miss macy’s room was next to miss west’s, and the southerner’s knock often appealed to lizzie’s hospitality when mme. clopin’s early curfew had driven her boarders from the salon. it sounded thus one evening just as lizzie, tired from an unusually long day of tuition, was in the act of removing her dress. she was in too indulgent a mood to withhold her “come in,” and as miss macy crossed the threshold, lizzie felt that vincent deering’s first letter — the letter from the train — had slipped from her loosened bodice to the floor.
miss macy, as promptly noting the fact, darted forward to recover the letter. lizzie stooped also, fiercely jealous of her touch; but the other reached the precious paper first, and as she seized it, lizzie knew that she had seen whence it fell, and was weaving round the incident a rapid web of romance.
lizzie blushed with annoyance. “it’s too stupid, having no pockets! if one gets a letter as she is going out in the morning, she has to carry it in her blouse all day.”
miss macy looked at her with swimming eyes. “it’s warm from your heart!” she breathed, reluctantly yielding up the missive.
lizzie laughed, for she knew better: she knew it was the letter that had warmed her heart. poor andora macy! she would never know. her bleak bosom would never take fire from such a contact. lizzie looked at her with kind eyes, secretly chafing at the injustice of fate.
the next evening, on her return home, she found andora hovering in the entrance hall.
“i thought you’d like me to put this in your own hand,” miss macy whispered significantly, pressing a letter upon lizzie. “i couldn’t bear to see it lying on the table with the others.”
it was deering’s letter from the steamer. lizzie blushed to the forehead, but without resenting andora’s divination. she could not have breathed a word of her bliss, but she was not altogether sorry to have it guessed, and pity for andora’s destitution yielded to the pleasure of using it as a mirror for her own abundance. deering wrote again on reaching new york, a long, fond, dissatisfied letter, vague in its indication of his own projects, specific in the expression of his love. lizzie brooded over every syllable of it till they formed the undercurrent of all her waking thoughts, and murmured through her midnight dreams; but she would have been happier if they had shed some definite light on the future.
that would come, no doubt, when he had had time to look about and get his bearings. she counted up the days that must elapse before she received his next letter, and stole down early to peep at the papers, and learn when the next american mail was due. at length the happy date arrived, and she hurried distractedly through the day’s work, trying to conceal her impatience by the endearments she bestowed upon her pupils. it was easier, in her present mood, to kiss them than to keep them at their grammars.
that evening, on mme. clopin’s threshold, her heart beat so wildly that she had to lean a moment against the door-post before entering. but on the hall table, where the letters lay, there was none for her.
she went over them with a feverish hand, her heart dropping down and down, as she had sometimes fallen down an endless stairway in a dream — the very same stairway up which she had seemed to fly when she climbed the long hill to deering’s door. then it suddenly struck her that andora might have found and secreted her letter, and with a spring she was on the actual stairs and rattling miss macy’s door-handle.
“you’ve a letter for me, haven’t you?” she panted.
miss macy, turning from the toilet-table, inclosed her in attenuated arms. “oh, darling, did you expect one to-day?”
“do give it to me!” lizzie pleaded with burning eyes.
“but i haven’t any! there hasn’t been a sign of a letter for you.”
“i know there is. there must be,” lizzie persisted, stamping her foot.
“but, dearest, i’ve watched for you, and there’s been nothing, absolutely nothing.”
day after day, for the ensuing weeks, the same scene reenacted itself with endless variations. lizzie, after the first sharp spasm of disappointment, made no effort to conceal her anxiety from miss macy, and the fond andora was charged to keep a vigilant eye upon the postman’s coming, and to spy on the bonne for possible negligence or perfidy. but these elaborate precautions remained fruitless, and no letter from deering came.
during the first fortnight of silence lizzie exhausted all the ingenuities of explanation. she marveled afterward at the reasons she had found for deering’s silence: there were moments when she almost argued herself into thinking it more natural than his continuing to write. there was only one reason which her intelligence consistently rejected, and that was the possibility that he had forgotten her, that the whole episode had faded from his mind like a breath from a mirror. from that she resolutely turned her thoughts, aware that if she suffered herself to contemplate it, the motive power of life would fail, and she would no longer understand why she rose up in the morning and lay down at night.
if she had had leisure to indulge her anguish she might have been unable to keep such speculations at bay. but she had to be up and working: the blanchisseuse had to be paid, and mme. clopin’s weekly bill, and all the little “extras” that even her frugal habits had to reckon with. and in the depths of her thought dwelt the dogging fear of illness and incapacity, goading her to work while she could. she hardly remembered the time when she had been without that fear; it was second nature now, and it kept her on her feet when other incentives might have failed. in the blankness of her misery she felt no dread of death; but the horror of being ill and “dependent” was in her blood.
in the first weeks of silence she wrote again and again to deering, entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. from the first she had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been too possessive, too exacting in her tone. she told herself that his fastidiousness shrank from any but a “light touch,” and that hers had not been light enough. she should have kept to the character of the “little friend,” the artless consciousness in which tormented genius may find an escape from its complexities; and instead, she had dramatized their relation, exaggerated her own part in it, presumed, forsooth, to share the front of the stage with him, instead of being content to serve as scenery or chorus.
but though to herself she admitted, and even insisted on, the episodical nature of the experience, on the fact that for deering it could be no more than an incident, she was still convinced that his sentiment for her, however fugitive, had been genuine.
his had not been the attitude of the unscrupulous male seeking a vulgar “advantage.” for a moment he had really needed her, and if he was silent now, it was perhaps because he feared that she had mistaken the nature of the need and built vain hopes on its possible duration.
it was of the very essence of lizzie’s devotion that it sought instinctively the larger freedom of its object; she could not conceive of love under any form of exaction or compulsion. to make this clear to deering became an overwhelming need, and in a last short letter she explicitly freed him from whatever sentimental obligation its predecessors might have seemed to impose. in this studied communication she playfully accused herself of having unwittingly sentimentalized their relation, affirming, in self-defense, a retrospective astuteness, a sense of the impermanence of the tenderer sentiments, that almost put deering in the fatuous position of having mistaken coquetry for surrender. and she ended gracefully with a plea for the continuance of the friendly regard which she had “always understood” to be the basis of their sympathy. the document, when completed, seemed to her worthy of what she conceived to be deering’s conception of a woman of the world, and she found a spectral satisfaction in the thought of making her final appearance before him in that distinguished character. but she was never destined to learn what effect the appearance produced; for the letter, like those it sought to excuse, remained unanswered.
