The House of Mirth

ook II, Chapter 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She continued to smile. “I like your frankness; but I am afraid our
friendship can hardly continue on those terms.” She turned away, as
though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and
he followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having
after all kept the game in her own hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You think you can?” broke from her ironically.

“Why, yes, I do: in one way, that is.” He stood before her, his
hands in his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid
waistcoat. “It’s this way, you see: I’ve had a pretty steady grind
of it these last years, working up my social position. Think it’s
funny I should say that? Why should I mind saying I want to get
into society? A man ain’t ashamed to say he wants to own a racing
stable or a picture gallery. Well, a taste for society’s just
another kind of hobby. Perhaps I want to get even with some of
the people who cold-shouldered me last year—put it that way if it
sounds better. Anyhow, I want to have the run of the best houses;
and I’m getting it too, little by little. But I know the quickest
way to queer yourself with the right people is to be seen with the
wrong ones; and that’s the reason I want to avoid mistakes.”

Miss Bart continued to stand before him in a silence that might
have expressed either mockery or a half-reluctant respect for his
candour, and after a moment’s pause he went on: “There it is, you
see. I’m more in love with you than ever, but if I married you now
I’d queer myself for good and all, and everything I’ve worked for
all these years would be wasted.”

She received this with a look from which all tinge of resentment
had faded. After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had
so long moved it was refreshing to step into the open daylight of
an avowed expediency.

“I understand you,” she said. “A year ago I should have been of
use to you, and now I should be an encumbrance; and I like you for
telling me so quite honestly.” She extended her hand with a smile.

Again the gesture had a disturbing effect upon Mr. Rosedale’s
self-command. “By George, you’re a dead game sport, you are!” he
exclaimed; and as she began once more to move away, he broke out
suddenly—“Miss Lily—stop. You know I don’t believe those stories—I
believe they were all got up by a woman who didn’t hesitate to
sacrifice you to her own convenience——”

Lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain: it was easier to
endure his insolence than his commiseration.

“You are very kind; but I don’t think we need discuss the matter
farther.”

But Rosedale’s natural imperviousness to hints made it easy for him
to brush such resistance aside. “I don’t want to discuss anything;
I just want to put a plain case before you,” he persisted.

She paused in spite of herself, held by the note of a new purpose
in his look and tone; and he went on, keeping his eyes firmly
upon her: “The wonder to me is that you’ve waited so long to get
square with that woman, when you’ve had the power in your hands.”
She continued silent under the rush of astonishment that his
words produced, and he moved a step closer to ask with low-toned
directness: “Why don’t you use those letters of hers you bought
last year?”

Lily stood speechless under the shock of the interrogation. In the
words preceding it she had conjectured, at most, an allusion to
her supposed influence over George Dorset; nor did the astonishing
indelicacy of the reference diminish the likelihood of Rosedale’s
resorting to it. But now she saw how far short of the mark she had
fallen; and the surprise of learning that he had discovered the
secret of the letters left her, for the moment, unconscious of the
special use to which he was in the act of putting his knowledge.

Her temporary loss of self-possession gave him time to press his
point; and he went on quickly, as though to secure completer
control of the situation: “You see I know where you stand—I know
how completely she’s in your power. That sounds like stage-talk,
don’t it?—but there’s a lot of truth in some of those old gags;
and I don’t suppose you bought those letters simply because you’re
collecting autographs.”

She continued to look at him with a deepening bewilderment: her
only clear impression resolved itself into a scared sense of his
power.

“You’re wondering how I found out about ’em?” he went on, answering
her look with a note of conscious pride. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten
that I’m the owner of the Benedick—but never mind about that now.
Getting on to things is a mighty useful accomplishment in business,
and I’ve simply extended it to my private affairs. For this IS
partly my affair, you see—at least, it depends on you to make it
so. Let’s look the situation straight in the eye. Mrs. Dorset, for
reasons we needn’t go into, did you a beastly bad turn last spring.
Everybody knows what Mrs. Dorset is, and her best friends wouldn’t
believe her on oath where their own interests were concerned; but
as long as they’re out of the row it’s much easier to follow her
lead than to set themselves against it, and you’ve simply been
sacrificed to their laziness and selfishness. Isn’t that a pretty
fair statement of the case?—Well, some people say you’ve got the
neatest kind of an answer in your hands: that George Dorset would
marry you tomorrow, if you’d tell him all you know, and give him
the chance to show the lady the door. I daresay he would; but you
don’t seem to care for that particular form of getting even, and,
taking a purely business view of the question, I think you’re
right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out with perfectly clean
hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to get Bertha
Dorset to back you up, instead of trying to fight her.”

He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time
for the expression of her gathering resistance; and as he pressed
on, expounding and elucidating his idea with the directness of
the man who has no doubts of his cause, she found the indignation
gradually freezing on her lip, found herself held fast in the grasp
of his argument by the mere cold strength of its presentation.
There was no time now to wonder how he had heard of her obtaining
the letters: all her world was dark outside the monstrous glare
of his scheme for using them. And it was not, after the first
moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-bound, subdued
to his will; it was rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost
cravings. He would marry her tomorrow if she could regain Bertha
Dorset’s friendship; and to induce the open resumption of that
friendship, and the tacit retractation of all that had caused its
withdrawal, she had only to put to the lady the latent menace
contained in the packet so miraculously delivered into her hands.
Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this course over that which
poor Dorset had pressed upon her. The other plan depended for its
success on the infliction of an open injury, while this reduced
the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third
person need have the remotest hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of
businesslike give-and-take, this understanding took on the harmless
air of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a
revision of boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it
as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every
concession had its recognized equivalent: Lily’s tired mind was
fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical estimates into a
region of concrete weights and measures.

Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only
a gradual acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-reaching
perception of the chances it offered; for as she continued to stand
before him without speaking, he broke out, with a quick return
upon himself: “You see how simple it is, don’t you? Well, don’t be
carried away by the idea that it’s TOO simple. It isn’t exactly
as if you’d started in with a clean bill of health. Now we’re
talking let’s call things by their right names, and clear the whole
business up. You know well enough that Bertha Dorset couldn’t have
touched you if there hadn’t been—well—questions asked before—little
points of interrogation, eh? Bound to happen to a good-looking girl
with stingy relatives, I suppose; anyhow, they DID happen, and she
found the ground prepared for her. Do you see where I’m coming out?
You don’t want these little questions cropping up again. It’s one
thing to get Bertha Dorset into line—but what you want is to keep
her there. You can frighten her fast enough—but how are you going
to keep her frightened? By showing her that you’re as powerful as
she is. All the letters in the world won’t do that for you as you
are now; but with a big backing behind you, you’ll keep her just
where you want her to be. That’s MY share in the business—that’s
what I’m offering you. You can’t put the thing through without
me—don’t run away with any idea that you can. In six months you’d
be back again among your old worries, or worse ones; and here I am,
ready to lift you out of ’em tomorrow if you say so. DO you say so,
Miss Lily?” he added, moving suddenly nearer.

The words, and the movement which accompanied them, combined to
startle Lily out of the state of tranced subservience into which
she had insensibly slipped. Light comes in devious ways to the
groping consciousness, and it came to her now through the disgusted
perception that her would-be accomplice assumed, as a matter of
course, the likelihood of her distrusting him and perhaps trying
to cheat him of his share of the spoils. This glimpse of his inner
mind seemed to present the whole transaction in a new aspect, and
she saw that the essential baseness of the act lay in its freedom
from risk.

She drew back with a quick gesture of rejection, saying, in a
voice that was a surprise to her own ears: “You are mistaken—quite
mistaken—both in the facts and in what you infer from them.”

Rosedale stared a moment, puzzled by her sudden dash in a direction
so different from that toward which she had appeared to be letting
him guide her.

“Now what on earth does that mean? I thought we understood each
other!” he exclaimed; and to her murmur of “Ah, we do NOW,” he
retorted with a sudden burst of violence: “I suppose it’s because
the letters are to HIM, then? Well, I’ll be damned if I see what
thanks you’ve got from him!”