The House of Mirth (33 page)

He swung round on her distrustfully. “Why not Selden? He's a lawyer, isn't he? One will do as well as another in a case like this.”

“As badly as another, you mean. I thought you relied on
me
to help you.”

“You do—by being so sweet and patient with me. If it hadn't been for you I'd have ended the thing long ago. But now it's got to end.” He rose suddenly, straightening himself with an effort. “You can't want to see me ridiculous.”

She looked at him kindly. “That's just it.” Then, after a moment's pondering, almost to her own surprise she broke out with a flash of inspiration: “Well, go over and see Mr. Selden. You'll have time to do it before dinner.”

“Oh,
dinner
—” he mocked her; but she left him with the smiling rejoinder: “Dinner on board, remember; we'll put it off till nine if you like.”

It was past four already; and when a cab had dropped her at the quay and she stood waiting for the gig to put off for her, she began to wonder what had been happening on the yacht. Of Silverton's whereabouts there had been no mention. Had he returned to the
Sabrina
? Or could Bertha—the dread alternative sprang on her suddenly—could Bertha, left to herself, have gone ashore to rejoin him? Lily's heart stood still at the thought. All her concern had hitherto been for young Silverton, not only because, in such affairs, the woman's instinct is to side with the man, but because his case made a peculiar appeal to her sympathies. He was so desperately in earnest, poor youth, and his earnestness was of so different a quality from Bertha's, though hers too was desperate enough. The difference was that Bertha was in earnest only about herself, while he was in earnest about her. But now, at the actual crisis, this difference seemed to throw the weight of destitution on Bertha's side, since at least he had her to suffer for and she had only herself.

At any rate, viewed less ideally, all the disadvantages of such a situation were for the woman; and it was to Bertha that Lily's sympathies now went out. She was not fond of Bertha Dorset, but neither was she without a sense of obligation, the heavier for having so little personal liking to sustain it. Bertha had been kind to her, they had lived together during the last months on terms of easy friendship, and the sense of friction of which Lily had recently become aware seemed to make it the more urgent that she should work undividedly in her friend's interest.

It was in Bertha's interest, certainly, that she had dispatched Dorset to consult with Lawrence Selden. Once the grotesqueness of the situation accepted, she had seen at a glance that it was the safest in which Dorset could find himself. Who but Selden could thus miraculously combine the skill to save Bertha with the obligation of doing so? The consciousness that much skill would be required made Lily rest thankfully in the greatness of the obligation. Since he would
have
to pull Bertha through she could trust him to find a way; and she put the fulness of her trust in the telegram she managed to send him on her way to the quay.

Thus far, then, Lily felt that she had done well; and the conviction strengthened her for the task that remained. She and Bertha had never been on confidential terms, but at such a crisis the barriers of reserve must surely fall: Dorset's wild allusions to the scene of the morning made Lily feel that they were down already and that any attempt to rebuild them would be beyond Bertha's strength. She pictured the poor creature shivering behind her fallen defences and awaiting with suspense the moment when she could take refuge in the first shelter that offered. If only that shelter had not already offered itself elsewhere! As the gig traversed the short distance between the quay and the yacht, Lily grew more than ever alarmed at the possible consequences of her long absence. What if the wretched Bertha, finding in all the long hours no soul to turn to—but by this time Lily's eager foot was on the side-ladder, and her first step on the
Sabrina
showed the worst of her apprehensions to be unfounded; for there, in the luxurious shade of the after-deck, the wretched Bertha, in full command of her usual attenuated elegance, sat dispensing tea to the Duchess of Beltshire and Lord Hubert.

The sight filled Lily with such surprise that she felt that Bertha, at least, must read its meaning in her look, and she was proportionately disconcerted by the blankness of the look returned. But in an instant she saw that Mrs. Dorset had, of necessity, to look blank before the others and that to mitigate the effect of her own surprise, she must at once produce some simple reason for it. The long habit of rapid transitions made it easy for her to exclaim to the Duchess: “Why, I thought you'd gone back to the Princess!” and this sufficed for the lady she addressed, if it was hardly enough for Lord Hubert.

At least it opened the way to a lively explanation of how the Duchess was, in fact, going back the next moment, but had first rushed out to the yacht for a word with Mrs. Dorset on the subject of to-morrow's dinner—the dinner with the Brys, to which Lord Hubert had finally insisted on dragging them.

“To save my neck, you know!” he explained with a glance that appealed to Lily for some recognition of his promptness; and the Duchess added, with her noble candour: “Mr. Bry has promised him a tip, and he says if we go he'll pass it on to us.”

This led to some final pleasantries, in which, as it seemed to Lily, Mrs. Dorset bore her part with astounding bravery, and at the close of which Lord Hubert, from half-way down the side-ladder, called back with an air of numbering heads: “And of course we may count on Dorset too?”

“Oh, count on him,” his wife assented gaily. She was keeping up well to the last—but as she turned back from waving her adieux over the side, Lily said to herself that the mask must drop and the soul of fear look out.

Mrs. Dorset turned back slowly; perhaps she wanted time to steady her muscles; at any rate, they were still under perfect control when, dropping once more into her seat behind the tea-table, she remarked to Miss Bart with a faint touch of irony: “I suppose I ought to say good morning.”

If it was a cue, Lily was ready to take it, though with only the vaguest sense of what was expected of her in return. There was something unnerving in the contemplation of Mrs. Dorset's composure, and she had to force the light tone in which she answered: “I tried to see you this morning, but you were not yet up.”

“No—I got to bed late. After we missed you at the station I thought we ought to wait for you till the last train.” She spoke very gently, but with just the least tinge of reproach.

“You missed us? You waited for us at the station?” Now indeed Lily was too far adrift in bewilderment to measure the other's words or keep watch on her own. “But I thought you didn't get to the station till after the last train had left!”

Mrs. Dorset, examining her between lowered lids, met this with the immediate query: “Who told you that?”

“George—I saw him just now in the gardens.”

“Ah, is that George's version? Poor George—he was in no state to remember what I told him. He had one of his worst attacks this morning, and I packed him off to see the doctor. Do you know if he found him?”

Lily, still lost in conjecture, made no reply, and Mrs. Dorset settled herself indolently in her seat. “He'll wait to see him; he was horribly frightened about himself. It's very bad for him to be worried, and whenever anything upsetting happens, it always brings on an attack.”

This time Lily felt sure that a cue was being pressed on her, but it was put forth with such startling suddenness and with so incredible an air of ignoring what it led up to that she could only falter out doubtfully: “Anything upsetting?”

“Yes—such as having you so conspicuously on his hands in the small hours. You know, my dear, you're rather a big responsibility in such a scandalous place after midnight.”

At that—at the complete unexpectedness and the inconceivable audacity of it—Lily could not restrain the tribute of an astonished laugh.

“Well, really—considering it was you who burdened him with the responsibility!”

Mrs. Dorset took this with an exquisite mildness. “By not having the superhuman cleverness to discover you in that frightful rush for the train? Or the imagination to believe that you'd take it without us—you and he all alone—instead of waiting quietly in the station till we
did
manage to meet you?”

Lily's colour rose; it was growing clear to her that Bertha was pursuing an object, following a line she had marked out for herself. Only, with such a doom impending, why waste time in these childish efforts to avert it? The puerility of the attempt disarmed Lily's indignation; did it not prove how horribly the poor creature was frightened?

“No; by our simply all keeping together at Nice,” she returned.

“Keeping together? When it was you who seized the first opportunity to rush off with the Duchess and her friends? My dear Lily, you are not a child to be led by the hand!”

“No—nor to be lectured, Bertha, really; if that's what you are doing to me now.”

Mrs. Dorset smiled on her reproachfully. “Lecture you—I? Heaven forbid! I was merely trying to give you a friendly hint. But it's usually the other way round, isn't it? I'm expected to take hints, not to give them; I've positively lived on them all these last months.”

“Hints—from me to you?” Lily repeated.

“Oh, negative ones merely—what not to be and to do and to see. And I think I've taken them to admiration. Only, my dear, if you'll let me say so, I didn't understand that one of my negative duties was
not
to warn you when you carried your imprudence too far.”

A chill of fear passed over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered treachery that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But compassion, in a moment, got the better of her instinctive recoil. What was this outpouring of senseless bitterness but the tracked creature's attempt to cloud the medium through which it was fleeing? It was on Lily's lips to exclaim: “You poor soul, don't double and turn—come straight back to me, and we'll find a way out!” But the words died under the impenetrable insolence of Bertha's smile. Lily sat silent, taking the brunt of it quietly, letting it spend itself on her to the last drop of its accumulated falseness; then, without a word, she rose and went down to her cabin.

M
iss Bart's telegram caught Lawrence Selden at the door of his hotel, and having read it, he turned back to wait for Dorset. The message necessarily left large gaps for conjecture, but all that he had recently heard and seen made these but too easy to fill in. On the whole he was surprised, for though he had perceived that the situation contained all the elements of an explosion he had often enough in the range of his personal experience, seen just such combinations subside into harmlessness. Still, Dorset's spasmodic temper and his wife's reckless disregard of appearances gave the situation a peculiar insecurity, and it was less from the sense of any special relation to the case than from a purely professional zeal that Selden resolved to guide the pair to safety. Whether, in the present instance, safety for either lay in repairing so damaged a tie, it was no business of his to consider; he had only, on general principles, to think of averting a scandal, and his desire to avert it was increased by his fear of its involving Miss Bart. There was nothing specific in this apprehension; he merely wished to spare her the embarrassment of being ever so remotely connected with the public washing of the Dorset linen.

How exhaustive and unpleasant such a process would be, he saw even more vividly after his two hours' talk with poor Dorset. If anything came out at all, it would be such a vast unpacking of accumulated moral rags as left him, after his visitor had gone, with the feeling that he must fling open the windows and have his room swept out. But nothing should come out; and happily for his side of the case, the dirty rags, however pieced together, could not, without considerable difficulty, be turned into a homogeneous grievance. The torn edges did not always fit—there were missing bits, there were disparities of size and colour, all of which it was naturally Selden's business to make the most of in putting them under his client's eye. But to a man in Dorset's mood the completest demonstration could not carry conviction, and Selden saw that for the moment all he could do was to soothe and temporize, to offer sympathy and to counsel prudence. He let Dorset depart charged to the brim with the sense that, till their next meeting, he must maintain a strictly noncommittal attitude, that, in short, his share in the game consisted for the present in looking on. Selden knew, however, that he could not long keep such violences in equilibrium; and he promised to meet Dorset the next morning at an hotel in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile, he counted not a little on the reaction of weakness and self-distrust that in such natures follows on every unwonted expenditure of moral force; and his telegraphic reply to Miss Bart consisted simply in the injunction: “Assume that everything is as usual.”

On this assumption, in fact, the early part of the following day was lived through. Dorset, as if in obedience to Lily's imperative bidding, had actually returned in time for a late dinner on the yacht. The repast had been the most difficult moment of the day. Dorset was sunk in one of the abysmal silences which so commonly followed on what his wife called his “attacks” that it was easy before the servants to refer it to this cause; but Bertha herself seemed, perversely enough, little disposed to make use of this obvious means of protection. She simply left the brunt of the situation on her husband's hands, as if too absorbed in a grievance of her own to suspect that she might be the object of one herself. To Lily this attitude was the most ominous, because the most perplexing, element in the situation. As she tried to fan the weak flicker of talk, to build up, again and again, the crumbling structure of “appearances,” her own attention was perpetually distracted by the question: “What on earth can she be driving at?” There was something positively exasperating in Bertha's attitude of isolated defiance. If only she would have given her friend a hint they might still have worked together successfully; but how could Lily be of use while she was thus obstinately shut out from participation? To be of use was what she honestly wanted; and not for her own sake but for the Dorsets'. She had not thought of her own situation at all; she was simply engrossed in trying to put a little order in theirs. But the close of the short, dreary evening left her with a sense of effort hopelessly wasted. She had not tried to see Dorset alone; she had positively shrunk from a renewal of his confidences. It was Bertha whose confidence she sought and who should as eagerly have invited her own; and Bertha, as if in the infatuation of self-destruction, was actually pushing away her rescuing hand.