_ Thus far, then, Lily felt that she had done well; and the
conviction strengthened her for the task that remained. She and
Bertha had never been on confidential terms, but at such a crisis
the barriers of reserve must surely fall: Dorset's wild allusions
to the scene of the morning made Lily feel that they were down
already, and that any attempt to rebuild them would be beyond
Bertha's strength. She pictured the poor creature shivering
behind her fallen defences and awaiting with suspense the moment
when she could take refuge in the first shelter that offered. If
only that shelter had not already offered itself elsewhere! As
the gig traversed the short distance between the quay and the
yacht, Lily grew more than ever alarmed at the possible
consequences of her long absence. What if the wretched Bertha,
finding in all the long hours no soul to turn to--but by this
time Lily's eager foot was on the side-ladder, and her first step
on the Sabrina showed the worst of her apprehensions to be
unfounded; for there, in the luxurious shade of the after-deck,
the wretched Bertha, in full command of her usual attenuated
elegance, sat dispensing tea to the Duchess of Beltshire and Lord
Hubert.
The sight filled Lily with such surprise that she felt that
Bertha, at least, must read its meaning in her look, and she was
proportionately disconcerted by the blankness of the look
returned. But in an instant she saw that Mrs. Dorset had, of
necessity, to look blank before the others, and that, to mitigate
the effect of her own surprise, she must at once produce some
simple reason for it. The long habit of rapid transitions made it
easy for her to exclaim to the Duchess: "Why, I thought you'd
gone back to the Princess!" and this sufficed for the lady she
addressed, if it was hardly enough for Lord Hubert.
At least it opened the way to a lively explanation of how the
Duchess was, in fact, going back the next moment, but had first
rushed out to the yacht for a word with Mrs. Dorset on the
subject of tomorrow's dinner--the dinner with the Brys, to which
Lord Hubert had finally insisted on dragging them.
"To save my neck, you know!" he explained, with a glance that
appealed to Lily for some recognition of his promptness; and the
Duchess added, with her noble candour: "Mr. Bry has promised him
a tip, and he says if we go he'll pass it onto us."
This led to some final pleasantries, in which, as it seemed to
Lily, Mrs. Dorset bore her part with astounding bravery, and at
the close of which Lord Hubert, from half way down the
side-ladder, called back, with an air of numbering heads: "And of
course we may count on Dorset too?"
"Oh, count on him," his wife assented gaily. She was keeping up
well to the last--but as she turned back from waving her adieux
over the side, Lily said to herself that the mask must drop and
the soul of fear look out.
Mrs. Dorset turned back slowly; perhaps she wanted time to steady
her muscles; at any rate, they were still under perfect control
when, dropping once more into her seat behind the tea-table, she
remarked to Miss Bart with a faint touch of irony: "I suppose I
ought to say good morning."
If it was a cue, Lily was ready to take it, though with only the
vaguest sense of what was expected of her in return. There was
something unnerving in the contemplation of Mrs. Dorset's
composure, and she had to force the light tone in which she
answered: "I tried to see you this morning, but you were not yet
up.
"No--I got to bed late. After we missed you at the station
I thought we ought to wait for you till the last train."
She spoke very gently, but with just the least tinge of reproach.
"You missed us? You waited for us at the station?" Now indeed
Lily was too far adrift in bewilderment to measure the other's
words or keep watch on her own. "But I thought you didn't get to
the station till after the last train had left!"
Mrs. Dorset, examining her between lowered lids, met this with
the immediate query: "Who told you that?"
"George--I saw him just now in the gardens."
"Ah, is that George's version? Poor George--he was in no state to
remember what I told him. He had one of his worst attacks this
morning, and I packed him off to see the doctor. Do you know if
he found him?"
Lily, still lost in conjecture, made no reply, and Mrs. Dorset
settled herself indolently in her seat. "He'll wait to see him;
he was horribly frightened about himself. It's very bad for him
to be worried, and whenever anything upsetting happens, it always
brings on an attack."
This time Lily felt sure that a cue was being pressed on her; but
it was put forth with such startling suddenness, and with so
incredible an air of ignoring what it led up to, that she could
only falter out doubtfully: "Anything upsetting?"
"Yes--such as having you so conspicuously on his hands in the
small hours. You know, my dear, you're rather a big
responsibility in such a scandalous place after midnight."
At that--at the complete unexpectedness and the inconceivable
audacity of it--Lily could not restrain the tribute of an
astonished laugh.
"Well, really--considering it was you who burdened him with the
responsibility!"
Mrs. Dorset took this with an exquisite mildness. "By not having
the superhuman cleverness to discover you in that frightful rush
for the train? Or the imagination to believe that you'd take it
without us--you and he all alone--instead of waiting quietly in
the station till we DID manage to meet you?"
Lily's colour rose: it was growing clear to her that Bertha was
pursuing an object, following a line she had marked out for
herself. Only, with such a doom impending, why waste time in
these childish efforts to avert it? The puerility of the
attempt disarmed Lily's indignation: did it not prove how
horribly the poor creature was frightened?"
No; by our simply all keeping together at Nice," she returned.
"Keeping together? When it was you who seized the first
opportunity to rush off with the Duchess and her friends? My dear
Lily, you are not a child to be led by the hand!"
"No--nor to be lectured, Bertha, really; if that's what you are
doing to me now."
Mrs. Dorset smiled on her reproachfully. "Lecture you--I? Heaven
forbid! I was merely trying to give you a friendly hint. But it's
usually the other way round, isn't it? I'm expected to take
hints, not to give them: I've positively lived on them all these
last months."
"Hints--from me to you?" Lily repeated.
"Oh, negative ones merely--what not to be and to do and to see.
And I think I've taken them to admiration. Only, my dear, if
you'll let me say so, I didn't understand that one of my negative
duties was NOT to warn you when you carried your imprudence too
far."
A chill of fear passed over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered
treachery that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But
compassion, in a moment, got the better of her instinctive
recoil. What was this outpouring of senseless bitterness but the
tracked creature's attempt to cloud the medium through which it
was fleeing? It was on Lily's lips to exclaim: "You poor soul,
don't double and turn--come straight back to me, and we'll find a
way out!" But the words died under the impenetrable insolence of
Bertha's smile. Lily sat silent, taking the brunt of it quietly,
letting it spend itself on her to the last drop of its
accumulated falseness; then, without a word, she rose and went
down to her cabin.
Miss Bart's telegram caught Lawrence Selden at the door of his
hotel; and having read it, he turned back to wait for Dorset. The
message necessarily left large gaps for conjecture; but all that
he had recently heard and seen made these but too easy to fill
in. On the whole he was surprised; for though he had perceived
that the situation contained all the elements of an explosion, he
had often enough, in the range of his personal experience, seen
just such combinations subside into harmlessness. Still, Dorset's
spasmodic temper, and his wife's reckless disregard of
appearances, gave the situation a peculiar insecurity; and it was
less from the sense of any special relation to the case than from
a purely professional zeal, that Selden resolved to guide the
pair to safety. Whether, in the present instance, safety for
either lay in repairing so damaged a tie, it was no business of
his to consider: he had only, on general principles, to think of
averting a scandal, and his desire to avert it was increased by
his fear of its involving Miss Bart. There was nothing specific
in this apprehension; he merely wished to spare her the
embarrassment of being ever so remotely connected with the public
washing of the Dorset linen.
How exhaustive and unpleasant such a process would be, he saw
even more vividly after his two hours' talk with poor Dorset. If
anything came out at all, it would be such a vast unpacking of
accumulated moral rags as left him, after his visitor had gone,
with the feeling that he must fling open the windows and have his
room swept out. But nothing should come out; and happily for his
side of the case, the dirty rags, however pieced together, could
not, without considerable difficulty, be turned into a
homogeneous grievance. The torn edges did not always fit--there
were missing bits, there were disparities of size and colour, all
of which it was naturally Selden's business to make the most of
in putting them under his client's eye. But to a man in Dorset's
mood the completest demonstration could not carry conviction, and
Selden saw that for the moment all he could do was to soothe and
temporize, to offer sympathy and to counsel prudence. He let
Dorset depart charged to the brim with the sense that, till
their next meeting, he must maintain a strictly noncommittal
attitude; that, in short, his share in the game consisted for the
present in looking on. Selden knew, however, that he could not
long keep such violences in equilibrium; and he promised to meet
Dorset, the next morning, at an hotel in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile
he counted not a little on the reaction of weakness and
self-distrust that, in such natures, follows on every unwonted
expenditure of moral force; and his telegraphic reply to Miss
Bart consisted simply in the injunction: "Assume that everything
is as usual."
On this assumption, in fact, the early part of the following day
was lived through. Dorset, as if in obedience to Lily's
imperative bidding, had actually returned in time for a late
dinner on the yacht. The repast had been the most difficult
moment of the day. Dorset was sunk in one of the abysmal silences
which so commonly followed on what his wife called his "attacks"
that it was easy, before the servants, to refer it to this cause;
but Bertha herself seemed, perversely enough, little disposed to
make use of this obvious means of protection. She simply left the
brunt of the situation on her husband's hands, as if too absorbed
in a grievance of her own to suspect that she might be the object
of one herself. To Lily this attitude was the most ominous,
because the most perplexing, element in the situation. As she
tried to fan the weak flicker of talk, to build up, again and
again, the crumbling structure of "appearances," her own
attention was perpetually distracted by the question: "What on
earth can she be driving at?" There was something positively
exasperating in Bertha's attitude of isolated defiance. If only
she would have given her friend a hint they might still have
worked together successfully; but how could Lily be of use, while
she was thus obstinately shut out from participation? To be of
use was what she honestly wanted; and not for her own sake but
for the Dorsets'. She had not thought of her own situation at
all: she was simply engrossed in trying to put a little order in
theirs. But the close of the short dreary evening left her with a
sense of effort hopelessly wasted. She had not tried to see
Dorset alone: she had positively shrunk from a renewal of his
confidences. It was Bertha whose confidence she sought, and who
should as eagerly have invited her own; and Bertha, as if
in the infatuation of self-destruction, was actually pushing away
her rescuing hand. _