even through his smile lizzie had seen, in the first moment, how changed he was; and the impression of the change deepened to the point of pain when, a few days later, in reply to his brief note, she accorded him a private hour.
that the first sight of his writing — the first answer to his letters — should have come, after three long years, in the shape of this impersonal line, too curt to be called humble, yet confessing to a consciousness of the past by the studied avoidance of its language! as she read, her mind flashed back over what she had dreamed his letters would be, over the exquisite answers she had composed above his name. there was nothing exquisite in the conventional lines before her; but dormant nerves began to throb again at the mere touch of the paper he had touched, and she threw the little note into the fire before she dared to reply to it.
now that he was actually before her again, he became, as usual, the one live spot in her consciousness. once more her tormented throbbing self sank back passive and numb, but now with all its power of suffering mysteriously transferred to the presence, so known, yet so unknown, at the opposite corner of her hearth. she was still lizzie west, and he was still vincent deering; but the styx rolled between them, and she saw his face through its fog. it was his face, really, rather than his words, that told her, as she furtively studied it, the tale of failure and slow discouragement which had so blurred its handsome lines. she kept afterward no precise memory of the actual details of his narrative: the pain it evidently cost him to impart it was so much the sharpest fact in her new vision of him. confusedly, however, she gathered that on reaching america he had found his wife’s small property gravely impaired; and that, while lingering on to secure what remained of it, he had contrived to sell a picture or two, and had even known a brief moment of success, during which he received orders and set up a studio. but inexplicably the tide had ebbed, his work remained on his hands, and a tedious illness, with its miserable sequel of debt, soon wiped out his small advantage. there followed a period of eclipse, still more vaguely pictured, during which she was allowed to infer that he had tried his hand at divers means of livelihood, accepting employment from a fashionable house-decorator, designing wall-papers, illustrating magazine articles, and acting for a time, she dimly understood, as the social tout of a new hotel desirous of advertising its restaurant. these disjointed facts were strung on a slender thread of personal allusions — references to friends who had been kind (jealously, she guessed them to be women), and to enemies who had darkly schemed against him. but, true to his tradition of “correctness,” he carefully avoided the mention of names, and left her trembling conjectures to grope dimly through an alien crowded world in which there seemed little room for her small shy presence.
as she listened, her private pang was merged in the intolerable sense of his unhappiness. nothing he had said explained or excused his conduct to her; but he had suffered, he had been lonely, had been humiliated, and she suddenly felt, with a fierce maternal rage, that there was no conceivable justification for any scheme of things in which such facts were possible. she could not have said why: she simply knew that it hurt too much to see him hurt.
gradually it came to her that her unconsciousness of any personal grievance was due to her having so definitely determined her own future. she was glad she had decided, as she now felt she had, to marry jackson benn, if only for the sense of detachment it gave her in dealing with the case of vincent deering. her personal safety insured her the requisite impartiality, and justified her in dwelling as long as she chose on the last lines of a chapter to which her own act had deliberately fixed the close. any lingering hesitations as to the finality of her decision were dispelled by the imminent need of making it known to deering; and when her visitor paused in his reminiscences to say, with a sigh, “but many things have happened to you too,” his words did not so much evoke the sense of her altered fortunes as the image of the protector to whom she was about to intrust them.
“yes, many things; it’s three years,” she answered.
deering sat leaning forward, in his sad exiled elegance, his eyes gently bent on hers; and at his side she saw the solid form of mr. jackson benn, with shoulders preternaturally squared by the cut of his tight black coat, and a tall shiny collar sustaining his baby cheeks and hard blue chin. then the vision faded as deering began to speak.
“three years,” he repeated, musingly taking up her words. “i’ve so often wondered what they’d brought you.”
she lifted her head with a quick blush, and the terrified wish that he should not, at the cost of all his notions of correctness, lapse into the blunder of becoming “personal.”
“you’ve wondered?” she smiled back bravely.
“do you suppose i haven’t?” his look dwelt on her. “yes, i daresay that was what you thought of me.”
she had her answer pat — “why, frankly, you know, i didn’t think of you.” but the mounting tide of her poor dishonored memories swept it indignantly away. if it was his correctness to ignore, it could never be hers to disavow.
“ was that what you thought of me?” she heard him repeat in a tone of sad insistence; and at that, with a quick lift of her head, she resolutely answered: “how could i know what to think? i had no word from you.”
if she had expected, and perhaps almost hoped, that this answer would create a difficulty for him, the gaze of quiet fortitude with which he met it proved that she had underestimated his resources.
“no, you had no word. i kept my vow,” he said.
“your vow?”
“that you shouldn’t have a word — not a syllable. oh, i kept it through everything!”
lizzie’s heart was sounding in her ears the old confused rumor of the sea of life, but through it she desperately tried to distinguish the still small voice of reason.
“what was your vow? why shouldn’t i have had a syllable from you?”
he sat motionless, still holding her with a look so gentle that it almost seemed forgiving.
then abruptly he rose, and crossing the space between them, sat down in a chair at her side. the deliberation of his movement might have implied a forgetfulness of changed conditions, and lizzie, as if thus viewing it, drew slightly back; but he appeared not to notice her recoil, and his eyes, at last leaving her face, slowly and approvingly made the round of the small bright drawing-room. “this is charming. yes, things have changed for you,” he said.
a moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of a vain return upon the past. it was as if all her retrospective tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to protect him from it. but his evasiveness exasperated her, and suddenly she felt the inconsistent desire to hold him fast, face to face with his own words.
before she could reiterate her question, however, he had met her with another.
“you did think of me, then? why are you afraid to tell me that you did?”
the unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.
“didn’t my letters tell you so enough?”
“ah, your letters!” keeping her gaze on his in a passion of unrelenting fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not the least quiver of a sensitive nerve. he only gazed back at her more sadly.
“they went everywhere with me — your letters,” he said.
“yet you never answered them.” at last the accusation trembled to her lips.
“yet i never answered them.”
“did you ever so much as read them, i wonder?”
all the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed them on him, as if to escape from their rage.
deering hardly seemed to hear her question. he merely shifted his attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by the least gesture, to remind her of the privileges which such nearness had once implied.
“there were beautiful, wonderful things in them,” he said, smiling.
she felt herself stiffen under his smile.
“you’ve waited three years to tell me so!”
he looked at her with grave surprise. “and do you resent my telling you even now?”
his parries were incredible. they left her with a breathless sense of thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindictive desire to drive him against the wall and pin him there.
“no. only i wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at the time — ”
and now, with a sudden turn, he gave her the final surprise of meeting her squarely on her own ground.
“when at the time i didn’t? but how could i— at the time?”
“why couldn’t you? you’ve not yet told me?”
he gave her again his look of disarming patience. “do i need to? hasn’t my whole wretched story told you?”
“told me why you never answered my letters?”
“yes, since i could only answer them in one way — by protesting my love and my longing.”
there was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers, of a wild confused reconstruction of her shattered past. “you mean, then, that you didn’t write because — ”
“because i found, when i reached america, that i was a pauper; that my wife’s money was gone, and that what i could earn — i’ve so little gift that way! — was barely enough to keep juliet clothed and educated. it was as if an iron door had been suddenly locked and barred between us.”
lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of her incredulity. “you might at least have told me — have explained. do you think i shouldn’t have understood?”
he did not hesitate. “you would have understood. it wasn’t that.”
“what was it then?” she quavered.
“it’s wonderful you shouldn’t see! simply that i couldn’t write you that. anything else — not that!”
“and so you preferred to let me suffer?”
there was a shade of reproach in his eyes. “i suffered too,” he said.
it was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment it nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent them trembling in the direction of scorn and irony. but even as the impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation. once again, as so often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always failed to reckon with — the fact of the deep irreducible difference between his image in her mind and his actual self, the mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality. she had phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to herself that she “never could remember him,” so completely did the sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders. bright and breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside which her private injury paled.
“i suffered horribly,” he repeated, “and all the more that i couldn’t make a sign, couldn’t cry out my misery. there was only one escape from it all — to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me.”
the blood rushed to lizzie’s forehead. “hate you — you prayed that i might hate you?”
he rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in his. “yes; because your letters showed me that, if you didn’t, you’d be unhappier still.”
her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it, and her thoughts, too — her poor fluttering stormy thoughts — felt themselves suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of communion.
“and i meant to keep my resolve,” he went on, slowly releasing his clasp. “i meant to keep it even after the random stream of things swept me back here in your way; but when i saw you the other day, i felt that what had been possible at a distance was impossible now that we were near each other. how was it possible to see you and want you to hate me?”
he had moved away, but not to resume his seat. he merely paused at a little distance, his hand resting on a chair-back, in the transient attitude that precedes departure.
lizzie’s heart contracted. he was going, then, and this was his farewell. he was going, and she could find no word to detain him but the senseless stammer “i never hated you.”
he considered her with his faint grave smile. “it’s not necessary, at any rate, that you should do so now. time and circumstances have made me so harmless — that’s exactly why i’ve dared to venture back. and i wanted to tell you how i rejoice in your good fortune. it’s the only obstacle between us that i can’t bring myself to wish away.”
lizzie sat silent, spellbound, as she listened, by the sudden evocation of mr. jackson benn. he stood there again, between herself and deering, perpendicular and reproachful, but less solid and sharply outlined than before, with a look in his small hard eyes that desperately wailed for reembodiment.
deering was continuing his farewell speech. “you’re rich now, you’re free. you will marry.” she vaguely saw him holding out his hand.
“it’s not true that i’m engaged!” she broke out. they were the last words she had meant to utter; they were hardly related to her conscious thoughts; but she felt her whole will suddenly gathered up in the irrepressible impulse to repudiate and fling away from her forever the spectral claim of mr. jackson benn.
