Tales of Men and Ghosts

THAT they must see each other again before his departure, in someplace less exposed than their usual haunts, was as clear to Lizzie as it appeared to be to Deering.  His expressing the wish seemed, indeed, the sweetest testimony to the quality of his feeling, since, in the first weeks of the most perfunctory widowerhood, a man of his stamp is presumed to abstain from light adventures.  If, then, at such a moment, he wished so much to be quietly and gravely with her, it could be only for reasons she did not call by name, but of which she felt the sacred tremor in her heart; and it would have seemed incredibly vain and vulgar to put forward, at such a crisis, the conventional objections by means of which such littleexposed existences defend the treasure of their freshness.

In such a mood as this one may descend from the Passy omnibus at the corner of the Pont de la Concorde (she had not let him fetch her in a cab) with a sense of dedication almost solemn, and may advance to meet one’s fate, in the shape of a gentleman of melancholy elegance, with an auto-taxi at his call, as one has advanced to the altar-steps in some girlish bridal vision.

Even the experienced waiter ushering them into an upper roomof the quiet restaurant on the Seine could hardly have supposed their quest for seclusion to be based on sentimental motives, so soberly did Deering give his orders, while his companion sat small and grave at his side.  She did not, indeed, mean to let her private pang obscure their hour together:  she was already learning that Deering shrank from sadness.  He should see that she had courage and gaiety to face their coming separation, and yet give herself meanwhile to this completer nearness; but she waited, as always, for him to strike the opening note.

Looking back at it later, she wondered at the mild suavity of the hour.  Her heart was unversed inhappiness, but he had found the tone to lull her apprehensions, and make her trust her fate for any golden wonder.  Deepest of all, he gave her the sense of something tacit and confirmed between them, as if his tenderness were a habit of the heart hardly needing the support of outward proof.

Such proof as he offered came, therefore, as a kind of crowning luxury, the flower of a profoundly rooted sentiment; andhere again the instinctive reserves and defenses would have seemed to vulgarize what his trust ennobled.  But if all the tender casuistries of her heart were at his service, he took no grave advantage of them.  Even when they sat alone after dinner, with the lights of the river trembling through their one low window, and the vast rumor of Paris inclosing them in a heart of silence, he seemed, as much as herself, under the spell of hallowing influences.  She felt it most of all as she yielded to the arm hepresently put about her, to the long caress he laid on her lips and eyes:  not a word or gesture missed the note of quiet union, or cast a doubt, in retrospect, on the pact they sealed with their last look.

That pact, as she reviewed it through a sleepless night, seemed to have consisted mainly, on his part, in pleadings for full and frequent news of her, on hers in the assurance that it shouldbe given as often as he asked it.  She had felt an intense desirenot to betray any undue eagerness, any crude desire to affirm anddefine her hold on him.  Her life had given her a certain acquaintance with the arts of defense:  girls in her situation were commonly supposed to know them all, and to use them as occasion called.  But Lizzie’s very need of them had intensified her disdain.  Just because she was so poor, and had always, materially, so to count her change and calculate her margin, she would at least know the joy of emotional prodigality, would give her heart as recklessly as the rich their millions.  She was sure now that Deering loved her, and if he had seized the occasion of their farewell to give her some definitely worded sign of his feeling—­if, more plainly, he had asked her to marry him,—­his doing so would have seemed less like a proof of his sincerity than of his suspecting in her the need of a verbal warrant.  That he had abstained seemed to show that he trusted her as she trusted him, and that they were one most of all in this deep security of understanding.

She had tried to make him divine all this in the chariness of her promise to write.  She would write; of course she would.  Buthe would be busy, preoccupied, on the move:  it was for him to lether know when he wished a word, to spare her the embarrassment ofill-timed intrusions.

“Intrusions?” He had smiled the word away.  “You can’t wellintrude, my darling, on a heart where you’re already established, to the complete exclusion of other lodgers.”  And then, taking her hands, and looking up from them into her happy, dizzy eyes:  “You don’t know much about being in love, do you, Lizzie?” he laughingly ended.

It seemed easy enough to reject this imputation in a kiss; but she wondered afterward if she had not deserved it.  Was she really cold and conventional, and did other women give more richly and recklessly?  She found that it was possible to turn about every one of her reserves and delicacies so that they looked like selfish scruples and petty pruderies, and at this game she came in time to exhaust all the resources of an over-abundant casuistry.

Meanwhile the first days after Deering’s departure wore a soft, refracted light like the radiance lingering after sunset. He, at any rate, was taxable with no reserves, nocalculations, and his letters of farewell, from train and steamer, filled her with long murmurs and echoes of his presence.  How he loved her, how he loved her—­and how he knew how to tell her so!

She was not sure of possessing the same aptitude.  Unused tothe expression of personal emotion, she fluctuated between the impulse to pour out all she felt and the fear lest her extravagance should amuse or even bore him.  She never lost the sense that what was to her the central crisis of experience must be a mere episode in a life so predestined as his to romantic accidents.  All that she felt and said would be subjected to the test of comparison with what others had already given him:  from all quarters of the globeshe saw passionate missives winging their way toward Deering, forwhom her poor little swallow-flight ofdevotion could certainly not make a summer.  But such moments were succeeded by others in which she raised her head and dared inwardly to affirm her conviction that no woman had ever loved him just as she had, and that none, therefore, had probably found just such things to say to him.  And this conviction strengthened the other less solidly based belief that he also, for the same reason, had found new accents to express his tenderness, and that the three letters she wore all day in her shabby blouse, and hid all night beneath her pillow, surpassed not only in beauty, but in quality, all he had ever penned for other eyes.

They gave her, at any rate, during the weeks that she wore them on her heart, sensations even more complex and delicate than Deering’s actual presence had ever occasioned.  To be with him was always like breasting a bright, rough sea, that blinded while it buoyed her:  but his letters formed a still pool of contemplation, above which she could bend, and see the reflection of the sky, and the myriad movements of life that flitted and gleamed below the surface.  The wealth of his hidden life—­that was what most surprised her!  It was incredible to her now that she had had no inkling of it, but had kept on blindly along the narrow track of habit, like a traveler climbing a road in a fog, who suddenly finds himself on a sunlit crag between blue leagues of sky and dizzy depths of valley.  And the odd thing was that all the people about her—­the whole world of the Passy pension—­were still plodding along the same dull path, preoccupied with the pebbles underfoot, and unconscious of the glory beyond the fog!

There were wild hours when she longed to cry out to them what one saw from the summit—­and hours of tremulous abasement when she asked herself why her happy feet had been guided there, while others, no doubt as worthy, stumbled and blundered in obscurity.  She felt, in particular, a sudden urgent pity for the two or three other girls at Mme. Clopin’s—­girls older, duller, less alive than she, and by that very token more appealingly flung upon her sympathy.  Would they ever know?  Had they ever known?—­those were the questions that haunted her as she crossed her companions on the stairs, faced them at the dinner-table, and listened to their poor, pining talk in the dim-lit slippery-seated salon.  One ofthe girls was Swiss, the other English; the third, Andora Macy, was ayoung lady from the Southern States who was studying French with the ultimate object of imparting it to the inmates of a girls’ school at Macon, Georgia.

Andora Macy was pale, faded, immature.  She had a drooping Southern accent, and a manner which fluctuated between arch audacity and fits of panicky hauteur.  She yearned to be admired, and feared to be insulted; and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined to miss both these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at second hand in the experiences of her more privileged friends.

It was perhaps for this reason that she took a wistful interest in Lizzie, who had shrunk from her at first, as the depressing image of her own probable future, but to whom she had now suddenly become an object of sentimental pity.