The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton (phonics reader .txt) 📗

Meanwhile, as October advanced she had to face the alternative of returning to the Trenors or joining her aunt in town. Even the desolating dullness of New York in October, and the soapy discomforts of Mrs. Peniston’s interior, seemed preferable to what might await her at Bellomont; and with an air of heroic devotion she announced her intention of remaining with her aunt till the holidays.

Sacrifices of this nature are sometimes received with feelings as mixed as those which actuate them; and Mrs. Peniston remarked to her confidential maid that, if any of the family were to be with her at such a crisis (though for forty years she had been thought competent to see to the hanging of her own curtains), she would certainly have preferred Miss Grace to Miss Lily. Grace Stepney was an obscure cousin, of adaptable manners and vicarious interests, who “ran in” to sit with Mrs. Peniston when Lily dined out too continuously; who played bezique, picked up dropped stitches, read out the deaths from the Times, and sincerely admired the purple satin drawing-room curtains, the Dying Gladiator in the window, and the seven-by-five painting of Niagara which represented the one artistic excess of Mr. Peniston’s temperate career.

Mrs. Peniston, under ordinary circumstances, was as much bored by her excellent cousin as the recipient of such services usually is by the person who performs them. She greatly preferred the brilliant and unreliable Lily, who did not know one end of a crochet-needle from the other, and had frequently wounded her susceptibilities by suggesting that the drawing-room should be “done over.” But when it came to hunting for missing napkins, or helping to decide whether the backstairs needed re-carpeting, Grace’s judgment was certainly sounder than Lily’s: not to mention the fact that the latter resented the smell of beeswax and brown soap, and behaved as though she thought a house ought to keep clean of itself, without extraneous assistance.

Seated under the cheerless blaze of the drawing-room chandelier⁠—Mrs. Peniston never lit the lamps unless there was “company”⁠—Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dullness to a middle age like Grace Stepney’s. When she ceased to amuse Judy Trenor and her friends she would have to fall back on amusing Mrs. Peniston; whichever way she looked she saw only a future of servitude to the whims of others, never the possibility of asserting her own eager individuality.

A ring at the doorbell, sounding emphatically through the empty house, roused her suddenly to the extent of her boredom. It was as though all the weariness of the past months had culminated in the vacuity of that interminable evening. If only the ring meant a summons from the outer world⁠—a token that she was still remembered and wanted!

After some delay a parlourmaid presented herself with the announcement that there was a person outside who was asking to see Miss Bart; and on Lily’s pressing for a more specific description, she added:

“It’s Mrs. Haffen, Miss; she won’t say what she wants.”

Lily, to whom the name conveyed nothing, opened the door upon a woman in a battered bonnet, who stood firmly planted under the hall-light. The glare of the unshaded gas shone familiarly on her pockmarked face and the reddish baldness visible through thin strands of straw-coloured hair. Lily looked at the charwoman in surprise.

“Do you wish to see me?” she asked.

“I should like to say a word to you, Miss.” The tone was neither aggressive nor conciliatory: it revealed nothing of the speaker’s errand. Nevertheless, some precautionary instinct warned Lily to withdraw beyond earshot of the hovering parlourmaid.

She signed to Mrs. Haffen to follow her into the drawing-room, and closed the door when they had entered.

“What is it that you wish?” she enquired.

The charwoman, after the manner of her kind, stood with her arms folded in her shawl. Unwinding the latter, she produced a small parcel wrapped in dirty newspaper.

“I have something here that you might like to see, Miss Bart.” She spoke the name with an unpleasant emphasis, as though her knowing it made a part of her reason for being there. To Lily the intonation sounded like a threat.

“You have found something belonging to me?” she asked, extending her hand.

Mrs. Haffen drew back. “Well, if it comes to that, I guess it’s mine as much as anybody’s,” she returned.

Lily looked at her perplexedly. She was sure, now, that her visitor’s manner conveyed a threat; but, expert as she was in certain directions, there was nothing in her experience to prepare her for the exact significance of the present scene. She felt, however, that it must be ended as promptly as possible.

“I don’t understand; if this parcel is not mine, why have you asked for me?”

The woman was unabashed by the question. She was evidently prepared to answer it, but like all her class she had to go a long way back to make a beginning, and it was only after a pause that she replied: “My husband was janitor to the Benedick till the first of the month; since then he can’t get nothing to do.”

Lily remained silent and she continued: “It wasn’t no fault of our own, neither: the agent had another man he wanted the place for, and we was put out, bag and baggage, just to suit his fancy. I had a long sickness last winter, and an operation that ate up all we’d put by; and it’s hard for me and the children, Haffen being so long out of a job.”

After all, then, she had come only to ask Miss Bart to find a place for her husband; or, more probably, to seek the young lady’s intervention with Mrs. Peniston. Lily had such an air of always getting what she wanted that she was used to being appealed to as an intermediary, and, relieved of her vague apprehension, she took refuge in the conventional formula.

“I am sorry you have been in trouble,” she said.

“Oh, that we have, Miss, and it’s on’y just beginning. If on’y