_ The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the
cheerless distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts
with a cold precision unmodified by shade or colour, and
refracted, as it were, from the blank walls of the surrounding
limitations: she had opened windows from which no sky was ever
visible. But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must
employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot
stoop; and it was easier for Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate
her case than to put it plainly to herself. Once confronted with
it, however, she went the full length of its consequences; and
these had never been more clearly present to her than when, the
next afternoon, she set out for a walk with Rosedale.
It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted
with the light of summer, and something in the lines of the
landscape, and in the golden haze which bathed them, recalled to
Miss Bart the September afternoon when she had climbed the slopes
of Bellomont with Selden. The importunate memory was kept before
her by its ironic contrast to her present situation, since her
walk with Selden had represented an irresistible flight from just
such a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring
about. But other memories importuned her also; the recollection
of similar situations, as skillfully led up to, but through some
malice of fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always
failing of the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady
enough now. She saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation
must begin again, and against far greater odds, if Bertha Dorset
should succeed in breaking up her friendship with the Gormers;
and her longing for shelter and security was intensified by the
passionate desire to triumph over Bertha, as only wealth and
predominance could triumph over her. As the wife of Rosedale--the
Rosedale she felt it in her power to create--she would at least
present an invulnerable front to her enemy.
She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant,
to keep up her part in the scene toward which Rosedale
was too frankly tending. As she walked beside him, shrinking in
every nerve from the way in which his look and tone made free of
her, yet telling herself that this momentary endurance of his
mood was the price she must pay for her ultimate power over him,
she tried to calculate the exact point at which concession must
turn to resistance, and the price HE would have to pay be made
equally clear to him. But his dapper self-confidence seemed
impenetrable to such hints, and she had a sense of something hard
and self-contained behind the superficial warmth of his manner.
They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky
glen above the lake, when she suddenly cut short the culmination
of an impassioned period by turning upon him the grave loveliness
of her gaze.
"I DO believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale," she said quietly; "and
I am ready to marry you whenever you wish."
Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received
this announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet,
where he halted before her in an attitude of almost comic
discomfiture.
"For I suppose that is what you do wish," she continued, in the
same quiet tone. "And, though I was unable to consent when you
spoke to me in this way before, I am ready, now that I know you
so much better, to trust my happiness to your hands."
She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on
such occasions, and which was like a large steady light thrown
across the tortuous darkness of the situation. In its
inconvenient brightness Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as
though conscious that every avenue of escape was unpleasantly
illuminated.
Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case,
in which, with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a
gold-tipped cigarette. Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it
a moment before saying: "My dear Miss Lily, I'm sorry if there's
been any little misapprehension between us-but you made me feel
my suit was so hopeless that I had really no intention of
renewing it."
Lily's blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she checked
the first leap of her anger, and said in a tone of gentle dignity:
"I have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the impression
that my decision was final."
Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held
him in puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added,
with the faintest inflection of sadness in her voice: "Before we
bid each other goodbye, I want at least to thank you for having
once thought of me as you did."
The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled
a vulnerable fibre in Rosedale. It was her exquisite
inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without
a hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give
her up.
"Why do you talk of saying goodbye? Ain't we going to be good
friends all the same?" he urged, without releasing her hand.
She drew it away quietly. "What is your idea of being good
friends?" she returned with a slight smile. "Making love to me
without asking me to marry you?" Rosedale laughed with a
recovered sense of ease.
"Well, that's about the size of it, I suppose. I can't help
making love to you--I don't see how any man could; but I don't
mean to ask you to marry me as long as I can keep out of it."
She continued to smile. "I like your frankness; but I am afraid
our friendship can hardly continue on those terms." She turned
away, as though to mark that its final term had in fact been
reached, and he followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense
of her having after all kept the game in her own hands.
"Miss Lily---" he began impulsively; but she walked on without
seeming to hear him.
He overtook her in a few quick strides, and laid an entreating
hand on her arm. "Miss Lily--don't hurry away like that. You're
beastly hard on a fellow; but if you don't mind speaking the
truth I don't see why you shouldn't allow me to do the same."
She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away
instinctively from his touch, though she made no effort to evade
his words.
"I was under the impression," she rejoined, "that you had done so
without waiting for my permission."
"Well--why shouldn't you hear my reasons for doing it, then?
We're neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking
is going to hurt us. I'm all broken up on you: there's nothing
new in that. I'm more in love with you than I was this time last
year; but I've got to face the fact that the situation is
changed."
She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic
composure. "You mean to say that I'm not as desirable a match as
you thought me?"
"Yes; that's what I do mean," he answered resolutely. "I won't go
into what's happened. I don't believe the stories about you--I
don't WANT to believe them. But they're there, and my not
believing them ain't going to alter the situation."
She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked
the retort on her lip and she continued to face him composedly.
"If they are not true," she said, "doesn't THAT alter the
situation?"
He met this with a steady gaze of his small stock-taking eyes,
which made her feel herself no more than some superfine human
merchandise. "I believe it does in novels; but I'm certain it
don't in real life. You know that as well as I do: if we're
speaking the truth, let's speak the whole truth. Last year I was
wild to marry you, and you wouldn't look at me: this year--well,
you appear to be willing. Now, what has changed in the interval?
Your situation, that's all. Then you thought you could do better;
now---"
"You think you can?" broke from her ironically.
"Why, yes, I do: in one way, that is." He stood before her, his
hands in his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid
waistcoat. "It's this way, you see: I've had a pretty steady
grind of it these last years, working up my social position.
Think it's funny I should say that? Why should I mind saying I
want to get into society? A man ain't ashamed to say he wants to
own a racing stable or a picture gallery. Well, a taste for
society's just another kind of hobby. Perhaps I want to get even
with some of the people who cold-shouldered me last year--put it
that way if it sounds better. Anyhow, I want to have the run of
the best houses; and I'm getting it too, little by little. But I
know the quickest way to queer yourself with the right
people is to be seen with the wrong ones; and that's the reason I
want to avoid mistakes."
Miss Bart continued to stand before him in a silence that might
have expressed either mockery or a half-reluctant respect for his
candour, and after a moment's pause he went on: "There it is, you
see. I'm more in love with you than ever, but if I married you
now I'd queer myself for good and all, and everything I've worked
for all these years would be wasted."
She received this with a look from which all tinge of resentment
had faded. After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had
so long moved it was refreshing to step into the open daylight of
an avowed expediency.
"I understand you," she said. "A year ago I should have been of
use to you, and now I should be an encumbrance; and I like you
for telling me so quite honestly." She extended her hand with a
smile.
Again the gesture had a disturbing effect upon Mr. Rosedale's
self-command. "By George, you're a dead game sport, you are!" he
exclaimed; and as she began once more to move away, he broke out
suddenly--"Miss Lily--stop. You know I don't believe those
stories--I believe they were all got up by a woman who didn't
hesitate to sacrifice you to her own convenience---"
Lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain: it was easier to
endure his insolence than his commiseration.
"You are very kind; but I don't think we need discuss the matter
farther."
But Rosedale's natural imperviousness to hints made it easy for
him to brush such resistance aside. "I don't want to discuss
anything; I just want to put a plain case before you," he
persisted.
She paused in spite of herself, held by the note of a new purpose
in his look and tone; and he went on, keeping his eyes firmly
upon her: "The wonder to me is that you've waited so long to get
square with that woman, when you've had the power in your hands."
She continued silent under the rush of astonishment that his
words produced, and he moved a step closer to ask with low-toned
directness: "Why don't you use those letters of hers you bought
last year?"
Lily stood speechless under the shock of the interrogation. In
the words preceding it she had conjectured, at most, an allusion
to her supposed influence over George Dorset; nor did the
astonishing indelicacy of the reference diminish the likelihood
of Rosedale's resorting to it. But now she saw how far short of
the mark she had fallen; and the surprise of learning that he had
discovered the secret of the letters left her, for the moment,
unconscious of the special use to which he was in the act of
putting his knowledge.
Her temporary loss of self-possession gave him time to press his
point; and he went on quickly, as though to secure completer
control of the situation: "You see I know where you stand--I know
how completely she's in your power. That sounds like stage-talk,
don't it?--but there's a lot of truth in some of those old gags;
and I don't suppose you bought those letters simply because
you're collecting autographs."
She continued to look at him with a deepening bewilderment: her
only clear impression resolved itself into a scared sense of his
power.
"You're wondering how I found out about 'em?" he went on,
answering her look with a note of conscious pride. "Perhaps
you've forgotten that I'm the owner of the Benedick-but never
mind about that now. Getting on to things is a mighty useful
accomplishment in business, and I've simply extended it to my
private affairs. For this IS partly my affair, you see--at least,
it depends on you to make it so. Let's look the situation
straight in the eye. Mrs. Dorset, for reasons we needn't go into,
did you a beastly bad turn last spring. Everybody knows what Mrs.
Dorset is, and her best friends wouldn't believe her on oath
where their own interests were concerned; but as long as they're
out of the row it's much easier to follow her lead than to set
themselves against it, and you've simply been sacrificed to their
laziness and selfishness. Isn't that a pretty fair statement of
the case?--Well, some people say you've got the neatest kind of
an answer in your hands: that George Dorset would marry you
tomorrow, if you'd tell him all you know, and give him the chance
to show the lady the door. I daresay he would; but you don't seem
to care for that particular form of getting even, and,
taking a purely business view of the question, I think you're
right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out with perfectly clean
hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to get Bertha
Dorset to back you up, instead of trying to fight her."
He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time
for the expression of her gathering resistance; and as he pressed
on, expounding and elucidating his idea with the directness of
the man who has no doubts of his cause, she found the indignation
gradually freezing on her lip, found herself held fast in the
grasp of his argument by the mere cold strength of its
presentation. There was no time now to wonder how he had heard of
her obtaining the letters: all her world was dark outside the
monstrous glare of his scheme for using them. And it was not,
after the first moment, the horror of the idea that held her
spell-bound, subdued to his will; it was rather its subtle
affinity to her own inmost cravings. He would marry her tomorrow
if she could regain Bertha Dorset's friendship; and to induce the
open resumption of that friendship, and the tacit retractation of
all that had caused its withdrawal, she had only to put to the
lady the latent menace contained in the packet so miraculously
delivered into her hands. Lily saw in a flash the advantage of
this course over that which poor Dorset had pressed upon her. The
other plan depended for its success on the infliction of an open
injury, while this reduced the transaction to a private
understanding, of which no third person need have the remotest
hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of business-like give-and-take,
this understanding took on the harmless air of a mutual
accommodation, like a transfer of property or a revision of
boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it as a
perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every
concession had its recognized equivalent: Lily's tired mind was
fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical estimates into
a region of concrete weights and measures. _