The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ send home the turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had looked at that morning.

      Lily knew people who “lived like pigs”, and their appearance and surroundings justified her mother’s repugnance to that form of existence. They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses with engravings from Cole’s Voyage of Life on the drawing-room walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said “I’ll go and see” to visitors calling at an hour when all right-minded persons are conventionally if not actually out. The disgusting part of it was that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily imbibed the idea that if people lived like pigs it was from choice, and through the lack of any proper standard of conduct. This gave her a sense of reflected superiority, and she did not need Mrs. Bart’s comments on the family frumps and misers to foster her naturally lively taste for splendour.

      Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view of the universe.

      The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a heavy thunder-cloud of bills. The light of the debut still lingered on the horizon, but the cloud had thickened; and suddenly it broke. The suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times when Lily relived with painful vividness every detail of the day on which the blow fell. She and her mother had been seated at the luncheon-table, over the chaufroix and cold salmon of the previous night’s dinner: it was one of Mrs. Bart’s few economies to consume in private the expensive remnants of her hospitality. Lily was feeling the pleasant languor which is youth’s penalty for dancing till dawn; but her mother, in spite of a few lines about the mouth, and under the yellow waves on her temples, was as alert, determined and high in colour as if she had risen from an untroubled sleep.

      In the centre of the table, between the melting marrons glacés and candied cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their vigorous stems; they held their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but their rose-colour had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily’s sense of fitness was disturbed by their reappearance on the luncheon-table.

      “I really think, mother,” she said reproachfully, “we might afford a few fresh flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or lilies-of-the-valley—”

      Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when there was no one present at it but the family. But she smiled at her daughter’s innocence.

      “Lilies-of-the-valley,” she said calmly, “cost two dollars a dozen at this season.”

      Lily was not impressed. She knew very little of the value of money.

      “It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl,” she argued.

      “Six dozen what?” asked her father’s voice in the doorway.

      The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday, the sight of Mr. Bart at luncheon was an unwonted one. But neither his wife nor his daughter was sufficiently interested to ask an explanation.

      Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the fragment of jellied salmon which the butler had placed before him.

      “I was only saying,” Lily began, “that I hate to see faded flowers at luncheon; and mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley would not cost more than twelve dollars. Mayn’t I tell the florist to send a few every day?”

      She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her anything, and Mrs. Bart had taught her to plead with him when her own entreaties failed.

      Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and his lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his thin hair lay in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he looked at his daughter and laughed. The laugh was so strange that Lily coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and her father seemed to see something ridiculous in the request. Perhaps he thought it foolish that she should trouble him about such a trifle.

      “Twelve dollars—twelve dollars a day for flowers? Oh, certainly, my dear—give him an order for twelve hundred.” He continued to laugh.

      Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.

      “You needn’t wait, Poleworth—I will ring for you,” she said to the butler.

      The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the remains of the chaufroix on the sideboard.

      “What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?” said Mrs. Bart severely.

      She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making, and it was odious to her that her husband should make a show of himself before the servants.

      “Are you ill?” she repeated.

      “Ill?— No, I’m ruined,” he said.

      Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her feet.

      “Ruined—?” she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she turned a calm face to Lily.

      “Shut the pantry door,” she said.

      Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between them, and his head bowed on his hands.

      Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair unnaturally yellow. She looked at Lily as the latter approached: her look was terrible, but her voice was modulated to a ghastly cheerfulness.

      “Your father is not well—he doesn’t know what he is saying. It is nothing—but you had better go upstairs; and don’t talk to the servants,” she added.

      Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that voice. She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart’s words: she knew at once that they were ruined. In the dark hours which followed, that awful fact overshadowed even her father’s slow and difficult dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated train to start. Lily’s feelings were softer: she pitied him in a frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for the most part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur—first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference—and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of fiction had led her to connect with such occasions, the filial instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active expression, remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by her mother’s grim unflagging resentment. Every look and act of Mrs. Bart’s seemed to say: “You are sorry for him now—but you will feel differently when you see what he has done to us.”

      It was a relief to Lily when her father died.

      Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing—the mere mockery of what she was entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to live like a pig? She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of inert anger against fate. Her faculty for “managing” deserted her, or she no longer took sufficient pride in it to exert it. It was well enough to “manage” when by so doing one could keep one’s own carriage; but when one’s best contrivance did not conceal the fact that one had to go on foot, СКАЧАТЬ