The House of Mirth (49 page)

Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.

A change had come over Selden's face as she spoke. Its guarded look had yielded to an expression still un-tinged by personal emotion, but full of a gentle understanding.

“I am glad to have you tell me that; but nothing I have said has really made the difference. The difference is in yourself—it will always be there. And since it
is
there, it can't really matter to you what people think: you are so sure that your friends will always understand you.”

“Ah, don't say that; don't say that what you have told me has made no difference. It seems to shut me out, to leave me all alone with the other people.” She had risen and stood before him, once more completely mastered by the inner urgency of the moment. The consciousness of his half-divined reluctance had vanished. Whether he wished it or not, he must see her wholly for once before they parted.

Her voice had gathered strength, and she looked him gravely in the eyes as she continued. “Once—twice—you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake: I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me—I understood. It was too late for happiness, but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have lived on; don't take it from me now! Even in my worst moments it has been like a little light in the darkness. Some women are strong enough to be good by themselves, but I needed the help of your belief in me. Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down. And then I remembered—I remembered your saying that such a life could never satisfy me; and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could. That is what you did for me; that is what I wanted to thank you for. I wanted to tell you that I have always remembered, and that I have tried—tried hard—”

She broke off suddenly. Her tears had risen again, and in drawing out her handkerchief, her fingers touched the packet in the folds of her dress. A wave of colour suffused her, and the words died on her lips. Then she lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered voice.

“I have tried hard, but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!”

Her lips wavered into a smile: she had been distracted by the whimsical remembrance of the confidences she had made to him, two years earlier, in that very room. Then she had been planning to marry Percy Gryce; what was it she was planning now?

The blood had risen strongly under Selden's dark skin, but his emotion showed itself only in an added seriousness of manner.

“You have something to tell me; do you mean to marry?” he said abruptly.

Lily's eyes did not falter, but a look of wonder, of puzzled self-interrogation, formed itself slowly in their depths. In the light of his question, she had paused to ask herself if her decision had really been taken when she entered the room.

“You always told me I should have to come to it sooner or later!” she said with a faint smile.

“And you have come to it now?”

“I shall have to come to it—presently. But there is something else I must come to first.” She paused again, trying to transmit to her voice the steadiness of her recovered smile. “There is some one I must say good-bye to. Oh, not
you
—we are sure to see each other again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you; I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently, she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you; and she'll be no trouble, she'll take up no room.”

She went toward him, and put out her hand, still smiling. “Will you let her stay with you?” she asked.

He caught her hand, and she felt in his the vibration of feeling that had not yet risen to his lips. “Lily, can't I help you?” he exclaimed.

She looked at him gently. “Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well, you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the moment is gone; it was I who let it go. And one must go on living. Good-bye.”

She laid her other hand on his, and they looked at each other with a kind of solemnity, as though they stood in the presence of death. Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.

In its light, everything else dwindled and fell away from her. She understood now that she could not go forth and leave her old self with him: that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it must still continue to be hers.

Selden had retained her hand and continued to scrutinize her with a strange sense of foreboding. The external aspect of the situation had vanished for him as completely as for her; he felt it only as one of those rare moments which lift the veil from their faces as they pass.

“Lily,” he said in a low voice, “you mustn't speak in this way. I can't let you go without knowing what you mean to do. Things may change, but they don't pass. You can never go out of my life.”

She met his eyes with an illumined look. “No,” she said. “I see that now. Let us always be friends. Then I shall feel safe, whatever happens.”

“Whatever happens? What do you mean? What is going to happen?”

She turned away quietly and walked toward the hearth.

“Nothing at present, except that I am very cold, and that before I go you must make up the fire for me.”

She knelt on the hearth-rug, stretching her hands to the embers. Puzzled by the sudden change in her tone, he mechanically gathered a handful of wood from the basket and tossed it on the fire. As he did so, he noticed how thin her hands looked against the rising light of the flames. He saw too, under the loose lines of her dress, how the curves of her figure had shrunk to angularity; he remembered long afterward how the red play of the flame sharpened the depression of her nostrils and intensified the blackness of the shadows which struck up from her cheekbones to her eyes. She knelt there for a few moments in silence, a silence which he dared not break. When she rose, he fancied that he saw her draw something from her dress and drop it into the fire; but he hardly noticed the gesture at the time. His faculties seemed tranced, and he was still groping for the word to break the spell.

She went up to him and laid her hands on his shoulders. “Good-bye,” she said, and as he bent over her she touched his forehead with her lips.

T
he street-lamps were lit, but the rain had ceased, and there was a momentary revival of light in the upper sky.

Lily walked on unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant ether which emanates from the high moments of life. But gradually it shrank away from her, and she felt the dull pavement beneath her feet. The sense of weariness returned with accumulated force, and for a moment she felt that she could walk no farther. She had reached the corner of Forty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and she remembered that in Bryant Park there were seats where she might rest.

That melancholy pleasure-ground was almost deserted when she entered it, and she sank down on an empty bench in the glare of an electric street-lamp. The warmth of the fire had passed out of her veins, and she told herself that she must not sit long in the penetrating dampness which struck up from the wet asphalt. But her will-power seemed to have spent itself in a last great effort, and she was lost in the blank reaction which follows on an unwonted expenditure of energy. And besides, what was there to go home to? Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room, that silence of the night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the most discordant noises: that and the bottle of chloral by her bed. The thought of the chloral was the only spot of light in the dark prospect; she could feel its lulling influence stealing over her already. But she was troubled by the thought that it was losing its power; she dared not go back to it too soon. Of late the sleep it had brought her had been more broken and less profound; there had been nights when she was perpetually floating up through it to consciousness. What if the effect of the drug should gradually fail, as all narcotics were said to fail? She remembered the chemist's warning against increasing the dose; and she had heard before of the capricious and incalculable action of the drug. Her dread of returning to a sleepless night was so great that she lingered on, hoping that excessive weariness would reinforce the waning power of the chloral.

Night had now closed in, and the roar of traffic in Forty-second Street was dying out. As complete darkness fell on the square, the lingering occupants of the benches rose and dispersed; but now and then a stray figure, hurrying homeward, struck across the path where Lily sat, looming black for a moment in the white circle of electric light. One or two of these passers-by slackened their pace to glance curiously at her lonely figure, but she was hardly conscious of their scrutiny.

Suddenly, however, she became aware that one of the passing shadows remained stationary between her line of vision and the gleaming asphalt, and raising her eyes she saw a young woman bending over her.

“Excuse me—are you sick? Why, it's Miss Bart!” a half-familiar voice exclaimed.

Lily looked up. The speaker was a poorly dressed young woman with a bundle under her arm. Her face had the air of unwholesome refinement which ill health and overwork may produce, but its common prettiness was redeemed by the strong and generous curve of the lips.

“You don't remember me,” she continued, brightening with the pleasure of recognition, “but I'd know you anywhere, I've thought of you such a lot. I guess my folks all know your name by heart. I was one of the girls at Miss Farish's club; you helped me to go to the country that time I had lung trouble. My name's Nettie Struther. It was Nettie Crane then, but I daresay you don't remember that either.”

Yes: Lily was beginning to remember. The episode of Nettie Crane's timely rescue from disease had been one of the most satisfying incidents of her connection with Gerty's charitable work. She had furnished the girl with the means to go to a sanatorium in the mountains; it struck her now with a peculiar irony that the money she had used had been Gus Trenor's.

She tried to reply, to assure the speaker that she had not forgotten; but her voice failed in the effort, and she felt herself sinking under a great wave of physical weakness. Nettie Struther, with a startled exclamation, sat down and slipped a shabbily clad arm behind her back.

“Why, Miss Bart, you
are
sick. Just lean on me a little till you feel better.”

A faint glow of returning strength seemed to pass into Lily from the pressure of the supporting arm.

“I'm only tired; it is nothing,” she found voice to say in a moment; and then, as she met the timid appeal of her companion's eyes, she added involuntarily: “I have been unhappy—in great trouble.”

“
You
in trouble? I've always thought of you as being so high up, where everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real mean and got to wondering why things were so queerly fixed in the world, I used to remember that
you
were having a lovely time, anyhow, and that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere. But you mustn't sit here too long; it's fearfully damp. Don't you feel strong enough to walk on a little ways now?” she broke off.

“Yes—yes; I must go home,” Lily murmured, rising.

Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin, shabby figure at her side. She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of over work and anæmic parentage, one of the superfluous fragments of life destined to be swept prematurely into that social refuse heap of which Lily had so lately expressed her dread. But Nettie Struther's frail envelope was now alive with hope and energy; whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be cast into the refuse heap without a struggle.

“I am very glad to have seen you,” Lily continued, summoning a smile to her unsteady lips. “It will be my turn to think of you as happy, and the world will seem a less unjust place to me too.”

“Oh, but I can't leave you like this; you're not fit to go home alone. And I can't go with you either!” Nettie Struther wailed with a start of recollection. “You see, it's my husband's night-shift—he's a motor-man—and the friend I leave the baby with has to step upstairs to get
her
husband's supper at seven. I didn't tell you I had a baby, did I? She'll be four months old day after tomorrow, and to look at her you wouldn't think I'd ever had a sick day. I'd give anything to show you the baby, Miss Bart, and we live right down the street here—it's only three blocks off.” She lifted her eyes tentatively to Lily's face, and then added with a burst of courage: “Why won't you get right into the cars and come home with me while I get baby's supper? It's real warm in our kitchen, and you can rest there, and I'll take
you
home as soon as ever she drops off to sleep.”