They were walking in the lobby. Pauline was in what for her, was evening dress, her manner a little daunted, not quite carrying it off with the air of being established at the pivot of existence which she could manage so well at Evanston. They were walking up and down, waiting, it seemed, for friends to join them, and they wheeled under the great chandelier just in time to come squarely across us. I could see Pauline clutch at her husband's arm, and the catch in her breath with which she jerked herself back from the impulse to nod, and looked deliberately away from me. For her, the evidence of my misdoing hung about me like an exhalation. She was afraid I should insist on speaking to her and some of her friends would come up and see me doing it. I didn't, however, offer to speak to her, I looked instead at Henry. I stood still in my tracks and looked at him steadily and curiously. I wished very much to know what he meant to do about it. He turned slowly as I looked, from deep red to mottled purple, and very much against his will his head bowed to me; his body, to which Pauline clung, dared not move lest she detect it, but quite above and independent of his smooth-vested, self-indulgent front, his head bowed to me. So went out of my life thirty years of intimacy which never succeeded in being intimate.
But though one may excise thirty years of one's past without a tremor, one may not do it without a scar. To allay the irritation of Pauline's slight, I came near to being as abandoned as she believed, as I had moments of believing myself. For the possibility that Helmeth Garrett had found in our relation of setting it aside, made it at times of a cheapness which seemed to extend to me who had entertained it. I should have been happier, I thought, to have taken it lightly as he did. If so many women who had begun as I had begun, had gone on repeating the particular instance, wasn't it because they found that that was the easiest, the only possible way to bear it? How else could one ease the pain of loving except by being loved again? And if I was to lose the Pauline Millses of the world by what had been entered upon so sincerely, why, then, what more had I to risk on the light adventure? All this time I was sick with the need of being confirmed in my faith in myself as a person worthy to be loved, to feel sure that since my love had missed its mark, it wasn't I at least that had fallen short of it.
It was that summer Jerry had been driven by some such need I imagined, as I admitted in myself, to put his future in jeopardy by another marriage which on the face of it, offered even a more immediate occasion for shipwreck than the first, and I hadn't scrupled to put forth to save him, the new capacity to charm which had come upon me with the experience of not caring any more myself to be charmed. I knew; it would have been a poor tribute to my skill as an actress if I hadn't by this time known, the moves by which a man who is susceptible of being played upon at all, can be drawn into a personal interest; and though I didn't then, and do not now believe that a love serviceable for the uses of living together, can be built up out of "made" love, I was willing for the time to pit myself against the game that was played by Miss Chichester for Jerry's peace of mind. I played it all the better for not being, as the young lady was, personally involved in the stake. That I thought afterward of doing anything for myself with what I had got, when at last I had by this means brought Jerry down from Newport to my place on the Hudson for a week end, was in part due to the extraordinary charm that Jerry displayed under the stimulus of a male interest in me, of whom for years he had thought of as being quite outside such consideration. There was a kind of wistfulness about Jerry when he was a little in love, that made him irresistible; no doubt I was also a little warmed by the fire which I had blown up.
He was to come from Saturday to Monday, and the moment I saw him getting down from the dog-cart I had sent to the station for him, I knew that I had only to let that interest take its course, to find myself provided with a lover, whether or no I could command my heart to loving. I do not remember that I came to any conscious decision about it, but I know that I yielded myself to the growing sense of intimacy, that I consciously drew, as one draws perfume from a flower, all that came to me from him: his new loverliness, touched still with the old solicitous sense of the preciousness of my gift. I dramatized to the full the possibility of what hung in the air between us, I dressed myself, I set the stage accordingly.
It was Saturday evening after dinner that I sent him to the garden to smoke, keeping the house long enough to fix his attention on my joining him, by wondering what kept me, and so overdid my part by just so much as I made myself conscious of the taint of theatricality. For as I went down the veranda steps to meet him in the rose walk, the response of the actress in me to the perfectness of the setting and my fitness for the part of the great lady of romance, drew up out of my past a faint reminder of myself going up another pair of stairs so many years ago in the figure of an orphan child toiling through the world. Out of that memory there distilled presently a cold dew over all my purpose.
It was a perfect night, warm emanations from the earth shut in the smell of the garden, and light airs from the river stirred the full-leafed trees. At the bottom of the lawn the soft, full rush, of the Hudson made a stir like the hurrying pulse. Beyond the silver gleam of its waters, lay the farther bank strewn with primrose-coloured lights, and above that the moon, low and full-orbed and golden. Its diffusing light mixed and mingled with the shadow of the moving boughs. I was wearing about my shoulders a light scarf that from time to time blew out with the wind, and as we paced in the garden strayed across Jerry's breast and was caught back by me, but not before on its communicating thread, ran an electric spark. It must have been a good two hours after moonrise before we turned to go in, where the great hall lamp burned with a steady rose-red glow.
At the foot of the veranda a breeze sprang up fresher than before, that caught my scarf from me and wrapped us both in it as in a warm, suffusing mood. We were so close that I had instinctively to put up my hand as a barricade against what was about to come from him to me, and as I did so I was aware of something that rose up from some subterranean crypt in me ... that old romance of my mother's ... women like her, worlds of patient, overworking, women who could do without happiness if only they found themselves doing right. Somehow they had laid on me, the necessity of being true to the best I had known, because it was the best and had been founded in integrity and stayed on renunciations. I knew what I had come into the garden to do. I had planned for it. I thought myself prepared to take up, as many women of my profession did, the next best in place of the best which life had denied me, but my past was too strong for me. The unslumbering instinct that saves wild creatures before they are well awake, had whipped me out of the soft entanglement, and before Jerry could grasp the change of mood in me, I was halfway up the stair.
"This wind," I said, "I think it will blow up a rain before morning." I went on up before him. "You can see the river darkling below its surface, it does that before a change." I went on drawing the chairs back from the edge of the veranda, I called Elsa to fasten all the windows. When at last we came into the glow of the hall lamp, I could see his face white yet with what he had missed; he thought he had blundered. He caught at my hand as I gave him his bedroom candle in an effort to recapture what had just trembled in the air between us.
"Olivia! I say ... Olivia!"
"Your train leaves at nine-thirty," I reminded him. "I'll be up to pour your coffee."