“Talk this thing out? You and I? What thing?”
“Tina’s future.”
There was a silence. Delia Ralston, who always responded instantly to the least appeal to her sincerity, breathed a deep sigh of relief. At last the ice in Charlotte’s breast was breaking up!
“My dear,” Delia murmured, “you know how much Tina’s happiness concerns me. If you disapprove of Lanning Halsey as a husband, have you any other candidate in mind?”
Miss Lovell smiled one of her faint hard smiles. “I am not aware that there is a queue at the door. Nor do I disapprove of Lanning Halsey as a husband. Personally, I find him very agreeable; I understand his attraction for Tina.”
“Ah—Tina is attracted?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Ralston pushed aside her work and thoughtfully considered her cousin’s sharply-lined face. Never had Charlotte Lovell more completely presented the typical image of the old maid than as she sat there, upright on her straight-backed chair, with narrowed elbows and clicking needles, and imperturbably discussed her daughter’s marriage.
“I don’t understand, Chatty. Whatever Lanning’s faults are—and I don’t believe they’re grave—I share your liking for him. After all—” Mrs. Ralston paused—“what is it that people find so reprehensible in him? Chiefly, as far as I can hear, that he can’t decide on the choice of a profession. The New York view about that is rather narrow, as we know. Young men may have other tastes…artistic…literary…they may even have difficulty in deciding…”
Both women coloured slightly, and Delia guessed that the same reminiscence which shook her own bosom also throbbed under Charlotte’s strait bodice.
Charlotte spoke. “Yes: I understand that. But hesitancy about a profession may cause hesitancy about…other decisions…”
“What do you mean? Surely not that Lanning—?”
“Lanning has not asked Tina to marry him.”
“And you think he’s hesitating?”
Charlotte paused. The steady click of her needles punctuated the silence as once, years before, it had been punctuated by the tick of the Parisian clock on Delia’s mantel. As Delia’s memory fled back to the scene she felt its mysterious tension in the air.
Charlotte spoke. “Lanning is not hesitating any longer: he has decided not to marry Tina. But he has also decided not to give up seeing her.”
Delia flushed abruptly; she was irritated and bewildered by Charlotte’s oracular phrases, doled out between parsimonious lips.
“You don’t mean that he has offered himself and then drawn back? I can’t think him capable of such an insult to Tina.”
“He has not insulted Tina. He has simply told her that he can’t afford to marry. Until he chooses a profession his father will allow him only a few hundred dollars a year; and that may be suppressed if—if he marries against his parents’ wishes.”
It was Delia’s turn to be silent. The past was too overwhelmingly resuscitated in Charlotte’s words. Clement Spender stood before her, irresolute, impecunious, persuasive. Ah, if only she had let herself be persuaded!
“I’m very sorry that this should have happened to Tina. But as Lanning appears to have behaved honourably, and withdrawn without raising false expectations, we must hope…we must hope…” Delia paused, not knowing what they must hope.
Charlotte Lovell laid down her knitting. “You know as well as I do, Delia, that every young man who is inclined to fall in love with Tina will find as good reasons for not marrying her.”
“Then you think Lanning’s excuses are a pretext?”
“Naturally. The first of many that will be found by his successors—for of course he will have successors. Tina—attracts.”
“Ah,” Delia murmured.
Here they were at last face to face with the problem which, through all the years of silence and evasiveness, had lain as close to the surface as a corpse too hastily buried! Delia drew another deep breath, which again was almost one of relief. She had always known that it would be difficult, almost impossible, to find a husband for Tina; and much as she desired Tina’s happiness, some inmost selfishness whispered how much less lonely and purposeless the close of her own life would be should the girl be forced to share it. But how say this to Tina’s mother?
“I hope you exaggerate, Charlotte. There may be disinterested characters…But, in any case, surely Tina need not be unhappy here, with us who love her so dearly.”
“Tina an old maid? Never!” Charlotte Lovell rose abruptly, her closed hand crashing down on the slender work-table. “My child shall have her life…her own life…whatever it costs me…”
Delia’s ready sympathy welled up. “I understand your feeling. I should want also…hard as it will be to let her go. But surely there is no hurry—no reason for looking so far ahead. The child is not twenty. Wait.”
Charlotte stood before her, motionless, perpendicular. At such moments she made Delia think of lava struggling through granite: there seemed no issue for the fires within.
“Wait? But if she doesn’t wait?”
“But if he has withdrawn—what do you mean?”
“He has given up marrying her—but not seeing her.”
Delia sprang up in her turn, flushed and trembling.
“Charlotte! Do you know what you’re insinuating?”
“Yes: I know.”
“But it’s too outrageous. No decent girl—”
The words died on Delia’s lips. Charlotte Lovell held her eyes inexorably. “Girls are not always what you call decent,” she declared.
Mrs. Ralston turned slowly back to her seat. Her tambour frame had fallen to the floor; she stooped heavily to pick it up. Charlotte’s gaunt figure hung over her, relentless as doom.
“I can’t imagine, Charlotte, what is gained by saying such things—even by hinting them. Surely you trust your own child.”
Charlotte laughed. “My mother trusted me,” she said.
“How dare you—how dare you?” Delia began; but her eyes fell, and she felt a tremor of weakness in her throat.
“Oh, I dare anything for Tina, even to judging her as she is,” Tina’s mother murmured.
“As she is? She’s perfect!”
“Let us say then that she must pay for my imperfections. All I want is that she shouldn’t pay too heavily.”
Mrs. Ralston sat silent. It seemed to her that Charlotte spoke with the voice of all the dark destinies coiled under the safe surface of life; and that to such a voice there was no answer but an awed acquiescence.
“Poor Tina!” she breathed.
“Oh, I don’t intend that she shall suffer! It’s not for that that I’ve waited…waited. Only I’ve made mistakes: mistakes that I understand now, and must remedy. You’ve been too good to us—and we must go.”
“Go?” Delia gasped.
“Yes. Don’t think me ungrateful. You saved my child once—do you suppose I can forget? But now it’s my turn—it’s I who must save her. And it’s only by taking her away from everything here—from everything she’s known till now—that I can do it. She’s lived too long among unrealities: and she’s like me. They won’t content her.”
“Unrealities?” Delia echoed vaguely.
“Unrealities for her. Young men who make love to her and can’t marry her. Happy households where she’s welcomed till she’s suspected of designs on a brother or a husband—or else exposed to their insults. How could we ever have imagined, either of us, that the child could escape disaster? I thought only of her present happiness—of all the advantages, for both of us, of being with you. But this affair with young Halsey has opened my eyes. I must take Tina away. We must go and live somewhere where we’re not known, where we shall be among plain people, leading plain lives. Somewhere where she can find a husband, and make herself a home.”
Charlotte paused. She had spoken in a rapid monotonous tone, as if by rote; but now her voice broke and she repeated painfully: “I’m not ungrateful.”
“Oh, don’t
let’s speak of gratitude! What place has it between you and me?”
Delia had risen and begun to move uneasily about the room. She longed to plead with Charlotte, to implore her not to be in haste, to picture to her the cruelty of severing Tina from all her habits and associations, of carrying her inexplicably away to lead “a plain life among plain people.” What chance was there, indeed, that a creature so radiant would tamely submit to such a fate, or find an acceptable husband in such conditions? The change might only precipitate a tragedy. Delia’s experience was too limited for her to picture exactly what might happen to a girl like Tina, suddenly cut off from all that sweetened life for her; but vague visions of revolt and flight—of a “fall” deeper and more irretrievable than Charlotte’s—flashed through her agonized imagination.
“It’s too cruel—it’s too cruel,” she cried, speaking to herself rather than to Charlotte.
Charlotte, instead of answering, glanced abruptly at the clock.
“Do you know what time it is? Past midnight. I mustn’t keep you sitting up for my foolish girl.”
Delia’s heart contracted. She saw that Charlotte wished to cut the conversation short, and to do so by reminding her that only Tina’s mother had a right to decide what Tina’s future should be. At that moment, though Delia had just protested that there could be no question of gratitude between them, Charlotte Lovell seemed to her a monster of ingratitude, and it was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: “Have all the years then given me no share in Tina?” But at the same instant she had put herself once more in Charlotte’s place, and was feeling the mother’s fierce terrors for her child. It was natural enough that Charlotte should resent the faintest attempt to usurp in private the authority she could never assert in public. With a pang of compassion Delia realized that she herself was literally the one being on earth before whom Charlotte could act the mother. “Poor thing—ah, let her!” she murmured inwardly.
“But why should you sit up for Tina? She has the key, and Delia is to bring her home.”
Charlotte Lovell did not immediately answer. She rolled up her knitting, looked severely at one of the candelabra on the mantelpiece, and crossed over to straighten it. Then she picked up her work-bag.
“Yes, as you say—why should any one sit up for her?” She moved about the room, putting out the lamps, covering the fire, assuring herself that the windows were bolted, while Delia passively watched her. Then the two cousins lit their bedroom candles and walked upstairs through the darkened house. Charlotte seemed determined to make no further allusion to the subject of their talk. On the landing she paused, bending her head toward Delia’s nightly kiss.
“I hope they’ve kept up your fire,” she said, with her capable housekeeping air; and on Delia’s hasty reassurance the two murmured a simultaneous “Goodnight,” and Charlotte turned down the passage to her room.
IX.
Delia’s fire had been kept up, and her dressing-gown was warming on an arm-chair near the hearth. But she neither undressed nor yet seated herself. Her conversation with Charlotte had filled her with a deep unrest.
For a few moments she stood in the middle of the floor, looking slowly about her. Nothing had ever been changed in the room which, even as a bride, she had planned to modernize. All her dreams of renovation had faded long ago. Some deep central indifference had gradually made her regard herself as a third person, living the life meant for another woman, a woman totally unrelated to the vivid Delia Lovell who had entered that house so full of plans and visions. The fault, she knew, was not her husband’s. With a little managing and a little wheedling she would have gained every point as easily as she had gained the capital one of taking the foundling baby under her wing. The difficulty was that, after that victory, nothing else seemed worth trying for. The first sight of little Tina had somehow decentralized Delia Ralston’s whole life, making her indifferent to everything else, except indeed the welfare of her own husband and children. Ahead of her she saw only a future full of duties, and these she had gaily and faithfully accomplished. But her own life was over: she felt as detached as a cloistered nun.
The change in her was too deep not to be visible. The Ralstons openly gloried in dear Delia’s conformity. Each acquiescence passed for a concession, and the family doctrine was fortified by such fresh proofs of its durability. Now, as Delia glanced about her at the Leopold Robert lithographs, the family daguerreotypes, the rosewood and mahogany, she understood that she was looking at the walls of her own grave.
The change had come on the day when Charlotte Lovell, cowering on that very lounge, had made her terrible avowal. Then for the first time Delia, with a kind of fearful exaltation, had heard the blind forces of life groping and crying underfoot. But on that day also she had known herself excluded from them, doomed to dwell among shadows. Life had passed her by, and left her with the Ralstons.
Very well, then! She would make the best of herself, and of the Ralstons. The vow was immediate and unflinching; and for nearly twenty years she had gone on observing it. Once only had she been not a Ralston but herself; once only had it seemed worth while. And now perhaps the same challenge had sounded again; again for a moment, it might be worth while to live. Not for the sake of Clement Spender—poor Clement, married years ago to a plain determined cousin, who had hunted him down in Rome, and enclosing him in an unrelenting domesticity, had obliged all New York on the grand tour to buy his pictures with a resigned grimace. No, not for Clement Spender, hardly for Charlotte or even for Tina; but for her own sake, hers, Delia Ralston’s, for the sake of her one missed vision, her forfeited reality, she would once more break down the Ralston barriers and reach out into the world.
A faint sound through the silent house disturbed her meditation. Listening, she heard Charlotte Lovell’s door open and her stiff petticoats rustle toward the landing. A light glanced under the door and vanished; Charlotte had passed Delia’s threshold on her way downstairs.
Without moving, Delia continued to listen. Perhaps the careful Charlotte had gone down to make sure that the front door was not bolted, or that she had really covered up the fire. If that were her object, her step would presently be heard returning. But no step sounded; and it became gradually evident that Charlotte had gone down to wait for her daughter. Why?
Delia’s bedroom was at the front of the house. She stole across the heavy carpet, drew aside the curtains and cautiously folded back the inner shutters. Below her lay the empty square, white with moonlight, its tree-trunks patterned on a fresh sprinkling of snow. The houses opposite slept in darkness; not a footfall broke the white surface, not a wheel-track marred the brilliant street. Overhead a heaven full of stars swam in the moonlight.
Of the households around Gramercy Park Delia knew that only two others had gone to the ball: the Petrus Vandergraves and their cousins the young Parmly Ralstons. The Lucius Lannings had just entered on their three years of mourning for Mrs. Lucius’s mother (it was hard on their daughter Kate, just eighteen, who would be unable to “come out” till she was twenty-one); young Mrs. Marcy Mingott was “expecting her third,” and consequently secluded from the public eye for nearly a year; and the other denizens of the square belonged to the undifferentiated and uninvited.
Delia pressed her forehead against the pane. Before long carriages would turn the corner, the sleeping square ring with hoof-beats, fresh laughter and young farewells mount from the door-steps. But why was Charlotte waiting for her daughter downstairs in the darkness?
The Parisian clock struck one. Delia came back into the room, raked the fire, picked up a shawl, and, wrapped in it, returned to her vigil. Ah, how old she must have grown, that she should feel the cold at such a moment! It reminded her of what the future held for her: neuralgia, rheumatism, stiffness, accumulating infirmities. And never had she kept a moonlight watch with a lover’s arms to warm her…
The square still lay silent. Yet the ball must surely be ending: the gayest dances did not last long after one
in the morning, and the drive from University Place to Gramercy Park was a short one. Delia leaned in the embrasure and listened.
Hoof-beats, muffled by the snow, sounded in Irving Place, and the Petrus Vandergraves’ family coach drew up before the opposite house. The Vandergrave girls and their brother sprang out and mounted the steps; then the coach stopped again a few doors farther on, and the Parmly Ralstons, brought home by their cousins, descended at their own door. The next carriage that rounded the corner must therefore be the John Juniuses’, bringing Tina.
The gilt clock struck half-past one. Delia wondered, knowing that young Delia, out of regard for John Junius’s business hours, never stayed late at evening parties. Doubtless Tina had delayed her; Mrs. Ralston felt a little annoyed with Tina’s thoughtlessness in keeping her cousin up. But the feeling was swept away by an immediate wave of sympathy. “We must go away somewhere, and lead plain lives among plain people.” If Charlotte had carried out her threat—and Delia knew she would hardly have spoken unless her resolve had been taken—it might be that at that very moment poor Tina was dancing her last valse.
Another quarter of an hour passed; then, just as the cold was finding a way through Delia’s shawl, she saw two people turn into the deserted square from Irving Place. One was a young man in opera hat and ample cloak. To his arm clung a figure so closely wrapped and muffled that, until the corner light fell on it, Delia hesitated. After that, she wondered that she had not at once recognized Tina’s dancing step, and her manner of tilting her head a little sideways to look up at the person she was talking to.
Tina—Tina and Lanning Halsey, walking home alone in the small hours from the Vandergrave ball! Delia’s first thought was of an accident: the carriage might have broken down, or else her daughter been taken ill and obliged to return home. But no; in the latter case she would have sent the carriage on with Tina. And if there had been an accident of any sort the young people would have been hastening to apprise Mrs. Ralston; instead of which, through the bitter brilliant night, they sauntered like lovers in a midsummer glade, and Tina’s thin slippers might have been falling on daisies instead of snow.
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