House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [167]
“Why, what’s the matter, Miss Lily? You’re not well!” he exclaimed; and she forced her lips into a pallid smile of reassurance.
“I’m a little tired—its nothing. Stay with me a moment, please,” she faltered. That she should be asking this service of Rosedale!
He glanced at the dirty and unpropitious corner on which they stood, with the shriek of the “elevated” and the tumult of trains and waggons contending hideously in their ears.
“We can’t stay here; but let me take you somewhere for a cup of tea. The Longworth is only a few yards off, and there’ll be no one there at this hour.”
A cup of tea in quiet, somewhere out of the noise and ugliness, seemed for the moment the one solace she could bear. A few steps brought them to the ladies’ door of the hotel he had named, and a moment later he was seated opposite to her, and the waiter had placed the tea-tray between them.
“Not a drop of brandy or whiskey first? You look regularly done up, Miss Lily. Well, take your tea strong, then; and, waiter, get a cushion for the lady’s back.”
Lily smiled faintly at the injunction to take her tea strong. It was the temptation she was always struggling to resist. Her craving for the keen stimulant was forever conflicting with that other craving for sleep—the midnight craving which only the little phial in her hand could still. But today, at any rate, the tea could hardly be too strong: she counted on it to pour warmth and resolution into her empty veins.
As she leaned back before him, her lids drooping in utter lassitude, though the first warm draught already tinged her face with returning life, Rosedale was seized afresh by the poignant surprise of her beauty. The dark pencilling of fatigue under her eyes, the morbid blue-veined pallour of the temples, brought out the brightness of her hair and lips, as though all her ebbing vitality were centred there. Against the dull chocolate-coloured background of the restaurant, the purity of her head stood out, as it had never done in the most brightly-lit ball-room. He looked at her with a startled uncomfortable feeling, as though her beauty were a forgotten enemy that had lain in ambush and now sprang out on him unawares.
To clear the air he tried to take an easy tone with her. “Why, Miss Lily, I haven’t seen you for an age. I didn’t know what had become of you.”
As he spoke, he was checked by an embarrassing sense of the complications to which this might lead. Though he had not seen her he had heard of her; he knew of her connection with Mrs. Hatch, and of the talk resulting from it. Mrs. Hatch’s milieu was one which he had once assiduously frequented, and now as devoutly shunned.
Lily, to whom the tea had restored her usual clearness of mind, saw what was in his thoughts and said with a slight smile: “You would not be likely to know about me. I have joined the working classes.”
He stared in genuine wonder. “You don’t mean—? Why, what on earth are you doing?”
“Learning to be a milliner—at least trying to learn,” she hastily qualified the statement.
Rosedale suppressed a low whistle of surprise. “Come off—you ain’t serious, are you?”
“Perfectly serious. I’m obliged to work for my living.”
“But I understood—I thought you were with Norma Hatch.”
“You heard I had gone to her as her secretary?”
“Something of the kind, I believe.” He leaned forward to refill her cup.
Lily guessed the possibilities of embarrassment which the topic held for him, and raising her eyes to his, she said suddenly: “I left her two months ago.”
Rosedale continued to fumble awkwardly with the tea-pot, and she felt sure that he had heard what had been said of her. But what was there that Rosedale did not hear?
“Wasn’t it a soft berth?” he enquired, with an attempt at lightness.
“Too soft—one might have sunk in too deep.” Lily rested one arm on the edge of the table, and sat looking at him more intently than she had ever looked before. An uncontrollable impulse was urging her to put her case to this man, from whose curiosity she had always so fiercely defended herself.
“You know Mrs. Hatch, I think? Well, perhaps you can understand that she might make things too easy for one.