_ Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young
man with a soft reddish beard, who, at the other end of the
carriage, appeared to be dissembling himself behind an unfolded
newspaper. Lily's eye brightened, and a faint smile relaxed the
drawn lines of her mouth. She had known that Mr. Percy Gryce was
to be at Bellomont, but she had not counted on the luck of having
him to herself in the train; and the fact banished all perturbing
thoughts of Mr. Rosedale. Perhaps, after all, the day was to end
more favourably than it had begun.
She began to cut the pages of a novel, tranquilly studying her
prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of
attack. Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told
her that he was aware of her presence: no one had ever been quite
so engrossed in an evening paper! She guessed that he was too shy
to come up to her, and that she would have to devise some means
of approach which should not appear to be an advance on her part.
It amused her to think that any one as rich as Mr. Percy Gryce
should be shy; but she was gifted with treasures of indulgence
for such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his timidity might serve
her purpose better than too much assurance. She had the art of
giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not
equally sure of being able to embarrass the self-confident.
She waited till the train had emerged from the tunnel and was
racing between the ragged edges of the northern suburbs. Then, as
it lowered its speed near Yonkers, she rose from her seat and
drifted slowly down the carriage. As she passed Mr. Gryce, the
train gave a lurch, and he was aware of a slender hand gripping
the back of his chair. He rose with a start, his ingenuous
face looking as though it had been dipped in crimson: even the
reddish tint in his beard seemed to deepen. The train swayed
again, almost flinging Miss Bart into his arms.
She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was
enveloped in the scent of her dress, and his shoulder had felt
her fugitive touch.
"Oh, Mr. Gryce, is it you? I'm so sorry--I was trying to find the
porter and get some tea."
She held out her hand as the train resumed its level rush, and
they stood exchanging a few words in the aisle. Yes--he was going
to Bellomont. He had heard she was to be of the party--he blushed
again as he admitted it. And was he to be there for a whole week?
How delightful!
But at this point one or two belated passengers from the last
station forced their way into the carriage, and Lily had to
retreat to her seat.
"The chair next to mine is empty--do take it," she said over her
shoulder; and Mr. Gryce, with considerable embarrassment,
succeeded in effecting an exchange which enabled him to transport
himself and his bags to her side.
"Ah--and here is the porter, and perhaps we can have some tea."
She signalled to that official, and in a moment, with the ease
that seemed to attend the fulfilment of all her wishes, a little
table had been set up between the seats, and she had helped Mr.
Gryce to bestow his encumbering properties beneath it.
When the tea came he watched her in silent fascination while her
hands flitted above the tray, looking miraculously fine and
slender in contrast to the coarse china and lumpy bread. It
seemed wonderful to him that any one should perform with such
careless ease the difficult task of making tea in public in a
lurching train. He would never have dared to order it for
himself, lest he should attract the notice of his
fellow-passengers; but, secure in the shelter of her
conspicuousness, he sipped the inky draught with a delicious
sense of exhilaration.
Lily, with the flavour of Selden's caravan tea on her lips, had
no great fancy to drown it in the railway brew which seemed such
nectar to her companion; but, rightly judging that one of
the charms of tea is the fact of drinking it together, she
proceeded to give the last touch to Mr. Gryce's enjoyment by
smiling at him across her lifted cup.
"Is it quite right--I haven't made it too strong?" she asked
solicitously; and he replied with conviction that he had never
tasted better tea.
"I daresay it is true," she reflected; and her imagination was
fired by the thought that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the
depths of the most complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually
taking his first journey alone with a pretty woman.
It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument
of his initiation. Some girls would not have known how to manage
him. They would have over-emphasized the novelty of the
adventure, trying to make him feel in it the zest of an escapade.
But Lily's methods were more delicate. She remembered that her
cousin Jack Stepney had once defined Mr. Gryce as the young man
who had promised his mother never to go out in the rain without
his overshoes; and acting on this hint, she resolved to impart a
gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her companion,
instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or
unusual, would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always
having a companion to make one's tea in the train.
But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the tray
had been removed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement
of Mr. Gryce's limitations. It was not, after all, opportunity
but imagination that he lacked: he had a mental palate which
would never learn to distinguish between railway tea and nectar.
There was, however, one topic she could rely on: one spring that
she had only to touch to set his simple machinery in motion. She
had refrained from touching it because it was a last resource,
and she had relied on other arts to stimulate other sensations;
but as a settled look of dulness began to creep over his candid
features, she saw that extreme measures were necessary.
"And how," she said, leaning forward, "are you getting on with
your Americana?"
His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an
incipient film had been removed from it, and she felt the pride
of a skilful operator.
"I've got a few new things," he said, suffused with pleasure, but
lowering his voice as though he feared his fellow-passengers
might be in league to despoil him.
She returned a sympathetic enquiry, and gradually he was drawn on
to talk of his latest purchases. It was the one subject which
enabled him to forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to
remember himself without constraint, because he was at home in
it, and could assert a superiority that there were few to
dispute. Hardly any of his acquaintances cared for Americana, or
knew anything about them; and the consciousness of this ignorance
threw Mr. Gryce's knowledge into agreeable relief. The only
difficulty was to introduce the topic and to keep it to the
front; most people showed no desire to have their ignorance
dispelled, and Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are
crammed with an unmarketable commodity.
But Miss Bart, it appeared, really did want to know about
Americana; and moreover, she was already sufficiently informed to
make the task of farther instruction as easy as it was agreeable.
She questioned him intelligently, she heard him submissively;
and, prepared for the look of lassitude which usually crept over
his listeners' faces, he grew eloquent under her receptive gaze.
The "points" she had had the presence of mind to glean from
Selden, in anticipation of this very contingency, were serving
her to such good purpose that she began to think her visit to him
had been the luckiest incident of the day. She had once more
shown her talent for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous
theories as to the advisability of yielding to impulse were
germinating under the surface of smiling attention which she
continued to present to her companion.
Mr. Gryce's sensations, if less definite, were equally agreeable.
He felt the confused titillation with which the lower organisms
welcome the gratification of their needs, and all his senses
floundered in a vague well-being, through which Miss Bart's
personality was dimly but pleasantly perceptible.
Mr. Gryce's interest in Americana had not originated with
himself: it was impossible to think of him as evolving any taste
of his own. An uncle had left him a collection already noted
among bibliophiles; the existence of the collection was
the only fact that had ever shed glory on the name of Gryce, and
the nephew took as much pride in his inheritance as though it had
been his own work. Indeed, he gradually came to regard it as
such, and to feel a sense of personal complacency when he chanced
on any reference to the Gryce Americana. Anxious as he was to
avoid personal notice, he took, in the printed mention of his
name, a pleasure so exquisite and excessive that it seemed a
compensation for his shrinking from publicity.
To enjoy the sensation as often as possible, he subscribed to all
the reviews dealing with book-collecting in general, and American
history in particular, and as allusions to his library abounded
in the pages of these journals, which formed his only reading, he
came to regard himself as figuring prominently in the public eye,
and to enjoy the thought of the interest which would be excited
if the persons he met in the street, or sat among in travelling,
were suddenly to be told that he was the possessor of the Gryce
Americana.
Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Miss Bart was
discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in
proportion to the outer self-depreciation. With a more confident
person she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic, or
to show such exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly
guessed that Mr. Gryce's egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring
constant nurture from without. Miss Bart had the gift of
following an undercurrent of thought while she appeared to be
sailing on the surface of conversation; and in this case her
mental excursion took the form of a rapid survey of Mr. Percy
Gryce's future as combined with her own. The Gryces were from
Albany, and but lately introduced to the metropolis, where the
mother and son had come, after old Jefferson Gryce's death, to
take possession of his house in Madison Avenue--an appalling
house, all brown stone without and black walnut within, with the
Gryce library in a fire-proof annex that looked like a mausoleum.
Lily, however, knew all about them: young Mr. Gryce's arrival had
fluttered the maternal breasts of New York, and when a girl has
no mother to palpitate for her she must needs be on the alert for
herself. Lily, therefore, had not only contrived to put herself
in the young man's way, but had made the acquaintance of
Mrs. Gryce, a monumental woman with the voice of a pulpit orator
and a mind preoccupied with the iniquities of her servants, who
came sometimes to sit with Mrs. Peniston and learn from that lady
how she managed to prevent the kitchen-maid's smuggling groceries
out of the house. Mrs. Gryce had a kind of impersonal
benevolence: cases of individual need she regarded with
suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their annual
reports showed an impressive surplus. Her domestic duties were
manifold, for they extended from furtive inspections of the
servants' bedrooms to unannounced descents to the cellar; but she
had never allowed herself many pleasures. Once, however, she had
had a special edition of the Sarum Rule printed in rubric and
presented to every clergyman in the diocese; and the gilt album
in which their letters of thanks were pasted formed the chief
ornament of her drawing-room table.
Percy had been brought up in the principles which so excellent a
woman was sure to inculcate. Every form of prudence and suspicion
had been grafted on a nature originally reluctant and cautious,
with the result that it would have seemed hardly needful for Mrs.
Gryce to extract his promise about the overshoes, so little
likely was he to hazard himself abroad in the rain. After
attaining his majority, and coming into the fortune which the
late Mr. Gryce had made out of a patent device for excluding
fresh air from hotels, the young man continued to live with his
mother in Albany; but on Jefferson Gryce's death, when another
large property passed into her son's hands, Mrs. Gryce thought
that what she called his "interests" demanded his presence in New
York. She accordingly installed herself in the Madison Avenue
house, and Percy, whose sense of duty was not inferior to his
mother's, spent all his week days in the handsome Broad Street
office where a batch of pale men on small salaries had grown grey
in the management of the Gryce estate, and where he was initiated
with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of
accumulation.
As far as Lily could learn, this had hitherto been Mr. Gryce's
only occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it
not too hard a task to interest a young man who had been kept on
such low diet. At any rate, she felt herself so completely
in command of the situation that she yielded to a sense of
security in which all fear of Mr. Rosedale, and of the
difficulties on which that fear was contingent, vanished beyond
the edge of thought.
The stopping of the train at Garrisons would not have distracted
her from these thoughts, had she not caught a sudden look of
distress in her companion's eye. His seat faced toward the door,
and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the approach of an
acquaintance; a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and
general sense of commotion which her own entrance into a
railway-carriage was apt to produce.
She knew the symptoms at once, and was not surprised to be hailed
by the high notes of a pretty woman, who entered the train
accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering
under a load of bags and dressing-cases.
"Oh, Lily--are you going to Bellomont? Then you can't let me have
your seat, I suppose? But I MUST have a seat in this
carriage--porter, you must find me a place at once. Can't some
one be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends. Oh, how
do you do, Mr. Gryce? Do please make him understand that I must
have a seat next to you and Lily."
Mrs. George Dorset, regardless of the mild efforts of a traveller
with a carpet-bag, who was doing his best to make room for her by
getting out of the train, stood in the middle of the aisle,
diffusing about her that general sense of exasperation which a
pretty woman on her travels not infrequently creates.
She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless
pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run
through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her
small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark
exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted
curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as
one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit
who took up a great deal of room. _