The House of Mirth
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 despatched
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 tomorrow’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 onto 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.
Chapter 3
Miss 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.”