Edith Wharton - SSC 11

by Uncollected Stories (v2. 1)

  “That’s what frightens me,” he answered, gravely.

  “Precisely,” she laughed; “and I shall take good care not to reassure you!”

  They stood face to face for a moment, reading in each other’s eyes the completeness of their communion; then he broke the silence by saying, “By the way, I’d forgotten; here’s a letter for you.”

  She took it unregardingly, her eyes still deep in his; but as her glance turned to the envelope she uttered a note of pleasure.

  “Oh, how nice—it’s from your only rival!”

  “Your Aunt Mary?”

  She nodded. “I haven’t heard from her in a month—and I’m afraid I haven’t written to her either. You don’t know how many beneficent intentions of mine you divert from their proper channels.”

  “But your Aunt Mary has had you all your life—I’ve only had you two months,” he objected.

  Delia was still contemplating the letter with a smile. “Dear thing!” she murmured. “I wonder when I shall see her?”

  “Write and ask her to come and spend the winter with us.”

  “What—and leave Boston, and her kindergartens, and associated charities, and symphony concerts, and debating clubs? You don’t know Aunt Mary!”

  “No, I don’t. It seems so incongruous that you should adore such a bundle of pedantries.”

  “I forgive that, because you’ve never seen her. How I wish you could!”

  He stood looking down at her with the all-promising smile of the happy lover. “Well, if she won’t come to us we’ll go to her.”

  “Laurence—and leave this!”

  “It will keep—we’ll come back to it. My dear girl, don’t beam so; you make me feel as if you hadn’t been happy until now.”

  “No—but it’s your thinking of it!”

  “I’ll do more than think; I’ll act; I’ll take you to Boston to see your Aunt Mary.”

  “Oh, Laurence, you’d hate doing it.”

  “Not doing it together.”

  She laid her hand for a moment on his. “What a difference that does make in things!” she said, as she broke the seal of the letter.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to commune with Aunt Mary. When you’ve done, come and find me in the library.”

  Delia sat down joyfully to the perusal of her letter, but as her eye travelled over the closely written pages her gratified expression turned to one of growing concern; and presently, thrusting it back into the envelope, she followed her husband to the library. It was a charming room and singularly indicative, to her fancy, of its occupant’s character; the expanse of harmonious bindings, the fruity bloom of Renaissance bronzes, and the imprisoned sunlight of two or three old pictures fitly epitomizing the delicate ramifications of her husband’s taste. But now her glance lingered less appreciatively than usual on the warm tones and fine lines which formed so expressive a background for Corbett’s fastidious figure.

  “Aunt Mary has been ill—I’m afraid she’s been seriously ill,” she announced as he rose to receive her. “She fell in coming down-stairs from one of her tenement-house inspections, and it brought on water on the knee. She’s been laid up ever since—some three or four weeks now. I’m afraid it’s rather bad at her age; and I don’t know how she will resign herself to keeping quiet.”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Corbett, sympathetically; “but water on the knee isn’t dangerous, you know.”

  “No—but the doctor says she mustn’t go out for weeks and weeks; and that will drive her mad. She’ll think the universe has come to a standstill.”

  “She’ll find it hasn’t,” suggested Corbett, with a smile which took the edge from his comment.

  “Ah, but such discoveries hurt—especially if one makes them late in life!”

  Corbett stood looking affectionately at his wife.

  “How long is it,” he asked, “since you have seen your Aunt Mary?”

  “I think it must be two years. Yes, just two years; you know I went home on business after—” She stopped; they never alluded to her first marriage.

  Corbett took her hand. “Well,” he declared, glancing rather wistfully at the Paris Bordone above the mantel-piece, “we’ll sail next month and pay her a little visit.”

  

  II.

  Corbett was really making an immense concession in going to America at that season; he disliked the prospect at all times, but just as his hotel in Paris had reopened its luxurious arms to him for the winter, the thought of departure was peculiarly distasteful. Delia knew it, and winced under the enormity of the sacrifice which he had imposed upon himself; but he bore the burden so lightly, and so smilingly derided her impulse to magnify the heroism of his conduct, that she gradually yielded to the undisturbed enjoyment of her anticipations. She was really very glad to be returning to Boston as Corbett’s wife; her occasional appearances there as Mrs. Benson had been so eminently unsatisfactory to herself and her relatives that she naturally desired to efface them by so triumphal a re-entry. She had passed so great a part of her own life in Europe that she viewed with a secret leniency Corbett’s indifference to his native land; but though she did not mind his not caring for his country she was intensely anxious that his country should care for him. He was a New Yorker, and entirely unknown, save by name, to her little circle of friends and relatives in Boston; but she reflected, with tranquil satisfaction, that, if he were cosmopolitan enough for Fifth Avenue, he was also cultured enough for Beacon Street. She was not so confident of his being altruistic enough for Aunt Mary; but Aunt Mary’s appreciations covered so wide a range that there seemed small doubt of his coming under the head of one of her manifold enthusiasms.

  Altogether Delia’s anticipations grew steadily rosier with the approach to Sandy Hook; and to her confident eye the Statue of Liberty, as they passed under it in the red brilliance of a winter sunrise, seemed to look down upon Corbett with her Aunt Mary’s most approving smile.

  Delia’s Aunt Mary—known from the Back Bay to the South End as Mrs. Mason Hayne—had been the chief formative influence of her niece’s youth. Delia, after the death of her parents, had even spent two years under Mrs. Hayne’s roof, in direct contact with all her apostolic ardors, her inflammatory zeal for righteousness in everything from baking-powder to municipal government; and though the girl never felt any inclination to interpret her aunt’s influence in action, it was potent in modifying her judgment of herself and others. Her parents had been incurably frivolous, Mrs. Hayne was incurably serious, and Delia, by some unconscious powers of selection, tended to frivolity of conduct, corrected by seriousness of thought. She would have shrunk from the life of unadorned activity, the unsmiling pursuit of Purposes with a capital letter, to which Mrs. Hayne’s energies were dedicated; but it lent relief to her enjoyment of the purposeless to measure her own conduct by her aunt’s utilitarian standards. This curious sympathy with aims so at variance with her own ideals would hardly have been possible to Delia had Mrs. Hayne been a narrow enthusiast without visual range beyond the blinders of her own vocation; it was the consciousness that her aunt’s perceptions included even such obvious inutility as hers which made her so tolerant of her aunt’s usefulness. All this she had tried, on the way across the Atlantic, to put vividly before Corbett; but she was conscious of a vague inability on his part to adjust his conception of Mrs. Hayne to his wife’s view of her; and Delia could only count on her aunt’s abounding personality to correct the one-sidedness of his impression.

  Mrs. Hayne lived in a wide brick house on Mount Vernon Street, which had belonged to her parents and grandparents, and from which she had never thought of moving. Thither, on the evening of their arrival in Boston, the Corbetts were driven from the Providence Station. Mrs. Hayne had written to her niece that Cyrus would meet them with a “hack;” Cyrus was a sable factotum designated in Mrs. Hayne’s vocabulary as a “chore-man.” When the train entered the station he was, in fact, conspicuous on the platform, his smile shining like an open piano, while h
e proclaimed with abundant gesture the proximity of “de hack,” and Delia, descending from the train into his dusky embrace, found herself guiltily wishing that he could have been omitted from the function of their arrival. She could not help wondering what her husband’s valet would think of him. The valet was to be lodged at a hotel: Corbett himself had suggested that his presence might disturb the routine of Mrs. Hayne’s household, a view in which Delia had eagerly acquiesced. There was, however, no possibility of dissembling Cyrus, and under the valet’s depreciatory eye the Corbetts suffered him to precede them to the livery-stable landau, with blue shades and a confidentially disposed driver, which awaited them outside the station.

  During the drive to Mount Vernon Street Delia was silent; but as they approached her aunt’s swell-fronted domicile she said, hurriedly, “You won’t like the house.”

  Corbett laughed. “It’s the inmate I’ve come to see,” he commented.

  “Oh, I’m not afraid of her,” Delia almost too confidently rejoined.

  The parlor-maid who admitted them to the hall (a discouraging hall, with a large-patterned oil-cloth and buff walls stencilled with a Greek border) informed them that Mrs. Hayne was above; and ascending to the next floor they found her genial figure, supported on crutches, awaiting them at the drawing-room door. Mrs. Hayne was a tall, stoutish woman, whose bland expanse of feature was accentuated by a pair of gray eyes of such surpassing penetration that Delia often accused her of answering people’s thoughts before they had finished thinking them. These eyes, through the close fold of Delia’s embrace, pierced instantly to Corbett, and never had that accomplished gentleman been more conscious of being called upon to present his credentials. But there was no reservation in the uncritical warmth of Mrs. Hayne’s welcome, and it was obvious that she was unaffectedly happy in their coming.

  She led them into the drawing-room, still clinging to Delia, and Corbett, as he followed, understood why his wife had said that he would not like the house. One saw at a glance that Mrs. Hayne had never had time to think of her house or her dress. Both were scrupulously neat, but her gown might have been an unaltered one of her mother’s, and her drawing-room wore the same appearance of contented archaism. There was a sufficient number of arm-chairs, and the tables (mostly marble-topped) were redeemed from monotony by their freight of books; but it had not occurred to Mrs. Hayne to substitute logs for hard coal in her fireplace, nor to replace by more personal works of art the smoky expanses of canvas “after” Raphael and Murillo which lurched heavily forward from the walls. She had even preserved the knotty antimacassars on her high-backed armchairs, and Corbett, who was growing bald, resignedly reflected that during his stay in Mount Vernon Street he should not be able to indulge in any lounging.

  

  III.

  Delia held back for three days the question which burned her lip; then, following her husband upstairs after an evening during which Mrs. Hayne had proved herself especially comprehensive (even questioning Corbett upon the tendencies of modern French art), she let escape the imminent “Well?”

  “She’s charming,” Corbett returned, with the fine smile which always seemed like a delicate criticism.

  “Really?”

  “Really, Delia. Do you think me so narrow that I can’t value such a character as your aunt’s simply because it’s cast in different lines from mine? I once told you that she must be a bundle of pedantries, and you prophesied that my first sight of her would correct that impression. You were right; she’s a bundle of extraordinary vitalities. I never saw a woman more thoroughly alive; and that’s the great secret of living—to be thoroughly alive.”

  “I knew it; I knew it!” his wife exclaimed. “Two such people couldn’t help liking each other.”

  “Oh, I should think she might very well help liking me.”

  “She doesn’t; she admires you immensely; but why?”

  “Well, I don’t precisely fit into any of her ideals, and the worst part of having ideals is that the people who don’t fit into them have to be discarded.”

  “Aunt Mary doesn’t discard anybody,” Delia interpolated.

  “Her heart may not, but I fancy her judgment does.”

  “But she doesn’t exactly fit into any of your ideals, and yet you like her,” his wife persisted.

  “I haven’t any ideals,” Corbett lightly responded. “Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve; and I find a great deal in your Aunt Mary.”

  Delia did not ask Mrs. Hayne what she thought of her husband; she was sure that, in due time, her aunt would deliver her verdict; it was impossible for her to leave any one unclassified. Perhaps, too, there was a latent cowardice in Delia’s reticence; an unacknowledged dread lest Mrs. Hayne should range Corbett among the intermediate types.

  After a day or two of mutual inspection and adjustment the three lives under Mrs. Hayne’s roof lapsed into their separate routines. Mrs. Hayne once more set in motion the complicated machinery of her own existence (rendered more intricate by the accident of her lameness), and Corbett and his wife began to dine out and return the visits of their friends. There were, however, some hours which Corbett devoted to the club or to the frequentation of the public libraries, and these Delia gave to her aunt, driving with Mrs. Hayne from one committee meeting to another, writing business letters at her dictation, or reading aloud to her the reports of the various philanthropic, educational, or political institutions in which she was interested. She had been conscious on her arrival of a certain aloofness from her aunt’s militant activities; but within a week she was swept back into the strong current of Mrs. Hayne’s existence. It was like stepping from a gondola to an ocean steamer; at first she was dazed by the throb of the screw and the rush of the parting waters, but gradually she felt herself infected by the exhilaration of getting to a fixed place in the shortest possible time. She could make sufficient allowance for the versatility of her moods to know that, a few weeks after her return to Paris, all that seemed most strenuous in Mrs. Hayne’s occupations would fade to unreality; but that did not defend her from the strong spell of the moment. In its light her own life seemed vacuous, her husband’s aims trivial as the subtleties of Chinese ivory carving; and she wondered if he walked in the same revealing flash.

  Some three weeks after the arrival of the Corbetts in Mount Vernon Street it became manifest that Mrs. Hayne had overtaxed her strength and must return for an undetermined period to her lounge. The life of restricted activity to which this necessity condemned her left her an occasional hour of leisure when there seemed no more letters to be dictated, no more reports to be read; and Corbett, always sure to do the right thing, was at hand to speed such unoccupied moments with the ready charm of his talk.

  One day when, after sitting with her for some time, he departed to the club, Mrs. Hayne, turning to Delia, who came in to replace him, said, emphatically, “My dear, he’s delightful.”

  “Oh, Aunt Mary, so are you!” burst gratefully from Mrs. Corbett.

  Mrs. Hayne smiled. “Have you suspended your judgment of me until now?” she asked.

  “No; but your liking each other seems to complete you both.”

  “Really, Delia, your husband couldn’t have put that more gracefully. But sit down and tell me about him.”

  “Tell you about him?” repeated Delia, thinking of the voluminous letters in which she had enumerated to Mrs. Hayne the sum of her husband’s merits.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hayne continued, cutting, as she talked, the pages of a report on state lunatic asylums; “for instance, you’ve never told me why so charming an American has condemned America to the hard fate of being obliged to get on without him.”

  “You and he will never agree on that point, Aunt Mary,” said Mrs. Corbett, coloring.

  “Never mind; I rather like listening to reasons that I know beforehand I’m bound to disagree with; it saves so much mental effort. And besides, how can you tell? I’m very uncertain.”

  “You are very broad-minded, but you’ll n
ever understand his just having drifted into it. Any definite reason would seem to you better than that.”

  “Ah—he drifted into it?”

  “Well, yes. You know his sister, who married the Comte de Vitrey and went to live in Paris, was very unhappy after her marriage; and when Laurence’s mother died there was no one left to look after her; and so Laurence went abroad in order to be near her. After a few years Monsieur de Vitrey died too; but by that time Laurence didn’t care to come back.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Hayne, “I see nothing so shocking in that. Your husband can gratify his tastes much more easily in Europe than in America; and, after all, that is what we’re all secretly striving to do. I’m sure if there were more lunatic asylums and poor-houses and hospitals in Europe than there are here I should be very much inclined to go and live there myself.”

  Delia laughed. “I knew you would like Laurence,” she said, with a wisdom bred of the event.

  “Of course I like him; he’s a liberal education. It’s very interesting to study the determining motives in such a man’s career. How old is your husband, Delia?”

  “Laurence is fifty-two.”

  “And when did he go abroad to look after his sister?”

  “Let me see—when he was about twenty-eight; it was in 1867, I think.”

  “And before that he had lived in America?”

  “Yes, the greater part of the time.”

  “Then of course he was in the war?” Mrs. Hayne continued, laying down her pamphlet. “You’ve never told me about that. Did he see any active service?”

  As she spoke Delia grew pale; for a moment she sat looking blankly at her aunt.

  “I don’t think he was in the war at all,” she said at length, in a low tone.

  Mrs. Hayne stared at her. “Oh, you must be mistaken,” she said, decidedly. “Why shouldn’t he have been in the war? What else could he have been doing?”