Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (33 page)

 
          
Lizzie
Hazeldean had long since come to regard most women of her age as children in
the art of life. Some savage instinct of self-defence, fostered by experience,
had always made her more alert and perceiving than the charming creatures
who
passed from the nursery to marriage as if lifted from
one rose-lined cradle into another. “Rocked to sleep—that’s what they’ve always
been,” she used to think sometimes, listening to their innocuous talk during
the long after-dinners in hot drawing-rooms, while their husbands, in the
smoking-rooms below, exchanged ideas which, if no more striking, were at least
based on more direct experiences.

 
          
But
then, as all the old ladies said, Lizzie Hazeldean had always preferred the
society of men.

 
          
The
man she now sought was not visible, and she gave a little sigh of ease. “If
only he has had the sense to stay away!” she thought.

 
          
She
would have preferred to stay away herself; but it had been her husband’s whim
that she should come. “You know you always enjoy yourself at Mrs.
Struthers’s—everybody does. The old girl somehow manages to have the most
amusing house in
New York
. Who is it who’s going to sing tonight
?…
If you
don’t go, I shall know it’s because I’ve coughed two or three times oftener
than usual, and you’re worrying about me. My dear girl, it will take more than
the Fifth Avenue Hotel fire to kill
me
…My
heart’s feeling unusually steady…Put on your black velvet, will you?—with these
two roses…”

 
          
So
she had gone. And here she was, in her black velvet, under the glitter of Mrs.
Struthers’s chandeliers, amid all the youth and good looks and gaiety of New
York; for, as Hazeldean said, Mrs. Struthers’s house was more amusing than
anybody else’s, and whenever she opened her doors the world flocked through
them.

 
          
As
Mrs. Hazeldean reached the inner drawing-room the last notes of a rich tenor
were falling on the attentive silence. She saw Campanini’s low-necked throat
subside into silence above the piano, and the clapping of many tightly-fitted
gloves was succeeded by a general movement, and the usual irrepressible
outburst of talk.

 
          
In
the breaking-up of groups she caught a glimpse of Sillerton Jackson’s silvery
crown. Their eyes met across bare shoulders, he bowed profoundly, and she
fancied that a dry smile lifted his moustache. “He doesn’t usually bow to me as
low as that,” she thought apprehensively.

 
          
But
as she advanced into the room her self-possession returned. Among all these
stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing almost everything
better than they did, from the way of doing her hair to the art of keeping a
secret! She felt a thrill of pride in the slope of her white shoulders above
the black velvet, in the one curl escaping from her thick
chignon
, and the slant of the gold arrow tipped with diamonds which
she had thrust in to retain it. And she had done it all without a maid, with no
one cleverer than Susan to help her! Ah, as a woman she knew her business…

 
          
Mrs.
Struthers, plumed and ponderous, with diamond stars studding her black wig like
a pin-cushion, had worked her resolute way back to the outer room. More people
were coming in; and with her customary rough skill she was receiving,
distributing,
introducing
them. Suddenly her smile
deepened; she was evidently greeting an old friend. The group about her
scattered, and Mrs. Hazeldean saw that, in her cordial absent-minded way, and
while her wandering hostess-eye swept the rooms, she was saying a confidential
word to a tall man whose hand she detained. They smiled at each other; then
Mrs. Struthers’s glance turned toward the inner room, and her smile seemed to
say: “You’ll find her there.”

 
          
The
tall man nodded. He looked about him composedly, and began to move toward the
centre of the throng, speaking to everyone, appearing to have no object beyond
that of greeting the next person in his path, yet quietly, steadily pursuing
that path, which led straight to the inner room.

 
          
Mrs.
Hazeldean had found a seat near the piano. A good-looking youth, seated beside
her, was telling her at considerable length what he was going to wear at the
Beauforts’ fancy-ball. She listened, approved, suggested; but her glance never
left the advancing figure of the tall man.

 
          
Handsome?
Yes, she said to herself; she had to admit that he
was handsome. A trifle too broad and florid, perhaps; though his air and his
attitude so plainly denied it that, on second thoughts, one agreed that a man
of his height had, after all, to carry some ballast. Yes; his assurance made
him, as a rule, appear to people exactly as he chose to appear; that is, as a
man over forty, but carrying his years carelessly, an active muscular man,
whose blue eyes were still clear, whose fair hair waved ever so little less
thickly than it used to on a low sunburnt forehead, over eyebrows almost
silvery in their blondness, and blue eyes the bluer for their thatch.
Stupid-looking?
By no means.
His
smile denied that. Just self-sufficient enough to escape fatuity, yet so cool
that one felt the fundamental coldness, he steered his way through life as
easily and resolutely as he was now working his way through Mrs. Struthers’s
drawing-rooms.

 
          
Half-way,
he was detained by a tap of Mrs. Wesson’s red fan. Mrs. Wesson—surely, Mrs.
Hazeldean reflected, Charles had spoken of Mrs. Sabina Wesson’s being with her
mother, old Mrs. Parrett, while they watched the fire? Sabina Wesson was a
redoubtable woman, one of the few of her generation and her clan who had broken
with tradition, and gone to Mrs. Struthers’s almost as soon as the Shoe–Polish
Queen had bought her house in
Fifth Avenue
, and issued her first challenge to society.
Lizzie Hazeldean shut her eyes for an instant; then, rising from her seat, she
joined the group about the singer. From there she wandered on to another knot
of acquaintances.

 
          
“Look
here: the fellow’s going to sing again. Let’s get into that corner over there.”

 
          
She
felt ever so slight a touch on her arm, and met Henry Prest’s composed glance.

 
          
A
red-lit and palm-shaded recess divided the drawing-rooms from the dining-room,
which ran across the width of the house at the back. Mrs. Hazeldean hesitated;
then she caught Mrs. Wesson’s watchful glance, lifted her head with a smile and
followed her companion.

 
          
They
sat down on a small sofa under the palms, and a couple, who had been in search
of the same retreat, paused on the threshold, and with an interchange of
glances passed on. Mrs. Hazeldean smiled more vividly.

 
          
“Where
are my roses? Didn’t you get them?” Prest asked. He had a way of looking her
over from beneath lowered lids, while he affected to be examining a
glove-button or contemplating the tip of his shining boot.

 
          
“Yes,
I got them,” she answered.

 
          
“You’re
not wearing them. I didn’t order those.”

 
          
“No.”

 
          
“Whose
are they, then?”

 
          
She
unfolded her mother-of-pearl fan, and bent above its complicated traceries.

 
          
“Mine,”
she pronounced.

 
          
“Yours!
Well, obviously. But I suppose someone sent them to
you?”

 
          
“
I
did.” She hesitated a second. “I sent
them to myself.”

 
          
He
raised his eyebrows a little. “Well they don’t suit you—that washy pink! May I
ask why you didn’t wear mine?”

 
          
“I’ve
already told you…I’ve often asked you never to send flowers…on the day…”

 
          
“Nonsense.
That’s the very day…What’s the matter? Are you
still nervous?”

 
          
She
was silent for a moment; then she lowered her voice to say: “You ought not to
have come here tonight.”

 
          
“My dear girl, how unlike you!
You
are
nervous.”

 
          
“Didn’t
you see all those people in the Parretts’ window?”

 
          
“What,
opposite? Lord, no; I just took to my heels! It was the deuce, the back way
being barred.
But what of it?
In
all
that
crowd, do you suppose for a moment—”

 
          
“My
husband was in the window with them,” she said, still lower.

 
          
His
confident face fell for a moment, and then almost at once regained its look of
easy arrogance.

 
          
“Well—?”

 
          
“Oh, nothing—as yet.
Only I ask you…to go away now.”

 
          
“Just as you asked me not to come!
Yet
you
came, because you had the sense to see that if you didn’t…and I
came for the same reason. Look here, my dear, for God’s sake don’t lose your
head!”

 
          
The
challenge seemed to rouse her. She lifted her chin, glanced about the thronged
room which they commanded from their corner, and nodded and smiled invitingly
at several acquaintances, with the hope that some one of them might come up to
her.
But though they all returned her greetings with a
somewhat elaborate cordiality, not one advanced toward her secluded seat.

 
          
She
turned her head slightly toward her companion. “I ask you again to go,” she
repeated.

 
          
“Well,
I will then, after the fellow’s sung. But I’m bound to say you’re a good deal
pleasanter—”

 
          
The
first bars of “Salve, Dimora” silenced him, and they sat side by side in the
meditative rigidity of fashionable persons listening to expensive music. She
had thrown herself into a corner of the sofa, and Henry Prest, about whom
everything was discreet but his eyes, sat apart from her, one leg crossed over
the other, one hand holding his folded opera-hat on his knee, while the other
hand rested beside him on the sofa. But an end of her tulle scarf lay in the
space between them; and without looking in his direction, without turning her
glance from the singer, she was conscious that Prest’s hand had reached and
drawn the scarf toward him. She shivered a little, made an involuntary motion
as though to gather it about her—and then desisted. As the song ended, he bent
toward her slightly, said: “Darling” so low that it seemed no more than a
breath on her cheek, and then, rising, bowed, and strolled into the other room.

 
          
She
sighed faintly, and, settling herself once more in her corner, lifted her
brilliant eyes to Sillerton Jackson, who was approaching. “It
was
good of you to bring Charlie home
from the Parretts’ this afternoon.” She held out her hand, making way for him at
her side.

 
          
“Good
of me?” he laughed. “Why, I was glad of the chance of getting him safely home;
it was rather naughty of
him
to be
where he was, I suspect.” She fancied a slight pause, as if he waited to see
the effect of this, and her lashes beat her cheeks. But already he was going
on: “Do you encourage him, with that cough, to run about town after
fire-engines?”

 
          
She
gave back the laugh.

 
          
“I
don’t discourage him—ever—if I can help it. But it
was
foolish of him to go out today,” she agreed; and all the while
she kept on asking herself, as she had that afternoon, in her talk with her
husband: “Now, what would be the
natural
thing for me to say?”

 
          
Should
she speak of having been at the fire herself—or should she not? The question
dinned in her brain so loudly that she could hardly hear what her companion was
saying; yet she had, at the same time, a queer feeling of his never having been
so close to her, or rather so closely intent on her, as now. In her strange
state of nervous lucidity, her eyes seemed to absorb with a new precision every
facial detail of whoever approached her; and old Sillerton Jackson’s narrow
mask, his withered pink cheeks, the veins in the hollow of his temples, under
the carefully-tended silvery hair, and the tiny blood-specks in the white of
his eyes as he turned their cautious blue gaze on her, appeared as if presented
under some powerful lens. With his eye-glasses dangling over one white-gloved
hand, the other supporting his opera-hat on his knee, he suggested, behind that
assumed carelessness of pose, the patient fixity of a naturalist holding his
breath near the crack from which some tiny animal might suddenly issue—if one
watched long enough, or gave it, completely enough, the impression of not
looking for it, or dreaming it was anywhere near. The sense of that tireless
attention made Mrs. Hazeldean’s temples ache as if she sat under a glare of
light even brighter than that of the Struthers’ chandeliers—a glare in which
each quiver of a half-formed thought might be as visible behind her forehead as
the faint lines wrinkling its surface into an uncontrollable frown of anxiety.
Yes, Prest was right; she was losing her head—losing it for the first time in
the dangerous year during which she had had such continual need to keep it steady.