Tales of Men and Ghosts

by Edith Wharton

  V

  THE fresh spring sunshine which had so often attended Lizzie Weston her dusty climb up the hill of St.-Cloud beamed on her, some two years later, in a scene and a situation of altered import.

  The horse-chestnuts of the Champs-Elysees filtered its rays through the symmetrical umbrage inclosing the graveled space about Daurent’s restaurant, and Miss West, seated at a table within that privileged circle, presented to the light a hat much better able to sustain its scrutiny than those which had sheltered the brow of Juliet Deering’s instructress.

  Her dress was in keeping with the hat, and both belonged to a situation rich in such possibilities as the act of a leisurely luncheon at Daurent’s in the opening week of the Salon. Her companions, of both sexes, confirmed and emphasized this impression by an elaborateness of garb and an ease of attitude implying the largest range of selection between the forms of Parisian idleness; and even Andora Macy, seated opposite, as in the place of co-hostess or companion, reflected, in coy grays and mauves, the festal note of the occasion.

  This note reverberated persistently in the ears of a solitary gentleman straining for glimpses of the group from a table wedgedin the remotest corner of the garden; but to Miss West herself the occurrence did not rise above the usual. For nearly a year she had been acquiring the habit of such situations, and the act of offering a luncheon at Daurent’s to her cousins, the Harvey Mearses of Providence, and their friend Mr. Jackson Benn, produced in herno emotion beyond the languid glow which Mr. Benn’s presence was beginning to impart to such scenes.

  “It’s frightful, the way you’ve got used to it,” Andora Macyhad wailed in the first days of her friend’s transfigured fortune, when Lizzie West had waked one morning to find herself among the heirs of an old and miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had formed, since her earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and conjecture in her own improvident family. Old Hezron Mears had never given any sign of life to the luckless Wests; had perhaps hardly been conscious of including them in the carefully drawn will which, following the old American convention, scrupulously divided his hoarded millions among his kin. It was by a mere genealogical accident that Lizzie, falling just within the golden circle, found herself possessed of a pittance sufficient to release her from the prospect of a long gray future in Mme. Clopin’s pension.

  The release had seemed wonderful at first; yet she presentlyfound that it had destroyed her former world without giving her anew one. On the ruins of the old pension life bloomed the only flower that had ever sweetened her path; and beyond the sense of present ease, and the removal of anxiety for the future, her reconstructed existence blossomed with no compensating joys. Shehad hoped great things from the opportunity to rest, to travel, to look about her, above all, in various artful feminine ways, to be “nice” to the companions of her less privileged state; but such widenings of scope left her, as it were, but the more conscious of the empty margin of personal life beyond them. It was not till she woke to the leisure of her new days that she had the full sense of what was gone from them.

  Their very emptiness made her strain to pack them with transient sensations: she was like the possessor of an unfurnished house, with random furniture and bric-a-brac perpetually pouring in “on approval.” It was in this experimental character that Mr. Jackson Benn had fixed her attention, and the languid effort of her imagination to adjust him to her requirements was seconded by thefond complicity of Andora and the smiling approval of her cousins. Lizzie did not discourage these demonstrations: she suffered serenely Andora’s allusions to Mr. Benn’s infatuation, and Mrs. Mears’s casual boast of his business standing. All the better ifthey could drape his narrow square-shouldered frame and round unwinking countenance in the trailing mists of sentiment: Lizzie looked and listened, not unhopeful of the miracle.

  “I never saw anything like the way these Frenchmen stare! Doesn’t it make you nervous, Lizzie?” Mrs. Mears broke out suddenly, ruffling her feather boa about an outraged bosom. Mrs. Mears was still in that stage of development when her countrywomen taste to the full the peril of being exposed to the gaze of the licentious Gaul.

  Lizzie roused herself from the contemplation of Mr. Benn’s round baby cheeks and the square blue jaw resting on his perpendicular collar. “Is some one staring at me?” she asked with a smile.

  “Don’t turn round, whatever you do! There—just over there, between the rhododendrons—the tall fair man alone at that table. Really, Harvey, I think you ought to speak to the head-waiter, orsomething; though I suppose in one of these places they’d only laugh at you,” Mrs. Mears shudderingly concluded.

  Her husband, as if inclining to this probability, continued the undisturbed dissection of his chicken wing; but Mr. Benn, perhaps aware that his situation demanded a more punctilious attitude, sternly revolved upon the parapet of his high collar inthe direction of Mrs. Mears’s glance.

  “What, that fellow all alone over there? Why, he’s not French; he’s an American,” he then proclaimed with a perceptible relaxing of the facial muscles.

  “Oh!” murmured Mrs. Mears, as perceptibly disappointed, and Mr. Benn continued carelessly: “He came over on the steamer with me. He’s some kind of an artist—a fellow named Deering. He wasstaring at me, I guess: wondering whether I was going to remember him. Why, how d’ ‘e do? How are you? Why, yes, of course; with pleasure—my friends, Mrs. Harvey Mears—Mr. Mears; my friends Miss Macy and Miss West.”

  “I have the pleasure of knowing Miss West,” said Vincent Deering with a smile.

  VI

  EVEN through his smile Lizzie had seen, in the first moment, how changed he was; and the impression of the change deepened to the point of pain when, a few days later, in reply to his brief note, she accorded him a private hour.

  That the first sight of his writing—the first answer to hisletters—should have come, after three long years, in the shape of this impersonal line, too curt to be called humble, yet confessing to a consciousness of the past by the studied avoidance of its language! As she read, her mind flashed back over what she had dreamed his letters would be, over the exquisite answers she had composed above his name. There was nothing exquisite in the conventional lines before her; but dormant nerves began to throb again at the mere touch of the paper he had touched, and she threw the little note into the fire before she dared to reply to it.

  Now that he was actually before her again, he became, as usual, the one live spot in her consciousness. Once more her tormented throbbing self sank back passive and numb, but now withall its power of suffering mysteriously transferred to the presence, so known, yet so unknown, at the opposite corner of herhearth. She was still Lizzie West, and he was still Vincent Deering; but the Styx rolled between them, and she saw his face through its fog. It was his face, really, rather than his words, that told her, as she furtively studied it, the tale of failure and slow discouragement which had so blurred its handsome lines. Shekept afterward no precise memory of the actual details of his narrative: the pain it evidently cost him to impart it was so much the sharpest fact in her new vision of him. Confusedly, however, she gathered that on reaching America he had found his wife’s small property gravely impaired; and that, while lingering on to securewhat remained of it, he had contrived to sell a picture or two, and had even known a brief moment of success, during which he received orders and set up a studio. But inexplicably the tide had ebbed, his work remained on his hands, and a tedious illness, with its miserable sequel of debt, soon wiped out his small advantage. There followed a period of eclipse, still more vaguely pictured, during which she was allowed to infer that he had tried his hand at divers means of livelihood, accepting employment from a fashionable house-decorator, designing wall-papers, illustrating magazine articles, and acting for a time, she dimly understood, as the social tout of a new hotel desirous of advertising its restaurant. These disjointed facts were strung on a slender thread of personal allusions—references to friends who had been kind (jealously, she gues
sed them to be women), and to enemies who had darkly schemed against him. But, true to his tradition of “correctness,” he carefully avoided the mention of names, and left her trembling conjectures to grope dimly through an alien crowded world in which there seemed little room for her small shy presence.

  As she listened, her private pang was merged in the intolerable sense of his unhappiness. Nothing he had said explained or excused his conduct to her; but he had suffered, he had been lonely, had been humiliated, and she suddenly felt, with a fierce maternal rage, that there was no conceivable justification for any scheme of things in which such facts were possible. She could not have said why: she simply knew that it hurt too much tosee him hurt.

  Gradually it came to her that her unconsciousness of any personal grievance was due to her having so definitely determinedher own future. She was glad she had decided, as she now felt she had, to marry Jackson Benn, if only for the sense of detachment it gave her in dealing with the case of Vincent Deering. Her personal safety insured her the requisite impartiality, and justified her in dwelling as long as she chose on the last lines of a chapter to which her own act had deliberately fixed the close. Any lingering hesitations as to the finality of her decision were dispelled by the imminent need of making it known to Deering; and when her visitor paused in his reminiscences to say, with a sigh, “But many things have happened to you too,” his words did not so much evokethe sense of her altered fortunes as the image of the protector to whom she was about to intrust them.

  “Yes, many things; it’s three years,” she answered.

  Deering sat leaning forward, in his sad exiled elegance, hiseyes gently bent on hers; and at his side she saw the solid form of Mr. Jackson Benn, with shoulders preternaturally squared by the cut of his tight black coat, and a tall shiny collar sustaining his baby cheeks and hard blue chin. Then the vision faded as Deeringbegan to speak.

  “Three years,” he repeated, musingly taking up her words. “I’ve so often wondered what they’d brought you.”

  She lifted her head with a quick blush, and the terrified wish that he should not, at the cost of all his notions of correctness, lapse into the blunder of becoming “personal.”

  “You’ve wondered?” She smiled back bravely.

  “Do you suppose I haven’t?” His look dwelt on her. “Yes, Idaresay that was what you thought of me.”

  She had her answer pat—“Why, frankly, you know, I didn’t think of you.” But the mounting tide of her poor dishonored memories swept it indignantly away. If it was his correctness toignore, it could never be hers to disavow.

  “ Was that what you thought of me?” she heard himrepeat in a tone of sad insistence; and at that, with a quick lift of her head, she resolutely answered: “How could I know what to think? I had no word from you.”

  If she had expected, and perhaps almost hoped, that this answer would create a difficulty for him, the gaze of quiet fortitude with which he met it proved that she had underestimatedhis resources.

  “No, you had no word. I kept my vow,” he said.

  “Your vow?”

  “That you shouldn’t have a word—not a syllable. Oh, I kept it through everything!”

  Lizzie’s heart was sounding in her ears the old confused rumor of the sea of life, but through it she desperately tried to distinguish the still small voice of reason.

  “What was your vow? Why shouldn’t I have had asyllable from you?”

  He sat motionless, still holding her with a look so gentle that it almost seemed forgiving.

  Then abruptly he rose, and crossing the space between them, sat down in a chair at her side. The deliberation of his movement might have implied a forgetfulness of changed conditions, and Lizzie, as if thus viewing it, drew slightly back; but he appeared not to notice her recoil, and his eyes, at last leaving her face, slowly and approvingly made the round of the small bright drawing-room. “This is charming. Yes, things have changed foryou,” he said.

  A moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of a vain return upon the past. It was as if all her retrospective tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to protect him from it. But his evasiveness exasperated her, and suddenly she felt the inconsistent desire tohold him fast, face to face with his own words.

  Before she could reiterate her question, however, he had mether with another.

  “You did think of me, then? Why are you afraid totell me that you did?”

  The unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.

  “Didn’t my letters tell you so enough?”

  “Ah, your letters!” Keeping her gaze on his in a passion ofunrelenting fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not theleast quiver of a sensitive nerve. He only gazed back at her more sadly.

  “They went everywhere with me—your letters,” he said.

  “Yet you never answered them.” At last the accusation trembled to her lips.

  “Yet I never answered them.”

  “Did you ever so much as read them, I wonder?”

  All the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed them on him, as if to escape from their rage.

  Deering hardly seemed to hear her question. He merely shifted his attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by the least gesture, to remind her of the privilegeswhich such nearness had once implied.

  “There were beautiful, wonderful things in them,” he said, smiling.

  She felt herself stiffen under his smile.

  “You’ve waited three years to tell me so!”

  He looked at her with grave surprise. “And do you resent mytelling you even now?”

  His parries were incredible. They left her with a breathless sense of thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindictive desire to drive him against thewall and pin him there.

  “No. Only I wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at the time—”

  And now, with a sudden turn, he gave her the final surprise of meeting her squarely on her own ground.

  “When at the time I didn’t? But how could I—at thetime?”

  “Why couldn’t you? You’ve not yet told me?”

  He gave her again his look of disarming patience. “Do I need to? Hasn’t my whole wretched story told you?”

  “Told me why you never answered my letters?”

  “Yes, since I could only answer them in one way—by protesting my love and my longing.”

  There was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers, of a wild confused reconstruction of her shattered past. “You mean, then, that you didn’t write because—”

  “Because I found, when I reached America, that I was a pauper; that my wife’s money was gone, and that what I could earn—I’ve so little gift that way!—was barely enough to keep Juliet clothed and educated. It was as if an iron door had been suddenly locked andbarred between us.”

  Lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of her incredulity. “You might at least have told me—have explained. Do you think I shouldn’t have understood?”

  He did not hesitate. “You would have understood. It wasn’tthat.”

  “What was it then?” she quavered.

  “It’s wonderful you shouldn’t see! Simply that I couldn’t write you that. Anything else—not that!”

  “And so you preferred to let me suffer?”

  There was a shade of reproach in his eyes. “I suffered too,” he said.

  It was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment it nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent them trembling in the direction of scorn and irony. Buteven as the impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation. Once again, as so often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always failed to reckon with—the fact of thedeep irreducible difference between his image in her mind and hisactual self, the mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the
look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality. She had phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to herself that she “never could rememberhim,” so completely did the sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders. Bright and breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside which her private injury paled.

  “I suffered horribly,” he repeated, “and all the more that Icouldn’t make a sign, couldn’t cry out my misery. There was onlyone escape from it all—to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me.”

  The blood rushed to Lizzie’s forehead. “Hate you—you prayed that I might hate you?”

  He rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in his. “Yes; because your letters showed me that, if youdidn’t, you’d be unhappier still.”