The House of Mirth
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.”
It WAS warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther’s match had
made a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself
to Lily as extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean. A
fire shone through the polished flanks of the iron stove, and near
it stood a crib in which a baby was sitting upright, with incipient
anxiety struggling for expression on a countenance still placid
with sleep.
Having passionately celebrated her reunion with her offspring, and
excused herself in cryptic language for the lateness of her return,
Nettie restored the baby to the crib and shyly invited Miss Bart to
the rocking-chair near the stove.
“We’ve got a parlour too,” she explained with pardonable pride;
“but I guess it’s warmer in here, and I don’t want to leave you
alone while I’m getting baby’s supper.”
On receiving Lily’s assurance that she much preferred the friendly
proximity of the kitchen fire, Mrs. Struther proceeded to prepare a
bottle of infantile food, which she tenderly applied to the baby’s
impatient lips; and while the ensuing degustation went on, she
seated herself with a beaming countenance beside her visitor.
“You’re sure you won’t let me warm up a drop of coffee for you,
Miss Bart? There’s some of baby’s fresh milk left over—well,
maybe you’d rather just sit quiet and rest a little while. It’s
too lovely having you here. I’ve thought of it so often that I
can’t believe it’s really come true. I’ve said to George again
and again: ‘I just wish Miss Bart could see me NOW—’ and I used
to watch for your name in the papers, and we’d talk over what you
were doing, and read the descriptions of the dresses you wore. I
haven’t seen your name for a long time, though, and I began to be
afraid you were sick, and it worried me so that George said I’d get
sick myself, fretting about it.” Her lips broke into a reminiscent
smile. “Well, I can’t afford to be sick again, that’s a fact: the
last spell nearly finished me. When you sent me off that time I
never thought I’d come back alive, and I didn’t much care if I did.
You see I didn’t know about George and the baby then.”
She paused to readjust the bottle to the child’s bubbling mouth.
“You precious—don’t you be in too much of a hurry! Was it mad with
mommer for getting its supper so late? Marry Anto’nette—that’s what
we call her: after the French queen in that play at the Garden—I
told George the actress reminded me of you, and that made me fancy
the name.... I never thought I’d get married, you know, and I’d
never have had the heart to go on working just for myself.”
She broke off again, and meeting the encouragement in Lily’s eyes,
went on, with a flush rising under her anaemic skin: “You see I
wasn’t only just SICK that time you sent me off—I was dreadfully
unhappy too. I’d known a gentleman where I was employed—I don’t
know as you remember I did type-writing in a big importing
firm—and—well—I thought we were to be married: he’d gone steady
with me six months and given me his mother’s wedding ring. But I
presume he was too stylish for me—he travelled for the firm, and
had seen a great deal of society. Work girls aren’t looked after
the way you are, and they don’t always know how to look after
themselves. I didn’t . . . and it pretty near killed me when he
went away and left off writing....
“It was then I came down sick—I thought it was the end of
everything. I guess it would have been if you hadn’t sent me off.
But when I found I was getting well I began to take heart in spite
of myself. And then, when I got back home, George came round and
asked me to marry him. At first I thought I couldn’t, because we’d
been brought up together, and I knew he knew about me. But after a
while I began to see that that made it easier. I never could have
told another man, and I’d never have married without telling; but
if George cared for me enough to have me as I was, I didn’t see why
I shouldn’t begin over again—and I did.”
The strength of the victory shone forth from her as she lifted
her irradiated face from the child on her knees. “But, mercy, I
didn’t mean to go on like this about myself, with you sitting there
looking so fagged out. Only it’s so lovely having you here, and
letting you see just how you’ve helped me.” The baby had sunk back
blissfully replete, and Mrs. Struther softly rose to lay the bottle
aside. Then she paused before Miss Bart.
“I only wish I could help YOU—but I suppose there’s nothing on
earth I could do,” she murmured wistfully.
Lily, instead of answering, rose with a smile and held out her
arms; and the mother, understanding the gesture, laid her child in
them.
The baby, feeling herself detached from her habitual anchorage,
made an instinctive motion of resistance; but the soothing
influences of digestion prevailed, and Lily felt the soft weight
sink trustfully against her breast. The child’s confidence in its
safety thrilled her with a sense of warmth and returning life, and
she bent over, wondering at the rosy blur of the little face, the
empty clearness of the eyes, the vague tendrilly motions of the
folding and unfolding fingers. At first the burden in her arms
seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as she
continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and
penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the
child entered into her and became a part of herself.
She looked up, and saw Nettie’s eyes resting on her with tenderness
and exultation.
“Wouldn’t it be too lovely for anything if she could grow up to be
just like you? Of course I know she never COULD—but mothers are
always dreaming the craziest things for their children.”
Lily clasped the child close for a moment and laid her back in her
mother’s arms.
“Oh, she must not do that—I should be afraid to come and see
her too often!” she said with a smile; and then, resisting Mrs.
Struther’s anxious offer of companionship, and reiterating the
promise that of course she would come back soon, and make George’s
acquaintance, and see the baby in her bath, she passed out of the
kitchen and went alone down the tenement stairs.
* * * * *
As she reached the street she realized that she felt stronger
and happier: the little episode had done her good. It was the
first time she had ever come across the results of her spasmodic
benevolence, and the surprised sense of human fellowship took the
mortal chill from her heart.
It was not till she entered her own door that she felt the reaction
of a deeper loneliness. It was long after seven o’clock, and the
light and odours proceeding from the basement made it manifest that
the boarding-house dinner had begun. She hastened up to her room,
lit the gas, and began to dress. She did not mean to pamper herself
any longer, to go without food because her surroundings made it
unpalatable. Since it was her fate to live in a boarding-house, she
must learn to fall in with the conditions of the life. Nevertheless
she was glad that, when she descended to the heat and glare of the
dining-room, the repast was nearly over.
* * * * *
In her own room again, she was seized with a sudden fever of
activity. For weeks past she had been too listless and indifferent
to set her possessions in order, but now she began to examine
systematically the contents of her drawers and cupboard. She had a
few handsome dresses left—survivals of her last phase of splendour,
on the Sabrina and in London—but when she had been obliged to
part with her maid she had given the woman a generous share of
her cast-off apparel. The remaining dresses, though they had lost
their freshness, still kept the long unerring lines, the sweep
and amplitude of the great artist’s stroke, and as she spread
them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn rose
vividly before her. An association lurked in every fold: each fall
of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record
of her past. She was startled to find how the atmosphere of her
old life enveloped her. But, after all, it was the life she had
been made for: every dawning tendency in her had been carefully
directed toward it, all her interests and activities had been
taught to centre around it. She was like some rare flower grown for
exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except
the crowning blossom of her beauty.
Last of all, she drew forth from the bottom of her trunk a heap
of white drapery which fell shapelessly across her arm. It was
the Reynolds dress she had worn in the Bry TABLEAUX. It had been
impossible for her to give it away, but she had never seen it since
that night, and the long flexible folds, as she shook them out,
gave forth an odour of violets which came to her like a breath
from the flower-edged fountain where she had stood with Lawrence
Selden and disowned her fate. She put back the dresses one by one,
laying away with each some gleam of light, some note of laughter,
some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure. She was still in
a state of highly-wrought impressionability, and every hint of the
past sent a lingering tremor along her nerves.
She had just closed her trunk on the white folds of the Reynolds
dress when she heard a tap at her door, and the red fist of the
Irish maid-servant thrust in a belated letter. Carrying it to the
light, Lily read with surprise the address stamped on the upper
corner of the envelope. It was a business communication from the
office of her aunt’s executors, and she wondered what unexpected
development had caused them to break silence before the appointed
time. She opened the envelope and a cheque fluttered to the floor.
As she stooped to pick it up the blood rushed to her face. The
cheque represented the full amount of Mrs. Peniston’s legacy, and
the letter accompanying it explained that the executors, having
adjusted the business of the estate with less delay than they had
expected, had decided to anticipate the date fixed for the payment
of the bequests.
Lily sat down beside the desk at the foot of her bed, and spreading
out the cheque, read over and over the TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS written
across it in a steely business hand. Ten months earlier the amount
it stood for had represented the depths of penury; but her standard
of values had changed in the interval, and now visions of wealth
lurked in every flourish of the pen. As she continued to gaze at
it, she felt the glitter of the visions mounting to her brain,
and after a while she lifted the lid of the desk and slipped the
magic formula out of sight. It was easier to think without those
five figures dancing before her eyes; and she had a great deal of
thinking to do before she slept.
She opened her cheque-book, and plunged into such anxious
calculations as had prolonged her vigil at Bellomont on the night
when she had decided to marry Percy Gryce. Poverty simplifies
book-keeping, and her financial situation was easier to ascertain
than it had been then; but she had not yet learned the control of
money, and during her transient phase of luxury at the Emporium she
had slipped back into habits of extravagance which still impaired
her slender balance. A careful examination of her cheque-book, and
of the unpaid bills in her desk, showed that, when the latter had
been settled, she would have barely enough to live on for the next