Mrs. Mant was away. She had been leaving for Washington to visit a new protégée when Mrs. Hazeldean arrived from Europe, and after a rapid consultation with the clan had decided that it would not be “decent” to let poor Charles’s widow go to an hotel. Lizzie had therefore the strange sensation of returning, after nearly nine years, to the house from which her husband had triumphantly rescued her; of returning there, to be sure, in comparative independence, and without danger of falling into her former bondage, yet with every nerve shrinking from all that the scene revived.
Mrs. Mant, the next day, had left for Washington; but before starting she had tossed a note across the breakfast-table to her visitor.
“Very proper — he was one of Charlie’s oldest friends, I believe?” she said, with her mild frosty smile. Mrs. Hazeldean glanced at the note, turned it over as if to examine the signature, and restored it to her hostess.
“Yes. But I don’t think I care to see anyone just yet.”
There was a pause, during which the butler brought in fresh griddle-cakes, replenished the hot milk, and withdrew. As the door closed on him, Mrs. Mant said, with a dangerous cordiality: “No one would misunderstand your receiving an old friend of your husband’s . . . like Mr. Prest.”
Lizzie Hazeldean cast a sharp glance at the large empty mysterious face across the table. They WANTED her to receive Henry Prest, then? Ah, well . . . perhaps she understood . . .
“Shall I answer this for you, my dear? Or will you?” Mrs. Mant pursued.
“Oh, as you like. But don’t fix a day, please. Later — ”
Mrs. Mant’s face again became vacuous. She murmured: “You must not shut yourself up too much. It will not do to be morbid. I’m sorry to have to leave you here alone — ”
Lizzie’s eyes filled: Mrs. Mant’s sympathy seemed more cruel than her cruelty. Every word that she used had a veiled taunt for its counterpart.
“Oh, you mustn’t think of giving up your visit — ”
“My dear, how can I? It’s a DUTY. I’ll send a line to Henry Prest, then . . . If you would sip a little port at luncheon and dinner we should have you looking less like a ghost . . . ”
Mrs. Mant departed; and two days later — the interval was “decent” — Mr. Henry Prest was announced. Mrs. Hazeldean had not seen him since the previous New Year’s day. Their last words had been exchanged in Mrs. Struthers’s crimson boudoir, and since then half a year had elapsed. Charles Hazeldean had lingered for a fortnight; but though there had been ups and downs, and intervals of hope when none could have criticised his wife for seeing her friends, her door had been barred against everyone. She had not excluded Henry Prest more rigorously than the others; he had simply been one of the many who received, day by day, the same answer: “Mrs. Hazeldean sees no one but the family.”
Almost immediately after her husband’s death she had sailed for Europe on a long-deferred visit to her father, who was now settled at Nice; but from this expedition she had presumably brought back little comfort, for when she arrived in New York her relations were struck by her air of ill-health and depression. It spoke in her favour, however; they were agreed that she was behaving with propriety.
She looked at Henry Prest as if he were a stranger: so difficult was it, at the first moment, to fit his robust and splendid person into the region of twilight shades which, for the last months, she had inhabited. She was beginning to find that everyone had an air of remoteness; she seemed to see people and life through the confusing blur of the long crape veil in which it was a widow’s duty to shroud her affliction. But she gave him her hand without perceptible reluctance.
He lifted it toward his lips, in an obvious attempt to combine gallantry with condolence, and then, half-way up, seemed to feel that the occasion required him to release it.
“Well — you’ll admit that I’ve been patient!” he exclaimed.
“Patient? Yes. What else was there to be?” she rejoined with a faint smile, as he seated himself beside her, a little too near.
“Oh, well . . . of course! I understood all that. I hope you’ll believe. But mightn’t you at least have answered my letters — one or two of them?
She shook her head. “I couldn’t write.”
“Not to anyone? Or not to me?” he queried, with ironic emphasis.
“I wrote only the letters I had to — no others.”
“Ah, I see.” He laughed slightly. “And you didn’t consider that letters to ME were among them?”
She was silent, and he stood up and took a turn across the room. His face was redder than usual, and now and then a twitch passed over it. She saw that he felt the barrier of her crape, and that it left him baffled and resentful. A struggle was still perceptibly going on in him between his traditional standard of behaviour at such a meeting, and primitive impulses renewed by the memory of their last hours together. When he turned back and paused before her his ruddy flush had paled, and he stood there, frowning, uncertain, and visibly resenting the fact that she made him so.
“You sit there like a stone!” he said.
“I feel like a stone.”
“Oh, come —!”
She knew well enough what he was thinking: that the only way to bridge over such a bad beginning was to get the woman into your arms — and talk afterward. It was the classic move. He had done it dozens of times, no doubt, and was evidently asking himself why the deuce he couldn’t do it now . . . But something in her look must have benumbed him. He sat down again beside her.
“What you must have been through, dearest!” He waited and coughed. “I can understand your being — all broken up. But I know nothing; remember, I know nothing as to what actually happened . . . ”
“Nothing happened.”
“As to — what we feared? No hint —?”
She shook her head.
He cleared his throat before the next question. “And you don’t think that in your absence he may have spoken — to anyone?”
“Never!”
“Then, my dear, we seem to have had the most unbelievable good luck; and I can’t see — ”
He had edged slowly nearer, and now laid a large ringed hand on her sleeve. How well she knew those rings — the two dull gold snakes with malevolent jewelled eyes! She sat as motionless as if their coils were about her, till slowly his tentative grasp relaxed.
“Lizzie, you know” — his tone was discouraged — “this is morbid . . . ”
“Morbid?”
“When you’re safe out of the worst scrape . . . and free, my darling, FREE! Don’t you realize it? I suppose the strain’s been too much for you; but I want you to feel that now — ”
She stood up suddenly, and put half the length of the room between them.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she almost screamed, as she had screamed long ago at Mrs. Mant.
He stood up also, darkly red under his rich sunburn, and forced a smile.
“Really,” he protested, “all things considered — and after a separation of six months!” She was silent. “My dear,” he continued mildly, “will you tell me what you expect me to think?”
“Oh, don’t take that tone,” she murmured.
“What tone?”
“As if — as if — you still imagined we could go back — ”
She saw his face fall. Had he ever before, she wondered, stumbled upon an obstacle in that smooth walk of his? It flashed over her that this was the danger besetting men who had a “way with women” — the day came when they might follow it too blindly.
The reflection evidently occurred to him almost as soon as it did to her. He summoned another propitiatory smile, and drawing near, took her hand gently. “But I don’t want to go back . . . I want to go forward, dearest . . . Now that at last you’re free.”
She seized on the word as if she had been waiting for her cue. “Free! Oh, that’s it — FREE! Can’t you see, can’t you understand, that I mean to stay free?”
Again a shadow of distrust crossed his face, and the smile he had begun for her reassurance seemed to remain on his lips for his own.
“But of course! Can you imagine that I want to put you in chains? I want you to be as free as you please — free to love me as much as you choose!” He was visibly pleased with the last phrase.
She drew away her hand, but not unkindly. “I’m sorry — I AM sorry, Henry. But you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“That what you ask is quite impossible — ever. I can’t go on . . . in the old way . . . ”
She saw his face working nervously. “In the old way? You mean —?” Before she could explain he hurried on with an increasing majesty of manner: “Don’t answer! I see — I understand. When you spoke of freedom just now I was misled for a moment — I frankly own I was — into thinking that, after your wretched marriage, you might prefer discreeter ties . . . an apparent independence which would leave us both . . . I say APPARENT, for on my side there has never been the least wish to conceal . . . But if I was mistaken, if on the contrary what you wish is . . . is to take advantage of your freedom to regularize our . . . our attachment . . . ”
She said nothing, not because she had any desire to have him complete the phrase, but because she found nothing to say. To all that concerned their common past she was aware of offering a numbed soul. But her silence evidently perplexed him, and in his perplexity he began to lose his footing, and to flounder in a sea of words.
“Lizzie! Do you hear me? If I was mistaken, I say — and I hope I’m not above owning that at times I MAY be mistaken; if I was — why, by God, my dear, no woman ever heard me speak the words before; but here I am to have and to hold, as the Book says! Why, hadn’t you realized it? Lizzie, look up —! I’M ASKING YOU TO MARRY ME.”
Still for a moment, she made no reply, but stood gazing about her as if she had the sudden sense of unseen presences between them. At length she gave a faint laugh. It visibly ruffled her visitor.
“I’m not conscious,” he began again, “of having said anything particularly laughable — ” He stopped and scrutinized her narrowly, as though checked by the thought that there might be something not quite normal . . . Then, apparently reassured, he half-murmured his only French phrase: “La joie fait peur . . . eh?”
She did not seem to hear. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said, “but only at the coincidences of life. It was in this room that my husband asked me to marry him.”
“Ah?” Her suitor appeared politely doubtful of the good taste, or the opportunity, of producing this reminiscence. But he made another call on his magnanimity. “Really? But, I say, my dear, I couldn’t be expected to know it, could I? If I’d guessed that such a painful association — ”
“Painful?” She turned upon him. “A painful association? Do you think that was what I meant?” Her voice sank. “This room is sacred to me.”
She had her eyes on his face, which, perhaps because of its architectural completeness, seemed to lack the mobility necessary to follow such a leap of thought. It was so ostensibly a solid building, and not a nomad’s tent. He struggled with a ruffled pride, rose again to playful magnanimity, and murmured: “Compassionate angel!”
“Oh, compassionate? To whom? Do you imagine — did I ever say anything to make you doubt the truth of what I’m telling you?”
His brows fretted: his temper was up. “SAY anything? No,” he insinuated ironically; then, in a hasty plunge after his lost forbearance, added with exquisite mildness: “Your tact was perfect . . . always. I’ve invariably done you that justice. No one could have been more thoroughly the . . . the lady. I never failed to admire your good-breeding in avoiding any reference to your . . . your other life.”
She faced him steadily. “Well, that other life WAS my life — my only life! Now you know.”
There was a silence. Henry Prest drew out a monogrammed handkerchief and passed it over his dry lips. As he did so, a whiff of his eau de Cologne reached her, and she winced a little. It was evident that he was seeking what to say next; wondering, rather helplessly, how to get back his lost command of the situation. He finally induced his features to break again into a persuasive smile.
“Not your ONLY life, dearest,” he reproached her.
She met it instantly. “Yes; so you thought — because I chose you should.”
“You chose —?” The smile became incredulous.
“Oh, deliberately. But I suppose I’ve no excuse that you would not dislike to hear . . . Why shouldn’t we break off now?”
“Break off . . . this conversation?” His tone was aggrieved. “Of course I’ve no wish to force myself — ”
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