Delia began to tremble like a girl. In a flash she had the answer to a question which had long been the subject of her secret conjectures. How did lovers like Charlotte and Clement Spender contrive to met? What Latmian solitude hid their clandestine joys? In the expose compact little society to which they all belonged, how was it possible—literally—for such encounters to take place? Delia would never have dared to put the question to Charlotte; there were moments when she almost preferred not to know, not even hazard a guess. But now, at a glance, she understood. How often Charlotte Lovell, staying alone in town with her infirm grandmother, must have walked home from evening parties with Clement Spender, how often have let herself and him into the darkened house in Mercer Street, where there was no one to spy upon their coming but a deaf old lady and her aged servants, all securely sleeping overhead! Delia, at the thought, saw the grim drawing-room which had been their moonlit forest, the drawing-room into which old Mrs. Lovell no longer descended, with its swathed chandelier and hard Empire sofas, and the eyeless marble caryatids of the mantel; she pictured the shaft of moonlight falling across the swans and garlands of the faded carpet, and in that icy light two young figures in each other’s arms.
Yes: it must have been some such memory that had roused Charlotte’s suspicions, excited her fears, sent her down in the darkness to confront the culprits. Delia shivered at the irony of the confrontation. If Tina had but known! But to Tina, of course, Charlotte was still what she had long since resolved to be: the image of prudish spinsterhood. And Delia could imagine how quietly and decently the scene below stairs would presently be enacted: no astonishment, no reproaches, no insinuations, but a smiling and resolute ignoring of excuses.
“What, Tina? You walked home with Lanning? You imprudent child—in this wet snow! Ah, I see: Delia was worried about the baby, and ran off early, promising to send back the carriage—and it never came? Well, my dear, I congratulate you on finding Lanning to see you home…Yes—I sat up because I couldn’t for the life of me remember whether you’d taken the latch-key—was there ever such a flighty old aunt? But don’t tell your Mamma, dear, or she’d scold me for being so forgetful, and for staying downstairs in the cold…You’re quite sure you have the key? Ah, Lanning has it? Thank you, Lanning; so kind! Goodnight—or one really ought to say, good morning.”
As Delia reached this point in her mute representation of Charlotte’s monologue the front door slammed below, and young Lanning Halsey walked slowly away across the square. Delia saw him pause on the opposite pavement, look up at the house-front, and then turn lingeringly away. His dismissal had taken exactly as long as Delia had calculated it would. A moment later she saw a passing light under her door, heard the starched rustle of Charlotte’s petticoats, and knew that mother and daughter had reached their rooms.
Slowly, with stiff motions, she began to undress, blew out her candles, and knelt by her bedside, her face hidden.
X.
Lying awake till morning, Delia lived over every detail of the fateful day when she had assumed the charge of Charlotte’s child. At the time she had been hardly more than a child herself, and there had been no one for her to turn to, no one to fortify her resolution, or to advise her how to put it into effect. Since then, the accumulated experiences of twenty years ought to have prepared her for emergencies, and taught her to advise others instead of seeking their guidance. But these years of experience weighed down on her like chains binding her down to her narrow plot of life; independent action struck her as more dangerous, less conceivable, than when she had first ventured on it. There seemed to be so many more people to “consider” now (“consider” was the Ralston word): her children, their children, the families into which they had married. What would the Halseys say, and what the Ralstons? Had she then become a Ralston through and through?
A few hours later she sat in old Dr. Lanskell’s library, her eyes on his sooty Smyrna rug. For some years now Dr. Lanskell had no longer practised: at most, he continued to go to a few old patients, and to give consultations in “difficult” cases. But he remained a power in his former kingdom, a sort of lay Pope or medical Elder to whom the patients he had once healed of physical ills often returned for moral medicine. People were agreed that Dr. Lanskell’s judgment was sound; but what secretly drew them to him was the fact that, in the most totem-ridden of communities he was known not to be afraid of anything.
Now, as Delia sat and watched his massive silver-headed figure moving ponderously about the room, between rows of medical books in calf bindings and the Dying Gladiators and Young Augusteses of grateful patients, she already felt the reassurance given by his mere bodily presence.
“You see, when I first took Tina I didn’t perhaps consider sufficiently—”
The Doctor halted behind his desk and brought his fist down on it with a genial thump. “Thank goodness you didn’t! There are considerers enough in this town without you, Delia Lovell.”
She looked up quickly. “Why do you call me Delia Lovell?”
“Well, because today I rather suspect you are,” he rejoined astutely; and she met this with a wistful laugh.
“Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before—I mean, if I’d always been a prudent deliberate Ralston it would have been kinder to Tina in the end.”
Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the armchair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”
She pondered. “Of course I realize that if I adopt Tina—”
“Yes?”
“Well, people will say…” A deep blush rose to her throat, covered her cheeks and brow, and ran like fire under her decently-parted hair.
He nodded; “Yes.”
“Or else—” the blush darkened—“that she’s Jims—”
Again Dr. Lanskell nodded. “That’s what they’re more likely to think; and what’s the harm if they do? I know Jim: he asked you no questions when you took the child—but he knew whose she was.”
She raised astonished eyes. “He knew—?”
“Yes: he came to me. And—well—in the baby’s interest I violated professional secrecy. That’s how Tina got a home. You’re not going to denounce me, are you?”
“Oh, Dr. Lanskell—” Her eyes filled with painful tears. “Jim knew? And didn’t tell me?”
“No. People didn’t tell each other things much in those days, did they? But he admired you enormously for what you did. And if you assume—as I suppose you do—that he’s now in a world of completer enlightenment, why not take it for granted that he’ll admire you still more for what you’re going to do? Presumably,” the Doctor concluded sardonically, “people realize in heaven that it’s a devilish sight harder, on earth, to do a brave thing at forty-five than at twenty-five.”
“Ah, that’s what I was thinking this morning,” she confessed.
“Well. You’re going to prove the contrary this afternoon.” He looked at his watch, stood up and laid a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “Let people think what they choose; and send young Delia to me if she gives you any trouble. Your boy won’t, you know, nor John Junius either; it must have been a woman who invented that third-and-fourth generation idea…”
An elderly maid-servant looked in, and Delia rose; but on the threshold she halted.
“I have an idea it’s Charlotte I may have to send to you.”
“Charlotte?”
“She’ll hate what I’m going to do, you know.”
Dr. Lanskell lifted his silver eyebrows. “Yes: poor Charlotte! I suppose she’s jealous? That’s where the truth of the third-and-fourth generation business comes in, after all. Somebody always has to foot the bill.”
“Ah—if only Tina doesn’t!”
“Well—that’s just what Charlotte will come to recognize in time. So your course is clear.”
He guided her out through the dining-room, where some poor people and one or two old
patients were already waiting.
Delia’s course, in truth, seemed clear enough till, that afternoon, she summoned Charlotte alone to her bedroom. Tina was lying down with a headache: it was in those days the accepted state of young ladies in sentimental dilemmas, and greatly simplified the communion of their elders.
Delia and Charlotte had exchanged only conventional phrases over their midday meal; but Delia still had the sense that her cousin’s decision was final. The events of the previous evening had no doubt confirmed Charlotte’s view that the time had come for such a decision.
Miss Lovell, closing the bedroom door with her dry deliberateness, advanced toward the chintz lounge between the windows.
“You wanted to see me, Delia?”
“Yes. Oh, don’t sit there,” Mrs. Ralston exclaimed uncontrollably.
Charlotte stared: was it possible that she did not remember the sobs of anguish she had once smothered in those very cushions?
“Not—?”
“No; come nearer to me. Sometimes I think I’m a little deaf,” Delia nervously explained, pushing a chair up to her own.
“Ah.” Charlotte seated herself. “I hadn’t remarked it. But if you are, it may have saved you from hearing at what hour of the morning Tina came back from the Vandergraves’ last night. She would never forgive herself—inconsiderate as she is—if she thought she’d waked you.”
“She didn’t wake me,” Delia answered. Inwardly she thought: “Charlotte’s mind is made up; I shan’t be able to move her.”
“I suppose Tina enjoyed herself very much at the ball?” she continued.
“Well, she’s paying for it with a headache. Such excitements are not meant for her, I’ve already told you—”
“Yes,” Mrs. Ralston interrupted. “It’s to continue our talk of last night that I’ve asked you to come up.”
“To continue it?” The brick-red circles appeared on Charlotte’s dried cheeks. “Is it worth while? I think I ought to tell you at once that my mind’s made up. I suppose you’ll admit that I know what’s best for Tina.”
“Yes; of course. But won’t you at least allow me a share in your decision?”
“A share?”
Delia leaned forward, laying a warm hand on her cousin’s interlocked fingers. “Charlotte, once in this room, years ago, you asked me to help you—you believed I could. Won’t you believe it again?”
Charlotte’s lips grew rigid. “I believe the time has come for me to help myself.”
“At the cost of Tina’s happiness?”
“No; but to spare her greater unhappiness.”
“But Charlotte, Tina’s happiness is all I want.”
“Oh, I know. You’ve done all you could for my child.”
“No, not all.” Delia rose, and stood before her cousin with a kind of solemnity. “But now I’m going to.” It was as if she had pronounced a vow.
Charlotte Lovell looked up at her with a glitter of apprehension in her hunted eyes.
“If you mean that you’re going to use your influence with the Halsey’s—I’m very grateful to you; I shall always be grateful. But I don’t want a compulsory marriage for my child.”
Delia flushed at the other’s incomprehension. It seemed to her that her tremendous purpose must be written on her face. “I’m going to adopt Tina—give her my name,” she announced.
Charlotte Lovell stared at her stonily. “Adopt her—adopt her?”
“Don’t you see, dear, the difference it will make? There’s my mother’s money—the Lovell money; it’s not much, to be sure; but Jim always wanted it to go back to the Lovells. And my Delia and her brother are so handsomely provided for. There’s no reason why my little fortune shouldn’t go to Tina. And why she shouldn’t be known as Tina Ralston.”
Delia paused. “I believe—I think I know—that Jim would have approved of that too.”
“Approved?”
“Yes. Can’t you see that when he let me take the child he must have foreseen and accepted whatever—whatever might eventually come of it?”
Charlotte stood up also. “Thank you, Delia. But nothing more must come of it, except our leaving you; our leaving you now. I’m sure that’s what Jim would have approved.”
Mrs. Ralston drew back a step or two. Charlotte’s cold resolution benumbed her courage, and she could find no immediate reply.
“Ah, then it’s easier for you to sacrifice Tina’s happiness than your pride?” she exclaimed.
“My pride? I’ve no right to any pride, except in my child. And that I’ll never sacrifice.”
“No one asks you to. You’re not reasonable. You’re cruel. All I want is to be allowed to help Tina, and you speak as if I were interfering with your rights.”
“My rights?” Charlotte echoed the words with a desolate laugh. “What are they? I have no rights, either before the law or in the heart of my own child.”
“How can you say such things? You know how Tina loves you.”
“Yes; compassionately—as I used to love my old-maid aunts. There were two of them—you remember? Like withered babies! We children used to be warned never to say anything that might shock Aunt Josie or Aunt Nonie; exactly as I heard you telling Tina the other night—”
“Oh—” Delia murmured.
Charlotte Lovell continued to stand before her, haggard, rigid, unrelenting. “No, it’s gone on long enough. I mean to tell her everything; and to take her away.”
“To tell her about her birth?”
“I was never ashamed of it,” Charlotte panted.
“You do sacrifice her, then—sacrifice her to your desire for mastery?”
The two women faced each other, both with weapons spent. Delia, through the tremor of her own indignation, saw her antagonist waver, step backward, sink down with a broken murmur on the lounge. Charlotte hid her face in the cushions, clenching them with violent hands. The same fierce maternal passion that had once flung her down upon those same cushions was now bowing her still lower, in the throes of a bitterer renunciation. Delia seemed to hear the old cry: “But how can I give up my baby?” Her own momentary resentment melted, and she bent over the mother’s labouring shoulders.
“Chatty—it won’t be like giving her up this time. Can’t we just go on loving her together?”
Charlotte did not answer. For a long time she lay silent, immovable, her face hidden: she seemed to fear to turn it to the face bent down to her. But presently Delia was aware of a gradual relaxing of the stretched muscles, and saw that one of her cousin’s arms was faintly stirring and groping. She lowered her hand to the seeking fingers, and it was caught and pressed to Charlotte’s lips.
XI.
Tina Lovell—now Miss Clementina Ralston—was to be married in July to Lanning Halsey. The engagement had been announced only in the previous April; and the female elders of the tribe had begun by crying out against the indelicacy of so brief a betrothal. It was unanimously agreed in the New York of those times that “young people should be given the chance to get to know each other”; though the greater number of the couples constituting New York society had played together as children, and been born of parents as long and as familiarly acquainted, yet some mysterious law of decorum required that the newly affianced should always be regarded as being also newly known to each other. In the southern states things were differently conducted: headlong engagements, even runaway marriages, were not uncommon in their annals; but such rashness was less consonant with the sluggish blood of New York, where the pace of life was still set with a Dutch deliberateness.
In a case as unusual as Tina Ralston’s, however, it was no great surprise to any one that tradition should have been disregarded. In the first place, everybody knew that she was no more Tina Ralston than you or I; unless, indeed, one were to credit the rumours about poor Jim’s unsuspected “past,” and his widow’s magnanimity. But the opinion of the majority was against this. People were reluctant to charge a dead man with an offense from which he
could not clear himself; and the Ralstons unanimously declared that, thoroughly as they disapproved of Mrs. James Ralston’s action, they were convinced that she would not have adopted Tina if her doing so could have been construed as “casting a slur” on her late husband.
No: the girl was perhaps a Lovell—though even that idea was not generally held—but she was certainly not a Ralston. Her brown eyes and flighty ways too obviously excluded her from the clan for any formal excommunication to be needful. In fact, most people believed that—as Dr. Lanskell had always affirmed—her origin was really undiscoverable, that she represented one of the unsolved mysteries which occasionally perplex and irritate well-regulated societies, and that her adoption by Delia Ralston was simply one more proof of the Lovell clannishness, since the child had been taken in by Mrs. Ralston only because her cousin Charlotte was so attached to it. To say that Mrs. Ralston’s son and daughter were pleased with the idea of Tina’s adoption would be an exaggeration; but they abstained from comment, minimizing the effect of their mother’s whim by a dignified silence. It was the old New York way for families thus to screen the eccentricities of an individual member, and where there was “money enough to go round” the heirs would have been thought vulgarly grasping to protest at the alienation of a small sum from the general inheritance.
Nevertheless, Delia Ralston, from the moment of Tina’s adoption, was perfectly aware of a different attitude on the part of both her children. They dealt with her patiently, almost parentally, as with a minor in whom one juvenile lapse has been condoned, but who must be subjected, in consequence, to a stricter vigilance; and society treated her in the same indulgent but guarded manner.
She had (it was Sillerton Jackson who first phrased it) an undoubted way of “carrying things off”; since that dauntless woman, Mrs. Manson Mingott, had broken her husband’s will, nothing so like her attitude had been seen in New York. But Mrs. Ralston’s method was different, and less easy to analyze. What Mrs. Manson Mingott had accomplished by dint of epigram, invective, insistency and runnings to and fro, the other achieved without raising her voice or seeming to take a step from the beaten path. When she had persuaded Jim Ralston to take in the foundling baby, it had been done in the turn of a hand, one didn’t know when or how; and the next day he and she were as untroubled and beaming as usual. And now, this adoption—! Well, she had pursued the same method; as Sillerton Jackson said, she behaved as if her adopting Tina had always been an understood thing, as if she wondered that people should wonder. And in face of her wonder theirs seemed foolish, and they gradually desisted.
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