________________________________________________
_ Outside, the sky was gusty and overcast, and as Lily and Selden
moved toward the deserted gardens below the restaurant, spurts of
warm rain blew fitfully against their faces. The fiction of the
cab had been tacitly abandoned; they walked on in silence, her
hand on his arm, till the deeper shade of the gardens received
them, and pausing beside a bench, he said: "Sit down a moment."
She dropped to the seat without answering, but the electric lamp
at the bend of the path shed a gleam on the struggling misery of
her face. Selden sat down beside her, waiting for her to speak,
fearful lest any word he chose should touch too roughly on her
wound, and kept also from free utterance by the wretched doubt
which had slowly renewed itself within him. What had brought her
to this pass? What weakness had placed her so abominably at her
enemy's mercy? And why should Bertha Dorset have turned into an
enemy at the very moment when she so obviously needed the support
of her sex? Even while his nerves raged at the subjection of husbands
to their wives, and at the cruelty of women to their kind,
reason obstinately harped on the proverbial relation between
smoke and fire. The memory of Mrs. Fisher's hints, and the
corroboration of his own impressions, while they deepened his pity
also increased his constraint, since, whichever way he sought a free
outlet for sympathy, it was blocked by the fear of committing a blunder.
Suddenly it struck him that his silence must seem almost as
accusatory as that of the men he had despised for turning from
her; but before he could find the fitting word she had cut him
short with a question.
"Do you know of a quiet hotel? I can send for my maid in the
morning."
"An hotel--HERE--that you can go to alone? It's not possible."
She met this with a pale gleam of her old playfulness. "What IS,
then? It's too wet to sleep in the gardens."
"But there must be some one---"
"Some one to whom I can go? Of course--any number--but at THIS
hour? You see my change of plan was rather sudden---"
"Good God--if you'd listened to me!" he cried, venting his
helplessness in a burst of anger.
She still held him off with the gentle mockery of her smile. "But
haven't I?" she rejoined. "You advised me to leave the yacht, and
I'm leaving it."
He saw then, with a pang of self-reproach, that she meant neither
to explain nor to defend herself; that by his miserable silence
he had forfeited all chance of helping her, and that the decisive
hour was past.
She had risen, and stood before him in a kind of clouded majesty,
like some deposed princess moving tranquilly to exile.
"Lily!" he exclaimed, with a note of despairing appeal; but--"Oh,
not now," she gently admonished him; and then, in all the
sweetness of her recovered composure: "Since I must find shelter
somewhere, and since you're so kindly here to help me---"
He gathered himself up at the challenge. "You will do as I tell
you? There's but one thing, then; you must go straight to your
cousins, the Stepneys."
"Oh--" broke from her with a movement of instinctive resistance;
but he insisted: "Come--it's late, and you must appear to have
gone there directly."
He had drawn her hand into his arm, but she held him back with a
last gesture of protest. "I can't--I can't--not that--you don't
know Gwen: you mustn't ask me!"
"I MUST ask you--you must obey me," he persisted, though infected
at heart by her own fear.
Her voice sank to a whisper: "And if she refuses?"--but, "Oh,
trust me--trust me!" he could only insist in return; and yielding
to his touch, she let him lead her back in silence to the edge of
the square.
In the cab they continued to remain silent through the brief
drive which carried them to the illuminated portals of the
Stepneys' hotel. Here he left her outside, in the darkness of the
raised hood, while his name was sent up to Stepney, and he paced
the showy hall, awaiting the latter's descent. Ten minutes later
the two men passed out together between the gold-laced custodians
of the threshold; but in the vestibule Stepney drew up with a
last flare of reluctance.
"It's understood, then?" he stipulated nervously, with his hand
on Selden's arm. "She leaves tomorrow by the early train--and my
wife's asleep, and can't be disturbed."
The blinds of Mrs. Peniston's drawing-room were drawn down
against the oppressive June sun, and in the sultry twilight the
faces of her assembled relatives took on a fitting shadow of
bereavement. They were all there: Van Alstynes, Stepneys and
Melsons--even a stray Peniston or two, indicating, by a greater
latitude in dress and manner, the fact of remoter relationship
and more settled hopes. The Peniston side was, in fact, secure in
the knowledge that the bulk of Mr. Peniston's property "went
back"; while the direct connection hung suspended on the disposal
of his widow's private fortune and on the uncertainty of its
extent. Jack Stepney, in his new character as the richest nephew,
tacitly took the lead, emphasizing his importance by the deeper
gloss of his mourning and the subdued authority of his manner;
while his wife's bored attitude and frivolous gown proclaimed the
heiress's disregard of the insignificant interests at stake. Old
Ned Van Alstyne, seated next to her in a coat that made
affliction dapper, twirled his white moustache to conceal the
eager twitch of his lips; and Grace Stepney, red-nosed and
smelling of crape, whispered emotionally to Mrs. Herbert Melson:
"I couldn't BEAR to see the Niagara anywhere else!"
A rustle of weeds and quick turning of heads hailed the opening
of the door, and Lily Bart appeared, tall and noble in her black
dress, with Gerty Farish at her side. The women's faces, as she
paused interrogatively on the threshold, were a study in
hesitation. One or two made faint motions of recognition, which
might have been subdued either by the solemnity of the scene, or
by the doubt as to how far the others meant to go; Mrs. Jack
Stepney gave a careless nod, and Grace Stepney, with a sepulchral
gesture, indicated a seat at her side. But Lily, ignoring the
invitation, as well as Jack Stepney's official attempt to direct
her, moved across the room with her smooth free gait, and seated
herself in a chair which seemed to have been purposely placed
apart from the others.
It was the first time that she had faced her family since her
return from Europe, two weeks earlier; but if she perceived
any uncertainty in their welcome, it served only to add a tinge
of irony to the usual composure of her bearing. The shock of
dismay with which, on the dock, she had heard from Gerty Farish
of Mrs. Peniston's sudden death, had been mitigated, almost at
once, by the irrepressible thought that now, at last, she would
be able to pay her debts. She had looked forward with
considerable uneasiness to her first encounter with her aunt.
Mrs. Peniston had vehemently opposed her niece's departure with
the Dorsets, and had marked her continued disapproval by not
writing during Lily's absence. The certainty that she had heard
of the rupture with the Dorsets made the prospect of the meeting
more formidable; and how should Lily have repressed a quick sense
of relief at the thought that, instead of undergoing the
anticipated ordeal, she had only to enter gracefully on a
long-assured inheritance? It had been, in the consecrated phrase,
"always understood" that Mrs. Peniston was to provide handsomely
for her niece; and in the latter's mind the understanding had
long since crystallized into fact.
"She gets everything, of course--I don't see what we're here
for," Mrs. Jack Stepney remarked with careless loudness to Ned
Van Alstyne; and the latter's deprecating murmur--"Julia was
always a just woman"--might have been interpreted as signifying
either acquiescence or doubt.
"Well, it's only about four hundred thousand," Mrs. Stepney
rejoined with a yawn; and Grace Stepney, in the silence produced
by the lawyer's preliminary cough, was heard to sob out: "They
won't find a towel missing--I went over them with her the very
day---"
Lily, oppressed by the close atmosphere, and the stifling odour
of fresh mourning, felt her attention straying as Mrs. Peniston's
lawyer, solemnly erect behind the Buhl table at the end of the
room, began to rattle through the preamble of the will.
"It's like being in church," she reflected, wondering vaguely
where Gwen Stepney had got such an awful hat. Then she noticed
how stout Jack had grown--he would soon be almost as plethoric as
Herbert Melson, who sat a few feet off, breathing puffily as he
leaned his black-gloved hands on his stick.
"I wonder why rich people always grow fat--I suppose it's because
there's nothing to worry them. If I inherit, I shall have to be
careful of my figure," she mused, while the lawyer droned on
through a labyrinth of legacies. The servants came first, then a
few charitable institutions, then several remoter Melsons and
Stepneys, who stirred consciously as their names rang out, and
then subsided into a state of impassiveness befitting the
solemnity of the occasion. Ned Van Alstyne, Jack Stepney, and a
cousin or two followed, each coupled with the mention of a few
thousands: Lily wondered that Grace Stepney was not among them.
Then she heard her own name--"to my niece Lily Bart ten thousand
dollars--" and after that the lawyer again lost himself in a coil
of unintelligible periods, from which the concluding phrase
flashed out with startling distinctness: "and the residue of my
estate to my dear cousin and name-sake, Grace Julia Stepney."
There was a subdued gasp of surprise, a rapid turning of heads,
and a surging of sable figures toward the corner in which Miss
Stepney wailed out her sense of unworthiness through the crumpled
ball of a black-edged handkerchief.
Lily stood apart from the general movement, feeling herself for
the first time utterly alone. No one looked at her, no one seemed
aware of her presence; she was probing the very depths of
insignificance. And under her sense of the collective
indifference came the acuter pang of hopes deceived.
Disinherited--she had been disinherited--and for Grace Stepney!
She met Gerty's lamentable eyes, fixed on her in a despairing
effort at consolation, and the look brought her to herself. There
was something to be done before she left the house: to be done
with all the nobility she knew how to put into such gestures. She
advanced to the group about Miss Stepney, and holding out her
hand said simply: "Dear Grace, I am so glad."
The other ladies had fallen back at her approach, and a space
created itself about her. It widened as she turned to go, and no
one advanced to fill it up. She paused a moment, glancing about
her, calmly taking the measure of her situation. She heard some
one ask a question about the date of the will; she caught a
fragment of the lawyer's answer--something about a sudden
summons, and an "earlier instru
ment." Then the tide of
dispersal began to drift past her; Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs.
Herbert Melson stood on the doorstep awaiting their motor; a
sympathizing group escorted Grace Stepney to the cab it was felt
to be fitting she should take, though she lived but a street or
two away; and Miss Bart and Gerty found themselves almost alone
in the purple drawing-room, which more than ever, in its stuffy
dimness, resembled a well-kept family vault, in which the last
corpse had just been decently deposited. _
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