Edith Wharton - Novel 15

by Old New York (v2. 1)

  She must have been mad, she thought, to have committed herself so far to Charlotte; yet, turn about as she would in the ever-tightening circle of the problem, she could still find no other issue. Somehow, it lay with her to save Clem Spender’s baby.

  She heard the sound of the latch-key (her heart had never beat so high at it), and the putting down of a tall hat on the hall console—or of two tall hats, was it? The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in: two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike; it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralston’s collectively.

  She would not have been young and tender, and a happy wife, if she had not thought Joe but an indifferent copy of her Jim; yet, allowing for defects in the reproduction, there remained a striking likeness between the two tall athletic figures, the short sanguine faces with straight noses, straight whiskers, straight brows, candid blue eyes and sweet selfish smiles. Only, at the present moment, Joe looked like Jim with a tooth-ache.

  “Look here, my dear: here’s a young man who’s asked to take pot-luck with us,” Jim smiled, with the confidence of a well-nourished husband who knows that he can always bring a friend home.

  “How nice of you, Joe!—Do you suppose he can put up with oyster soup and a stuffed goose?” Delia beamed upon her husband.

  “I knew it! I told you so, my dear chap! He said you wouldn’t like it—that you’d be fussed about the dinner. Wait till you’re married, Joseph Ralston—.” Jim brought down a genial paw on his cousin’s bottle-green shoulder, and Joe grimaced as if the tooth had stabbed him.

  “It’s excessively kind of you, cousin Delia, to take me in this evening. The fact is—”

  “Dinner, first, my boy, if you don’t mind! A bottle of Burgundy will brush away the blue devils. Your arm to your cousin, please; I’ll just go and see that the wine is brought up.”

  Oyster soup, broiled bass, stuffed goose, apple fritters and green peppers, followed by one of Grandmamma Ralston’s famous caramel custards: through all her mental anguish, Delia was faintly aware of a secret pride in her achievement. Certainly it would serve to confirm the rumour that Jim Ralston could always bring a friend home to dine without notice. The Ralston and Lovell wines rounded off the effect, and even Joe’s drawn face had mellowed by the time the Lovell Madeira started westward. Delia marked the change when the two young men rejoined her in the drawing-room.

  “And now, my dear fellow, you’d better tell her the whole story,” Jim counselled, pushing an armchair toward his cousin.

  The young woman, bent above her wool-work, listened with lowered lids and flushed cheeks. As a married woman—as a mother—Joe hoped she would think him justified in speaking to her frankly: he had her husband’s authority to do so.

  “Oh, go ahead, go ahead,” chafed the exuberant after-dinner Jim from the hearth-rug.

  Delia listened, considered, let the bridegroom flounder on through his embarrassed exposition. Her needle hung like a sword of Damocles above the canvas; she saw at once that Joe depended on her trying to win Charlotte over to his way of thinking. But he was very much in love: at a word from Delia, she understood that he would yield, and Charlotte gain her point, save the child, and marry him…

  How easy it was, after all! A friendly welcome, a good dinner, a ripe wine, and the memory of Charlotte’s eyes—so much the more expressive for all that they had looked upon. A secret envy stabbed the wife who had lacked this last enlightenment.

  How easy it was—and yet it must not be! Whatever happened, she could not let Charlotte Lovell marry Joe Ralston. All the traditions of honour and probity in which she had been brought up forbade her to connive at such a plan. She could conceive—had already conceived—of high-handed measures, swift and adroit defiances of precedent, subtle revolts against the heartlessness of the social routine. But a lie she could never connive at. The idea of Charlotte’s marrying Joe Ralston—her own Jim’s cousin—without revealing her past to him, seemed to Delia as dishonourable as it would have seemed to any Ralston. And to tell him the truth would at once put an end to the marriage; of that even Chatty was aware. Social tolerance was not dealt in the same measure to men and to women, and neither Delia nor Charlotte had ever wondered why: like all the young women of their class they simply bowed to the ineluctable.

  No; there was no escape from the dilemma. As clearly as it was Delia’s duty to save Clem Spender’s child, so clearly, also, she seemed destined to sacrifice his mistress. As the thought pressed on her she remembered Charlotte’s wistful cry: “I want to be married, like all of you,” and her heart tightened. But yet it must not be.

  “I make every allowance” (Joe was droning on) “for my sweet girl’s ignorance and inexperience—for her lovely purity. How could a man wish his future wife to be—to be otherwise? You’re with me, Jim? And Delia? I’ve told her, you understand, that she shall always have a special sum set apart for her poor children—in addition to her pin money; on that she may absolutely count. God! I’m willing to draw up a deed, a settlement, before a lawyer, if she says so. I admire, I appreciate her generosity. But I ask you, Delia, as a mother—mind you, now, I want your frank opinion. If you think I can stretch a point—can let her go on giving her personal care to these children until…until…” A flush of pride suffused the potential father’s brow…“till nearer duties claim her, why, I’m more than ready…if you’ll tell her so. I undertake,” Joe proclaimed, suddenly tingling with the memory of his last glass, “to make it right with my mother, whose prejudices, of course, while I respect them, I can never allow to—to come between me and my own convictions.” He sprang to his feet, and beamed on his dauntless double in the chimney-mirror. “My convictions,” he flung back at it.

  “Hear, hear!” cried Jim emotionally.

  Delia’s needle gave the canvas a sharp prick, and she pushed her work aside.

  “I think I understand you both, Joe. Certainly, in Charlotte’s place, I could never give up those children.”

  “There you are, my dear fellow!” Jim triumphed, as proud of this vicarious courage as of the perfection of the dinner.

  “Never,” said Delia. “Especially, I mean, the foundlings—there are two, I think. Those children always die if they are sent to asylums. That is what is haunting Chatty.”

  “Poor innocents! How I love her for loving them! That there should be such scoundrels upon this earth unpunished—. Delia, will you tell her that I’ll do whatever—”

  “Gently, old man, gently,” Jim admonished him, with a flash of Ralston caution.

  “Well, that is to say, whatever—in reason—”

  Delia lifted an arresting hand. “I’ll tell her, Joe: she will be grateful. But it’s of no use—”

  “No use? What more—?”

  “Nothing more: except this. Charlotte has had a return of her old illness. She coughed blood here today. You must not marry her.”

  There: it was done. She stood up, trembling in every bone, and feeling herself pale to the lips. Had she done right? Had she done wrong? And would she ever know?

  Poor Joe turned on her a face as wan as hers: he clutched the back of his armchair, his head drooping forward like an old man’s. His lips moved, but made no sound.

  “My God!” Jim stammered. “But you know you’ve got to buck up, old boy.”

  “I’m—I’m so sorry for you, Joe. She’ll tell you herself tomorrow,” Delia faltered, while her husband continued to proffer heavy consolations.

  “Take it like a man, old chap. Think of yourself—your future. Can’t be, you know. Delia’s right; she always is. Better get it over—better face the music now than later.”

  “Now than later,” Joe echoed with a tortured grin; and it occurred to Delia that never before in the course of his easy good-natured life had he had—any more than her Jim—to give up anything his heart was set on. Even the vocabulary of renunciation, and its conventi
onal gestures, were unfamiliar to him.

  “But I don’t understand. I can’t give her up,” he declared, blinking away a boyish tear.

  “Think of the children, my dear fellow; it’s your duty,” Jim insisted, checking a glance of pride at Delia’s wholesome comeliness.

  In the long conversation that followed between the cousins—argument, counter-argument, sage counsel and hopeless protest—Delia took but an occasional part. She knew well enough what the end would be. The bridegroom who had feared that his bride might bring home contagion from her visits to the poor would not knowingly implant disease in his race. Nor was that all. Too many sad instances of mothers prematurely fading, and leaving their husbands alone with a young flock to rear, must be pressing upon Joe’s memory. Ralstons, Lovells, Lannings, Archers, van der Luydens—which one of them had not some grave to care for in a distant cemetery: graves of young relatives “in a decline,” sent abroad to be cured by balmy Italy? The Protestant grave-yards of Rome and Pisa were full of New York names; the vision of that familiar pilgrimage with a dying wife was one to turn the most ardent Ralston cold. And all the while, as she listened with bent head, Delia kept repeating to herself: “This is easy; but how am I going to tell Charlotte?”

  When poor Joe, late that evening, wrung her hand with a stammered farewell, she called him back abruptly from the threshold.

  “You must let me see her first, please; you must wait till she sends for you—” and she winced a little at the alacrity of his acceptance. But no amount of rhetorical bolstering-up could make it easy for a young man to face what lay ahead of Joe; and her final glance at his was one of compassion…

  The front door closed upon Joe, and she was roused by her husband’s touch on her shoulder.

  “I never admired you more, darling. My wise Delia!”

  Her head bent back, she took his kiss, and then drew apart. The sparkle in his eyes she understood to be as much an invitation to her bloom as a tribute to her sagacity.

  She held him at arms’ length. “What should you have done, Jim, if I’d had to tell you about myself what I’ve just told Joe about Chatty?”

  A slight frown showed that he thought the question negligible, and hardly in her usual taste. “Come,” his strong arm entreated her.

  She continued to stand away from him, with grave eyes. “Poor Chatty! Nothing left now—”

  His own eyes grew grave, in instant sympathy. At such moments he was still the sentimental boy whom she could manage.

  “Ah, poor Chatty, indeed!” He groped for the readiest panacea. “Lucky, now, after all, that she has those paupers, isn’t it? I suppose a woman must have children to love—somebody else’s if not her own.” It was evident that the thought of the remedy had already relieved his pain.

  “Yes,” Delia agreed, “I see no other comfort for her. I’m sure Joe will feel that too. Between us, darling—” and now she let him have her hands—“between us, you and I must see to it that she keeps her babies.”

  “Her babies?” He smiled at the possessive pronoun. “Of course, poor girl! Unless indeed she’s sent to Italy?”

  “Oh, she won’t be that—where’s the money to come from? And, besides, she’d never leave Aunt Lovell. But I thought, dear, if I might tell her tomorrow—you see, I’m not exactly looking forward to my talk with her—if I might tell her that you would let me look after the baby she’s most worried about, the poor little foundling girl who has no name and no home—if I might put aside a fixed sum from my pin-money…”

  Their hands flowed together, she lifted her flushing face to his. Manly tears were in his eyes; ah, how he triumphed in her health, her wisdom, her generosity!

  “Not a penny from your pin-money, never!”

  She feigned discouragement and wonder. “Think, dear—if I’d had to give you up!”

  “Not a penny from your pin-money, I say—but as much more as you need, to help poor Chatty’s pauper. There—will that content you?”

  “Dearest! When I think of our own, upstairs!” They held each other, awed by that evocation.

  

  V.

  Charlotte Lovell, at the sound of her cousin’s step, lifted a fevered face from the pillow.

  The bedroom, dim and close, smelt of eau de Cologne and fresh linen. Delia, blinking in from the bright winter sun, had to feel her way through a twilight obstructed by dark mahogany.

  “I want to see your face, Chatty; unless your head aches too much?”

  Charlotte signed “No,” and Delia drew back the heavy window curtains and let in a ray of light. In it she saw the girl’s head, livid against the bed-linen, the brick-rose circles again visible under darkly shadowed lids. Just so, she remembered, poor cousin So-and-so had looked the week before she sailed for Italy!

  “Delia!” Charlotte breathed.

  Delia drew near the bed, and stood looking down at her cousin with new eyes. Yes: it had been easy enough, the night before, to dispose of Chatty’s future as if it were her own. But now?

  “Darling—”

  “Oh, begin, please,” the girl interrupted, “or I shall know that what’s coming is too dreadful!”

  “Chatty, dearest if I promised you too much—”

  “Jim won’t let you take my child? I knew it! Shall I always go on dreaming things that can never be?”

  Delia, her tears running down, knelt by the bed, and gave her fresh hand into the other’s burning clutch.

  “Don’t think that, dear: think only of what you’d like best…”

  “Like best?” The girl sat up sharply against her pillows, alive to the hot finger-tips.

  “You can’t marry Joe, dear—can you—and keep little Tina?” Delia continued.

  “Not keep her with me, no: but somewhere where I could slip off to see her—oh, I had hoped such follies!”

  “Give up follies, Charlotte. Keep her where? See your own child in secret? Always in dread of disgrace? Of wrong to your other children? Have you ever thought of that?

  “Oh, my poor head won’t think! You’re trying to tell me that I must give her up?”

  “No, dear; but that you must not marry Joe.”

  Charlotte sank back on the pillow, her eyes half-closed. “I tell you I must make my child a home. Delia, you’re too blest to understand!”

  “Think of yourself blest too, Chatty. You shan’t give up your baby. She shall live with you: you shall take care of her—for me.”

  “For you?”

  “I promised you I’d take her, didn’t I? But not that you should marry Joe. Only that I would make a home for your baby. Well, that’s done; you two shall be always together.”

  Charlotte clung to her and sobbed. “But Joe—I can’t tell him, I can’t!” She put back Delia suddenly. “You haven’t told him of my—of my baby? I couldn’t bear to hurt him as much as that.”

  “I told him that you coughed blood yesterday. He’ll see you presently: he’s dreadfully unhappy. He has been given to understand that, in view of your bad health, the engagement is broken by your wish—and he accepts your decision; but if he weakens, or if you weaken, I can do nothing for you or for little Tina. For heaven’s sake remember that!”

  Delia released her hold, and Charlotte leaned back silent, with closed eyes and narrowed lips. Almost like a corpse she lay there. On a chair near the bed hung the poplin with red velvet ribbons which had been made over in honour of her betrothal. A pair of new slippers of bronze kid peeped from beneath it. Poor Chatty! She had hardly had time to be pretty…

  Delia sat by the bed motionless, her eyes on her cousin’s closed face. They followed the course of a tear that forced a way between Charlotte’s tight lids, hung on the lashes, glittered slowly down the cheeks. As the tear reached the narrowed lips they spoke.

  “Shall I live with her somewhere, do you mean? Just she and I together?”

  “Just you and she.”

  “In a little house?”

  “In a little house…”

  You
’re sure, Delia?”

  “Sure, my dearest.”

  Charlotte once more raised herself on her elbow and sent a hand groping under the pillow. She drew out a narrow ribbon on which hung a diamond ring.

  “I had taken it off already,” she said simply, and handed it to Delia.

  

  Part II.

  VI.

  You could always have told, every one agreed afterward, that Charlotte Lovell was meant to be an old maid. Even before her illness it had been manifest: there was something prim about her in spite of her fiery hair. Lucky enough for her, poor girl, considering her wretched health in her youth: Mrs. James Ralston’s contemporaries, for instance, remembered Charlotte as a mere ghost, coughing her lungs out—that, of course, had been the reason for her breaking her engagement with Joe Ralston.

  True, she had recovered very rapidly, in spite of the peculiar treatment she was given. The Lovells, as every one knew, couldn’t afford to send her to Italy; the previous experiment in Georgia had been unsuccessful; and so she was packed off to a farm-house on the Hudson—a little place on the James Ralston’s property—where she lived for five or six years with an Irish servant-woman and a foundling baby. The story of the foundling was another queer episode in Charlotte’s history. From the time of her first illness, when she was only twenty-two or three, she had developed an almost morbid tenderness for children, especially for the children of the poor. It was said—Dr. Lanskell was understood to have said—that the baffled instinct of motherhood was peculiarly intense in cases where lung-disease prevented marriage. And so, when it was decided that Chatty must break her engagement to Joe Ralston and go to live in the country, the doctor had told her family that the only hope of saving her lay in not separating her entirely from her pauper children, but in letting her choose one of them, the youngest and most pitiable, and devote herself to its care. So the James Ralstons had lent her their little farm-house, and Mrs. Jim, with her extraordinary gift of taking things in at a glance, had at once arranged everything, and even pledged herself to look after the baby if Charlotte died.