House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [188]
Selden laid the book aside, and sank into the chair beside the desk. He leaned his elbows on it, and hid his face in his hands. The bitter waters of life surged high about him, their sterile taste was on his lips. Did the cheque to Trenor explain the mystery or deepen it? At first his mind refused to act—he felt only the taint of such a transaction between a man like Trenor and a girl like Lily Bart. Then, gradually, his troubled vision cleared, old hints and rumours came back to him, and out of the very insinuations he had feared to probe, he constructed an explanation of the mystery. It was true, then, that she had taken money from Trenor; but true also, as the contents of the little desk declared, that the obligation had been intolerable to her, and that at the first opportunity she had freed herself from it, though the act left her face to face with bare unmitigated poverty.
That was all he knew—all he could hope to unravel of the story. The mute lips on the pillow refused him more than this—unless indeed they had told him the rest in the kiss they had left upon his forehead. Yes, he could now read into that farewell all that his heart craved to find there; he could even draw from it courage not to accuse himself for having failed to reach the height of his opportunity.
He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. But at least he had loved her—had been willing to stake his future on his faith in her—and if the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives.
It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled to her side.
He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees;dq and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.
ENDNOTES
1 (p. 158) a translation of the Eumenides... and snatches an hour’s repose: In Greek mythology, Orestes is the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the brother of Iphigenia and Electra. In the Eumenides, the third part of the tragedy Oresteia, Aeschylus tells how the Furies pursue Orestes when he murders Clytemnestra. She had taken revenge on Agamemnon for sacrificing Iphigenia to secure favorable winds for the Greek army to sail to war against the Trojans. In the prologue of the play, Orestes finds the Furies asleep in the cave of the oracle. At the end, the goddess Athena saves Orestes from the Furies’ vengeance.
2 (p. 181) Beatrice Cenci: The daughter of a Roman nobleman, Beatrice (1577-1599) was arrested and executed for plotting to murder a relative who had developed an incestuous passion for her. Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice plays a crucial role in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun (1860).
3 (p. 187) There was a girl... they killed her. The story that Rosedale refers to is from Livy’s The Rise of Rome. When the Romans were fighting the Sabines, Spurius Tarpeius was in command of the Roman citadel. Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines, “induced Spurius’ virgin daughter by a bribe of gold to admit his armed men into the citadel.... Once admitted they crushed her under the weight of their weapons either so that the citadel might appear to have been captured by force or to set an example for the future that no one should ever keep faith with a traitor” (from the T. J. Luce translation, Oxford University Press, 1998).
4 (p. 198) Sabrina: The Dorset’s boat is named after a mythological water nymph. Sabrina was goddess of the River Severn in England and patroness of chastity in John Milton’s masque Comus (1637): “Sabrina fair / Listen where thou art sitting /Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, / In twisted braids of lilies knitting/The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.