These anxieties sharpened the intensity of her enjoyment, and made the contrast keener between her crowded sparkling hours and the vacant months at Saint Desert. Little as she understood of the qualities that made Moffatt what he was, the results were of the kind most palpable to her. He used life exactly as she would have used it in his place. Some of his enjoyments were beyond her range, but even these appealed to her because of the money that was required to gratify them. When she took him to see some inaccessible picture, or went with him to inspect the treasures of a famous dealer, she saw that the things he looked at moved him in a way she could not understand, and that the actual touching of rare textures—bronze or marble, or velvets flushed with the bloom of age—gave him sensations like those her own beauty had once roused in him. But the next moment he was laughing over some commonplace joke, or absorbed in a long cipher cable handed to him as they re-entered the Nouveau Luxe for tea, and his aesthetic emotions had been thrust back into their own compartment of the great steel strong-box of his mind.
Her new life went on without comment or interference from her husband, and she saw that he had accepted their altered relation, and intended merely to keep up an external semblance of harmony. To that semblance she knew he attached intense importance: it was an article of his complicated social creed that a man of his class should appear to live on good terms with his wife. For different reasons it was scarcely less important to Undine: she had no wish to affront again the social reprobation that had so nearly wrecked her. But she could not keep up the life she was leading without more money, a great deal more money; and the thought of contracting her expenditure was no longer tolerable.
One afternoon, several weeks later, she came in to find a tradesman’s representative waiting with a bill. There was a noisy scene in the anteroom before the man threateningly withdrew—a scene witnessed by the servants, and overheard by her motherin-law, whom she found seated in the drawing-room when she entered. The old Marquise’s visits to her daughter-in-law were made at long intervals but with ritual regularity; she called every other Friday at five, and Undine had forgotten that she was due that day. This did not make for greater cordiality between them, and the altercation in the anteroom had been too loud for concealment. The Marquise was on her feet when her daughter-in-law came in, and instantly said with lowered eyes: “It would perhaps be best for me to go.”
“Oh, I don’t care. You’re welcome to tell Raymond you’ve heard me insulted because I’m too poor to pay my bills—he knows it well enough already!” The words broke from Undine unguardedly, but once spoken they nourished her defiance.
“I’m sure my son has frequently recommended greater prudence—” the Marquise murmured.
“Yes! It’s a pity he didn’t recommend it to your other son instead! All the money I was entitled to has gone to pay Hubert’s debts.”
“Raymond has told me that there are certain things you fail to understand—I have no wish whatever to discuss them.” The Marquise had gone toward the door; with her hand on it she paused to add: “I shall say nothing whatever of what has happened.”
Her icy magnanimity added the last touch to Undine’s wrath. They knew her extremity, one and all, and it did not move them. At most, they would join in concealing it like a blot on their honour. And the menace grew and mounted, and not a hand was stretched to help her….
Hardly a half-hour earlier Moffatt, with whom she had been visiting a “private view,” had sent her home in his motor with the excuse that he must hurry back to the Nouveau Luxe to meet his stenographer and sign a batch of letters for the New York mail. It was therefore probable that he was still at home—that she should find him if she hastened there at once. An overwhelming desire to cry out her wrath and wretchedness brought her to her feet and sent her down to hail a passing cab. As it whirled her through the bright streets powdered with amber sunlight her brain throbbed with confused intentions. She did not think of Moffatt as a power she could use, but simply as some one who knew her and understood her grievance. It was essential to her at that moment to be told that she was right and that every one opposed to her was wrong.
At the hotel she asked his number and was carried up in the lift. On the landing she paused a moment, disconcerted—it had occurred to her that he might not be alone. But she walked on quickly, found the number and knocked…. Moffatt opened the door, and she glanced beyond him and saw that the big bright sitting-room was empty.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed, surprised; and as he stood aside to let her enter she saw him draw out his watch and glance at it surreptitiously. He was expecting someone, or he had an engagement elsewhere—something claimed him from which she was excluded. The thought flushed her with sudden resolution. She knew now what she had come for—to keep him from every one else, to keep him for herself alone.
“Don’t send me away!” she said, and laid her hand on his beseechingly.
XLV
She advanced into the room and slowly looked about her. The big vulgar writing-table wreathed in bronze was heaped with letters and papers. Among them stood a lapis bowl in a Renaissance mounting of enamel and a vase of Phenician glass that was like a bit of rainbow caught in cobwebs. On a table against the window a little Greek marble lifted its pure lines. On every side some rare and sensitive object seemed to be shrinking back from the false colours and crude contours of the hotel furniture. There were no books in the room, but the florid console under the mirror was stacked with old numbers of Town Talk and the New York Radiator. Undine recalled the dingy hall-room that Moffatt had lodged in at Mrs. Flynn’s, over Hober’s livery stable, and her heart beat at the signs of his altered state. When her eyes came back to him their lids were moist.
“Don’t send me away,” she repeated. He looked at her and smiled. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know—but I had to come. To-day, when you spoke again of sailing, I felt as if I couldn’t stand it.” She lifted her eyes and looked in his profoundly.
He reddened a little under her gaze, but she could detect no softening or confusion in the shrewd steady glance he gave her back.
“Things going wrong again—is that the trouble?” he merely asked with a comforting inflexion.
“They always are wrong; it’s all been an awful mistake. But I shouldn’t care if you were here and I could see you sometimes. You’re so STRONG: that’s what I feel about you, Elmer. I was the only one to feel it that time they all turned against you out at Apex…. Do you remember the afternoon I met you down on Main Street, and we walked out together to the Park? I knew then that you were stronger than any of them….”
She had never spoken more sincerely. For the moment all thought of self-interest was in abeyance, and she felt again, as she had felt that day, the instinctive yearning of her nature to be one with his. Something in her voice must have attested it, for she saw a change in his face.
“You’re not the beauty you were,” he said irrelevantly; “but you’re a lot more fetching.”
The oddly qualified praise made her laugh with mingled pleasure and annoyance.
“I suppose I must be dreadfully changed—”
“You’re all right!—But I’ve got to go back home,” he broke off abruptly. “I’ve put it off too long.”
She paled and looked away, helpless in her sudden disappointment. “I knew you’d say that…. And I shall just be left here….” She sat down on the sofa near which they had been standing, and two tears formed on her lashes and fell.
Moffatt sat down beside her, and both were silent. She had never seen him at a loss before. She made no attempt to draw nearer, or to use any of the arts of cajolery; but presently she said, without rising: “I saw you look at your watch when I came in. I suppose somebody else is waiting for you.”