The House of Mirth
archway. Then there were Kauffmann nymphs garlanding the altar of
Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads and
marble architecture; and a Watteau group of lute-playing comedians,
lounging by a fountain in a sunlit glade.
Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in
Selden, leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even Gerty
Farish’s running commentary—“Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson looks!”
or: “That must be Kate Corby, to the right there, in purple”—did
not break the spell of the illusion. Indeed, so skilfully had the
personality of the actors been subdued to the scenes they figured
in that even the least imaginative of the audience must have felt
a thrill of contrast when the curtain suddenly parted on a picture
which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.
Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of
personality—the unanimous “Oh!” of the spectators was a tribute,
not to the brush-work of Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the flesh
and blood loveliness of Lily Bart. She had shown her artistic
intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could
embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It
was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s
canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams
of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a splendid
setting—she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo’s
Cleopatra—had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her
unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a picture without
distracting accessories of dress or surroundings. Her pale
draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood,
served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward
from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her
attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of
poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet
lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now
so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the
real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world,
and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which
her beauty was a part.
“Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there
isn’t a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to
know it!”
These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned
Van Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden’s
shoulder whenever the parting of the curtains presented any
exceptional opportunity for the study of the female outline,
affected their hearer in an unexpected way. It was not the first
time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and
hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his
view of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt.
This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which
she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment
on Miranda?
In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel
the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus
detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out
suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once
met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be
with her again.
He was roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers. “Wasn’t she too
beautiful, Lawrence? Don’t you like her best in that simple dress?
It makes her look like the real Lily—the Lily I know.”
He met Gerty Farish’s brimming gaze. “The Lily we know,” he
corrected; and his cousin, beaming at the implied understanding,
exclaimed joyfully: “I’ll tell her that! She always says you
dislike her.”
* * * * *
The performance over, Selden’s first impulse was to seek
Miss Bart. During the interlude of music which succeeded the
TABLEAUX, the actors had seated themselves here and there in the
audience, diversifying its conventional appearance by the varied
picturesqueness of their dress. Lily, however, was not among them,
and her absence served to protract the effect she had produced
on Selden: it would have broken the spell to see her too soon in
the surroundings from which accident had so happily detached her.
They had not met since the day of the Van Osburgh wedding, and on
his side the avoidance had been intentional. Tonight, however,
he knew that, sooner or later, he should find himself at her
side; and though he let the dispersing crowd drift him whither
it would, without making an immediate effort to reach her, his
procrastination was not due to any lingering resistance, but to the
desire to luxuriate a moment in the sense of complete surrender.
Lily had not an instant’s doubt as to the meaning of the murmur
greeting her appearance. No other tableau had been received with
that precise note of approval: it had obviously been called forth
by herself, and not by the picture she impersonated. She had feared
at the last moment that she was risking too much in dispensing with
the advantages of a more sumptuous setting, and the completeness
of her triumph gave her an intoxicating sense of recovered power.
Not caring to diminish the impression she had produced, she held
herself aloof from the audience till the movement of dispersal
before supper, and thus had a second opportunity of showing
herself to advantage, as the throng poured slowly into the empty
drawing-room where she was standing.
She was soon the centre of a group which increased and renewed
itself as the circulation became general, and the individual
comments on her success were a delightful prolongation of the
collective applause. At such moments she lost something of
her natural fastidiousness, and cared less for the quality of
the admiration received than for its quantity. Differences of
personality were merged in a warm atmosphere of praise, in which
her beauty expanded like a flower in sunlight; and if Selden had
approached a moment or two sooner he would have seen her turning
on Ned Van Alstyne and George Dorset the look he had dreamed of
capturing for himself.
Fortune willed, however, that the hurried approach of Mrs. Fisher,
as whose aide-de-camp Van Alstyne was acting, should break up the
group before Selden reached the threshold of the room. One or two
of the men wandered off in search of their partners for supper,
and the others, noticing Selden’s approach, gave way to him in
accordance with the tacit freemasonry of the ball-room. Lily was
therefore standing alone when he reached her; and finding the
expected look in her eye, he had the satisfaction of supposing he
had kindled it. The look did indeed deepen as it rested on him, for
even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily felt the quicker beat
of life that his nearness always produced. She read, too, in his
answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her triumph, and for
the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she cared to
be beautiful.
Selden had given her his arm without speaking. She took it in
silence, and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but
against the tide which was setting thither. The faces about her
flowed by like the streaming images of sleep: she hardly noticed
where Selden was leading her, till they passed through a glass
doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly in
the fragrant hush of a garden. Gravel grated beneath their feet,
and about them was the transparent dimness of a midsummer night.
Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the depths of foliage, and
whitened the spray of a fountain falling among lilies. The magic
place was deserted: there was no sound but the splash of the water
on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might have been
blown across a sleeping lake.
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene
as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have
surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see
the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry
sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the
sweetness of being alone in it together. At length Lily withdrew
her hand, and moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness
was outlined against the dusk of the branches. Selden followed her,
and still without speaking they seated themselves on a bench beside
the fountain.
Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a
child. “You never speak to me—you think hard things of me,” she
murmured.
“I think of you at any rate, God knows!” he said.
“Then why do we never see each other? Why can’t we be friends?
You promised once to help me,” she continued in the same tone, as
though the words were drawn from her unwillingly.
“The only way I can help you is by loving you,” Selden said in a
low voice.
She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion
of a flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips touched. She
drew back and rose from her seat. Selden rose too, and they stood
facing each other. Suddenly she caught his hand and pressed it a
moment against her cheek.
“Ah, love me, love me—but don’t tell me so!” she sighed with her
eyes in his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped
through the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the
room beyond.
Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the
transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but
presently he reentered the house and made his way through the
deserted rooms to the door. A few sumptuously-cloaked ladies were
already gathered in the marble vestibule, and in the coat-room he
found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.
The former, at Selden’s approach, paused in the careful selection
of a cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near the
door.
“Hallo, Selden, going too? You’re an Epicurean like myself, I see:
you don’t want to see all those goddesses gobbling terrapin. Gad,
what a show of good-looking women; but not one of ’em could touch
that little cousin of mine. Talk of jewels—what’s a woman want with
jewels when she’s got herself to show? The trouble is that all
these fal-bals they wear cover up their figures when they’ve got
’em. I never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has.”
“It’s not her fault if everybody don’t know it now,” growled
Trenor, flushed with the struggle of getting into his fur-lined
coat. “Damned bad taste, I call it—no, no cigar for me. You can’t
tell what you’re smoking in one of these new houses—likely as not
the CHEF buys the cigars. Stay for supper? Not if I know it! When
people crowd their rooms so that you can’t get near any one you
want to speak to, I’d as soon sup in the elevated at the rush hour.
My wife was dead right to stay away: she says life’s too short to
spend it in breaking in new people.”
Chapter 13
Lily woke from happy dreams to find two notes at her bed-side.
One was from Mrs. Trenor, who announced that she was coming to town
that afternoon for a flying visit, and hoped Miss Bart would be
able to dine with her. The other was from Selden. He wrote briefly
that an important case called him to Albany, whence he would be
unable to return till the evening, and asked Lily to let him know
at what hour on the following day she would see him.
Lily, leaning back among her pillows, gazed musingly at his
letter. The scene in the Brys’ conservatory had been like a part
of her dreams; she had not expected to wake to such evidence
of its reality. Her first movement was one of annoyance: this
unforeseen act of Selden’s added another complication to life. It