“Oh, compassionate? To whom? Do you imagine—did I ever say anything to make you doubt the truth of what I’m telling you?”
His brows fretted: his temper was up. “Say anything? No,” he insinuated ironically; then, in a hasty plunge after his lost forbearance, added with exquisite mildness: “Your tact was perfect… always. I’ve invariably done you that justice. No one could have been more thoroughly the…the lady. I never failed to admire your good-breeding in avoiding any reference to your… your other life.”
She faced him steadily. “Well, that other life was my life—my only life! Now you know.”
There was a silence. Henry Prest drew out a monogrammed handkerchief and passed it over his dry lips. As he did so, a whiff of his eau de Cologne reached her, and she winced a little. It was evident that he was seeking what to say next; wondering, rather helplessly, how to get back his lost command of the situation. He finally induced his features to break again into a persuasive smile.
“Not your only life, dearest,” he reproached her.
She met it instantly. “Yes; so you thought—because I chose you should.”
“You chose—?” The smile became incredulous.
“Oh, deliberately. But I suppose I’ve no excuse that you would not dislike to hear…Why shouldn’t we break off now?”
“Break off…this conversation?” His tone was aggrieved. “Of course I’ve no wish to force myself—”
She interrupted him with a raised hand. “Break off for good, Henry.”
“For good?” He stared, and gave a quick swallow, as though the dose were choking him. “For good? Are you really—? You and I? Is this serious, Lizzie?”
“Perfectly. But if you prefer to hear…what can only be painful…”
He straightened himself, threw back his shoulders, and said in an uncertain voice: “I hope you don’t take me for a coward.”
She made no direct reply, but continued: “Well, then, you thought I loved you, I suppose—”
He smiled again, revived his moustache with a slight twist, and gave a hardly perceptible shrug. “You…ah…managed to produce the illusion…”
“Oh, well, yes: a woman can—so easily! That’s what men often forget. You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.”
“Elizabeth!” he gasped, pale now to the ruddy eyelids. She saw that the word had wounded more than his pride, and that, before realizing the insult to his love, he was shuddering at the offence to his taste. Mistress! Prostitute! Such words were banned. No one reproved coarseness of language in women more than Henry Prest; one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s greatest charms (as he had just told her) had been her way of remaining, “through it all,” so ineffably “the lady.” He looked at her as if a fresh doubt of her sanity had assailed him.
“Shall I go on?” she smiled.
He bent his head stiffly. “I am still at a loss to imagine for what purpose you made a fool of me.”
“Well, then, it was as I say. I wanted money—money for my husband.”
He moistened his lips. “For your husband?”
“Yes; when he began to be so ill; when he needed comforts, luxury, the opportunity to get away. He saved me, when I was a girl, from untold humiliation and wretchedness. No one else lifted a finger to help me—not one of my own family. I hadn’t a penny or a friend. Mrs. Mant had grown sick of me, and was trying to find an excuse to throw me over. Oh, you don’t know what a girl has to put up with—a girl alone in the world—who depends for her clothes, and her food, and the roof over her head, on the whims of a vain capricious old woman! It was because he knew, because he understood, that he married me…He took me out of misery into blessedness. He put me up above them all…he put me beside himself. I didn’t care for anything but that; I didn’t care for the money or the freedom; I cared only for him. I would have followed him into the desert—I would have gone barefoot to be with him. I would have starved, begged, done anything for him—anything.” She broke off, her voice lost in a sob. She was no longer aware of Prest’s presence—all her consciousness was absorbed in the vision she had evoked. “It was he who cared—who wanted me to be rich and independent and admired! He wanted to heap everything on me—during the first years I could hardly persuade him to keep enough money for himself…And then he was taken ill; and as he got worse, and gradually dropped out of affairs, his income grew smaller, and then stopped altogether; and all the while there were new expenses piling up—nurses, doctors, travel; and he grew frightened; frightened not for himself but for me …And what was I to do? I had to pay for things somehow. For the first year I managed to put off paying—then I borrowed small sums here and there. But that couldn’t last. And all the while I had to keep on looking pretty and prosperous, or else he began to worry, and think we were ruined, and wonder what would become of me if he didn’t get well. By the time you came I was desperate—I would have done anything, anything! He thought the money came from my Portuguese stepmother. She really was rich, as it happens. Unluckily my poor father tried to invest her money, and lost it all; but when they were first married she sent a thousand dollars—and all the rest, all you gave me, I built on that.”
She paused pantingly, as if her tale were at an end. Gradually her consciousness of present things returned, and she saw Henry Prest, as if far off, a small indistinct figure looming through the mist of her blurred eyes. She thought to herself: “He doesn’t believe me,” and the thought exasperated her.
“You wonder, I suppose,” she began again, “that a woman should dare confess such things about herself—”
He cleared his throat. “About herself? No; perhaps not. But about her husband.”
The blood rushed to her forehead. “About her husband? But you don’t dare to imagine—?”
“You leave me,” he rejoined icily, “no other inference that I can see.” She stood dumbfounded, and he added: “At any rate, it certainly explains your extraordinary coolness—pluck, I used to think it. I perceive that I needn’t have taken such precautions.”
She considered this. “You think, then, that he knew? You think, perhaps, that I knew he did?” She pondered again painfully, and then her face lit up. “He never knew—never! That’s enough for me—and for you it doesn’t matter. Think what you please. He was happy to the end—that’s all I care for.”
“There can be no doubt about your frankness,” he said with pinched lips.
“There’s no longer any reason for not being frank.”
He picked up his hat, and studiously considered its lining; then he took the gloves he had laid in it, and drew them thoughtfully through his hands. She thought: “Thank God, he’s going!”
But he set the hat and gloves down on a table, and moved a little nearer to her. His face looked as ravaged as a reveller’s at daybreak.
“You—leave positively nothing to the imagination!” he murmured.
“I told you it was useless—” she began; but he interrupted her: “Nothing, that is—if I believed you.” He moistened his lips again, and tapped them with his handkerchief. Again she had a whiff of the eau de Cologne. “But I don’t! he proclaimed. “Too many memories…too many…proofs, my dearest…” He stopped, smiling somewhat convulsively. She saw that he imagined the smile would soothe her.
She remained silent, and he began once more, as if appealing to her against her own verdict: “I know better, Lizzie. In spite of everything, I know you’re not that kind of woman.”
“I took your money—”
“As a favour. I knew the difficulties of your position…I understood completely. I beg of you never again to allude to—all that.” It dawned on her that anything would be more endurable to him than to think he had been a dupe—and one of two dupes! The part was not one that he could conceive of having played. His pride was up in arms to defend her, not so much for her sake as for his own. The discovery gave her a baffling sense of helplessness; against that impenetrable self-sufficiency all her affirmations might spend
themselves in vain.
“No man who has had the privilege of being loved by you could ever for a moment…”
She raised her head and looked at him. “You have never had that privilege,” she interrupted.
His jaw fell. She saw his eyes pass from uneasy supplication to a cold anger. He gave a little inarticulate grunt before his voice came back to him.
“You spare no pains in degrading yourself in my eyes.”
“I am not degrading myself. I am telling you the truth. I needed money. I knew no way of earning it. You were willing to give it… for what you call the privilege…”
“Lizzie,” he interrupted solemnly, “don’t go on! I believe I enter into all your feelings—I believe I always have. In so sensitive, so hypersensitive a nature, there are moments when every other feeling is swept away by scruples…For those scruples I only honour you the more. But I won’t hear another word now. If I allowed you to go on in your present state of…nervous exaltation…you might be the first to deplore…I wish to forget everything you have said…I wish to look forward, not back…: He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and fixed her with a glance of recovered confidence. “How little you know me if you believe that I could fail you now!”
She returned his look with a weary steadiness. “You are kind—you mean to be generous, I’m sure. But don’t you see that I can’t marry you?”
“I only see that, in the natural rush of your remorse—”
“Remorse? Remorse?” She broke in with a laugh. “Do you imagine I feel any remorse? I’d do it all over again tomorrow—for the same object! I got what I wanted—I gave him that last year, that last good year. It was the relief from anxiety that kept him alive, that kept him happy. Oh, he was happy—I know that!” She turned to Prest with a strange smile. “I do thank you for that—I’m not ungrateful.”
“You…you…ungrateful? This…is really…indecent…” He took up his hat again, and stood in the middle of the room as if waiting to be waked from a bad dream.
“You are—rejecting an opportunity—” he began.
She made a faint motion of assent.
“You do realize it? I’m still prepared to—to help you, if you should…” She made no answer, and he continued: “How do you expect to live—since you have chosen to drag in such considerations?”
“I don’t care how I live. I never wanted the money for myself.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “Oh, don’t—again! The woman I had meant to…” Suddenly, to her surprise, she saw a glitter of moisture on his lower lids. He applied his handkerchief to them, and the waft of scent checked her momentary impulse of compunction. That Cologne water! It called up picture after picture with a hideous precision. “Well, it was worth it,” she murmured doggedly.
Henry Prest restored his handkerchief to his pocket. He waited, glanced about the room, turned back to her.
“If your decision is final—”
“Oh, final!”
He bowed. “There is one thing more—which I should have mentioned if you had ever given me the opportunity of seeing you after—after last New Year’s day. Something I preferred not to commit to writing—”
“Yes?” she questioned indifferently.
“Your husband, you are positively convinced had no idea…that day…?”
“None.”
“Well, others, it appears, had.” He paused. “Mrs. Wesson saw us.”
“So I supposed. I remember now that she went out of her way to cut me that evening at Mrs. Struthers’s.”
“Exactly. And she was not the only person who saw us. If people had not been disarmed by your husband’s falling ill that very day you would have found yourself—ostracized.”
She made no comment, and he pursued, with a last effort: “In your grief, your solitude, you haven’t yet realized what your future will be—how difficult. It is what I wished to guard you against—it was my purpose in asking you to marry me.” He drew himself up and smiled as if he were looking at his own reflection in a mirror, and thought favourably of it. “A man who has had the misfortune to compromise a woman is bound in honour—Even if my own inclination were not what it is, I should consider…”
She turned to him with a softened smile. Yes, he had really brought himself to think that he was proposing to marry her to save her reputation. At this glimpse of the old hackneyed axioms on which he actually believed that his conduct was based, she felt anew her remoteness from the life he would have drawn her back to.
“My poor Henry, don’t you see how far I’ve got beyond the Mrs. Wessons? If all New York wants to ostracize me, let it! I’ve had my day…no woman has more than one. Why shouldn’t I have to pay for it? I’m ready.”
“Good heavens!” he murmured.
She was aware that he had put forth his last effort. The wound she had inflicted had gone to the most vital spot; she had prevented his being magnanimous, and the injury was unforgivable. He was glad, yes, actually glad now, to have her know that New York meant to cut her; but, strive as she might, she could not bring herself to care either for the fact, or for his secret pleasure in it. Her own secret pleasures were beyond New York’s reach and his.
“I’m sorry,” she reiterated gently. He bowed, without trying to take her hand, and left the room.
As the door closed she looked after him with a dazed stare. “He’s right, I suppose; I don’t realize yet—” She heard the shutting of the outer door, and dropped to the sofa, pressing her hands against her aching eyes. At that moment, for the first time, she asked herself what the next day, and the next, would be like…
“If only I cared more about reading,” she moaned, remembering how vainly she had tried to acquire her husband’s tastes, and how gently and humorously he had smiled at her efforts. “Well—there are always cards; and when I get older, knitting and patience, I suppose. And if everybody cuts me I shan’t need any evening dresses. That will be an economy, at any rate,” she concluded with a little shiver.
VII.
…“She was bad…always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
I must go back now to this phrase of my mother’s—the phrase from which, at the opening of my narrative, I broke away for a time in order to project more vividly on the scene that anxious moving vision of Lizzie Hazeldean: a vision in which memories of my one boyish glimpse of her were pieced together with hints collected afterward.
When my mother uttered her condemnatory judgment I was a young man of twenty-one, newly graduated from Harvard, and at home again under the family roof in New York. It was long since I had heard Mrs. Hazeldean spoken of. I had been away, at school and at Harvard, for the greater part of the interval, and in the holidays she was probably not considered a fitting subject of conversation, especially now that my sisters came to the table.
At any rate, I had forgotten everything I might ever have picked up about her when, on the evening after my return, my cousin Hubert Wesson—now towering above me as a pillar of the Knickerbocker Club, and a final authority on the ways of the world—suggested our joining her at the opera.
“Mrs. Hazeldean? But I don’t know her. What will she think?”
“That it’s all right. Come along. She’s the jolliest woman I know. We’ll go back afterward and have supper with her—jolliest house I know.” Hubert twirled a self-conscious moustache.
We were dining at the Knickerbocker, to which I had just been elected, and the bottle of Pommery we were finishing disposed me to think that nothing could be more fitting for two men of the world than to end their evening in the box of the jolliest woman Hubert knew. I groped for my own moustache, gave a twirl in the void, and followed him, after meticulously sliding my overcoat sleeve around my silk hat as I had seen him do.
But once in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box I was only an overgrown boy again, bathed in such blushes as used, at the same age, to visit Hubert, forgetting that I had a moustache to twirl, and knocking my hat from the peg on which I
had just hung it, in my zeal to pick up a programme she had not dropped.
For she was really too lovely—too formidably lovely. I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished—and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who need not fear crow’s-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and chatted? but then no young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known had been only a warm pink nursery, while this new one was a place of darkness, perils and enchantments…
It was the next day that one of my sisters asked me where I had been the evening before, and that I puffed out my chest to answer: “With Mrs. Hazeldean—at the opera.” My mother looked up, but did not speak till the governess had swept the girls off; then she said with pinched lips: “Hubert Wesson took you to Mrs. Hazeldean’s box?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a young man may go where he pleases. I hear Hubert is still infatuated; it serves Sabina right for not letting him marry the youngest Lyman girl. But don’t mention Mrs. Hazeldean again before your sisters…They say her husband never knew—I suppose if he had she would never have got old Miss Cecilia Winter’s money.” And it was then that my mother pronounced the name of Henry Prest, and added that phrase about the Fifth Avenue Hotel which suddenly woke my boyish memories…
In a flash I saw again, under its quickly-lowered veil, the face with the exposed eyes and the frozen smile, and felt through my grown-up waistcoat the stab to my boy’s heart and the loosened murmur of my soul; felt all this, and at the same moment tried to relate that former face, so fresh and clear despite its anguish, to the smiling guarded countenance of Hubert’s “Jolliest woman I know.”
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