“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.”
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?”