Chapter Chapter 5 · 第5章

The observance of Sunday at Bellomont was chiefly marked by the

punctual appearance of the smart omnibus destined to convey the

household to the little church at the gates. Whether any one got

into the omnibus or not was a matter of secondary importance,

since by standing there it not only bore witness to the orthodox

intentions of the family, but made Mrs. Trenor feel, when she

finally heard it drive away, that she had somehow vicariously made

use of it.

It was Mrs. Trenor’s theory that her daughters actually did go

to church every Sunday; but their French governess’s convictions

calling her to the rival fane, and the fatigues of the week keeping

their mother in her room till luncheon, there was seldom any one

present to verify the fact. Now and then, in a spasmodic burst of

virtue—when the house had been too uproarious over night—Gus Trenor

forced his genial bulk into a tight frock-coat and routed his

daughters from their slumbers; but habitually, as Lily explained to

Mr. Gryce, this parental duty was forgotten till the church bells

were ringing across the park, and the omnibus had driven away empty.

Lily had hinted to Mr. Gryce that this neglect of religious

observances was repugnant to her early traditions, and that during

her visits to Bellomont she regularly accompanied Muriel and Hilda

to church. This tallied with the assurance, also confidentially

imparted, that, never having played bridge before, she had been

“dragged into it” on the night of her arrival, and had lost an

appalling amount of money in consequence of her ignorance of

the game and of the rules of betting. Mr. Gryce was undoubtedly

enjoying Bellomont. He liked the ease and glitter of the life, and

the lustre conferred on him by being a member of this group of rich

and conspicuous people. But he thought it a very materialistic

society; there were times when he was frightened by the talk of the

men and the looks of the ladies, and he was glad to find that Miss

Bart, for all her ease and self-possession, was not at home in so

ambiguous an atmosphere. For this reason he had been especially

pleased to learn that she would, as usual, attend the young Trenors

to church on Sunday morning; and as he paced the gravel sweep

before the door, his light overcoat on his arm and his prayer-book

in one carefully-gloved hand, he reflected agreeably on the

strength of character which kept her true to her early training in

surroundings so subversive to religious principles.

For a long time Mr. Gryce and the omnibus had the gravel sweep to

themselves; but, far from regretting this deplorable indifference

on the part of the other guests, he found himself nourishing the

hope that Miss Bart might be unaccompanied. The precious minutes

were flying, however; the big chestnuts pawed the ground and

flecked their impatient sides with foam; the coachman seemed to be

slowly petrifying on the box, and the groom on the doorstep; and

still the lady did not come. Suddenly, however, there was a sound

of voices and a rustle of skirts in the doorway, and Mr. Gryce,

restoring his watch to his pocket, turned with a nervous start;

but it was only to find himself handing Mrs. Wetherall into the

carriage.

The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast

group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to

perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding

puppets. It is true that the Bellomont puppets did not go to

church; but others equally important did—and Mr. and Mrs.

Wetherall’s circle was so large that God was included in their

visiting-list. They appeared, therefore, punctual and resigned,

with the air of people bound for a dull “At Home,” and after them

Hilda and Muriel straggled, yawning and pinning each other’s veils

and ribbons as they came. They had promised Lily to go to church

with her, they declared, and Lily was such a dear old duck that

they didn’t mind doing it to please her, though they couldn’t

fancy what had put the idea in her head, and though for their own

part they would much rather have played lawn tennis with Jack and

Gwen, if she hadn’t told them she was coming. The Misses Trenor

were followed by Lady Cressida Raith, a weather-beaten person in

Liberty silk and ethnological trinkets, who, on seeing the omnibus,

expressed her surprise that they were not to walk across the park;

but at Mrs. Wetherall’s horrified protest that the church was

a mile away, her ladyship, after a glance at the height of the

other’s heels, acquiesced in the necessity of driving, and poor

Mr. Gryce found himself rolling off between four ladies for whose

spiritual welfare he felt not the least concern.

It might have afforded him some consolation could he have known

that Miss Bart had really meant to go to church. She had even risen

earlier than usual in the execution of her purpose. She had an idea

that the sight of her in a grey gown of devotional cut, with her

famous lashes drooped above a prayer-book, would put the finishing

touch to Mr. Gryce’s subjugation, and render inevitable a certain

incident which she had resolved should form a part of the walk they

were to take together after luncheon. Her intentions in short had

never been more definite; but poor Lily, for all the hard glaze of

her exterior, was inwardly as malleable as wax. Her faculty for

adapting herself, for entering into other people’s feelings, if it

served her now and then in small contingencies, hampered her in the

decisive moments of life. She was like a water-plant in the flux

of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was carrying

her toward Lawrence Selden. Why had he come? Was it to see herself

or Bertha Dorset? It was the last question which, at that moment,

should have engaged her. She might better have contented herself

with thinking that he had simply responded to the despairing

summons of his hostess, anxious to interpose him between herself

and the ill-humour of Mrs. Dorset. But Lily had not rested till she

learned from Mrs. Trenor that Selden had come of his own accord.

“He didn’t even wire me—he just happened to find the trap at the

station. Perhaps it’s not over with Bertha after all,” Mrs. Trenor

musingly concluded; and went away to arrange her dinner-cards

accordingly.

Perhaps it was not, Lily reflected; but it should be soon, unless

she had lost her cunning. If Selden had come at Mrs. Dorset’s call,

it was at her own that he would stay. So much the previous evening

had told her. Mrs. Trenor, true to her simple principle of making

her married friends happy, had placed Selden and Mrs. Dorset next

to each other at dinner; but, in obedience to the time-honoured

traditions of the match-maker, she had separated Lily and Mr.

Gryce, sending in the former with George Dorset, while Mr. Gryce

was coupled with Gwen Van Osburgh.

George Dorset’s talk did not interfere with the range of his

neighbour’s thoughts. He was a mournful dyspeptic, intent on

finding out the deleterious ingredients of every dish and diverted

from this care only by the sound of his wife’s voice. On this

occasion, however, Mrs. Dorset took no part in the general

conversation. She sat talking in low murmurs with Selden, and

turning a contemptuous and denuded shoulder toward her host, who,

far from resenting his exclusion, plunged into the excesses of

the MENU with the joyous irresponsibility of a free man. To Mr.

Dorset, however, his wife’s attitude was a subject of such evident

concern that, when he was not scraping the sauce from his fish, or

scooping the moist bread-crumbs from the interior of his roll, he

sat straining his thin neck for a glimpse of her between the lights.

Mrs. Trenor, as it chanced, had placed the husband and wife on

opposite sides of the table, and Lily was therefore able to observe

Mrs. Dorset also, and by carrying her glance a few feet farther, to

set up a rapid comparison between Lawrence Selden and Mr. Gryce.

It was that comparison which was her undoing. Why else had she

suddenly grown interested in Selden? She had known him for eight

years or more: ever since her return to America he had formed a

part of her background. She had always been glad to sit next to

him at dinner, had found him more agreeable than most men, and had

vaguely wished that he possessed the other qualities needful to

fix her attention; but till now she had been too busy with her own

affairs to regard him as more than one of the pleasant accessories

of life. Miss Bart was a keen reader of her own heart, and she saw

that her sudden preoccupation with Selden was due to the fact that

his presence shed a new light on her surroundings. Not that he was

notably brilliant or exceptional; in his own profession he was

surpassed by more than one man who had bored Lily through many a

weary dinner. It was rather that he had preserved a certain social

detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having

points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were

all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside

the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In

reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open;

but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having

once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden’s

distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.

That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily,

turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world

through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut

off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table,

studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his

heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed

on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long

bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a

jeweller’s window lit by electricity. And between the two, what a

long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!

Lily reviewed them with a scornful impatience: Carry Fisher, with

her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying

a “spicy paragraph”; young Silverton, who had meant to live on

proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends

and had become critical of truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated

visiting-list, whose most fervid convictions turned on the wording

of invitations and the engraving of dinner-cards; Wetherall, with

his perpetual nervous nod of acquiescence, his air of agreeing with

people before he knew what they were saying; Jack Stepney, with his

confident smile and anxious eyes, half way between the sheriff and

an heiress; Gwen Van Osburgh, with all the guileless confidence of

a young girl who has always been told that there is no one richer

than her father.

Lily smiled at her classification of her friends. How different

they had seemed to her a few hours ago! Then they had symbolized

what she was gaining, now they stood for what she was giving

up. That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant

qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.

Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty

of their achievement. It was not that she wanted them to be

more disinterested; but she would have liked them to be more

picturesque. And she had a shamed recollection of the way in which,

a few hours since, she had felt the centripetal force of their

standards. She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine

of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white

road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it

in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the

pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut which is denied to

those on wheels.

She was roused by a chuckle which Mr. Dorset seemed to eject from

the depths of his lean throat.

“I say, do look at her,” he exclaimed, turning to Miss Bart with

lugubrious merriment—“I beg your pardon, but do just look at my

wife making a fool of that poor devil over there! One would really

suppose she was gone on him—and it’s all the other way round, I

assure you.”

Thus adjured, Lily turned her eyes on the spectacle which was

affording Mr. Dorset such legitimate mirth. It certainly appeared,

as he said, that Mrs. Dorset was the more active participant in

the scene: her neighbour seemed to receive her advances with a

temperate zest which did not distract him from his dinner. The

sight restored Lily’s good humour, and knowing the peculiar

disguise which Mr. Dorset’s marital fears assumed, she asked gaily:

“Aren’t you horribly jealous of her?”

Dorset greeted the sally with delight. “Oh, abominably—you’ve

just hit it—keeps me awake at night. The doctors tell me that’s

what has knocked my digestion out—being so infernally jealous of

her.—I can’t eat a mouthful of this stuff, you know,” he added

suddenly, pushing back his plate with a clouded countenance;

and Lily, unfailingly adaptable, accorded her radiant attention

to his prolonged denunciation of other people’s cooks, with a

supplementary tirade on the toxic qualities of melted butter.

It was not often that he found so ready an ear; and, being a man

as well as a dyspeptic, it may be that as he poured his grievances

into it he was not insensible to its rosy symmetry. At any rate he

engaged Lily so long that the sweets were being handed when she

caught a phrase on her other side, where Miss Corby, the comic

woman of the company, was bantering Jack Stepney on his approaching

engagement. Miss Corby’s role was jocularity: she always entered

the conversation with a handspring.

“And of course you’ll have Sim Rosedale as best man!” Lily heard

her fling out as the climax of her prognostications; and Stepney

responded, as if struck: “Jove, that’s an idea. What a thumping

present I’d get out of him!”

SIM ROSEDALE! The name, made more odious by its diminutive,

obtruded itself on Lily’s thoughts like a leer. It stood for one

of the many hated possibilities hovering on the edge of life. If

she did not marry Percy Gryce, the day might come when she would

have to be civil to such men as Rosedale. IF SHE DID NOT MARRY

HIM? But she meant to marry him—she was sure of him and sure of

herself. She drew back with a shiver from the pleasant paths in

which her thoughts had been straying, and set her feet once more in

the middle of the long white road.... When she went upstairs that

night she found that the late post had brought her a fresh batch of

bills. Mrs. Peniston, who was a conscientious woman, had forwarded

them all to Bellomont.

* * * * *

Miss Bart, accordingly, rose the next morning with the most earnest

conviction that it was her duty to go to church. She tore herself

betimes from the lingering enjoyment of her breakfast tray, rang to

have her grey gown laid out, and despatched her maid to borrow a

prayer-book from Mrs. Trenor.

But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs

of rebellion. No sooner were her preparations made than they roused

a smothered sense of resistance. A small spark was enough to

kindle Lily’s imagination, and the sight of the grey dress and the

borrowed prayer-book flashed a long light down the years. She would

have to go to church with Percy Gryce every Sunday. They would have

a front pew in the most expensive church in New York, and his name

would figure handsomely in the list of parish charities. In a few

years, when he grew stouter, he would be made a warden. Once in the

winter the rector would come to dine, and her husband would beg

her to go over the list and see that no DIVORCEES were included,

except those who had showed signs of penitence by being re-married

to the very wealthy. There was nothing especially arduous in this

round of religious obligations; but it stood for a fraction of that

great bulk of boredom which loomed across her path. And who could

consent to be bored on such a morning? Lily had slept well, and

her bath had filled her with a pleasant glow, which was becomingly

reflected in the clear curve of her cheek. No lines were visible

this morning, or else the glass was at a happier angle.

And the day was the accomplice of her mood: it was a day for

impulse and truancy. The light air seemed full of powdered gold;

below the dewy bloom of the lawns the woodlands blushed and

smouldered, and the hills across the river swam in molten blue.

Every drop of blood in Lily’s veins invited her to happiness.

The sound of wheels roused her from these musings, and leaning

behind her shutters she saw the omnibus take up its freight. She

was too late, then—but the fact did not alarm her. A glimpse of Mr.

Gryce’s crestfallen face even suggested that she had done wisely

in absenting herself, since the disappointment he so candidly

betrayed would surely whet his appetite for the afternoon walk.

That walk she did not mean to miss; one glance at the bills on her

writing-table was enough to recall its necessity. But meanwhile

she had the morning to herself, and could muse pleasantly on the

disposal of its hours. She was familiar enough with the habits of

Bellomont to know that she was likely to have a free field till

luncheon. She had seen the Wetheralls, the Trenor girls and Lady

Cressida packed safely into the omnibus; Judy Trenor was sure to

be having her hair shampooed; Carry Fisher had doubtless carried

off her host for a drive; Ned Silverton was probably smoking

the cigarette of young despair in his bedroom; and Kate Corby

was certain to be playing tennis with Jack Stepney and Miss Van

Osburgh. Of the ladies, this left only Mrs. Dorset unaccounted for,

and Mrs. Dorset never came down till luncheon: her doctors, she

averred, had forbidden her to expose herself to the crude air of

the morning.

To the remaining members of the party Lily gave no special thought;

wherever they were, they were not likely to interfere with her

plans. These, for the moment, took the shape of assuming a dress

somewhat more rustic and summerlike in style than the garment she

had first selected, and rustling downstairs, sunshade in hand, with

the disengaged air of a lady in quest of exercise. The great hall

was empty but for the knot of dogs by the fire, who, taking in at

a glance the outdoor aspect of Miss Bart, were upon her at once

with lavish offers of companionship. She put aside the ramming paws

which conveyed these offers, and assuring the joyous volunteers

that she might presently have a use for their company, sauntered

on through the empty drawing-room to the library at the end of the

house. The library was almost the only surviving portion of the

old manor-house of Bellomont: a long spacious room, revealing the

traditions of the mother-country in its classically-cased doors,

the Dutch tiles of the chimney, and the elaborate hob-grate with

its shining brass urns. A few family portraits of lantern-jawed

gentlemen in tie-wigs, and ladies with large head-dresses and small

bodies, hung between the shelves lined with pleasantly-shabby

books: books mostly contemporaneous with the ancestors in question,

and to which the subsequent Trenors had made no perceptible

additions. The library at Bellomont was in fact never used for

reading, though it had a certain popularity as a smoking room or

a quiet retreat for flirtation. It had occurred to Lily, however,

that it might on this occasion have been resorted to by the only

member of the party in the least likely to put it to its original

use. She advanced noiselessly over the dense old rug scattered

with easy-chairs, and before she reached the middle of the room

she saw that she had not been mistaken. Lawrence Selden was in

fact seated at its farther end; but though a book lay on his knee,

his attention was not engaged with it, but directed to a lady

whose lace-clad figure, as she leaned back in an adjoining chair,

detached itself with exaggerated slimness against the dusky leather

upholstery.

Lily paused as she caught sight of the group; for a moment she

seemed about to withdraw, but thinking better of this, she

announced her approach by a slight shake of her skirts which made

the couple raise their heads, Mrs. Dorset with a look of frank

displeasure, and Selden with his usual quiet smile. The sight of

his composure had a disturbing effect on Lily; but to be disturbed

was in her case to make a more brilliant effort at self-possession.

“Dear me, am I late?” she asked, putting a hand in his as he

advanced to greet her.

“Late for what?” enquired Mrs. Dorset tartly. “Not for luncheon,

certainly—but perhaps you had an earlier engagement?”

“Yes, I had,” said Lily confidingly.

“Really? Perhaps I am in the way, then? But Mr. Selden is entirely

at your disposal.” Mrs. Dorset was pale with temper, and her

antagonist felt a certain pleasure in prolonging her distress.

“Oh, dear, no—do stay,” she said good-humouredly. “I don’t in the

least want to drive you away.”

“You’re awfully good, dear, but I never interfere with Mr. Selden’s

engagements.”

The remark was uttered with a little air of proprietorship not lost

on its object, who concealed a faint blush of annoyance by stooping

to pick up the book he had dropped at Lily’s approach. The latter’s

eyes widened charmingly and she broke into a light laugh.

“But I have no engagement with Mr. Selden! My engagement was to go

to church; and I’m afraid the omnibus has started without me. HAS

it started, do you know?”

She turned to Selden, who replied that he had heard it drive away

some time since.

“Ah, then I shall have to walk; I promised Hilda and Muriel to go

to church with them. It’s too late to walk there, you say? Well, I

shall have the credit of trying, at any rate—and the advantage of

escaping part of the service. I’m not so sorry for myself, after

all!”

And with a bright nod to the couple on whom she had intruded, Miss

Bart strolled through the glass doors and carried her rustling

grace down the long perspective of the garden walk.

She was taking her way churchward, but at no very quick pace; a

fact not lost on one of her observers, who stood in the doorway

looking after her with an air of puzzled amusement. The truth is

that she was conscious of a somewhat keen shock of disappointment.

All her plans for the day had been built on the assumption that it

was to see her that Selden had come to Bellomont. She had expected,

when she came downstairs, to find him on the watch for her; and

she had found him, instead, in a situation which might well denote

that he had been on the watch for another lady. Was it possible,

after all, that he had come for Bertha Dorset? The latter had

acted on the assumption to the extent of appearing at an hour when

she never showed herself to ordinary mortals, and Lily, for the

moment, saw no way of putting her in the wrong. It did not occur

to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire

to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with

the sentimental motive in their judgments of men. But Lily was not

easily disconcerted; competition put her on her mettle, and she

reflected that Selden’s coming, if it did not declare him to be

still in Mrs. Dorset’s toils, showed him to be so completely free

from them that he was not afraid of her proximity.

These thoughts so engaged her that she fell into a gait hardly

likely to carry her to church before the sermon, and at length,

having passed from the gardens to the wood-path beyond, so far

forgot her intention as to sink into a rustic seat at a bend of the

walk. The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the

charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she was

not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company,

and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck

her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit

by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she

rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she

walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life

was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking,

or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her

sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner

isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

Her footsteps flagged, and she stood gazing listlessly ahead,

digging the ferny edge of the path with the tip of her sunshade.

As she did so a step sounded behind her, and she saw Selden at her

side.

“How fast you walk!” he remarked. “I thought I should never catch

up with you.”

She answered gaily: “You must be quite breathless! I’ve been

sitting under that tree for an hour.”

“Waiting for me, I hope?” he rejoined; and she said with a vague

laugh:

“Well—waiting to see if you would come.”

“I seize the distinction, but I don’t mind it, since doing the one

involved doing the other. But weren’t you sure that I should come?”

“If I waited long enough—but you see I had only a limited time to

give to the experiment.”

“Why limited? Limited by luncheon?”

“No; by my other engagement.”

“Your engagement to go to church with Muriel and Hilda?”

“No; but to come home from church with another person.”

“Ah, I see; I might have known you were fully provided with

alternatives. And is the other person coming home this way?”

Lily laughed again. “That’s just what I don’t know; and to find

out, it is my business to get to church before the service is over.”

“Exactly; and it is my business to prevent your doing so; in which

case the other person, piqued by your absence, will form the

desperate resolve of driving back in the omnibus.”

Lily received this with fresh appreciation; his nonsense was like

the bubbling of her inner mood. “Is that what you would do in such

an emergency?” she enquired.

Selden looked at her with solemnity. “I am here to prove to you,”

he cried, “what I am capable of doing in an emergency!”

“Walking a mile in an hour—you must own that the omnibus would be

quicker!”

“Ah—but will he find you in the end? That’s the only test of

success.”

They looked at each other with the same luxury of enjoyment that

they had felt in exchanging absurdities over his tea-table; but

suddenly Lily’s face changed, and she said: “Well, if it is, he has

succeeded.”

Selden, following her glance, perceived a party of people advancing

toward them from the farther bend of the path. Lady Cressida

had evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of the

church-goers had thought it their duty to accompany her. Lily’s

companion looked rapidly from one to the other of the two men of

the party; Wetherall walking respectfully at Lady Cressida’s side

with his little sidelong look of nervous attention, and Percy Gryce

bringing-up the rear with Mrs. Wetherall and the Trenors.

“Ah—now I see why you were getting up your Americana!” Selden

exclaimed with a note of the freest admiration but the blush with

which the sally was received checked whatever amplifications he had

meant to give it.

That Lily Bart should object to being bantered about her suitors,

or even about her means of attracting them, was so new to Selden

that he had a momentary flash of surprise, which lit up a number

of possibilities; but she rose gallantly to the defence of her

confusion, by saying, as its object approached: “That was why I was

waiting for you—to thank you for having given me so many points!”

“Ah, you can hardly do justice to the subject in such a short

time,” said Selden, as the Trenor girls caught sight of Miss Bart;

and while she signalled a response to their boisterous greeting, he

added quickly: “Won’t you devote your afternoon to it? You know I

must be off tomorrow morning. We’ll take a walk, and you can thank

me at your leisure.”