The House of Mirth

ook II, Chapter 6

As became persons of their rising consequence, the Gormers were
engaged in building a country-house on Long Island; and it was a
part of Miss Bart’s duty to attend her hostess on frequent visits
of inspection to the new estate. There, while Mrs. Gormer plunged
into problems of lighting and sanitation, Lily had leisure to
wander, in the bright autumn air, along the tree-fringed bay to
which the land declined. Little as she was addicted to solitude,
there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape
from the empty noises of her life. She was weary of being swept
passively along a current of pleasure and business in which she
had no share; weary of seeing other people pursue amusement and
squander money, while she felt herself of no more account among
them than an expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child.

It was in this frame of mind that, striking back from the shore
one morning into the windings of an unfamiliar lane, she came
suddenly upon the figure of George Dorset. The Dorset place was in
the immediate neighbourhood of the Gormers’ newly-acquired estate,
and in her motor-flights thither with Mrs. Gormer, Lily had caught
one or two passing glimpses of the couple; but they moved in so
different an orbit that she had not considered the possibility of a
direct encounter.

Dorset, swinging along with bent head, in moody abstraction, did
not see Miss Bart till he was close upon her; but the sight,
instead of bringing him to a halt, as she had half-expected, sent
him toward her with an eagerness which found expression in his
opening words.

“Miss Bart!—You’ll shake hands, won’t you? I’ve been hoping to meet
you—I should have written to you if I’d dared.” His face, with its
tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look,
as though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the
thoughts at his heels.

The look drew a word of compassionate greeting from Lily, and he
pressed on, as if encouraged by her tone: “I wanted to apologize—to
ask you to forgive me for the miserable part I played——”

She checked him with a quick gesture. “Don’t let us speak of it: I
was very sorry for you,” she said, with a tinge of disdain which,
as she instantly perceived, was not lost on him.

He flushed to his haggard eyes, flushed so cruelly that she
repented the thrust. “You might well be; you don’t know—you must
let me explain. I was deceived: abominably deceived——”

“I am still more sorry for you, then,” she interposed, without
irony; “but you must see that I am not exactly the person with whom
the subject can be discussed.”

He met this with a look of genuine wonder. “Why not? Isn’t it to
you, of all people, that I owe an explanation——”

“No explanation is necessary: the situation was perfectly clear to
me.”

“Ah——” he murmured, his head drooping again, and his irresolute
hand switching at the underbrush along the lane. But as Lily made a
movement to pass on, he broke out with fresh vehemence: “Miss Bart,
for God’s sake don’t turn from me! We used to be good friends—you
were always kind to me—and you don’t know how I need a friend now.”

The lamentable weakness of the words roused a motion of pity in
Lily’s breast. She too needed friends—she had tasted the pang of
loneliness; and her resentment of Bertha Dorset’s cruelty softened
her heart to the poor wretch who was after all the chief of
Bertha’s victims.

“I still wish to be kind; I feel no ill-will toward you,” she said.
“But you must understand that after what has happened we can’t be
friends again—we can’t see each other.”

“Ah, you ARE kind—you’re merciful—you always were!” He fixed his
miserable gaze on her. “But why can’t we be friends—why not, when
I’ve repented in dust and ashes? Isn’t it hard that you should
condemn me to suffer for the falseness, the treachery of others? I
was punished enough at the time—is there to be no respite for me?”

“I should have thought you had found complete respite in the
reconciliation which was effected at my expense,” Lily began, with
renewed impatience; but he broke in imploringly: “Don’t put it in
that way—when that’s been the worst of my punishment. My God! what
could I do—wasn’t I powerless? You were singled out as a sacrifice:
any word I might have said would have been turned against you——”

“I have told you I don’t blame you; all I ask you to understand is
that, after the use Bertha chose to make of me—after all that her
behaviour has since implied—it’s impossible that you and I should
meet.”

He continued to stand before her, in his dogged weakness. “Is
it—need it be? Mightn’t there be circumstances——?” he checked
himself, slashing at the wayside weeds in a wider radius. Then he
began again: “Miss Bart, listen—give me a minute. If we’re not to
meet again, at least let me have a hearing now. You say we can’t be
friends after—after what has happened. But can’t I at least appeal
to your pity? Can’t I move you if I ask you to think of me as a
prisoner—a prisoner you alone can set free?”

Lily’s inward start betrayed itself in a quick blush: was it
possible that this was really the sense of Carry Fisher’s
adumbrations?

“I can’t see how I can possibly be of any help to you,” she
murmured, drawing back a little from the mounting excitement of his
look.

Her tone seemed to sober him, as it had so often done in his
stormiest moments. The stubborn lines of his face relaxed, and he
said, with an abrupt drop to docility: “You WOULD see, if you’d be
as merciful as you used to be: and heaven knows I’ve never needed
it more!”

She paused a moment, moved in spite of herself by this reminder of
her influence over him. Her fibres had been softened by suffering,
and the sudden glimpse into his mocked and broken life disarmed her
contempt for his weakness.

“I am very sorry for you—I would help you willingly; but you must
have other friends, other advisers.”

“I never had a friend like you,” he answered simply. “And
besides—can’t you see?—you’re the only person”—his voice dropped to
a whisper—“the only person who knows.”

Again she felt her colour change; again her heart rose in
precipitate throbs to meet what she felt was coming. He lifted his
eyes to her entreatingly. “You do see, don’t you? You understand?
I’m desperate—I’m at the end of my tether. I want to be free, and
you can free me. I know you can. You don’t want to keep me bound
fast in hell, do you? You can’t want to take such a vengeance as
that. You were always kind—your eyes are kind now. You say you’re
sorry for me. Well, it rests with you to show it; and heaven knows
there’s nothing to keep you back. You understand, of course—there
wouldn’t be a hint of publicity—not a sound or a syllable to
connect you with the thing. It would never come to that, you know:
all I need is to be able to say definitely: ‘I know this—and
this—and this’—and the fight would drop, and the way be cleared,
and the whole abominable business swept out of sight in a second.”

He spoke pantingly, like a tired runner, with breaks of exhaustion
between his words; and through the breaks she caught, as through
the shifting rents of a fog, great golden vistas of peace and
safety. For there was no mistaking the definite intention behind
his vague appeal; she could have filled up the blanks without the
help of Mrs. Fisher’s insinuations. Here was a man who turned to
her in the extremity of his loneliness and his humiliation: if she
came to him at such a moment he would be hers with all the force of
his deluded faith. And the power to make him so lay in her hand—lay
there in a completeness he could not even remotely conjecture.
Revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke—there was
something dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity.

She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch
of the deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her—fear of
herself, and of the terrible force of the temptation. All her past
weaknesses were like so many eager accomplices drawing her toward
the path their feet had already smoothed. She turned quickly, and
held out her hand to Dorset.

“Goodbye—I’m sorry; there’s nothing in the world that I can do.”

“Nothing? Ah, don’t say that,” he cried; “say what’s true: that you
abandon me like the others. You, the only creature who could have
saved me!”

“Goodbye—goodbye,” she repeated hurriedly; and as she moved away
she heard him cry out on a last note of entreaty: “At least you’ll
let me see you once more?”

* * * * *

Lily, on regaining the Gormer grounds, struck rapidly across the
lawn toward the unfinished house, where she fancied that her
hostess might be speculating, not too resignedly, on the cause of
her delay; for, like many unpunctual persons, Mrs. Gormer disliked
to be kept waiting.

As Miss Bart reached the avenue, however, she saw a smart phaeton
with a high-stepping pair disappear behind the shrubbery in the
direction of the gate; and on the doorstep stood Mrs. Gormer, with
a glow of retrospective pleasure on her open countenance. At sight
of Lily the glow deepened to an embarrassed red, and she said
with a slight laugh: “Did you see my visitor? Oh, I thought you
came back by the avenue. It was Mrs. George Dorset—she said she’d
dropped in to make a neighbourly call.”

Lily met the announcement with her usual composure, though her
experience of Bertha’s idiosyncrasies would not have led her to
include the neighbourly instinct among them; and Mrs. Gormer,
relieved to see that she gave no sign of surprise, went on with
a deprecating laugh: “Of course what really brought her was
curiosity—she made me take her all over the house. But no one could
have been nicer—no airs, you know, and so good-natured: I can quite
see why people think her so fascinating.”

This surprising event, coinciding too completely with her
meeting with Dorset to be regarded as contingent upon it, had
yet immediately struck Lily with a vague sense of foreboding.
It was not in Bertha’s habits to be neighbourly, much less to
make advances to any one outside the immediate circle of her
affinities. She had always consistently ignored the world of outer
aspirants, or had recognized its individual members only when
prompted by motives of self-interest; and the very capriciousness
of her condescensions had, as Lily was aware, given them special
value in the eyes of the persons she distinguished. Lily saw
this now in Mrs. Gormer’s unconcealable complacency, and in the
happy irrelevance with which, for the next day or two, she quoted
Bertha’s opinions and speculated on the origin of her gown. All
the secret ambitions which Mrs. Gormer’s native indolence, and the
attitude of her companions, kept in habitual abeyance, were now
germinating afresh in the glow of Bertha’s advances; and whatever
the cause of the latter, Lily saw that, if they were followed up,
they were likely to have a disturbing effect upon her own future.

She had arranged to break the length of her stay with her new
friends by one or two visits to other acquaintances as recent;
and on her return from this somewhat depressing excursion she was
immediately conscious that Mrs. Dorset’s influence was still in
the air. There had been another exchange of visits, a tea at a
country-club, an encounter at a hunt ball; there was even a rumour
of an approaching dinner, which Mattie Gormer, with an unnatural
effort at discretion, tried to smuggle out of the conversation
whenever Miss Bart took part in it.

The latter had already planned to return to town after a farewell
Sunday with her friends; and, with Gerty Farish’s aid, had
discovered a small private hotel where she might establish herself
for the winter. The hotel being on the edge of a fashionable
neighbourhood, the price of the few square feet she was to
occupy was considerably in excess of her means; but she found a
justification for her dislike of poorer quarters in the argument
that, at this particular juncture, it was of the utmost importance
to keep up a show of prosperity. In reality, it was impossible for
her, while she had the means to pay her way for a week ahead, to
lapse into a form of existence like Gerty Farish’s. She had never
been so near the brink of insolvency; but she could at least manage
to meet her weekly hotel bill, and having settled the heaviest of
her previous debts out of the money she had received from Trenor,
she had a still fair margin of credit to go upon. The situation,
however, was not agreeable enough to lull her to complete
unconsciousness of its insecurity. Her rooms, with their cramped
outlook down a sallow vista of brick walls and fire-escapes, her
lonely meals in the dark restaurant with its surcharged ceiling and
haunting smell of coffee—all these material discomforts, which were
yet to be accounted as so many privileges soon to be withdrawn,
kept constantly before her the disadvantages of her state; and her
mind reverted the more insistently to Mrs. Fisher’s counsels. Beat
about the question as she would, she knew the outcome of it was
that she must try to marry Rosedale; and in this conviction she was
fortified by an unexpected visit from George Dorset.

She found him, on the first Sunday after her return to town,
pacing her narrow sitting-room to the imminent peril of the few
knick-knacks with which she had tried to disguise its plush
exuberances; but the sight of her seemed to quiet him, and he said
meekly that he hadn’t come to bother her—that he asked only to be
allowed to sit for half an hour and talk of anything she liked.
In reality, as she knew, he had but one subject: himself and his
wretchedness; and it was the need of her sympathy that had drawn
him back. But he began with a pretence of questioning her about
herself, and as she replied, she saw that, for the first time,
a faint realization of her plight penetrated the dense surface
of his self-absorption. Was it possible that her old beast of an
aunt had actually cut her off? That she was living alone like this
because there was no one else for her to go to, and that she really
hadn’t more than enough to keep alive on till the wretched little
legacy was paid? The fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in
him, but he was suffering so intensely that he had a faint glimpse
of what other sufferings might mean—and, as she perceived, an
almost simultaneous perception of the way in which her particular
misfortunes might serve him.

When at length she dismissed him, on the pretext that she must
dress for dinner, he lingered entreatingly on the threshold to
blurt out: “It’s been such a comfort—do say you’ll let me see you
again—” But to this direct appeal it was impossible to give an
assent; and she said with friendly decisiveness: “I’m sorry—but you
know why I can’t.”

He coloured to the eyes, pushed the door shut, and stood before her
embarrassed but insistent. “I know how you might, if you would—if
things were different—and it lies with you to make them so. It’s
just a word to say, and you put me out of my misery!”

Their eyes met, and for a second she trembled again with the
nearness of the temptation. “You’re mistaken; I know nothing; I saw
nothing,” she exclaimed, striving, by sheer force of reiteration,
to build a barrier between herself and her peril; and as he turned
away, groaning out “You sacrifice us both,” she continued to
repeat, as if it were a charm: “I know nothing—absolutely nothing.”

* * * * *

Lily had seen little of Rosedale since her illuminating talk with
Mrs. Fisher, but on the two or three occasions when they had met
she was conscious of having distinctly advanced in his favour.
There could be no doubt that he admired her as much as ever, and
she believed it rested with herself to raise his admiration to
the point where it should bear down the lingering counsels of
expediency. The task was not an easy one; but neither was it easy,
in her long sleepless nights, to face the thought of what George
Dorset was so clearly ready to offer. Baseness for baseness, she
hated the other least: there were even moments when a marriage with
Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her difficulties.
She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day of
plighting: after that everything faded into a haze of material
well-being, in which the personality of her benefactor remained
mercifully vague. She had learned, in her long vigils, that there
were certain things not good to think of, certain midnight images
that must at any cost be exorcised—and one of these was the image
of herself as Rosedale’s wife.

Carry Fisher, on the strength, as she frankly owned, of the
Brys’ Newport success, had taken for the autumn months a small
house at Tuxedo; and thither Lily was bound on the Sunday after
Dorset’s visit. Though it was nearly dinner-time when she arrived,
her hostess was still out, and the firelit quiet of the small
silent house descended on her spirit with a sense of peace and
familiarity. It may be doubted if such an emotion had ever before
been evoked by Carry Fisher’s surroundings; but, contrasted to
the world in which Lily had lately lived, there was an air of
repose and stability in the very placing of the furniture, and in
the quiet competence of the parlour-maid who led her up to her
room. Mrs. Fisher’s unconventionality was, after all, a merely
superficial divergence from an inherited social creed, while the
manners of the Gormer circle represented their first attempt to
formulate such a creed for themselves.

It was the first time since her return from Europe that Lily had
found herself in a congenial atmosphere, and the stirring of
familiar associations had almost prepared her, as she descended
the stairs before dinner, to enter upon a group of her old
acquaintances. But this expectation was instantly checked by the
reflection that the friends who remained loyal were precisely those
who would be least willing to expose her to such encounters; and
it was hardly with surprise that she found, instead, Mr. Rosedale
kneeling domestically on the drawing-room hearth before his
hostess’s little girl.

Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily;
yet she could not but notice a quality of homely goodness in his
advances to the child. They were not, at any rate, the premeditated
and perfunctory endearments of the guest under his hostess’s
eye, for he and the little girl had the room to themselves; and
something in his attitude made him seem a simple and kindly being
compared to the small critical creature who endured his homage.
Yes, he would be kind—Lily, from the threshold, had time to
feel—kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the
predatory creature with his mate. She had but a moment in which
to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man mitigated
her repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate
form; for at sight of her he was immediately on his feet again, the
florid and dominant Rosedale of Mattie Gormer’s drawing-room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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