Edith Wharton - Novel 15

by Old New York (v2. 1)

  Aunt Sabina Wesson was obliged to stuff her lace handkerchief between her lips, while her firm poplin-cased figure rocked with delight.

  “Well, my dear,” Grandmamma gently reminded her, “in my youth we wore low-necked dresses all day long and all the year round.”

  No one listened. My cousin Kate, who always imitated Aunt Sabina, was pinching my arm in an agony of mirth. “Look at them scuttling! The parlours must be full of smoke. Oh, but this one is still funnier; the one with the tall feather in her hair! Granny, did you wear feathers in your hair in the daytime? Oh, don’t ask me to believe it! And the one with the diamond necklace! And all the gentlemen in white ties! Did Grandpapa wear a white tie at two o’clock in the afternoon?” Nothing was sacred to Kate, and she feigned not to notice Grandmamma’s mild frown of reproval.

  “Well, they do in Paris, to this day, at weddings—wear evening clothes and white ties,” said Sillerton Jackson with authority. “When Minnie Transome of Charleston was married at the Madeleine to the Duc de…”

  But no one listened even to Sillerton Jackson. One of the party had abruptly exclaimed: “Oh, there’s a lady running out of the hotel who’s not in evening dress!”

  The exclamation caused all our eyes to turn toward the person indicated, who had just reached the threshold; and someone added, in an odd voice: “Why, her figure looks like Lizzie Hazeldean’s—”

  A dead silence followed. The lady who was not in evening dress paused. Standing on the door-step with lifted veil, she faced our window. Her dress was dark and plain—almost conspicuously plain—and in less time than it takes to tell she had put her hand to her closely-patterned veil and pulled it down over her face. But my young eyes were keen and far-sighted; and in that hardly perceptible interval I had seen a vision. Was she beautiful—or was she only someone apart? I felt the shock of a small pale oval, dark eyebrows curved with one sure stroke, lips made for warmth, and now drawn up in a grimace of terror; and it seemed as if the mysterious something, rich, secret and insistent, that broods and murmurs behind a boy’s conscious thoughts, had suddenly peered out at me…As the dart reached me her veil dropped.

  “But it is Lizzie Hazeldean!” Aunt Sabina gasped. She had stopped laughing, and her crumpled handkerchief fell to the carpet.

  “Lizzie—Lizzie?” The name was echoed over my head with varying intonations of reprobation, dismay and half-veiled malice.

  Lizzie Hazeldean? Running out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel on New Year’s day with all those dressed-up women? But what on earth could she have been doing there? No; nonsense! It was impossible…

  “There’s Henry Prest with her,” continued Aunt Sabina in a precipitate whisper.

  “With her?” someone gasped; and “oh—” my mother cried with a shudder.

  The men of the family said nothing, but I saw Hubert Wesson’s face crimson with surprise. Henry Prest! Hubert was forever boring us youngsters with his Henry Prest! That was the kind of chap Hubert meant to be at thirty: in his eyes Henry Prest embodied all the manly graces. Married? No, thank you! That kind of man wasn’t made for the domestic yoke. Too fond of ladies’ society, Hubert hinted with his undergraduate smirk; and handsome, rich, independent—an all-round sportsman, good horseman, good shot, crack yachtsman (had his pilot’s certificate, and always sailed his own sloop, whose cabin was full of racing trophies); gave the most delightful little dinners, never more than six, with cigars that beat old Beaufort’s; was awfully decent to the younger men, chaps of Hubert’s age included—and combined, in short, all the qualities, mental and physical, which make up, in such eyes as Hubert’s that oracular and irresistible figure, the man of the world. “Just the fellow,” Hubert always solemnly concluded that I should go straight to if ever I got into any kind of row that I didn’t want the family to know about”; and our blood ran pleasantly cold at the idea of our old Hubert’s ever being in such an unthinkable predicament.

  I felt sorry to have missed a glimpse of this legendary figure; but my gaze had been enthralled by the lady, and now the couple had vanished in the crowd.

  The group in our window continued to keep an embarrassed silence. They looked almost frightened; but what struck me even more deeply was that not one of them looked surprised. Even to my boyish sense it was clear that what they had just seen was only the confirmation of something they had long been prepared for. At length one of my uncles emitted a whistle, was checked by a severe glance from his wife, and muttered: “I’ll be damned”; another uncle began an unheeded narrative of a fire at which he had been present in his youth, and my mother said to me severely: “You ought to be at home preparing your lessons—a big boy like you!”—a remark so obviously unfair that it served only to give the measure of her agitation.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Grandmamma, in a low voice of warning, protest and appeal. I saw Hubert steal a grateful look at her.

  But nobody else listened: every eye still strained through the window. Livery-stable “hacks,” of the old blue-curtained variety, were driving up to carry off the fair fugitives; for the day was bitterly cold, and lit by one of those harsh New York suns of which every ray seems an icicle. Into these ancient vehicles the ladies, now regaining their composure, were being piled with their removable possessions, while their kid-gloved callers (“So like the White Rabbit!” Kate exulted) appeared and reappeared in the doorway, gallantly staggering after them under bags, reticules, bird-cages, pet dogs and heaped-up finery. But to all this—as even I, a little boy, was aware—nobody in Grandmamma’s window paid the slightest attention. The thoughts of one and all, with a mute and guarded eagerness, were still following the movements of those two who were so obviously unrelated to the rest. The whole business—discovery, comment, silent visual pursuit—could hardly, all told, have filled a minute, perhaps not as much; before the sixty seconds were over, Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest had been lost in the crowd, and, while the hotel continued to empty itself into the street, had gone their joint or separate ways. But in my grandmother’s window the silence continued unbroken.

  “Well, it’s over: here are the firemen coming out again,” someone said at length.

  We youngsters were all alert at that; yet I felt that the grown-ups lent but a half-hearted attention to the splendid sight which was New York’s only pageant: the piling of scarlet ladders on scarlet carts, the leaping up on the engine of the helmeted flame-fighters, and the disciplined plunge forward of each pair of broad-chested black steeds, as one after another the chariots of fire rattled off.

  Silently, almost morosely, we withdrew to the drawing-room hearth; where, after an interval of languid monosyllables, my mother, rising first, slipped her knitting into its bag, and turning on me with renewed severity, said: “This racing after fire-engines is what makes you too sleepy to prepare your lessons:—a comment so wide of the mark that once again I perceived, without understanding, the extent of the havoc wrought in her mind by the sight of Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest coming out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel together.

  It was not until many years later that chance enabled me to relate this fugitive impression to what had preceded and what came after it.

  

  II.

  Mrs. Hazeldean paused at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. The crowd attracted by the fire still enveloped her; it was safe to halt and take breath.

  Her companion, she knew, had gone in the opposite direction. Their movements, on such occasions, were as well-ordered and as promptly executed as those of the New York Fire Brigade; and after their precipitate descent to the hall, the discovery that the police had barred their usual exit, and the quick: “You’re all right?” to which her imperceptible nod had responded, she was sure he had turned down Twenty-third Street toward Sixth Avenue.

  “The Parretts’ windows were full of people,” was her first thought.

  She dwelt on it a moment, and then reflected: “Yes, but in all that crowd and excitement nobody would have beenthinking of me!”


  Instinctively she put her hand to her veil, as though recalling that her features had been exposed when she ran out, and unable to remember whether she had covered them in time or not.

  “What a fool I am! It can’t have been off my face for more than a second—” but immediately afterward another disquieting possibility assailed her. “I’m almost sure I saw Sillerton Jackson’s head in one of the windows, just behind Sabina Wesson’s. No one else has that particularly silvery gray hair.” She shivered, for everyone in New York knew that Sillerton Jackson saw everything, and could piece together seemingly unrelated fragments of fact with the art of a skilled china-mender.

  Meanwhile, after sending through her veil the circular glance which she always shot about her at that particular corner, she had begun to walk up Broadway. She walked well—fast, but not too fast; easily, assuredly, with the air of a woman who knows that she has a good figure, and expects rather than fears to be identified by it. But under this external appearance of ease she was covered with cold beads of sweat.

  Broadway, as usual at that hour, and on a holiday, was nearly deserted; the promenading public still slowly poured up and down Fifth Avenue.

  “Luckily there was such a crowd when we came out of the hotel that no one could possibly have noticed me,” she murmured over again, reassured by the sense of having the long thoroughfare to herself. Composure and presence of mind were so necessary to a woman in her situation that they had become almost a second nature to her, and in a few minutes her thick uneven heart-beats began to subside and to grow steadier. As if to test their regularity, she paused before a florist’s window, and looked appreciatively at the jars of roses and forced lilac, the compact bunches of lilies-of-the-valley and violets, the first pots of close-budded azaleas. Finally she opened the shop-door, and after examining the Jacqueminots and Marshal Niels, selected with care two perfect specimens of a new silvery-pink rose, waited for the florist to wrap them in cotton-wool, and slipped their long stems into her muff for more complete protection.

  “It’s so simple, after all,” she said to herself as she walked on. “I’ll tell him that as I was coming up Fifth Avenue from Cousin Cecilia’s I heard the fire-engines turning into Twenty-third Street, and ran after them. Just what he would have done…once…” she ended on a sigh.

  At Thirty-first Street she turned the corner with a quicker step. The house she was approaching was low and narrow; but the Christmas holly glistening between frilled curtains, the well-scrubbed steps, the shining bell and door-knob, gave it a welcoming look. From garret to basement it beamed like the abode of a happy couple.

  As Lizzie Hazeldean reached the door a curious change came over her. She was conscious of it at once—she had so often said to herself, when her little house rose before her: “It makes me feel younger as soon as I turn the corner.” And it was true even today. In spite of her agitation she was aware that the lines between her eyebrows were smoothing themselves out, and that a kind of inner lightness was replacing the heavy tumult of her breast. The lightness revealed itself in her movements, which grew as quick as a girl’s as she ran up the steps. She rang twice—it was her signal—and turned an unclouded smile on her elderly parlourmaid.

  “Is Mr. Hazeldean in the library, Susan? I hope you’ve kept up the fire for him.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. But Mr. Hazeldean’s not in,” said Susan, returning the smile respectfully.

  “Not in? With his cold—and in this weather?”

  “That’s what I told him, ma’am. But he just laughed—”

  “Just laughed? What do you mean, Susan?” Lizzie Hazeldean felt herself turning pale. She rested her hand quickly on the hall table.

  “Well, ma’am, the minute he heard the fire-engine, off he rushed like a boy. It seems the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s on fire: there’s where he’s gone.”

  The blood left Mrs. Hazeldean’s lips; she felt it shuddering back to her heart. But a second later she spoke in a tone of natural and good-humoured impatience.

  “What madness! How long ago—can you remember?” Instantly, she felt the possible imprudence of the question, and added: “The doctor said he ought not to be out more than a quarter of an hour, and only at the sunniest time of the day.”

  “I know that, ma’am, and so I reminded him. But he’s been gone nearly an hour, I should say.”

  A sense of deep fatigue overwhelmed Mrs. Hazeldean. She felt as if she had walked for miles against an icy gale: her breath came laboriously.

  “How could you let him go?” she wailed; then, as the parlourmaid again smiled respectfully, she added: “Oh, I know—sometimes one can’t stop him. He gets so restless, being shut up with these long colds.”

  “That’s what I do feel, ma’am.”

  Mistress and maid exchanged a glance of sympathy, and Susan felt herself emboldened to suggest: “Perhaps the outing will do him good,” with the tendency of her class to encourage favoured invalids in disobedience.

  Mrs. Hazeldean’s look grew severe. “Susan! I’ve often warned you against talking to him in that way—”

  Susan reddened, and assumed a pained expression. “How can you think it, ma’am?—me that never say anything to anybody, as all in the house will bear witness.”

  Her mistress made an impatient movement. “Oh, well, I daresay he won’t be long. The fire’s over.”

  “Ah—you knew of it too, then, ma’am?”

  “Of the fire? Why, of course. I saw it, even—” Mrs. Hazeldean smiled. “I was walking home from Washington Square—from Miss Cecilia Winter’s—and at the corner of Twenty-third Street there was a huge crowd, and clouds of smoke…It’s very odd that I shouldn’t have run across Mr. Hazeldean.” She looked limpidly at the parlourmaid.” But, then, of course, in all that crowd and confusion …”

  Half-way up the stairs she turned to call back: “Make up a good fire in the library, please, and bring the tea up. It’s too cold in the drawing-room.”

  The library was on the upper landing. She went in, drew the two roses from her muff, tenderly unswathed them, and put them in a slim glass on her husband’s writing-table. In the doorway she paused to smile at this touch of summer in the firelit wintry room; but a moment later her frown of anxiety reappeared. She stood listening intently for the sound of a latch-key; then, hearing nothing, passed on to her bedroom.

  It was a rosy room, hung with one of the new English chintzes, which also covered the deep sofa, and the bed with its rose-lined pillow-covers. The carpet was cherry red, the toilet-table ruffled and looped like a ball-dress. Ah, how she and Susan had ripped and sewn and hammered, and pieced together old scraps of lace and ribbon and muslin, in the making of that airy monument! For weeks after she had done over the room her husband never came into it without saying: “I can’t think how you managed to squeeze all this loveliness out of that last cheque of your stepmother’s.”

  On the dressing-table Lizzie Hazeldean noticed a long florist’s box, one end of which had been cut open to give space to the still longer stems of a bunch of roses. She snipped the string, and extracted from the box an envelope which she flung into the fire without so much as a glance at its contents. Then she pushed the flowers aside, and after rearranging her dark hair before the mirror, carefully dressed herself in a loose garment of velvet and lace which lay awaiting her on the sofa, beside her high-heeled slippers and stockings of open-work silk.

  She had been one of the first women in New York to have tea every afternoon at five, and to put off her walking-dress for a tea-gown.

  

  III.

  She returned to the library, where the fire was beginning to send a bright blaze through the twilight. It flashed on the bindings of Hazeldean’s many books, and she smiled absently at the welcome it held out. A latch-key rattled, and she heard her husband’s step, and the sound of his cough below in the hall.

  “What madness—what madness!” she murmured.

  Slowly—how slowly for a young man!—he mounted the stair
s, and still coughing came into the library. She ran to him and took him in her arms.

  “Charlie! How could you? In this weather? It’s nearly dark!”

  His long thin face lit up with a deprecating smile. “I suppose Susan’s betrayed me, eh? Don’t be cross. You’ve missed such a show! The Fifth Avenue Hotel’s been on fire.”

  “Yes; I know.” She paused, just perceptibly. I didn’t miss it, though—I rushed across Madison Square for a look at it myself.”

  “You did? You were there too? What fun!” The idea appeared to fill him with boyish amusement.

  “Naturally I was! On my way home from Cousin Cecilia’s…”

  “Ah, of course. I’d forgotten you were going there. But how odd, then, that we didn’t meet!”

  “If we had I should have dragged you home long ago. I’ve been in at least half an hour, and the fire was already over when I got there. What a baby you are to have stayed out so long, staring at smoke and a fire-engine!”

  He smiled, still holding her, and passing his gaunt hand softly and wistfully over her head. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ve been indoors, safely sheltered, and drinking old Mrs. Parrett’s punch. The old lady saw me from her window, and sent one of the Wesson boys across the street to fetch me in. They had just finished a family luncheon. And Sillerton Jackson, who was there, drove me home. So you see,—”

  He released her, and moved toward the fire, and she stood motionless, staring blindly ahead, while the thoughts spun through her mind like a mill-race.

  “Sillerton Jackson—” she echoed, without in the least knowing what she said.

  “Yes; he has the gout again—luckily for me!—and his sister’s brougham came to the Parretts’ to fetch him.”

  She collected herself. “You’re coughing more than you did yesterday,” she accused him.