_ Selden, following her glance, perceived a party of people
advancing toward them from the farther bend of the path. Lady
Cressida had evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of
the church-goers had thought it their duty to accompany
her. Lily's companion looked rapidly from one to the other of the
two men of the party; Wetherall walking respectfully at Lady
Cressida's side with his little sidelong look of nervous
attention, and Percy Gryce bringing up the rear with Mrs.
Wetherall and the Trenors.
"Ah--now I see why you were getting up your Americana!" Selden
exclaimed with a note of the freest admiration but the blush with
which the sally was received checked whatever amplifications he
had meant to give it.
That Lily Bart should object to being bantered about her suitors,
or even about her means of attracting them, was so new to Selden
that he had a momentary flash of surprise, which lit up a number
of possibilities; but she rose gallantly to the defence of her
confusion, by saying, as its object approached: "That was why I
was waiting for you--to thank you for having given me so many
points!"
"Ah, you can hardly do justice to the subject in such a short
time," said Selden, as the Trenor girls caught sight of Miss
Bart; and while she signalled a response to their boisterous
greeting, he added quickly: "Won't you devote your afternoon to
it? You know I must be off tomorrow morning. We'll take a walk,
and you can thank me at your leisure."
The afternoon was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air,
and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze
which diffused the brightness without dulling it.
In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill;
but as the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the
long slopes beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached
a zone of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with
scattered trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters
and purpling sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver
of ash-leaves, the country unrolled itself in pastoral distances.
Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the
creeping glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang
it, and the shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a
beech-grove. The boles of the trees stood well apart, with only a
light feathering of undergrowth; the path wound along the edge of
the wood, now and then looking out on a sunlit pasture or on an
orchard spangled with fruit.
Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for
the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which
was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape
outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood,
and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth,
its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples
wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey
orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove.
Two or three red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees, and the
white wooden spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder
of the hill; while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road
ran between the fields.
"Let us sit here," Selden suggested, as they reached an open
ledge of rock above which the beeches rose steeply between mossy
boulders.
Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She
sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent,
her eyes wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the
landscape. Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet,
tilting his hat against the level sun-rays, and clasping his
hands behind his head, which rested against the side of the rock.
He had no wish to make her talk; her quick-breathing silence
seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of things. In his
own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling the
sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene
at their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his,
was throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her
at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and
exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black
prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew
fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon
expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for
flight.
She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which
seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her
feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination
of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the
spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods,
the thought of the dulness she had fled from? Lily had no
definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings.
She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but
only once with a man. That was years ago, when she first came
out, and had been smitten with a romantic passion for a young
gentleman named Herbert Melson, who had blue eyes and a little
wave in his hair. Mr. Melson, who was possessed of no other
negotiable securities, had hastened to employ these in capturing
the eldest Miss Van Osburgh: since then he had grown stout and
wheezy, and was given to telling anecdotes about his children. If
Lily recalled this early emotion it was not to compare it with
that which now possessed her; the only point of comparison was
the sense of lightness, of emancipation, which she remembered
feeling, in the whirl of a waltz or the seclusion of a
conservatory, during the brief course of her youthful romance.
She had not known again till today that lightness, that glow of
freedom; but now it was something more than a blind groping of
the blood. The peculiar charm of her feeling for Selden
was that she understood it; she could put her finger on every
link of the chain that was drawing them together. Though his
popularity was of the quiet kind, felt rather than actively
expressed among his friends, she had never mistaken his
inconspicuousness for obscurity. His reputed cultivation was
generally regarded as a slight obstacle to easy intercourse, but
Lily, who prided herself on her broad-minded recognition of
literature, and always carried an Omar Khayam in her
travelling-bag, was attracted by this attribute, which she felt
would have had its distinction in an older society. It was,
moreover, one of his gifts to look his part; to have a height
which lifted his head above the crowd, and the keenly-modelled
dark features which, in a land of amorphous types, gave him the
air of belonging to a more specialized race, of carrying the
impress of a concentrated past. Expansive persons found him a
little dry, and very young girls thought him sarcastic; but this
air of friendly aloofness, as far removed as possible from any
assertion of personal advantage, was the quality which piqued
Lily's interest. Everything about him accorded with the
fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with
which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him
most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a
sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met.
It was the unconscious prolongation of this thought which led her
to say presently, with a laugh: "I have broken two engagements
for you today. How many have you broken for me?"
"None," said Selden calmly. "My only engagement at Bellomont was
with you."
She glanced down at him, faintly smiling.
"Did you really come to Bellomont to see me?"
"Of course I did."
Her look deepened meditatively. "Why?" she murmured, with an
accent which took all tinge of coquetry from the question.
"Because you're such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see
what you are doing."
"How do you know what I should be doing if you were not here?"
Selden smiled. "I don't flatter myself that my coming has
deflected your course of action by a hair's breadth."
"That's absurd--since, if you were not here, I could obviously
not be taking a walk with you."
"No; but your taking a walk with me is only another way of making
use of your material. You are an artist and I happen to be the
bit of colour you are using today. It's a part of your cleverness
to be able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously."
Lily smiled also: his words were too acute not to strike her
sense of humour. It was true that she meant to use the accident
of his presence as part of a very definite effect; or that, at
least, was the secret pretext she had found for breaking her
promise to walk with Mr. Gryce. She had sometimes been accused of
being too eager--even Judy Trenor had warned her to go slowly.
Well, she would not be too eager in this case; she would give her
suitor a longer taste of suspense. Where duty and inclination
jumped together, it was not in Lily's nature to hold them
asunder. She had excused herself from the walk on the plea of a
headache: the horrid headache which, in the morning, had
prevented her venturing to church. Her appearance at luncheon
justified the excuse. She looked languid, full of a suffering
sweetness; she carried a scent-bottle in her hand. Mr. Gryce was
new to such manifestations; he wondered rather nervously if she
were delicate, having far-reaching fears about the future of his
progeny. But sympathy won the day, and he besought her not to
expose herself: he always connected the outer air with ideas of
exposure. _