The House of Mirth (32 page)

The rooms were packed with the gazing throng which in the afternoon hours trickles heavily between the tables, like the Sunday crowd in a lion-house. In the stagnant flow of the mass, identities were hardly distinguishable; but Lily presently saw Mrs. Bry cleaving her determined way through the doors, and in the broad wake she left, the light figure of Mrs. Fisher bobbing after her like a row-boat at the stern of a tug. Mrs. Bry pressed on, evidently animated by the resolve to reach a certain point in the rooms; but Mrs. Fisher, as she passed Lily, broke from her towing-line and let herself float to the girl's side.

“Lose her?” she echoed the latter's query, with an indifferent glance at Mrs. Bry's retreating back. “I daresay—it doesn't matter: I
have
lost her already.” And, as Lily exclaimed, she added: “We had an awful row this morning. You know, of course, that the Duchess chucked her at dinner last night, and she thinks it was my fault—my want of management. The worst of it is, the message—just a mere word by telephone—came so late that the dinner had to be paid for; and Bécassin
had
run it up—it had been so drummed into him that the Duchess was coming!” Mrs. Fisher indulged in a faint laugh at the remembrance. “Paying for what she doesn't get rankles so dreadfully with Louisa; I can't make her see that it's one of the preliminary steps to getting what you haven't paid for—and as I was the nearest thing to smash, she smashed me to atoms, poor dear!”

Lily murmured her commiseration. Impulses of sympathy came naturally to her, and it was instinctive to proffer her help to Mrs. Fisher.

“If there's anything I can do—if it's only a question of meeting the Duchess! I heard her say she thought Mr. Bry amusing—”

But Mrs. Fisher interposed with a decisive gesture. “My dear, I have my pride: the pride of my trade.
I
couldn't manage the Duchess, and I can't palm off your arts on Louisa Bry as mine. I've taken the final step: I go to Paris tonight with the Sam Gormers.
They're
still in the elementary stage; an Italian prince is a great deal more than a prince to them, and they're always on the brink of taking a courier for one. To save them from that is my present mission.” She laughed again at the picture. “But before I go I want to make my last will and testament—I want to leave you the Brys.”

“Me?” Miss Bart joined in her amusement. “It's charming of you to remember me, dear; but really—”

“You're already so well provided for?” Mrs. Fisher flashed a sharp glance at her. “
Are
you, though, Lily—to the point of rejecting my offer?”

Miss Bart coloured slowly. “What I really meant was, that the Brys wouldn't in the least care to be so disposed of.”

Mrs. Fisher continued to probe her embarrassment with an unflinching eye. “What you really meant was that you've snubbed the Brys horribly; and you know that they know it—”

“Carry!”

“Oh, on certain sides Louisa bristles with perceptions. If you'd even managed to have them asked once on the
Sabrina
—especially when royalties were coming! But it's not too late,” she ended earnestly; “it's not too late for either of you.”

Lily smiled. “Stay over, and I'll get the Duchess to dine with them.”

“I shan't stay over—the Gormers have paid for my
salon-lit,
” said Mrs. Fisher with simplicity. “But get the Duchess to dine with them all the same.”

Lily's smile again flowed into a slight laugh; her friend's importunity was beginning to strike her as irrelevant. “I'm sorry I have been negligent about the Brys—” she began.

“Oh, as to the Brys—it's you I'm thinking of,” said Mrs. Fisher abruptly. She paused, and then, bending forward, with a lowered voice: “You know we all went on to Nice last night when the Duchess chucked us. It was Louisa's idea; I told her what I thought of it.”

Miss Bart assented. “Yes, I caught sight of you on the way back, at the station.”

“Well, the man who was in the carriage with you and George Dorset—that horrid little Dabham who does ‘Society Notes from the Riviera'—had been dining with us at Nice. And he's telling everybody that you and Dorset came back alone after midnight.”

“Alone? When he was with us?” Lily laughed, but her laugh faded into gravity under the prolonged implication of Mrs. Fisher's look. “We
did
come back alone—if that's so very dreadful! But whose fault was it? The Duchess was spending the night at Cimiez with the Crown Princess; Bertha got bored with the show and went off early, promising to meet us at the station. We turned up on time, but she didn't—she didn't turn up at all!”

Miss Bart made this announcement in the tone of one who presents, with careless assurance, a complete vindication; but Mrs. Fisher received it in a manner almost inconsequent. She seemed to have lost sight of her friend's part in the incident; her inward vision had taken another slant.

“Bertha never turned up at all? Then how on earth did she get back?”

“Oh, by the next train, I suppose; there were two extra ones for the
fête
. At any rate, I know she's safe on the yacht, though I haven't yet seen her; but you see, it was not my fault,” Lily summed up.

“Not your fault that Bertha didn't turn up? My poor child, if only you don't have to pay for it!” Mrs. Fisher rose—she had seen Mrs. Bry surging back in her direction. “There's Louisa, and I must be off—oh, we're on the best of terms externally; we're lunching together; but at heart it's
me
she's lunching on,” she explained; and with a last hand-clasp and a last look, she added: “Remember, I leave her to you; she's hovering now, ready to take you in.”

 

Lily carried the impression of Mrs. Fisher's leave-taking away with her from the Casino doors. She had accomplished, before leaving, the first step toward her reinstatement in Mrs. Bry's good graces. An affable advance—a vague murmur that they must see more of each other—an allusive glance to a near future that was felt to include the Duchess as well as the
Sabrina
—how easily it was all done if one possessed the knack of doing it! She wondered at herself, as she had so often wondered, that, possessing the knack, she did not more consistently exercise it. But sometimes she was forgetful; and sometimes, could it be that she was proud? To-day, at any rate, she had been vaguely conscious of a reason for sinking her pride, had in fact even sunk it to the point of suggesting to Lord Hubert Dacey, whom she ran across on the Casino steps, that he might really get the Duchess to dine with the Brys if
she
undertook to have them asked on the
Sabrina
. Lord Hubert had promised his help with the readiness on which she could always count: it was his only way of ever reminding her that he had once been ready to do so much more for her. Her path, in short, seemed to smooth itself before her as she advanced; yet the faint stir of uneasiness persisted. Had it been produced, she wondered, by her chance meeting with Selden? She thought not—time and change seemed so completely to have relegated him to his proper distance. The sudden and exquisite reaction from her anxieties had had the effect of throwing the recent past so far back that even Selden, as part of it, retained a certain air of unreality. And he had made it so clear that they were not to meet again, that he had merely dropped down to Nice for a day or two and had almost his foot on the next steamer. No, that part of the past had merely surged up for a moment on the fleeing surface of events; and now that it was submerged again, the uncertainty, the apprehension, persisted.

They grew to sudden acuteness as she caught sight of George Dorset descending the steps of the Hotel de Paris and making for her across the square. She had meant to drive down to the quay and regain the yacht, but she now had the immediate impression that something more was to happen first.

“Which way are you going? Shall we walk a bit?” he began, putting the second question before the first was answered, and not waiting for a reply to either before he directed her silently toward the comparative seclusion of the lower gardens.

She detected in him at once all the signs of extreme nervous tension. The skin was puffed out under his sunken eyes, and its sallowness had paled to a leaden white against which his irregular eyebrows and long reddish moustache were relieved with a saturnine effect. His appearance, in short, presented an odd mixture of the bedraggled and the ferocious.

He walked beside her in silence with quick, precipitate steps till they reached the embowered slopes to the east of the Casino; then, pulling up abruptly, he said: “Have you seen Bertha?”

“No, when I left the yacht she was not yet up.”

He received this with a laugh like the whirring sound in a disabled clock. “Not yet up? Had she gone to bed? Do you know at what time she came on board? This morning at seven!” he exclaimed.

“At seven?” Lily started. “What happened—an accident to the train?”

He laughed again. “They missed the train—all the trains—they had to drive back.”

“Well—?” She hesitated, feeling at once how little even this necessity accounted for the fatal lapse of hours.

“Well, they couldn't get a carriage at once—at that time of night, you know—” the explanatory note made it almost seem as though he were putting the case for his wife “—and when they finally did, it was only a one-horse cab, and the horse was lame!”

“How tiresome! I see,” she affirmed, with the more earnestness because she was so nervously conscious that she did not; and after a pause she added: “I'm so sorry—but ought we to have waited?”

“Waited for the one-horse cab? It would scarcely have carried the four of us, do you think?”

She took this in what seemed the only possible way, with a laugh intended to sink the question itself in his humorous treatment of it. “Well, it would have been difficult; we should have had to walk by turns. But it would have been jolly to see the sunrise.”

“Yes; the sunrise
was
jolly,” he agreed.

“Was it? You saw it, then?”

“I saw it, yes; from the deck. I waited up for them.”

“Naturally—I suppose you were worried. Why didn't you call on me to share your vigil?”

He stood still, dragging at his moustache with a lean, weak hand. “I don't think you would have cared for its
dénouement,
” he said with sudden grimness.

Again she was disconcerted by the abrupt change in his tone, and as in one flash she saw the peril of the moment and the need of keeping her sense of it out of her eyes.

“
Denouement
—isn't that too big a word for such a small incident? The worst of it, after all, is the fatigue which Bertha has probably slept off by this time.”

She clung to the note bravely, though its futility was now plain to her in the glare of his miserable eyes.

“Don't—don't—!” he broke out with the hurt cry of a child; and while she tried to merge her sympathy and her resolve to ignore any cause for it in one ambiguous murmur of deprecation, he dropped down on the bench near which they had paused and poured out the wretchedness of his soul.

It was a dreadful hour, an hour from which she emerged shrinking and seared, as though her lids had been scorched by its actual glare. It was not that she had never had premonitory glimpses of such an outbreak, but rather because here and there throughout the three months the surface of life had shown such ominous cracks and vapours that her fears had always been on the alert for an upheaval. There had been moments when the situation had presented itself under a homelier yet more vivid image—that of a shaky vehicle dashed by unbroken steeds over a bumping road while she cowered within, aware that the harness wanted mending and wondering what would give way first. Well—everything had given way now, and the wonder was that the crazy outfit had held together so long. Her sense of being involved in the crash instead of merely witnessing it from the road was intensified by the way in which Dorset, through his furies of denunciation and wild reactions of self-contempt, made her feel the need he had of her, the place she had taken in his life. But for her, what ear would have been open to his cries? And what hand but hers could drag him up again to a footing of sanity and self-respect? All through the stress of the struggle with him, she had been conscious of something faintly maternal in her efforts to guide and uplift him. But for the present, if he clung to her, it was not in order to be dragged up, but to feel some one floundering in the depths with him: he wanted her to suffer with him, not to help him to suffer less.

Happily for both, there was little physical strength to sustain his frenzy. It left him, collapsed and breathing heavily, to an apathy so deep and prolonged that Lily almost feared the passers-by would think it the result of a seizure and stop to offer their aid. But Monte Carlo is, of all places, the one where the human bond is least close, and odd sights are the least arresting. If a glance or two lingered on the couple, no intrusive sympathy disturbed them; and it was Lily herself who broke the silence by rising from her seat. With the clearing of her vision, the sweep of peril had extended, and she saw that the post of danger was no longer at Dorset's side.

“If you won't go back, I must—don't make me leave you!” she urged.

But he remained mutely resistant, and she added: “What are you going to do? You really can't sit here all night.”

“I can go to a hotel. I can telegraph my lawyers.” He sat up, roused by a new thought. “By Jove, Selden's at Nice—I'll send for Selden!”

Lily, at this, reseated herself with a cry of alarm. “No, no,
no!
” she protested.