The House of Mirth
meeting with Dorset to be regarded as contingent upon it, had
yet immediately struck Lily with a vague sense of foreboding.
It was not in Bertha’s habits to be neighbourly, much less to
make advances to any one outside the immediate circle of her
affinities. She had always consistently ignored the world of outer
aspirants, or had recognized its individual members only when
prompted by motives of self-interest; and the very capriciousness
of her condescensions had, as Lily was aware, given them special
value in the eyes of the persons she distinguished. Lily saw
this now in Mrs. Gormer’s unconcealable complacency, and in the
happy irrelevance with which, for the next day or two, she quoted
Bertha’s opinions and speculated on the origin of her gown. All
the secret ambitions which Mrs. Gormer’s native indolence, and the
attitude of her companions, kept in habitual abeyance, were now
germinating afresh in the glow of Bertha’s advances; and whatever
the cause of the latter, Lily saw that, if they were followed up,
they were likely to have a disturbing effect upon her own future.
She had arranged to break the length of her stay with her new
friends by one or two visits to other acquaintances as recent;
and on her return from this somewhat depressing excursion she was
immediately conscious that Mrs. Dorset’s influence was still in
the air. There had been another exchange of visits, a tea at a
country-club, an encounter at a hunt ball; there was even a rumour
of an approaching dinner, which Mattie Gormer, with an unnatural
effort at discretion, tried to smuggle out of the conversation
whenever Miss Bart took part in it.
The latter had already planned to return to town after a farewell
Sunday with her friends; and, with Gerty Farish’s aid, had
discovered a small private hotel where she might establish herself
for the winter. The hotel being on the edge of a fashionable
neighbourhood, the price of the few square feet she was to
occupy was considerably in excess of her means; but she found a
justification for her dislike of poorer quarters in the argument
that, at this particular juncture, it was of the utmost importance
to keep up a show of prosperity. In reality, it was impossible for
her, while she had the means to pay her way for a week ahead, to
lapse into a form of existence like Gerty Farish’s. She had never
been so near the brink of insolvency; but she could at least manage
to meet her weekly hotel bill, and having settled the heaviest of
her previous debts out of the money she had received from Trenor,
she had a still fair margin of credit to go upon. The situation,
however, was not agreeable enough to lull her to complete
unconsciousness of its insecurity. Her rooms, with their cramped
outlook down a sallow vista of brick walls and fire-escapes, her
lonely meals in the dark restaurant with its surcharged ceiling and
haunting smell of coffee—all these material discomforts, which were
yet to be accounted as so many privileges soon to be withdrawn,
kept constantly before her the disadvantages of her state; and her
mind reverted the more insistently to Mrs. Fisher’s counsels. Beat
about the question as she would, she knew the outcome of it was
that she must try to marry Rosedale; and in this conviction she was
fortified by an unexpected visit from George Dorset.
She found him, on the first Sunday after her return to town,
pacing her narrow sitting-room to the imminent peril of the few
knick-knacks with which she had tried to disguise its plush
exuberances; but the sight of her seemed to quiet him, and he said
meekly that he hadn’t come to bother her—that he asked only to be
allowed to sit for half an hour and talk of anything she liked.
In reality, as she knew, he had but one subject: himself and his
wretchedness; and it was the need of her sympathy that had drawn
him back. But he began with a pretence of questioning her about
herself, and as she replied, she saw that, for the first time,
a faint realization of her plight penetrated the dense surface
of his self-absorption. Was it possible that her old beast of an
aunt had actually cut her off? That she was living alone like this
because there was no one else for her to go to, and that she really
hadn’t more than enough to keep alive on till the wretched little
legacy was paid? The fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in
him, but he was suffering so intensely that he had a faint glimpse
of what other sufferings might mean—and, as she perceived, an
almost simultaneous perception of the way in which her particular
misfortunes might serve him.
When at length she dismissed him, on the pretext that she must
dress for dinner, he lingered entreatingly on the threshold to
blurt out: “It’s been such a comfort—do say you’ll let me see you
again—” But to this direct appeal it was impossible to give an
assent; and she said with friendly decisiveness: “I’m sorry—but you
know why I can’t.”
He coloured to the eyes, pushed the door shut, and stood before her
embarrassed but insistent. “I know how you might, if you would—if
things were different—and it lies with you to make them so. It’s
just a word to say, and you put me out of my misery!”
Their eyes met, and for a second she trembled again with the
nearness of the temptation. “You’re mistaken; I know nothing; I saw
nothing,” she exclaimed, striving, by sheer force of reiteration,
to build a barrier between herself and her peril; and as he turned
away, groaning out “You sacrifice us both,” she continued to
repeat, as if it were a charm: “I know nothing—absolutely nothing.”
* * * * *
Lily had seen little of Rosedale since her illuminating talk with
Mrs. Fisher, but on the two or three occasions when they had met
she was conscious of having distinctly advanced in his favour.
There could be no doubt that he admired her as much as ever, and
she believed it rested with herself to raise his admiration to
the point where it should bear down the lingering counsels of
expediency. The task was not an easy one; but neither was it easy,
in her long sleepless nights, to face the thought of what George
Dorset was so clearly ready to offer. Baseness for baseness, she
hated the other least: there were even moments when a marriage with
Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her difficulties.
She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day of
plighting: after that everything faded into a haze of material
well-being, in which the personality of her benefactor remained
mercifully vague. She had learned, in her long vigils, that there
were certain things not good to think of, certain midnight images
that must at any cost be exorcised—and one of these was the image
of herself as Rosedale’s wife.
Carry Fisher, on the strength, as she frankly owned, of the
Brys’ Newport success, had taken for the autumn months a small
house at Tuxedo; and thither Lily was bound on the Sunday after
Dorset’s visit. Though it was nearly dinner-time when she arrived,
her hostess was still out, and the firelit quiet of the small
silent house descended on her spirit with a sense of peace and
familiarity. It may be doubted if such an emotion had ever before
been evoked by Carry Fisher’s surroundings; but, contrasted to
the world in which Lily had lately lived, there was an air of
repose and stability in the very placing of the furniture, and in
the quiet competence of the parlour-maid who led her up to her
room. Mrs. Fisher’s unconventionality was, after all, a merely
superficial divergence from an inherited social creed, while the
manners of the Gormer circle represented their first attempt to
formulate such a creed for themselves.
It was the first time since her return from Europe that Lily had
found herself in a congenial atmosphere, and the stirring of
familiar associations had almost prepared her, as she descended
the stairs before dinner, to enter upon a group of her old
acquaintances. But this expectation was instantly checked by the
reflection that the friends who remained loyal were precisely those
who would be least willing to expose her to such encounters; and
it was hardly with surprise that she found, instead, Mr. Rosedale
kneeling domestically on the drawing-room hearth before his
hostess’s little girl.
Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily;
yet she could not but notice a quality of homely goodness in his
advances to the child. They were not, at any rate, the premeditated
and perfunctory endearments of the guest under his hostess’s
eye, for he and the little girl had the room to themselves; and
something in his attitude made him seem a simple and kindly being
compared to the small critical creature who endured his homage.
Yes, he would be kind—Lily, from the threshold, had time to
feel—kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the
predatory creature with his mate. She had but a moment in which
to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man mitigated
her repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate
form; for at sight of her he was immediately on his feet again, the
florid and dominant Rosedale of Mattie Gormer’s drawing-room.
It was no surprise to Lily to find that he had been selected as her
only fellow-guest. Though she and her hostess had not met since
the latter’s tentative discussion of her future, Lily knew that
the acuteness which enabled Mrs. Fisher to lay a safe and pleasant
course through a world of antagonistic forces was not infrequently
exercised for the benefit of her friends. It was, in fact,
characteristic of Carry that, while she actively gleaned her own
stores from the fields of affluence, her real sympathies were on
the other side—with the unlucky, the unpopular, the unsuccessful,
with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the shorn stubble of success.
Mrs. Fisher’s experience guarded her against the mistake of
exposing Lily, for the first evening, to the unmitigated impression
of Rosedale’s personality. Kate Corby and two or three men dropped
in to dinner, and Lily, alive to every detail of her friend’s
method, saw that such opportunities as had been contrived for her
were to be deferred till she had, as it were, gained courage to
make effectual use of them. She had a sense of acquiescing in this
plan with the passiveness of a sufferer resigned to the surgeon’s
touch; and this feeling of almost lethargic helplessness continued
when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs. Fisher followed her
upstairs.
“May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire? If we talk in
my room we shall disturb the child.” Mrs. Fisher looked about her
with the eye of the solicitous hostess. “I hope you’ve managed to
make yourself comfortable, dear? Isn’t it a jolly little house?
It’s such a blessing to have a few quiet weeks with the baby.”
Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively
maternal that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could
ever get time and money enough, she would not end by devoting them
both to her daughter.
“It’s a well-earned rest: I’ll say that for myself,” she continued,
sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near
the fire. “Louisa Bry is a stern task-master: I often used to
wish myself back with the Gormers. Talk of love making people
jealous and suspicious—it’s nothing to social ambition! Louisa
used to lie awake at night wondering whether the women who called
on us called on ME because I was with her, or on HER because she
was with me; and she was always laying traps to find out what
I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends, rather
than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single
acquaintance—when, all the while, that was what she had me there