The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a
heavy thunder-cloud of bills. The light of the debut still
lingered on the horizon, but the cloud had thickened; and
suddenly it broke. The suddenness added to the horror; and there
were still times when Lily relived with painful vividness every
detail of the day on which the blow fell. She and her mother had
been seated at the luncheon-table, over the CHAUFROIX and cold
salmon of the previous night's dinner: it was one of Mrs. Bart's
few economies to consume in private the expensive remnants of her
hospitality. Lily was feeling the pleasant languor which is
youth's penalty for dancing till dawn; but her mother, in spite
of a few lines about the mouth, and under the yellow waves on her
temples, was as alert, determined and high in colour as if she
had risen from an untroubled sleep.
In the centre of the table, between the melting MARRONS GLACES
and candied cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their
vigorous stems; they held their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but
their rose-colour had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily's
sense of fitness was disturbed by their reappearance on the
luncheon-table.
"I really think, mother," she said reproachfully, "we might
afford a few fresh flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or
lilies-of-the-valley---"
Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the
world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked
when there was no one present at it but the family. But she
smiled at her daughter's innocence.
"Lilies-of-the-valley," she said calmly, "cost two dollars a
dozen at this season."
Lily was not impressed. She knew very little of the value of
money.
"It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl," she
argued.
"Six dozen what?" asked her father's voice in the doorway.
The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday,
the sight of Mr. Bart at luncheon was an unwonted one. But
neither his wife nor his daughter was sufficiently interested to
ask an explanation.
Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the
fragment of jellied salmon which the butler had placed before
him.
"I was only saying," Lily began, "that I hate to see faded
flowers at luncheon; and mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-
valley would not cost more than twelve dollars. Mayn't I tell the
florist to send a few every day?"
She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her
anything, and Mrs. Bart had taught her to plead with him when her
own entreaties failed.
Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and
his lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his
thin hair lay in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he
looked at his daughter and laughed. The laugh was so strange that
Lily coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and her
father seemed to see something ridiculous in the request. Perhaps
he thought it foolish that she should trouble him about such a
trifle.
"Twelve dollars--twelve dollars a day for flowers? Oh, certainly,
my dear--give him an order for twelve hundred." He continued to
laugh.
Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.
"You needn't wait, Poleworth--I will ring for you," she said to
the butler.
The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving
the remains of the CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.
"What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?" said Mrs. Bart
severely.
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making,
and it was odious to her that her husband should make a show of
himself before the servants.
"Are you ill?" she repeated.
"Ill?---No, I'm ruined," he said.
Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her
feet.
"Ruined---?" she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she
turned a calm face to Lily.
"Shut the pantry door," she said.
Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father
was sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon
between them, and his head bowed on his hands.
Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair
unnaturally yellow. She looked at Lily as the latter approached:
her look was terrible, but her voice was modulated to a ghastly
cheerfulness.
"Your father is not well--he doesn't know what he is saying. It
is nothing--but you had better go upstairs; and don't talk to the
servants," she added.
Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that
voice. She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart's words: she knew
at once that they were ruined. In the dark hours which followed,
that awful fact overshadowed even her father's slow and difficult
dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct
when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side
with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated
train to start. Lily's feelings were softer: she pitied him in a
frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for the most
part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the
room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of
a stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home
till after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a
blur--first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference--
and now the fog had thickened till he was almost
indistinguishable. If she could have performed any little
services for him, or have exchanged with him a few of those
affecting words which an extensive perusal of fiction had
led her to connect with such occasions, the filial instinct might
have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active expression,
remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by her
mother's grim unflagging resentment. Every look and act of Mrs.
Bart's seemed to say: "You are sorry for him now--but you will
feel differently when you see what he has done to us."
It was a relief to Lily when her father died.
Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to
Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing--the mere mockery of what
she was entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to
live like a pig? She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state
of inert anger against fate. Her faculty for "managing" deserted
her, or she no longer took sufficient pride in it to exert it. It
was well enough to "manage" when by so doing one could keep one's
own carriage; but when one's best contrivance did not conceal the
fact that one had to go on foot, the effort was no longer worth
making.
Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long
visits to relations whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and
who deplored the fact that she let Lily breakfast in bed when the
girl had no prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap
continental refuges, where Mrs. Bart held herself fiercely aloof
from the frugal tea-tables of her companions in misfortune. She
was especially careful to avoid her old friends and the scenes of
her former successes. To be poor seemed to her such a confession
of failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she detected a note
of condescension in the friendliest advances.
Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of
Lily's beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though
it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance.
It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which
their life was to be rebuilt. She watched it jealously, as though
it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she
tried to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility
that such a charge involved. She followed in imagination the
career of other beauties, pointing out to her daughter what might
be achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful
warning of those who, in spite of it, had failed to get what they
wanted: to Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could explain the lamentable
denouement of some of her examples. She was not above the
inconsistency of charging fate, rather than herself, with her own
misfortunes; but she inveighed so acrimoniously against
love-matches that Lily would have fancied her own marriage had
been of that nature, had not Mrs. Bart frequently assured her
that she had been "talked into it"--by whom, she never made
clear.
Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities.
The dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief
the existence to which she felt herself entitled. To a less
illuminated intelligence Mrs. Bart's counsels might have been
dangerous; but Lily understood that beauty is only the raw
material of conquest, and that to convert it into success other
arts are required. She knew that to betray any sense of
superiority was a subtler form of the stupidity her mother
denounced, and it did not take her long to learn that a beauty
needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features.
Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart's. It had been among
that lady's grievances that her husband--in the early days,
before he was too tired--had wasted his evenings in what she
vaguely described as "reading poetry"; and among the effects
packed off to auction after his death were a score or two of
dingy volumes which had struggled for existence among the boots
and medicine bottles of his dressing-room shelves. There was in
Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source,
which gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes. She
liked to think of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her
the opportunity to attain a position where she should make her
influence felt in the vague diffusion of refinement and good
taste. She was fond of pictures and flowers, and of sentimental
fiction, and she could not help thinking that the possession of
such tastes ennobled her desire for worldly advantages. She would
not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: she
was secretly ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money.
Lily's preference would have been for an English nobleman with
political ambitions and vast estates; or, for second
choice, an Italian prince with a castle in the Apennines and an
hereditary office in the Vatican. Lost causes had a romantic
charm for her, and she liked to picture herself as standing aloof
from the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her
pleasure to the claims of an immemorial tradition. . . .
How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were
hardly more futile and childish than the earlier ones which had
centred about the possession of a French jointed doll with real
hair. Was it only ten years since she had wavered in imagination
between the English earl and the Italian prince? Relentlessly her
mind travelled on over the dreary interval. . . .
After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died---died of a
deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be
dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded
after the first year.
"People can't marry you if they don't see you--and how can they
see you in these holes where we're stuck?" That was the burden of
her lament; and her last adjuration to her daughter was to escape
from dinginess if she could.
"Don't let it creep up on you and drag you down. Fight your way
out of it somehow--you're young and can do it," she insisted.
She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and
there Lily at once became the centre of a family council composed
of the wealthy relatives whom she had been taught to despise for
living like pigs. It may be that they had an inkling of the
sentiments in which she had been brought up, for none of them
manifested a very lively desire for her company; indeed, the
question threatened to remain unsolved till Mrs. Peniston with a
sigh announced: "I'll try her for a year."
Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their
surprise, lest Mrs. Peniston should be alarmed by it into
reconsidering her decision.
Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart's widowed sister, and if she was by no
means the richest of the family group, its other members
nevertheless abounded in reasons why she was clearly destined by
Providence to assume the charge of Lily. In the first place she
was alone, and it would be charming for her to have a
young companion. Then she sometimes travelled, and Lily's
familiarity with foreign customs--deplored as a misfortune by her
more conservative relatives--would at least enable her to act as
a kind of courier. But as a matter of fact Mrs. Peniston had not
been affected by these considerations. She had taken the girl
simply because no one else would have her, and because she had
the kind of moral MAUVAISE HONTE which makes the public display
of selfishness difficult, though it does not interfere with its
private indulgence. It would have been impossible for Mrs.
Peniston to be heroic on a desert island, but with the eyes of
her little world upon her she took a certain pleasure in her act.
She reaped the reward to which disinterestedness is entitled, and
found an agreeable companion in her niece. She had expected to
find Lily headstrong, critical and "foreign"--for even Mrs.
Peniston, though she occasionally went abroad, had the family
dread of foreignness--but the girl showed a pliancy, which, to a
more penetrating mind than her aunt's, might have been less
reassuring than the open selfishness of youth. Misfortune had
made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable
substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
Mrs. Peniston, however, did not suffer from her niece's
adaptability. Lily had no intention of taking advantage of her
aunt's good nature. She was in truth grateful for the refuge
offered her: Mrs. Peniston's opulent interior was at least not
externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality which assumes all
manner of disguises; and Lily soon found that it was as latent in
the expensive routine of her aunt's life as in the makeshift
existence of a continental pension.
Mrs. Peniston was one of the episodical persons who form the
padding of life. It was impossible to believe that she had
herself ever been a focus of activities. The most vivid thing
about her was the fact that her grandmother had been a Van
Alstyne. This connection with the well-fed and industrious stock
of early New York revealed itself in the glacial neatness of Mrs.
Peniston's drawing-room and in the excellence of her cuisine. She
belonged to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived
well, dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these
inherited obligations Mrs. Peniston faitfully conformed.
She had always been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled
one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were
accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that from the
depths of an impenetrable domesticity they might see what was
happening in the street.
Mrs. Peniston was the owner of a country-place in New Jersey, but
she had never lived there since her husband's death--a remote
event, which appeared to dwell in her memory chiefly as a
dividing point in the personal reminiscences that formed the
staple of her conversation. She was a woman who remembered dates
with intensity, and could tell at a moment's notice whether the
drawing-room curtains had been renewed before or after Mr.
Peniston's last illness.
