Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (34 page)

 
          
“What
is it? What has happened to me?” she wondered.

 
          
There
had been alarms before—how could it be otherwise? but they had only stimulated
her, made her more alert and prompt; whereas tonight she felt herself quivering
away into she knew not what abyss of weakness. What was different, then? Oh,
she knew well enough! It was Charles…that haggard look in his eyes, and the
lines of his throat as he had leaned back sleeping. She had never before
admitted to herself how ill she thought him; and now, to have to admit it, and
at the same time not to have the complete certainty that the look in his eyes
was caused by illness only, made the strain unbearable.

 
          
She
glanced about her with a sudden sense of despair. Of all the people in those
brilliant animated groups—of all the women who called her Lizzie, and the men
who were familiars at her house—she knew that not one, at that moment, guessed,
or could have understood what she was feeling…Her eyes fell on Henry Prest, who
had come to the surface a little way off, bending over the chair of the
handsome Mrs. Lyman. “And
you
least
of all!” she thought. “Yet God knows,” she added with a shiver, “
they
all have their theories about me!”

 
          
“My
dear Mrs. Hazeldean, you look a little pale. Are you cold? Shall I get you some
champagne?” Sillerton Jackson was officiously suggesting.

 
          
“If
you think the other women look blooming! My dear man, it’s this hideous vulgar
overhead lighting…” She rose impatiently. It had occurred to her that the thing
to do—the “natural” thing—would be to stroll up to Jinny Lyman, over whom Prest
was still attentively bending.
Then
people would see if she was nervous, or ill—or afraid!

 
          
But
half-way she stopped and thought: “Suppose the Parretts and Wessons
did
see me? Then my joining Jinny while
he’s talking to her will look—how will it look?” She began to regret not having
had it out on the spot with Sillerton Jackson, who could be trusted to hold his
tongue on occasion, especially if a pretty woman threw herself on his mercy.
She glanced over her shoulder as if to call him back; but he had turned away,
been absorbed into another
group,
and she found
herself, instead, abruptly face to face with Sabina Wesson. Well, perhaps that
was better still. After all, it all depended on how much Mrs. Wesson had seen,
and what line she meant to take, supposing she
had
seen anything. She was not likely to be as inscrutable as old
Sillerton. Lizzie wished now that she had not forgotten to go to Mrs. Wesson’s
last party.

 
          
“Dear
Mrs. Wesson, it was so kind of you—”

 
          
But
Mrs. Wesson was not there. By the exercise of that mysterious protective power
which enables a woman desirous of not being waylaid to make herself invisible,
or to transport herself, by means imperceptible, to another part of the earth’s
surface, Mrs. Wesson, who, two seconds earlier, appeared in all her hard
handsomeness to be bearing straight down on Mrs. Hazeldean, with a scant yard
of clear parquet between them—Mrs. Wesson, as her animated back and her active
red fan now called on all the company to notice, had never been there at all,
had never seen Mrs. Hazeldean (“
Was
she at Mrs. Struthers’s last Sunday? How odd! I must have left before she got
there—"), but was busily engaged, on the farther side of the piano, in
examining a picture to which her attention appeared to have been called by the
persons nearest her.

 
          
“Ah, how
life-like
!
That’s what I always feel when I see a Meissonier,” she was heard to exclaim,
with her well-known instinct for the fitting epithet.

 
          
Lizzie
Hazeldean stood motionless. Her eyes dazzled as if she had received a blow on
the forehead. “So
that’s
what it
feels like!” she thought. She lifted her head very high, looked about her
again, tried to signal to Henry Prest, but saw him still engaged with the
lovely Mrs. Lyman, and at the same moment caught the glance of young Hubert
Wesson, Sabina’s eldest, who was standing in disengaged expectancy near the
supper-room door.

 
          
Hubert
Wesson, as his eyes met Mrs. Hazeldean’s, crimsoned to the forehead, hung back
a moment, and then came forward, bowing low—again that too low bow! “So
he
saw me too,” she thought. She put her
hand on his arm with a laugh. “Dear me, how ceremonious you are! Really, I’m
not as old as that bow of yours implies. My dear boy, I hope you want to take me
in to supper at once. I was out in the cold all the afternoon, gazing at the
Fifth Avenue Hotel fire, and I’m simply dying of hunger and fatigue.”

 
          
There,
the die was cast—she had said it loud enough for all the people nearest her to
hear! And she was sure now that it was the right, the “natural” thing to do.

 
          
Her
spirits rose, and she sailed into the supper-room like a goddess, steering
Hubert to an unoccupied table in a flowery corner.

 
          
“No—I
think we’re very well by ourselves, don’t you? Do you want that fat old bore of
a Lucy Vanderlow to join us? If you
do
,
of course…I can see she’s dying to…but then, I warn you, I shall ask a young
man! Let me see—shall I ask Henry Prest? You see he’s hovering! No, it
is
jollier with just you and me, isn’t
it?” She leaned forward a little, resting her chin on her clasped hands, her
elbows on the table, in an attitude which the older women thought shockingly
free, but the younger ones were beginning to imitate.

 
          
“And
now, some champagne, please—and
hot
terrapin
!…
But I suppose you were at the fire yourself,
weren’t you?” she leaned still a little nearer to say.

 
          
The
blush again swept over young Wesson’s face, rose to his forehead, and turned
the lobes of his large ears to balls of fire (“It looks,” she thought, “as if
he had on huge coral earrings.”). But she forced him to look at her, laughed
straight into his eyes, and went on: “Did you ever see a funnier sight than all
those dressed up absurdities rushing out into the cold? It looked like the end
of an Inauguration Ball! I was so fascinated that I actually pushed my way into
the hall. The firemen were furious, but they couldn’t stop me—nobody can stop
me at a fire! You should have seen the ladies scuttling down-stairs—the fat
ones! Oh, but I beg your pardon; I’d forgotten that you admire…avoirdupois. No?
But…Mrs. Van…so stupid of me! Why, you’re actually blushing! I assure you,
you’re as red as your mother’s fan—and visible from as great a distance! Yes,
please; a little more champagne…”

 
          
And
then the inevitable began. She forgot the fire, forgot her anxieties, forgot
Mrs. Wesson’s affront, forgot everything but the amusement, the passing
childish amusement, of twirling around her little finger this shy clumsy boy,
as she had twirled so many others, old and young, not caring afterward if she
ever saw them again, but so absorbed in the sport, and in her sense of knowing
how to do it better than the other women—more quietly, more insidiously,
without ogling, bridling or grimacing—that sometimes she used to ask herself with
a shiver: “What was the gift given to me for?” Yes; it always amused her at
first: the gradual dawn of attraction in eyes that had regarded her with
indifference, the blood rising to the face, the way she could turn and twist
the talk as though she had her victim on a leash, spinning him after her down
winding paths of sentimentality, irony, caprice…and leaving him, with beating
heart and dazzled eyes, to visions of an all-promising morrow…” My only
accomplishment!” she murmured to herself as she rose from the table followed by
young Wesson’s fascinated gaze, while already, on her own lips, she felt the
taste of cinders.

 
          
“But
at any rate,” she thought, “he’ll hold his tongue about having seen me at the
fire.”

 
          
  

 
          
She
let herself in with her latch-key, glanced at the notes and letters on the
hall-table (the old habit of allowing nothing to escape her), and stole up
through the darkness to her room.

 
          
A
fire still glowed in the chimney, and its light fell on two vases of crimson
roses. The room was full of their scent.

 
          
Mrs.
Hazeldean frowned, and then shrugged her shoulders. It had been a mistake,
after all, to let it appear that she was indifferent to the flowers; she must
remember to thank Susan for rescuing them. She began to undress, hastily yet
clumsily, as if her deft fingers were all thumbs; but first, detaching the two
faded pink roses from her bosom, she put them with a reverent touch into a
glass on the toilet-table. Then, slipping on her dressing-gown, she stole to
her husband’s door. It was shut, and she leaned her ear to the keyhole. After a
moment she caught his breathing, heavy, as it always was when he had a cold,
but regular, untroubled…With a sigh of relief she tiptoed back. Her uncovered
bed, with its fresh pillows and satin coverlet, sent her a rosy invitation; but
she cowered down by the fire, hugging her knees and staring into the coals.

 
          
“So
that’s
what it feels like!” she
repeated.

 
          
It
was the first time in her life that she had ever been deliberately “cut”; and
the cut was a deadly injury in old
New York
. For Sabina Wesson to have used it,
consciously, deliberately—for there was no doubt that she had purposely
advanced toward her victim—she must have done so with intent to kill. And to
risk that, she must have been sure of her facts, sure of corroborating
witnesses, sure of being backed up by all her clan.

 
          
Lizzie
Hazeldean had her clan too—but it was a small and weak one, and she hung on its
outer fringe by a thread of little-regarded cousinship. As for the Hazeldean
tribe, which was larger and stronger (though nothing like the great organized
Wesson–Parrett gens, with half New York and all Albany at its back)—well, the
Hazeldeans were not much to be counted on, and would even, perhaps, in a
furtive negative way, be not too sorry (“if it were not for poor Charlie”) that
poor Charlie’s wife should at last be made to pay for her good looks, her
popularity, above all for being, in spite of her origin, treated by poor
Charlie as if she were one of them!

 
          
Her
origin was, of course, respectable enough. Everybody knew all about the
Winters—
she had been Lizzie Winter. But the Winters were
very small people, and her father, the Reverend Arcadius Winter, the
sentimental over-popular Rector of a fashionable New York church, after a few
seasons of too great success as preacher and director of female consciences,
had suddenly had to resign and go to Bermuda for his health—or was it
France?—to some obscure watering-place, it was rumoured. At any rate, Lizzie,
who went with him (with a crushed bed-ridden mother), was ultimately, after the
mother’s death, fished out of a girls’ school in Brussels—they seemed to have
been in so many countries at once!—and brought back to New York by a former
parishioner of poor Arcadius’s, who had always “believed in him,” in spite of
the Bishop, and who took pity on his lonely daughter.

 
          
The
parishioner, Mrs. Mant, was “one of the Hazeldeans.” She was a rich widow,
given to generous gestures which she was often at a loss how to complete: and
when she had brought Lizzie Winter home, and sufficiently celebrated her own
courage in doing so, she did not quite know what step to take next. She had
fancied it would be pleasant to have a clever handsome girl about the house; but
her house-keeper was not of the same mind. The spare-room sheets had not been
out of lavender for twenty years—and Miss Winter always left the blinds up in
her room, and the carpet and curtains, unused to such exposure, suffered
accordingly. Then young men began to call—they calledin numbers. Mrs. Mant had
not supposed that the daughter of a clergyman—and a clergyman “under a
cloud”—would expect visitors. She had imagined herself taking Lizzie Winter to
church Fairs, and having the stitches of her knitting picked up by the young
girl, whose “eyes were better” than her benefactress’s. But Lizzie did not know
how to knit—she possessed no useful accomplishments—and she was visibly bored
by Church Fairs, where her presence was of little use, since she had no money
to spend. Mrs. Mant began to see her mistake; and the discovery made her
dislike her
protégée
, whom she
secretly regarded as having intentionally misled her.