The House of Mirth (24 page)

“Go and sit down there, please; I've got a word to say to you.”

Lily's quick temper was getting the better of her fears. She drew herself up and moved toward the door.

“If you have anything to say to me, you must say it another time. I shall go up to Judy unless you call a cab for me at once.”

He burst into a laugh. “Go upstairs and welcome, my dear; but you won't find Judy. She ain't there.”

Lily cast a startled look upon him. “Do you mean that Judy is not in the house—not in town?” she exclaimed.

“That's just what I do mean,” returned Trenor, his bluster sinking to sullenness under her look.

“Nonsense—I don't believe you. I am going upstairs,” she said impatiently.

He drew unexpectedly aside, letting her reach the threshold unimpeded.

“Go up and welcome; but my wife is at Bellomont.” But Lily had a flash of reassurance. “If she hadn't come she would have sent me word—”

“She did; she telephoned me this afternoon to let you know.”

“I received no message.”

“I didn't send any.”

The two measured each other for a moment, but Lily still saw her opponent through a blur of scorn that made all other considerations indistinct.

“I can't imagine your object in playing such a stupid trick on me; but if you have fully gratified your peculiar sense of humour, I must again ask you to send for a cab.”

It was the wrong note, and she knew it as she spoke. To be stung by irony it is not necessary to understand it, and the angry streaks on Trenor's face might have been raised by an actual lash.

“Look here, Lily, don't take that high and mighty tone with me.” He had again moved toward the door, and in her instinctive shrinking from him she let him regain command of the threshold. “I
did
play a trick on you; I own up to it; but if you think I'm ashamed, you're mistaken. Lord knows I've been patient enough—I've hung round and looked like an ass. And all the while you were letting a lot of other fellows make up to you, letting 'em make fun of me, I daresay. I'm not sharp and can't dress my friends up to look funny as you do, but I can tell when it's being done to me. I can tell fast enough when I'm made a fool of.”

“Ah, I shouldn't have thought that!” flashed from Lily; but her laugh dropped to silence under his look.

“No; you wouldn't have thought it; but you'll know better now. That's what you're here for to-night. I've been waiting for a quiet time to talk things over, and now I've got it I mean to make you hear me out.”

His first rush of inarticulate resentment had been followed by a steadiness and concentration of tone more disconcerting to Lily than the excitement preceding it. For a moment her presence of mind forsook her. She had more than once been in situations where a quick sword-play of wit had been needful to cover her retreat; but her frightened heart-throbs told her that here such skill would not avail.

To gain time she repeated: “I don't understand what you want.”

Trenor had pushed a chair between herself and the door. He threw himself in it and leaned back, looking up at her.

“I'll tell you what I want; I want to know just where you and I stand. Hang it, the man who pays for the dinner is generally allowed to have a seat at table.”

She flamed with anger and abasement and the sickening need of having to conciliate where she longed to humble.

“I don't know what you mean; but you must see, Gus, that I can't stay here talking to you at this hour—”

“Gad, you go to men's houses fast enough in broad daylight; strikes me you're not always so deuced careful of appearances.”

The brutality of the thrust gave her the sense of dizziness that follows on a physical blow. Rosedale had spoken then—this was the way men talked of her. She felt suddenly weak and defenceless; there was a throb of self-pity in her throat. But all the while another self was sharpening her to vigilance, whispering the terrified warning that every word and gesture must be measured.

“If you have brought me here to say insulting things—” she began.

Trenor laughed. “Don't talk stage-rot. I don't want to insult you. But a man's got his feelings, and you've played with mine too long. I didn't begin this business—kept out of the way, and left the track clear for the other chaps till you rummaged me out and set to work to make an ass of me—and an easy job you had of it, too. That's the trouble—it was too easy for you—you got reckless—thought you could turn me inside out and chuck me in the gutter like an empty purse. But, by gad, that ain't playing fair: that's dodging the rules of the game. Of course I know now what you wanted—it wasn't my beautiful eyes you were after—but I tell you what, Miss Lily, you've got to pay up for making me think so—”

He rose, squaring his shoulders aggressively, and stepped toward her with a reddening brow; but she held her footing, though every nerve tore at her to retreat as he advanced.

“Pay up?” she faltered. “Do you mean that I owe you money?”

He laughed again. “Oh, I'm not asking for payment in kind. But there's such a thing as fair play—and interest on one's money—and hang me if I've had as much as a look from you—”

“Your money? What have I to do with your money? You advised me how to invest mine—you must have seen I knew nothing of business—you told me it was all right—”

“It
was
all right—it is, Lily: you're welcome to all of it, and ten times more. I'm only asking for a word of thanks from you.” He was closer still, with a hand that grew formidable; and the frightened self in her was dragging the other down.

“I have thanked you; I've shown I was grateful. What more have you done than any friend might do, or any one accept from a friend?”

Trenor caught her up with a sneer. “I don't doubt you've accepted as much before—and chucked the other chaps as you'd like to chuck me. I don't care how you settled your score with them; if you fooled 'em I'm that much to the good. Don't stare at me like that—I know I'm not talking the way a man is supposed to talk to a girl—but, hang it, if you don't like it you can stop me quick enough—you know I'm mad about you—damn the money, there's plenty more of it—if
that
bothers you. I was a brute, Lily—Lily! Just look at me—”

Over and over her the sea of humiliation broke—wave crashing on wave so close that the moral shame was one with the physical dread. It seemed to her that self-esteem would have made her invulnerable, that it was her own dishonour which put a fearful solitude about her.

His touch was a shock to her drowning consciousness. She drew back from him with a desperate assumption of scorn.

“I've told you I don't understand—but if I owe you money you shall be paid—”

Trenor's face darkened to rage; her recoil of abhorrence had called out the primitive man.

“Ah—you'll borrow from Selden or Rosedale—and take your chances of fooling them as you've fooled me! Unless—unless you've settled your other scores already—and I'm the only one left out in the cold!”

She stood silent, frozen to her place. The words—the words were worse than the touch! Her heart was beating all over her body—in her throat, her limbs, her helpless, useless hands. Her eyes travelled despairingly about the room; they lit on the bell, and she remembered that help was in call. Yes, but scandal with it—a hideous mustering of tongues. No, she must fight her way out alone. It was enough that the servants knew her to be in the house with Trenor; there must be nothing to excite conjecture in her way of leaving it.

She raised her head, and achieved a last clear look at him.

“I am here alone with you,” she said. “What more have you to say?”

To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with a speechless stare. With his last gust of words the flame had died out, leaving him chill and humbled. It was as though a cold air had dispersed the fumes of his libations, and the situation loomed before him black and naked as the ruins of a fire. Old habits, old restraints, the hand of inherited order, plucked back the bewildered mind which passion had jolted from its ruts. Trenor's eye had the haggard look of the sleep-walker waked on a deathly ledge.

“Go home! Go away from here,” he stammered, and turning his back on her, walked toward the hearth.

The sharp release from her fears restored Lily to immediate lucidity. The collapse of Trenor's will left her in control, and she heard herself, in a voice that was her own, yet outside herself, bidding him ring for the servant, bidding him give the order for a hansom, directing him to put her in it when it came. Whence the strength came to her she knew not; but an insistent voice warned her that she must leave the house openly, and nerved her, in the hall before the hovering care-taker, to exchange light words with Trenor, and charge him with the usual messages for Judy, while all the while she shook with inward loathing. On the door-step, with the street before her, she felt a mad throb of liberation, intoxicating as the prisoner's first draught of free air; but the clearness of brain continued, and she noted the mute aspect of Fifth Avenue, guessed at the lateness of the hour, and even observed a man's figure—was there something half-familiar in its outline?—which, as she entered the hansom, turned from the opposite corner and vanished in the obscurity of the side-street.

But with the turn of the wheels, reaction came and shuddering darkness closed on her. “I can't think—I can't think,” she moaned, and leaned her head against the rattling side of the cab. She seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves in her, the one she had always known and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained. She had once picked up, in a house where she was staying, a translation of the
Eumenides,
and her imagination had been seized by the high terror of the scene where Orestes, in the cave of the oracle, finds his implacable huntresses asleep and snatches an hour's repose. Yes, the Furies might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the dark corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their wings was in her brain. She opened her eyes and saw the streets passing—the familiar, alien streets. All she looked on was the same and yet changed. There was a great gulf fixed between to-day and yesterday. Everything in the past seemed simple, natural, full of daylight—and she was alone in a place of darkness and pollution. Alone! It was the loneliness that frightened her. Her eyes fell on an illuminated clock at a street corner, and she saw that the hands marked the half-hour after eleven. Only half-past eleven—there were hours and hours left of the night! And she must spend them alone, shuddering sleepless on her bed. Her soft nature recoiled from this ordeal, which had none of the stimulus of conflict to goad her through it. Oh, the slow cold drip of the minutes on her head! She had a vision of herself lying on the black walnut bed—and the darkness would frighten her, and if she left the light burning the dreary details of the room would brand themselves forever on her brain. She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston's—its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers. To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs. But even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think of Mrs. Peniston's mind as offering shelter or comprehension to such misery as Lily's. As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude but compassion holding its breath.

She started up and looked forth on the passing streets. Gerty! They were nearing Gerty's corner. If only she could reach there before this labouring anguish burst from her breast to her lips—if only she could feel the hold of Gerty's arms while she shook in the ague-fit of fear that was coming upon her! She pushed up the door in the roof and called the address to the driver. It was not so late; Gerty might still be waking. And even if she were not, the sound of the bell would penetrate every recess of her tiny apartment and rouse her to answer her friend's call.

G
erty Farish, the morning after the Wellington Brys' entertainment, woke from dreams as happy as Lily's. If they were less vivid in hue, more subdued to the half-tints of her personality and her experience, they were for that very reason better suited to her mental vision. Such flashes of joy as Lily moved in would have blinded Miss Farish, who was accustomed, in the way of happiness, to such scant light as shone through the cracks of other people's lives.

Now she was the centre of a little illumination of her own: a mild but unmistakable beam, compounded of Lawrence Selden's growing kindness to herself and the discovery that he extended his liking to Lily Bart. If these two factors seem incompatible to the student of feminine psychology, it must be remembered that Gerty had always been a parasite in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other tables and content to look through the window at the banquet spread for her friends. Now that she was enjoying a little private feast of her own, it would have seemed incredibly selfish not to lay a plate for a friend; and there was no one with whom she would rather have shared her enjoyment than Miss Bart.

As to the nature of Selden's growing kindness, Gerty would no more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a butterfly's colours by knocking the dust from its wings. To seize on the wonder would be to brush off its bloom and perhaps see it fade and stiffen in her hand; better the sense of beauty palpitating out of reach while she held her breath and watched where it would alight. Yet Selden's manner at the Brys' had brought the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be beating in her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive, so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual manner had an absent-minded kindliness which she accepted, and was grateful for, as the liveliest sentiment her presence was likely to inspire; but she was quick to feel in him a change implying that for once she could give pleasure as well as receive it.