Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (38 page)

 
          
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.

 
          
  

 
          
…“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.”

 
          
I
was familiar with Hubert’s indiscriminate use of his one adjective, and had not
expected to find Mrs. Hazeldean “jolly” in the literal sense: in the case of
the lady he happened to be in love with the epithet simply meant that she
justified his choice. Nevertheless, as I compared Mrs. Hazeldean’s earlier face
to this one, I had my first sense of what may befall in the long years between
youth and maturity, and of how short a distance I had travelled on that
mysterious journey. If only she would take me by the hand!

 
          
I
was not wholly unprepared for my mother’s comment. There was no other lady in
Mrs. Hazeldean’s box when we entered; none joined her during the evening, and
our hostess offered no apology for her isolation. In the New York of my youth
every one knew what to think of a woman who was seen “alone at the opera”; if
Mrs. Hazeldean was not openly classed with Fanny Ring, our one conspicuous
“professional,” it was because, out of respect for her social origin, New York
preferred to avoid such juxtapositions. Young as I was, I knew this social law,
and had guessed, before the evening was over, that Mrs. Hazeldean was not a
lady on whom other ladies called, though she was not, on the other hand, a lady
whom it was forbidden to mention to other ladies. So I did mention her, with
bravado.

 
          
No
ladies showed themselves at the opera with Mrs. Hazeldean; but one or two
dropped in to the jolly supper announced by Hubert, an entertainment whose
jollity consisted in a good deal of harmless banter over broiled canvas-backs
and celery, with the best of champagne. These same ladies I sometimes met at
her house afterward. They were mostly younger than their hostess, and still,
though precariously, within the social pale: pretty trivial creatures, bored
with a monotonous prosperity, and yearning for such unlawful joys as
cigarettes, plain speaking, and a drive home in the small hours with the young
man of the moment. But such daring spirits were few in old
New York
, their appearances infrequent and somewhat
furtive. Mrs. Hazeldean’s society consisted mainly of men, men of all ages,
from her bald or grey-headed contemporaries to youths of Hubert’s accomplished
years and raw novices of mine.