stood in the middle of the room as if waiting
to be waked from a bad dream.
“You are--rejecting an opportunity--” he began.
She made a faint motion of assent.
“You do realize it? I’m still prepared to--to help you, if you
should....” She made no answer, and he continued: “How do you expect to
live--since you have chosen to drag in such considerations?”
“I don’t care how I live. I never wanted the money for myself.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “Oh, don’t--_again_! The woman I had meant
to....” Suddenly, to her surprise, she saw a glitter of moisture on his
lower lids. He applied his handkerchief to them, and the waft of scent
checked her momentary impulse of compunction. That Cologne water! It
called up picture after picture with a hideous precision. “Well, it was
worth it,” she murmured doggedly.
Henry Prest restored his handkerchief to his pocket. He waited, glanced
about the room, turned back to her.
“If your decision is final--”
“Oh, final!”
He bowed. “There is one thing more--which I should have mentioned if you
had ever given me the opportunity of seeing you after--after last New
Year’s day. Something I preferred not to commit to writing--”
“Yes?” she questioned indifferently.
“Your husband, you are positively convinced, had no idea ... that day
...?”
“None.”
“Well, others, it appears, had.” He paused. “Mrs. Wesson saw us.”
“So I supposed. I remember now that she went out of her way to cut me
that evening at Mrs. Struthers’s.”
“Exactly. And she was not the only person who saw us. If people had not
been disarmed by your husband’s falling ill that very day you would have
found yourself--ostracized.”
She made no comment, and he pursued, with a last effort: “In your grief,
your solitude, you haven’t yet realized what your future will be--how
difficult. It is what I wished to guard you against--it was my purpose
in asking you to marry me.” He drew himself up and smiled as if he were
looking at his own reflection in a mirror, and thought favourably of it.
“A man who has had the misfortune to compromise a woman is bound in
honour--Even if my own inclination were not what it is, I should
consider....”
She turned to him with a softened smile. Yes, he had really brought
himself to think that he was proposing to marry her to save her
reputation. At this glimpse of the old hackneyed axioms on which he
actually believed that his conduct was based, she felt anew her
remoteness from the life he would have drawn her back to.
“My poor Henry, don’t you see how far I’ve got beyond the Mrs. Wessons?
If all New York wants to ostracize me, let it! I’ve had my day ... no
woman has more than one. Why shouldn’t I have to pay for it? I’m ready.”
“Good heavens!” he murmured.
She was aware that he had put forth his last effort. The wound she had
inflicted had gone to the most vital spot; she had prevented his being
magnanimous, and the injury was unforgivable. He was glad, yes, actually
glad now, to have her know that New York meant to cut her; but, strive
as she might, she could not bring herself to care either for the fact,
or for his secret pleasure in it. Her own secret pleasures were beyond
New York’s reach and his.
“I’m sorry,” she reiterated gently. He bowed, without trying to take
her hand, and left the room.
As the door closed she looked after him with a dazed stare. “He’s right,
I suppose; I don’t realize yet--” She heard the shutting of the outer
door, and dropped to the sofa, pressing her hands against her aching
eyes. At that moment, for the first time, she asked herself what the
next day, and the next, would be like....
“If only I cared more about reading,” she moaned, remembering how vainly
she had tried to acquire her husband’s tastes, and how gently and
humorously he had smiled at her efforts. “Well--there are always cards;
and when I get older, knitting and patience, I suppose. And if everybody
cuts me I shan’t need any evening dresses. That will be an economy, at
any rate,” she concluded with a little shiver.
VII
“She was _bad_ ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
I must go back now to this phrase of my mother’s--the phrase from which,
at the opening of my narrative, I broke away for a time in order to
project more vividly on the scene that anxious moving vision of Lizzie
Hazeldean: a vision in which memories of my one boyish glimpse of her
were pieced together with hints collected afterward.
When my mother uttered her condemnatory judgment I was a young man of
twenty-one, newly graduated from Harvard, and at home again under the
family roof in New York. It was long since I had heard Mrs. Hazeldean
spoken of. I had been away, at school and at Harvard, for the greater
part of the interval, and in the holidays she was probably not
considered a fitting subject of conversation, especially now that my
sisters came to the table.
At any rate, I had forgotten everything I might ever have picked up
about her when, on the evening after my return, my cousin Hubert
Wesson--now towering above me as a pillar of the Knickerbocker Club, and
a final authority on the ways of the world--suggested our joining her at
the opera.
“Mrs. Hazeldean? But I don’t know her. What will she think?”
“That it’s all right. Come along. She’s the jolliest woman I know. We’ll
go back afterward and have supper with her--jolliest house I know.”
Hubert twirled a self-conscious moustache.
We were dining at the Knickerbocker, to which I had just been elected,
and the bottle of Pommery we were finishing disposed me to think that
nothing could be more fitting for two men of the world than to end their
evening in the box of the jolliest woman Hubert knew. I groped for my
own moustache, gave a twirl in the void, and followed him, after
meticulously sliding my overcoat sleeve around my silk hat as I had seen
him do.
But once in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box I was only an overgrown boy again,
bathed in such blushes as used, at the same age, to visit Hubert,
forgetting that I had a moustache to twirl, and knocking my hat from the
peg on which I had just hung it, in my zeal to pick up a programme she
had not dropped.
For she was really too lovely--too formidably lovely. I was used by now
to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang
like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a
pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished,
finished--and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse
of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What!
There were women who need not fear crow’s-feet, were more beautiful for
being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and
their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and, chatted? But then no
young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known
had been only a warm pink nursery, while this new one was a place of
darkness, perils and enchantments....
It was the next day that one of my sisters asked me where I had been the
evening before, and that I puffed out my chest to answer: “With Mrs.
Hazeldean--at the opera.” My mother looked up, but did not speak till
the governess had swept the girls off; then she said with pinched lips:
“Hubert Wesson took you to Mrs. Hazeldean’s box?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a young man may go where he pleases. I hear Hubert is still
infatuated; it serves Sabina right for not letting him marry the
youngest Lyman girl. But don’t mention Mrs. Hazeldean again before your
sisters.... They say her husband never knew--I suppose if he _had_ she
would never have got old Miss Cecilia Winter’s money.” And it was then
that my mother pronounced the name of Henry Prest, and added that
phrase about the Fifth Avenue Hotel which suddenly woke my boyish
memories....
In a flash I saw again, under its quickly-lowered veil, the face with
the exposed eyes and the frozen smile, and felt through my grown-up
waistcoat the stab to my boy’s heart and the loosened murmur of my soul;
felt all this, and at the same moment tried to relate that former face,
so fresh and clear despite its anguish, to the smiling guarded
countenance of Hubert’s “jolliest woman I know.”
I was familiar with Hubert’s indiscriminate use of his one adjective,
and had not expected to find Mrs. Hazeldean “jolly” in the literal
sense: in the case of the lady he happened to be in love with the
epithet simply meant that she justified his choice. Nevertheless, as I
compared Mrs. Hazeldean’s earlier face to this one, I had my first
sense of what may befall in the long years between youth and maturity,
and of how short a distance I had travelled on that mysterious journey.
If only she would take me by the hand!
I was not wholly unprepared for my mother’s comment. There was no other
lady in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box when we entered; none joined her during the
evening, and our hostess offered no apology for her isolation. In the
New York of my youth every one knew what to think of a woman who was
seen “alone at the opera”; if Mrs. Hazeldean was not openly classed with
Fanny Ring, our one conspicuous “professional,” it was because, out of
respect for her social origin, New York preferred to avoid such
juxtapositions. Young as I was, I knew this social law, and had guessed,
before the evening was over, that Mrs. Hazeldean was not a lady on whom
other ladies called, though she was not, on the other hand, a lady whom
it was forbidden to mention to other ladies. So I did mention her, with
bravado.
No ladies showed themselves at the opera with Mrs. Hazeldean; but one or
two dropped in to the jolly supper announced by Hubert, an entertainment
whose jollity consisted in a good deal of harmless banter over broiled
canvas-backs and celery, with the best of champagne. These same ladies I
sometimes met at her house afterward. They were mostly younger than
their hostess, and still, though precariously, within the social pale:
pretty trivial creatures, bored with a monotonous prosperity, and
yearning for such unlawful joys as cigarettes, plain speaking, and a
drive home in the small hours with the young man of the moment. But
such daring spirits were few in old New York, their appearances
infrequent and somewhat furtive. Mrs. Hazeldean’s society consisted
mainly of men, men of all ages, from her bald or grey-headed
contemporaries to youths of Hubert’s accomplished years and raw novices
of mine.
A great dignity and decency prevailed in her little circle. It was not
the oppressive respectability which weighs on the reformed _déclassée_,
but the air of ease imparted by a woman of distinction who has wearied
of society and closed her doors to all save her intimates. One always
felt, at Lizzie Hazeldean’s, that the next moment one’s grandmother and
aunts might be announced; and yet so pleasantly certain that they
wouldn’t be.
What is there in the atmosphere of such houses that makes them so
enchanting to a fastidious and imaginative youth? Why is it that “those
women” (as the others call them) alone know how to put the awkward at
ease, check the familiar, smile a little at the over-knowing, and yet
encourage naturalness in all? The difference of atmosphere is felt on
the very threshold. The flowers grow differently in their vases, the
lamps and easy-chairs have found a cleverer way of coming together, the
books on the table are the very ones that one is longing to get hold of.
The most perilous coquetry may not be in a woman’s way of arranging her
dress but in her way of arranging her drawing-room; and in this art Mrs.
Hazeldean excelled.
I have spoken of books; even then they were usually the first objects to
attract me in a room, whatever else of beauty it contained; and I
remember, on the evening of that first “jolly supper,” coming to an
astonished pause before the crowded shelves that took up one wall of the
drawing-room. What! The goddess read, then? She could accompany one on
those flights too? Lead one, no doubt? My heart beat high....
But I soon learned that Lizzie Hazeldean did not read. She turned but
languidly even the pages of the last Ouida novel; and I remember seeing
Mallock’s _New Republic_ uncut on her table for weeks. It took me no
long time to make the discovery: at my very next visit she caught my
glance of surprise in the direction of the rich shelves, smiled,
coloured a little, and met it with the confession: “No, I can’t read
them. I’ve tried--I _have_ tried--but print makes me sleepy. Even novels
do....” “They” were the accumulated treasures of English poetry, and a
rich and varied selection of history, criticism, letters, in English,
French and Italian--she spoke these languages, I knew--books evidently
assembled by a sensitive and widely-ranging reader. We were alone at the
time, and Mrs. Hazeldean went on in a lower tone: “I kept just the few
he liked best--my husband, you know.” It was the first time that Charles
Hazeldean’s name had been spoken between us, and my surprise was so
great that my candid cheek must have reflected the blush on hers. I had
fancied that women in her situation avoided alluding to their husbands.
But she continued to look at me, wistfully, humbly almost, as if there
were something more that she wanted to say, and was inwardly entreating
me to understand.
“He was a great reader: a student. And he tried so hard to make me read
too--he wanted to share everything with me. And I _did_ like
poetry--some poetry--when he read it aloud to me. After his death I
thought: ‘There’ll be his books. I can go back to them--I shall find him
there.’ And I tried--oh, so hard--but it’s no use. They’ve lost their
meaning ... as most things have.” She stood up, lit a cigarette, pushed
back a log on the hearth. I felt that she was waiting for me to speak.
If life had but taught me how to answer her, what was there of her story
I might not have learned? But I was too inexperienced; I could not shake
off my bewilderment. What! This woman whom I had been pitying for
matrimonial miseries which seemed to justify her seeking solace
elsewhere--this woman could speak of her husband in such a tone! I had
instantly perceived that the tone was not feigned; and a confused sense
of the complexity--or the chaos--of human relations held me as
tongue-tied as a schoolboy to whom a problem beyond his grasp is
suddenly propounded.
Before the thought took shape she had read it, and with the smile which
drew such sad lines about her mouth, had continued gaily: “What are you
up to this evening, by the way? What do you say to going to the “Black
Crook” with your cousin Hubert and one or two others? I have a box.”
It was inevitable that, not long after this candid confession, I should
have persuaded myself that a taste for reading was boring in a woman,
and that one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s chief charms lay in her freedom from
literary pretensions. The truth was, of course, that it lay in her
sincerity; in her humble yet fearless estimate of her own qualities and
short-comings. I had never met its like in a woman of any age, and
coming to me in such early days, and clothed in such looks and
intonations, it saved me, in after years, from all peril of meaner
beauties.
But before I had come to understand that, or to guess what falling in
love with Lizzie Hazeldean was to do for me, I had quite unwittingly and
fatuously done the falling. The affair turned out, in the perspective of
the years, to be but an incident of our long friendship; and if I touch
on it here it is only to illustrate another of my poor friend’s gifts.
If she could not read books she could read hearts; and she bent a
playful yet compassionate gaze on mine while it still floundered in
unawareness.
I remember it all as if it were yesterday. We were sitting alone in her
drawing-room, in the winter twilight, over the fire. We had reached--in
her company it was not difficult--the degree of fellowship when friendly
talk lapses naturally into a friendlier silence, and she had taken up
the evening paper while I glowered dumbly at the embers. One little
foot, just emerging below her dress, swung, I remember, between me and
the fire, and seemed to hold her all in the spring of its instep....
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “poor Henry Prest--“. She dropped the paper. “His
wife is dead--poor fellow,” she said simply.
The blood rushed to my forehead: my heart was in my throat. She had
named him--named him at last, the recreant lover, the man who had
“dishonoured” her! My hands were clenched: if he had entered the room
they would have been at his throat....
And then, after a quick interval, I had again the humiliating
disheartening sense of not understanding: of being too young, too
inexperienced, to know. This woman, who spoke of her deceived husband
with tenderness, spoke compassionately of her faithless lover! And she
did the one as naturally as the other, not as if this impartial charity
were an attitude she had determined to assume, but as if it were part of
the lesson life had taught her.
“I didn’t know he was married,” I growled between my teeth.
She meditated absently. “Married? Oh, yes; when was it? The year after
...” her voice dropped again ... “after my husband died. He married a
quiet cousin, who had always been in love with him, I believe. They had
two boys.--You knew him?” she abruptly questioned.
I nodded grimly.
“People always thought he would never marry--he used to say so himself,”
she went on, still absently.
I burst out: “The--hound!”
“_Oh!_” she exclaimed. I started up, our eyes met, and hers filled with
tears of reproach and understanding. We sat looking at each other in
silence. Two of the tears overflowed, hung on her lashes, melted down
her cheeks. I continued to stare at her shamefacedly; then I got to my
feet, drew out my handkerchief, and tremblingly, reverently, as if I had
touched a sacred image, I wiped them away.
My love-making went no farther. In another moment she had contrived to
put a safe distance between us. She did not want to turn a boy’s head;
long since (she told me afterward) such amusements had ceased to excite
her. But she did want my sympathy, wanted it overwhelmingly: amid the
various feelings she was aware of arousing, she let me see that
sympathy, in the sense of a moved understanding, had always been
lacking. “But then,” she added ingenuously, “I’ve never really been
sure, because I’ve never told anyone my story. Only I take it for
granted that, if I haven’t, it’s _their_ fault rather than mine....” She
smiled half-deprecatingly, and my bosom swelled, acknowledging the
distinction. “And now I want to tell _you_--” she began.
I have said that my love for Mrs. Hazeldean was a brief episode in our
long relation. At my age, it was inevitable that it should be so. The
“fresher face” soon came, and in its light I saw my old friend as a
middle-aged woman, turning grey, with a mechanical smile and haunted
eyes. But it was in the first glow of my feeling that she had told me
her story; and when the glow subsided, and in the afternoon light of a
long intimacy I judged and tested her statements, I found that each
detail fitted into the earlier picture.
My opportunities were many; for once she had told the tale she always
wanted to be retelling it. A perpetual longing to relive the past, a
perpetual need to explain and justify herself--the satisfaction of these
two cravings, once she had permitted herself to indulge them, became the
luxury of her empty life. She had kept it empty--emotionally,
sentimentally empty--from the day of her husband’s death, as the
guardian of an abandoned temple might go on forever sweeping and tending
what had once been the god’s abode. But this duty performed, she had no
other. She had done one great--or abominable--thing; rank it as you
please, it had been done heroically. But there was nothing in her to
keep her at that height. Her tastes, her interests, her conceivable
occupations, were all on the level of a middling domesticity; she did
not know how to create for herself any inner life in keeping with that
one unprecedented impulse.
Soon after her husband’s death, one of her cousins, the Miss Cecilia
Winter of Washington Square to whom my mother had referred, had died
also, and left Mrs. Hazeldean a handsome legacy. And a year or two later
Charles Hazeldean’s small estate had undergone the favourable change
that befell New York realty in the ’eighties. The property he had
bequeathed to his wife had doubled, then tripled, in value; and she
found herself, after a few years of widowhood, in possession of an
income large enough to supply her with all the luxuries which her
husband had struggled so hard to provide. It was the peculiar irony of
her lot to be secured from temptation when all danger of temptation was
over; for she would never, I am certain, have held out the tip of her
finger to any man to obtain such luxuries for her own enjoyment. But if
she did not value her money for itself, she owed to it--and the service
was perhaps greater than she was aware--the power of mitigating her
solitude, and filling it with the trivial distractions without which she
was less and less able to live.
She had been put into the world, apparently, to amuse men and enchant
them; yet, her husband dead, her sacrifice accomplished, she would have
preferred, I am sure, to shut herself up in a lonely monumental
attitude, with thoughts and pursuits on a scale with her one great hour.
But what was she to do? She had known of no way of earning money except
by her graces; and now she knew no way of filling her days except with
cards and chatter and theatre-going. Not one of the men who approached
her passed beyond the friendly barrier she had opposed to me. Of that I
was sure. She had not shut out Henry Prest in order to replace him--her
face grew white at the suggestion. But what else was there to do, she
asked me; what? The days had to be spent somehow; and she was incurably,
disconsolately sociable.
So she lived, in a cold celibacy that passed for I don’t know what
licence; so she lived, withdrawn from us all, yet needing us so
desperately, inwardly faithful to her one high impulse, yet so incapable
of attuning her daily behaviour to it! And so, at the very moment when
she ceased to deserve the blame of society, she found herself cut off
from it, and reduced to the status of the “fast” widow noted for her
jolly suppers.
I bent bewildered over the depths of her plight. What else, at any stage
of her career, could she have done, I often wondered? Among the young
women now growing up about me I find none with enough imagination to
picture the helpless incapacity of the pretty girl of the ’seventies,
the girl without money or vocation, seemingly put into the world only to
please, and unlearned in any way of maintaining herself there by her own
efforts. Marriage alone could save such a girl from starvation, unless
she happened to run across an old lady who wanted her dogs exercised
and her _Churchman_ read aloud to her. Even the day of painting
wild-roses on fans, of colouring photographs to “look like” miniatures,
of manufacturing lamp-shades and trimming hats for more fortunate
friends--even this precarious beginning of feminine independence had not
dawned. It was inconceivable to my mother’s generation that a
portionless girl should not be provided for by her relations until she
found a husband; and that, having found him, she should have to help him
to earn a living, was more inconceivable still. The self-sufficing
little society of that vanished New York attached no great importance to
wealth, but regarded poverty as so distasteful that it simply took no
account of it.
These things pleaded in favour of poor Lizzie Hazeldean, though to
superficial observers her daily life seemed to belie the plea. She had
known no way of smoothing her husband’s last years but by being false to
him; but once he was dead, she expiated her betrayal by a rigidity of
conduct for which she asked no reward but her own inner satisfaction. As
she grew older, and her friends scattered, married, or were kept away
from one cause or another, she filled her depleted circle with a less
fastidious hand. One met in her drawing-room dull men, common men, men
who too obviously came there because they were not invited elsewhere,
and hoped to use her as a social stepping-stone. She was aware of the
difference--her eyes said so whenever I found one of these newcomers
installed in my arm-chair--but never, by word or sign, did she admit it.
She said to me once: “You find it duller here than it used to be. It’s
my fault, perhaps; I think I knew better how to draw out my old
friends.” And another day: “Remember, the people you meet here now come
out of kindness. I’m an old woman, and I consider nothing else.” That
was all.
She went more assiduously than ever to the theatre and the opera; she
performed for her friends a hundred trivial services; in her eagerness
to be always busy she invented superfluous attentions, oppressed people
by offering assistance they did not need, verged at times--for all her
tact--on the officiousness of the desperately lonely. At her little
suppers she surprised us with exquisite flowers and novel delicacies.
The champagne and cigars grew better and better as the quality of the
guests declined; and sometimes, as the last of her dull company
dispersed, I used to see her, among the scattered ash-trays and liqueur
decanters, turn a stealthy glance at her reflection in the mirror, with
haggard eyes which seemed to ask: “Will even _these_ come back
tomorrow?”
I should be loth to leave the picture at this point; my last vision of
her is more satisfying. I had been away, travelling for a year at the
other end of the world; the day I came back I ran across Hubert Wesson
at my club. Hubert had grown pompous and heavy. He drew me into a
corner, and said, turning red, and glancing cautiously over his
shoulder: “Have you seen our old friend Mrs. Hazeldean? She’s very ill,
I hear.”
I was about to take up the “I hear”; then I remembered that in my
absence Hubert had married, and that his caution was probably a tribute
to his new state. I hurried at once to Mrs. Hazeldean’s; and on her
door-step, to my surprise, I ran against a Catholic priest, who looked
gravely at me, bowed and passed out.
I was unprepared for such an encounter, for my old friend had never
spoken to me of religious matters. The spectacle of her father’s career
had presumably shaken whatever incipient faith was in her; though in her
little-girlhood, as she often told me, she had been as deeply impressed
by Dr. Winter’s eloquence as any grown-up member of his flock. But now,
as soon as I laid eyes on her, I understood. She was very ill, she was
visibly dying; and in her extremity, fate, not always kind, had sent her
the solace which she needed. Had some obscure inheritance of religious
feeling awaked in her? Had she remembered that her poor father, after
his long life of mental and moral vagabondage, had finally found rest
in the ancient fold? I never knew the explanation--she probably never
knew it herself.
But she knew that she had found what she wanted. At last she could talk
of Charles, she could confess her sin, she could be absolved of it.
Since cards and suppers and chatter were over, what more blessed barrier
could she find against solitude? All her life, henceforth, was a long
preparation for that daily hour of expansion and consolation. And then
this merciful visitor, who understood her so well, could also tell her
things about Charles: knew where he was, how he felt, what exquisite
daily attentions could still be paid to him, and how, with all
unworthiness washed away, she might at last hope to reach him. Heaven
could never seem strange, so interpreted; each time that I saw her,
during the weeks of her slow fading, she was more and more like a
traveller with her face turned homeward, yet smilingly resigned to await
her summons. The house no longer seemed lonely, nor the hours tedious;
there had even been found for her, among the books she had so often
tried to read, those books which had long looked at her with such
hostile faces, two or three (they were always on her bed) containing
messages from the world where Charles was waiting.
Thus provided and led, one day she went to him.
THE END
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "New Year's Day (The 'Seventies)" ***
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