Her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it, and her thoughts, too—her poor fluttering stormy thoughts—felt themselves suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of communion.
“And I meant to keep my resolve,” he went on, slowly releasing his clasp. “I meant to keep it even after the random stream of things swept me back here in your way; but when I saw you the other day, I felt that what had been possible at a distance was impossible now that we were near each other. How was it possibleto see you and want you to hate me?”
He had moved away, but not to resume his seat. He merely paused at a little distance, his hand resting on a chair-back, inthe transient attitude that precedes departure.
Lizzie’s heart contracted. He was going, then, and this washis farewell. He was going, and she could find no word to detainhim but the senseless stammer “I never hated you.”
He considered her with his faint grave smile. “It’s not necessary, at any rate, that you should do so now. Time and circumstances have made me so harmless—that’s exactly why I’ve dared to venture back. And I wanted to tell you how I rejoice inyour good fortune. It’s the only obstacle between us that I can’t bring myself to wish away.”
Lizzie sat silent, spellbound, as she listened, by the sudden evocation of Mr. Jackson Benn. He stood there again, between herself and Deering, perpendicular and reproachful, but less solid and sharply outlined than before, with a look in his small hard eyes that desperately wailed for reembodiment.
Deering was continuing his farewell speech. “You’re rich now, you’re free. You will marry.” She vaguely saw him holding out his hand.
“It’s not true that I’m engaged!” she broke out. They were the last words she had meant to utter; they were hardly related to her conscious thoughts; but she felt her whole will suddenly gathered up in the irrepressible impulse to repudiate and fling away from her forever the spectral claim of Mr. Jackson Benn.
VII
IT was the firm conviction of Andora Macy that every object in the Vincent Deerings’ charming little house at Neuilly had been expressly designed for the Deerings’ son to play with.
The house was full of pretty things, some not obviously applicable to the purpose; but Miss Macy’s casuistry was equal tothe baby’s appetite, and the baby’s mother was no match for them in the art of defending her possessions. There were moments, in fact, when Lizzie almost fell in with Andora’s summary division of her works of art into articles safe or unsafe for the baby to lick, or resisted it only to the extent of occasionally substituting some less precious or less perishable object for the particular fragility on which her son’s desire was fixed. And it was with this intention that, on a certain fair spring morning—which worethe added luster of being the baby’s second birthday—she had murmured, with her mouth in his curls, and one hand holding a bitof Chelsea above his dangerous clutch: “Wouldn’t he rather have that beautiful shiny thing over there in Aunt Andorra’s hand?”
The two friends were together in Lizzie’s little morning-room—the room she had chosen, on acquiring the house, because, when she sat there, she could hear Deering’s step as he paced up and down before his easel in the studio she had built for him. His step had been less regularly audible than she had hoped, for, after three years of wedded bliss, he had somehow failed to settle downto the great work which was to result from that privileged state; but even when she did not hear him she knew that he was there, above her head, stretched out on the old divan from Passy, and smoking endless cigarettes while he skimmed the morning papers; and the sense of his nearness had not yet lost its first keen edge of bliss.
Lizzie herself, on the day in question, was engaged in a more arduous task than the study of the morning’s news. She had neverunlearned the habit of orderly activity, and the trait she least understood in her husband’s character was his way of letting the loose ends of life hang as they would. She had been disposed at first to ascribe this to the chronic incoherence of his first menage; but now she knew that, though he basked under therule of her beneficent hand, he would never feel any active impulse to further its work. He liked to see things fall into place about him at a wave of her wand; but his enjoyment of her household magic in no way diminished his smiling irresponsibility, and it was with one of its least amiable consequences that his wife and her friend were now dealing.
Before them stood two travel-worn trunks and a distended portmanteau, which had shed their contents in heterogeneous heapsover Lizzie’s rosy carpet. They represented the hostages left byher husband on his somewhat precipitate departure from a New Yorkboarding-house, and indignantly redeemed by her on her learning, in a curt letter from his landlady, that the latter was not disposedto regard them as an equivalent for the arrears of Deering’s board.
Lizzie had not been shocked by the discovery that her husband had left America in debt. She had too sad an acquaintance with the economic strain to see any humiliation in such accidents; but it offended her sense of order that he should not have liquidated his obligation in the three years since their marriage. He took her remonstrance with his usual disarming grace, and left her to forward the liberating draft, though her delicacy had provided him with a bank-account which assured his personal independence. Lizzie had discharged the duty without repugnance, since she knewthat his delegating it to her was the result of his good-humored indolence and not of any design on her exchequer. Deering was not dazzled by money; his altered fortunes had tempted him to no excesses: he was simply too lazy to draw the check, as he had been too lazy to remember the debt it canceled.
“No, dear! No!” Lizzie lifted the Chelsea figure higher. “Can’t you find something for him, Andora, among that rubbish over there? Where’s the beaded bag you had in your hand just now? I don’t think it could hurt him to lick that.”
Miss Macy, bag in hand, rose from her knees, and stumbled through the slough of frayed garments and old studio properties. Before the group of mother and son she fell into a raptured attitude.
“Do look at him reach for it, the tyrant! Isn’t he just like the young Napoleon?”
Lizzie laughed and swung her son in air. “Dangle it before him, Andora. If you let him have it too quickly, he won’t care for it. He’s just like any man, I think.”
Andora slowly lowered the shining bag till the heir of the Deerings closed his masterful fist upon it. “There—my Chelsea’ssafe!” Lizzie smiled, setting her boy on the floor, and watchinghim stagger away with his booty.
Andora stood beside her, watching too. “Have you any idea where that bag came from, Lizzie?”
Mrs. Deering, bent above a pile of dis-collared shirts, shook an inattentive head. “I never saw such wicked washing! There isn’t one that’s fit to mend. The bag? No; I’ve not the least idea.”
Andora surveyed her dramatically. “Doesn’t it make you utterly miserable to think that some woman may have made it for him?”
Lizzie, bowed in anxious scrutiny above the shirts, broke into an unruffled laugh. “Really, Andora, really—six, seven, nine; no, there isn’t even a dozen. There isn’t a whole dozen of anything. I don’t see how men live alone!”
Andora broodingly pursued her theme. “Do you mean to tell me it doesn’t make you jealous to handle these things of his that other women may have given him?”
Lizzie shook her head again, and, straightening herself with a smile, tossed a bundle in her friend’s direction. “No, it doesn’t make me the least bit jealous. Here, count these socks for me, like a darling.”
Andora moaned, “Don’t you feel anything at all?“ asthe socks landed in her hollow bosom; but Lizzie, intent upon her task, tranquilly continued to unfold and sort. She felt a great deal as she did so, but her feelings were too deep and delicate for the simplifying process of speech. She only knew that each article she drew from the trunks sent through her the long tremor of Deering’s touch. It was part of her wonderful new life that everything belonging to him contained an infinitesimal fraction of hi
mself—a fraction becoming visible in the warmth of her love as certain secret elements become visible in rare intensities of temperature. And in the case of the objects before her, poor shabby witnesses of his days of failure, what they gave out acquired a special poignancy from its contrast to his present cherished state. His shirts were all in round dozens now, and washed as carefully as old lace. As for his socks, she knew the pattern of every pair, and would have liked to see the washerwoman who dared to mislay one, or bring it home with the colors “run”! And in these homely tokens of his well-being she saw the symbol of what her tenderness had brought him. He was safe in it, encompassed by it, morally and materially, and she defied the embattled powers of malice to reach him through the armor of her love. Such feelings, however, were not communicable, even had one desired to express them: they wereno more to be distinguished from the sense of life itself than bees from the lime-blossoms in which they murmur.
“Oh, do look at him, Lizzie! He’s found out how toopen the bag!”
Lizzie lifted her head to smile a moment at her son, who satthroned on a heap of studio rubbish, with Andora before him on adoring knees. She thought vaguely, “Poor Andora!” and then resumed the discouraged inspection of a buttonless white waistcoat. The next sound she was aware of was a fluttered exclamation from her friend.
“Why, Lizzie, do you know what he used the bag for? To keepyour letters in!”
Lizzie looked up more quickly. She was aware that Andora’s pronoun had changed its object, and was now applied to Deering. And it struck her as odd, and slightly disagreeable, that a letter of hers should be found among the rubbish abandoned in her husband’s New York lodgings.
“How funny! Give it to me, please.”
“Give the bag to Aunt Andora, darling! Here—look inside, and see what else a big big boy can find there! Yes, here’s another! Why, why—”
Lizzie rose with a shade of impatience and crossed the floorto the romping group beside the other trunk.
“What is it? Give me the letters, please.” As she spoke, she suddenly recalled the day when, in Mme. Clopin’s pension, she had addressed a similar behest to Andora Macy.
Andora had lifted a look of startled conjecture. “Why, thisone’s never been opened! Do you suppose that awful woman could have kept it from him?”
Lizzie laughed. Andora’s imaginings were really puerile. “What awful woman? His landlady? Don’t be such a goose, Andora. How can it have been kept back from him, when we’ve found it here among his things?”
“Yes; but then why was it never opened?”
Andora held out the letter, and Lizzie took it. The writingwas hers; the envelop bore the Passy postmark; and it was unopened. She stood looking at it with a sudden sharp drop of the heart.
“Why, so are the others—all unopened!” Andora threw out on a rising note; but Lizzie, stooping over, stretched out her hand.
“Give them to me, please.”
“Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie—” Andora, still on her knees, continued to hold back the packet, her pale face paler with anger and compassion. “Lizzie, they’re the letters I used to post for you—_the letters he never answered!_ Look!”
“Give them back to me, please.”
The two women faced each other, Andora kneeling, Lizzie motionless before her, the letters in her hand. The blood had rushed to her face, humming in her ears, and forcing itself into the veins of her temples like hot lead. Then it ebbed, and she felt cold and weak.
“It must have been some plot—some conspiracy!” Andora cried, so fired by the ecstasy of invention that for the moment she seemed lost to all but the esthetic aspect of the case.
Lizzie turned away her eyes with an effort, and they rested on the boy, who sat at her feet placidly sucking the tassels of the bag. His mother stooped and extracted them from his rosy mouth, which a cry of wrath immediately filled. She lifted him in her arms, and for the first time no current of life ran from his bodyinto hers. He felt heavy and clumsy, like some one else’s child; and his screams annoyed her.
“Take him away, please, Andora.”
“Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie!” Andora wailed.
Lizzie held out the child, and Andora, struggling to her feet, received him.
“I know just how you feel,” she gasped out above the baby’s head.
Lizzie, in some dark hollow of herself, heard the echo of a laugh. Andora always thought she knew how people felt!
“Tell Marthe to take him with her when she fetches Juliet home from school.”
“Yes, yes.” Andora gloated over her. “If you’d only give way, my darling!”
The baby, howling, dived over Andora’s shoulder for the bag.
“Oh, take him!” his mother ordered.
Andora, from the door, cried out: “I’ll be back at once. Remember, love, you’re not alone!”
But Lizzie insisted, “Go with them—I wish you to go with them,” in the tone to which Miss Macy had never learned the answer.
The door closed on her outraged back, and Lizzie stood alone. She looked about the disordered room, which offered a dreary image of the havoc of her life. An hour or two ago everything about her had been so exquisitely ordered, without and within; her thoughtsand emotions had lain outspread before her like delicate jewels laid away symmetrically in a collector’s cabinet. Now they had been tossed down helter-skelter among the rubbish there on the floor, and had themselves turned to rubbish like the rest. Yes, there lay her life at her feet, among all that tarnished trash.
She knelt and picked up her letters, ten in all, and examined the flaps of the envelops. Not one had been opened—not one. Asshe looked, every word she had written fluttered to life, and every feeling prompting it sent a tremor through her. With vertiginousspeed and microscopic vision she was reliving that whole period of her life, stripping bare again the black ruin over which the drift of three happy years had fallen.
She laughed at Andora’s notion of a conspiracy—of the letters having been “kept back.” She required no extraneous aid in deciphering the mystery: her three years’ experience of Deering shed on it all the light she needed. And yet a moment before shehad believed herself to be perfectly happy! Now it was the worstpart of her anguish that it did not really surprise her.
She knew so well how it must have happened. The letters hadreached him when he was busy, occupied with something else, and had been put aside to be read at some future time—a time which nevercame. Perhaps on his way to America, on the steamer, even, he had met “some one else”—the “some one” who lurks, veiled and ominous, in the background of every woman’s thoughts about her lover. Or perhaps he had been merely forgetful. She had learned from experience that the sensations which he seemed to feel with the most exquisite intensity left no reverberations in his mind—thathe did not relive either his pleasures or his pains. She needed no better proof of that than the lightness of his conduct toward hisdaughter. He seemed to have taken it for granted that Juliet would remain indefinitely with the friends who had received her after her mother’s death, and it was at Lizzie’s suggestion that the littlegirl was brought home and that they had established themselves at Neuilly to be near her school. But Juliet once with them, he became the model of a tender father, and Lizzie wondered that he had not felt the child’s absence, since he seemed so affectionately aware of her presence.
Lizzie had noted all this in Juliet’s case, but had taken for granted that her own was different; that she formed, for Deering, the exception which every woman secretly supposes herself to formin the experience of the man she loves. Certainly, she had learned by this time that she could not modify his habits, but she imagined that she had deepened his sensibilities, had furnished him with an “ideal”—angelic function! And she now saw that the fact of her letters—her unanswered letters—having, on his own assurance, “meant so much” to him, had been the basis on which this beautiful fabric was reared.
There they lay now, the letters, precisely as when they had left her hands. He had
not had time to read them; and there had been a moment in her past when that discovery would have been thesharpest pang imaginable to her heart. She had traveled far beyond that point. She could have forgiven him now for having forgottenher; but she could never forgive him for having deceived her.
She sat down, and looked again vaguely about the room. Suddenly she heard his step overhead, and her heart contracted. She was afraid he was coming down to her. She sprang up and bolted the door; then she dropped into the nearest chair, tremulous and exhausted, as if the pushing of the bolt had required an immense muscular effort. A moment later she heard him on the stairs, andher tremor broke into a cold fit of shaking. “I loathe you—I loathe you!” she cried.
She listened apprehensively for his touch on the handle of the door. He would come in, humming a tune, to ask some idle question and lay a caress on her hair. But no, the door was bolted; she was safe. She continued to listen, and the step passed on. He had not been coming to her, then. He must have gone down-stairs to fetchsomething—another newspaper, perhaps. He seemed to read little else, and she sometimes wondered when he had found time to store the material that used to serve for their famous “literary” talks. The wonder shot through her again, barbed with a sneer. At that moment it seemed to her that everything he had ever done and beenwas a lie.
She heard the house-door close, and started up. Was he going out? It was not his habit to leave the house in the morning.
She crossed the room to the window, and saw him walking, with a quick decided step, between the budding lilacs to the gate. What could have called him forth at that unwonted hour? It was odd that he should not have told her. The fact that she thought it odd suddenly showed her how closely their lives were interwoven. Shehad become a habit to him, and he was fond of his habits. But toher it was as if a stranger had opened the gate and gone out. She wondered what he would feel if he knew that she felt that.
“In an hour he will know,” she said to herself, with a kind of fierce exultation; and immediately she began to dramatize the scene. As soon as he came in she meant to call him up to her room and hand him the letters without a word. For a moment she gloated on the picture; then her imagination recoiled from it. She was humiliated by the thought of humiliating him. She wanted to keephis image intact; she would not see him.
Tales of Men and Ghosts Page 29
