She opened the envelope, and a cheque fluttered to the floor. As she stooped to pick it up, the blood rushed to her face. The cheque represented the full amount of Mrs. Peniston’s legacy, and the letter accompanying it explained that the executors, having adjusted the business of the estate with less delay than they had expected, had decided to anticipate the date fixed for the payment of the bequests.

  Lily sat down beside the desk at the foot of her bed, and spreading out the cheque, read over and over the ten thousand dollars written across it in a steely business hand. Ten months earlier the amount it stood for had represented the depths of penury; but her standard of values had changed in the interval, and now visions of wealth lurked in every flourish of the pen. As she continued to gaze at it, she felt the glitter of the visions mounting to her brain, and after a while she lifted the lid of the desk and slipped the magic formula out of sight. It was easier to think without those five figures dancing before her eyes, and she had a great deal of thinking to do before she slept.

  She opened her cheque-book, and plunged into such anxious calculations as had prolonged her vigil at Bellomont on the night when she had decided to marry Percy Gryce. Poverty simplifies book-keeping, and her financial situation was easier to ascertain than it had been then; but she had not yet learned the control of money, and during her transient phase of luxury at the Emporium, she had slipped back into habits of extravagance which still impaired her slender balance. A careful examination of her cheque-book and of the unpaid bills in her desk showed that when the latter had been settled, she would have barely enough to live on for the next three or four months; and even after that, if she were to continue her present way of living, without earning any additional money, all incidental expenses must be reduced to the vanishing point. She hid her eyes with a shudder, beholding herself at the entrance of that ever-narrowing perspective down which she had seen Miss Silverton’s dowdy figure take its despondent way.

  It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper empoverishment, of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor, to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now, the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spindrift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another; there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the blood—whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands but made up of inherited passions and loyalties—it has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving.

  Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her mating instinct, but they had been checked by the disintegrating influences of the life about her. All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance; her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen.

  The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the fragments of her life and build herself a shelter with them seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail, audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.

  Yes, but it had taken two to build the nest; the man’s faith as well as the woman’s courage. Lily remembered Nettie’s words: I knew he knew about me. Her husband’s faith in her had made her renewal possible; it is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be! Well, Selden had twice been ready to stake his faith on Lily Bart; but the third trial had been too severe for his endurance. The very quality of his love had made it the more impossible to recall to life. If it had been a simple instinct of the blood, the power of her beauty might have revived it. But the fact that it struck deeper, that it was inextricably wound up with inherited habits of thought and feeling, made it as impossible to restore to growth as a deep-rooted plant torn from its bed. Selden had given her of his best, but he was as incapable as herself of an uncritical return to former states of feeling.

  There remained to her, as she had told him, the uplifting memory of his faith in her; but she had not reached the age when a woman can live on her memories. As she held Nettie Struther’s child in her arms, the frozen currents of youth had loosed themselves and run warm in her veins: the old life-hunger possessed her, and all her being clamoured for its share of personal happiness. Yes, it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.

  It was growing late, and an immense weariness once more possessed her. It was not the stealing sense of sleep, but a vivid wakeful fatigue, a wan lucidity of mind against which all the possibilities of the future were shadowed forth gigantically. She was appalled by the intense clearness of the vision; she seemed to have broken through the merciful veil which intervenes between intention and action and to see exactly what she would do in all the long days to come. There was the cheque in her desk, for instance; she meant to use it in paying her debt to Trenor; but she foresaw that when the morning came, she would put off doing so, would slip into gradual tolerance of the debt. The thought terrified her; she dreaded to fall from the height of her last moment with Lawrence Selden. But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses; she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate. She felt an intense longing to prolong, to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit. If only life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the loving and foregoing in the world!

  She reached out suddenly, and drawing the cheque from her writing-desk, enclosed it in an envelope which she addressed to her bank. She then wrote out a cheque for Trenor, and placing it, without an accompanying word, in an envelope inscribed with his name, laid the two letters side by side on her desk. After that she continued to sit at the table, sorting her papers and writing, till the intense silence of the house reminded her of the lateness of the hour. In the street the noise of wheels had ceased, and the rumble of the “elevated” came only at long intervals through the deep, unnatural hush. In the mysterious nocturnal separation from all outward signs of life, she felt herself more strangely confronted with her fate. The sensation made her brain reel, and she tried to shut out consciousness by pressing her hands against her eyes. But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to symbolize her future; she felt as though the house, the street, the world, were all empty and she alone left sentient in a lifeless universe.

  But this was the verge of delirium; she had never hung so near the dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted; she remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon her. She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch of her pillow. She felt so profoundly tired that she thought she must fall asleep at once, but as soon as she had lain down, every nerve started once more into separate wakefulness. It was as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it without knowing where to take refuge.

  She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was possible; her whole past was re-enacting itself at a hundred different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could still this legion of insurgent nerves? The sense of exhaustion would have been sweet compared to this shrill beat of activities, but weariness had dropped from her as though some cruel stimulant had been forced into her veins.

  She could bear it—yes, she could bear it; but what strength would be left her the next day? Perspective had disappeared—the next day pressed close upon her, and on its heels came the days that were to follow—they swarmed about her like a shrieking mob. She must shut them out for a few hours; she must take a brief bath of oblivion. She put out her hand and measured the soothing drops into a glass; but as she did so, she knew they would be powerless against the supernatural lucidity of her brain. She had long since raised the dose to its highest limit, but to-night she felt she must increase it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing so; she remembered the chemist’s warning. If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep without waking. But after all, that was but one chance in a hundred: the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure for her the rest she so desperately needed.

  She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely; the physical craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation. Her mind shrank from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes contract in a blaze of light—darkness, darkness was what she must have at any cost. She raised herself in bed and swallowed the contents of the glass; then she blew out her candle and lay down.

  She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first effects of the soporific. She knew in advance what form they would take—the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over her in the darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect increased its fascination; it was delicious to lean over and look down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness. To-night the drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts. But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited. She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about; she had returned to her normal view of life. To-morrow would not be so difficult after all; she felt sure that she would have the strength to meet it. She did not quite remember what it was that she had been afraid to meet, but the uncertainty no longer troubled her. She had been unhappy, and now she was happy; she had felt herself alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished.

  She stirred once and turned on her side, and as she did so, she suddenly understood why she did not feel herself alone. It was odd, but Nettie Struther’s child was lying on her arm; she felt the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure. She settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to pillow the round, downy head and holding her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping child.

  As she lay there, she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought; she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke, and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.

  Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold her. She struggled faintly against it, feeling that she ought to keep awake on account of the baby; but even this feeling was gradually lost in an indistinct sense of drowsy peace, through which, of a sudden, a dark flash of loneliness and terror tore its way.

  She started up again, cold and trembling with the shock; for a moment she seemed to have lost her hold of the child. But no—she was mistaken—the tender pressure of its body was still close to hers; the recovered warmth flowed through her once more, she yielded to it, sank into it, and slept.

  XIV

  The next morning rose mild and bright, with a promise of summer in the air. The sunlight slanted joyously down Lily’s street, mellowed the blistered house-front, gilded the paintless railings of the door-step, and struck prismatic glories from the panes of her darkened window.

  When such a day coincides with the inner mood, there is intoxication in its breath; and Selden, hastening along the street through the squalor of its morning confidences, felt himself thrilling with a youthful sense of adventure. He had cut loose from the familiar shores of habit and launched himself on uncharted seas of emotion; all the old tests and measures were left behind, and his course was to be shaped by new stars.

  That course, for the moment, led merely to Miss Bart’s boarding-house; but its shabby door-step had suddenly become the threshold of the untried. As he approached, he looked up at the triple row of windows, wondering boyishly which one of them was hers. It was nine o’clock, and the house, being tenanted by workers, already showed an awakened front to the street. He remembered afterward having noticed that only one blind was down. He noticed too that there was a pot of pansies on one of the window-sills, and at once concluded that the window must be hers; it was inevitable that he should connect her with the one touch of beauty in the dingy scene.

  Nine o’clock was an early hour for a visit, but Selden had passed beyond all such conventional observances. He only knew that he must see Lily Bart at once; he had found the word he meant to say to her, and it could not wait another moment to be said. It was strange that it had not come to his lips sooner, that he had let her pass from him the evening before without being able to speak it. But what did that matter now that a new day had come? It was not a word for twilight, but for the morning.

  Selden ran eagerly up the steps and pulled the bell; and even in his state of self-absorption, it came as a sharp surprise to him that the door should open so promptly. It was still more of a surprise to see, as he entered, that it had been opened by Gerty Farish and that behind her, in an agitated blur, several other figures ominously loomed.

  “Lawrence!” Gerty cried in a strange voice. “How could you get here so quickly?” And the trembling hand she laid on him seemed instantly to close about his heart.

  He noticed the other faces, vague with fear and conjecture; he saw the landlady’s imposing bulk sway professionally toward him, but he shrank back, putting up his hand, while his eyes mechanically mounted the steep black walnut stairs up which he was immediately aware that his cousin was about to lead him.

  A voice in the background said that the doctor might be back at any minute and that nothing, upstairs, was to be disturbed. Some one else exclaimed: “It was the greatest mercy—” Then Selden felt that Gerty had taken him gently by the hand and that they were to be suffered to go up alone.

  In silence they mounted the three flights and walked along the passage to a closed door. Gerty opened the door, and Selden went in after her. Though the blind was down, the irresistible sunlight poured a tempered golden flood into the room, and in its light Selden saw a narrow bed along the wall, and on the bed, with motionless hands and calm, unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart.

  That it was her real self, every pulse in him ardently denied. Her real self had lain warm on his heart but a few hours earlier; what had he to do with this estranged and tranquil face which, for the first time, neither paled nor brightened at his coming?

  Gerty, strangely tranquil too, with the conscious self-control of one who has ministered to much pain, stood by the bed, speaking gently, as if transmitting a final message.

  “The doctor found a bottle of chloral; she had been sleeping badly for a long time, and she must have taken an overdose by mistake. There is no doubt of that—no doubt—there will be no question—he has been very kind. I told him that you and I would like to be left alone with her to go over her things before any one else comes. I know it is what she would have wished.”

  Selden was hardly conscious of what she said. He stood looking down on the sleeping face which seemed to lie like a delicate impalpable mask over the living lineaments he had known. He felt that the real Lily was still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible; and the tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense of helplessness. There had never been more than a little impalpable barrier between them, and yet he had suffered it to keep them apart! And now, though it seemed slighter and frailer than ever, it had suddenly hardened to adamant, and he might beat his life out against it in vain.

  He had dropped on his knees beside the bed, but a touch from Gerty aroused him. He stood up, and as their eyes met, he was struck by the extraordinary light in his cousin’s face.

  “You understand what the doctor has gone for? He has promised that there shall be no trouble, but of course the formalities must be gone through. And I asked him to give us time to look through her things first—”