_OLD NEW YORK_
THE OLD MAID
(_The ’Fifties_)
_By EDITH WHARTON_
OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN
THE OLD MAID
THE SPARK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
SUMMER
THE REEF
THE MARNE
FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING
OLD NEW YORK
THE OLD MAID
(_The ’Fifties_)
BY
EDITH WHARTON
AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC.
DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL
[Illustration: colophon]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Copyright, 1922, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporation_
(_The Red Book Magazine_)
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE OLD MAID
(_The ’Fifties_)
PART I
THE OLD MAID
(_The ’Fifties_)
I
In the old New York of the ’fifties a few families ruled, in simplicity
and affluence. Of these were the Ralstons.
The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to
produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things
handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious
world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants,
shipbuilders and ship-chandlers. Those well-fed slow-moving people, who
seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only because the
caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and
strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of
which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then
enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted
key-boards, on which Fate played without a sound.
In this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the
largest areas was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications. The
Ralstons were of middle-class English stock. They had not come to the
colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank-account. The result
had been beyond their hopes, and their religion was tinged by their
success. An edulcorated Church of England which, under the conciliatory
name of the “Episcopal Church of the United States of America,” left
out the coarser allusions in the Marriage Service, slid over the
comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and thought it more
respectful to say “Our Father _who_” than “_which_” in the Lord’s
Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the
Ralstons had built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same
instinctive recoil from new religions as from unaccounted-for people.
Institutional to the core, they represented the conservative element
that holds new societies together as seaplants bind the seashore.
Compared with the Ralstons, even such traditionalists as the Lovells,
the Halseys or the Vandergraves appeared careless, indifferent to money,
almost reckless in their impulses and indecisions. Old John Frederick
Ralston, the stout founder of the race, had perceived the difference,
and emphasized it to his son, Frederick John, in whom he had scented a
faint leaning toward the untried and unprofitable.
“You let the Lannings and the Dagonets and the Spenders take risks and
fly kites. It’s the county-family blood in ’em: we’ve nothing to do with
that. Look how they’re petering out already--the men, I mean. Let your
boys marry their girls, if you like (they’re wholesome and handsome);
though I’d sooner see my grandsons take a Lovell or a Vandergrave, or
any of our own kind. But don’t let your sons go mooning around after
their young fellows, horse-racing, and running down south to those d----d
Springs, and gambling at New Orleans, and all the rest of it. That’s
how you’ll build up the family, and keep the weather out. The way we’ve
always done it.”
Frederick John listened, obeyed, married a Halsey, and passively
followed in his father’s steps. He belonged to the cautious generation
of New York gentlemen who revered Hamilton and served Jefferson, who
longed to lay out New York like Washington, and who laid it out instead
like a gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people
they secretly looked down upon. Shopkeepers to the marrow, they put in
their windows the wares there was most demand for, keeping their private
opinions for the back-shop, where through lack of use, they gradually
lost substance and colour.
The fourth generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of
convictions save an acute sense of honour in private and business
matters; on the life of the community and the state they took their
daily views from the newspapers, and the newspapers they already
despised. The Ralstons had done little to shape the destiny of their
country, except to finance the Cause when it had become safe to do so.
They were related to many of the great men who had built the Republic;
but no Ralston had so far committed himself as to be great. As old John
Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they
regarded heroism as a form of gambling. Yet by merely being so numerous
and so similar they had come to have a weight in the community. People
said: “The Ralstons” when they wished to invoke a precedent. This
attribution of authority had gradually convinced the third generation of
its collective importance, and the fourth, to which Delia Ralston’s
husband belonged, had the ease and simplicity of a ruling class.
Within the limits of their universal caution, the Ralstons fulfilled
their obligations as rich and respected citizens. They figured on the
boards of all the old-established charities, gave handsomely to thriving
institutions, had the best cooks in New York, and when they travelled
abroad ordered statuary of the American sculptors in Rome whose
reputation was already established. The first Ralston who had brought
home a statue had been regarded as a wild fellow; but when it became
known that the sculptor had executed several orders for the British
aristocracy it was felt in the family that this too was a three per cent
investment.
Two marriages with the Dutch Vandergraves had consolidated these
qualities of thrift and handsome living, and the carefully built-up
Ralston character was now so congenital that Delia Ralston sometimes
asked herself whether, were she to turn her own little boy loose in a
wilderness, he would not create a small New York there, and be on all
its boards of directors.
Delia Lovell had married James Ralston at twenty. The marriage, which
had taken place in the month of September, 1840, had been solemnized, as
was then the custom, in the drawing-room of the bride’s country home, at
what is now the corner of Avenue A and Ninety-first Street, overlooking
the Sound. Thence her husband had driven her (in Grandmamma Lovell’s
canary-coloured coach with a fringed hammer-cloth) through spreading
suburbs and untidy elm-shaded streets to one of the new houses in
Gramercy Park, which the pioneers of the younger set were just beginning
to affect; and there, at five-and-twenty, she was established, the
mother of two children, the possessor of a generous allowance of
pin-money, and, by common consent, one of the handsomest and most
popular “young matrons” (as they were called) of her day.
She was thinking placidly and gratefully of these things as she sat one
afternoon in her handsome bedroom in Gramercy Park. She was too near to
the primitive Ralstons to have as clear a view of them as, for instance,
the son in question might one day command: she lived under them as
unthinkingly as one lives under the laws of one’s country. Yet that
tremor of the muted key-board, that secret questioning which sometimes
beat in her like wings, would now and then so divide her from them that
for a fleeting moment she could survey them in their relation to other
things. The moment was always fleeting; she dropped back from it
quickly, breathless and a little pale, to her children, her
house-keeping, her new dresses and her kindly Jim.
She thought of him today with a smile of tenderness, remembering how he
had told her to spare no expense on her new bonnet. Though she was
twenty-five, and twice a mother, her image was still surprisingly fresh.
The plumpness then thought seemly in a young wife stretched the grey
silk across her bosom, and caused her heavy gold watch-chain--after it
left the anchorage of the brooch of St. Peter’s in mosaic that fastened
her low-cut Cluny collar--to dangle perilously in the void above a tiny
waist buckled into a velvet waist-band. But the shoulders above sloped
youthfully under her Cashmere scarf, and every movement was as quick as
a girl’s.
Mrs. Jim Ralston approvingly examined the rosy-cheeked oval set in the
blonde ruffles of the bonnet on which, in compliance with her husband’s
instructions, she had spared no expense. It was a cabriolet of white
velvet tied with wide satin ribbons and plumed with a crystal-spangled
marabout--a wedding bonnet ordered for the marriage of her cousin,
Charlotte Lovell, which was to take place that week at St.
Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Charlotte was making a match exactly like
Delia’s own: marrying a Ralston, of the Waverly Place branch, than which
nothing could be safer, sounder or more--well, usual. Delia did not know
why the word had occurred to her, for it could hardly be postulated,
even of the young women of her own narrow clan, that they “usually”
married Ralstons; but the soundness, safeness, suitability of the
arrangement, did make it typical of the kind of alliance which a nice
girl in the nicest set would serenely and blushingly forecast for
herself.
Yes--and afterward?
Well--what? And what did this new question mean? Afterward: why, of
course, there was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible
exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek
in return for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the
terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his
shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions,
insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the
reminder of the phrase “to obey” in the glittering blur of the Marriage
Service; a week or a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed
pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the
matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed,
the early morning discussions and consultations through that
dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a fiery pit
scorching the brow of innocence.
And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to “make up for
everything,” and didn’t--though they were such darlings, and one had no
definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they
were to make up for.
Yes: Charlotte’s fate would be just like hers. Joe Ralston was so like
his second cousin Jim (Delia’s James), that Delia could see no reason
why life in the squat brick house in Waverly Place should not exactly
resemble life in the tall brownstone house in Gramercy Park. Only
Charlotte’s bedroom would certainly not be as pretty as hers.
She glanced complacently at the French wall-paper that reproduced a
watered silk, with a “valanced” border, and tassels between the loops.
The mahogany bedstead, covered with a white embroidered counterpane, was
symmetrically reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe which matched it.
Coloured lithographs of the “Four Seasons” by Léopold Robert surmounted
groups of family daguerreotypes in deeply-recessed gilt frames. The
ormolu clock represented a shepherdess sitting on a fallen trunk, a
basket of flowers at her feet. A shepherd, stealing up, surprised her
with a kiss, while her little dog barked at him from a clump of roses.
One knew the profession of the lovers by their crooks and the shape of
their hats. This frivolous time-piece had been a wedding-gift from
Delia’s aunt, Mrs. Manson Mingott, a dashing widow who lived in Paris
and was received at the Tuileries. It had been entrusted by Mrs. Mingott
to young Clement Spender, who had come back from Italy for a short
holiday just after Delia’s marriage; the marriage which might never have
been, if Clem Spender could have supported a wife, or if he had
consented to give up painting and Rome for New York and the law. The
young man (who looked, already, so odd and foreign and sarcastic) had
laughingly assured the bride that her aunt’s gift was “the newest thing
in the Palais Royal”; and the family, who admired Mrs. Manson Mingott’s
taste though they disapproved of her “foreignness,” had criticized
Delia’s putting the clock in her bedroom instead of displaying it on the
drawing-room mantel. But she liked, when she woke in the morning, to see
the bold shepherd stealing his kiss.
Charlotte would certainly not have such a pretty clock in her bedroom;
but then she had not been used to pretty things. Her father, who had
died at thirty of lung-fever, was one of the “poor Lovells.” His widow,
burdened with a young family, and living all the year round “up the
River,” could not do much for her eldest girl; and Charlotte had entered
society in her mother’s turned garments, and shod with satin sandals
handed down from a defunct aunt who had “opened a ball” with General
Washington. The old-fashioned Ralston furniture, which Delia already saw
herself banishing, would seem sumptuous to Chatty; very likely she would
think Delia’s gay French time-piece somewhat frivolous, or even not
“quite nice.” Poor Charlotte had become so serious, so prudish almost,
since she had given up balls and taken to visiting the poor! Delia
remembered, with ever-recurring wonder, the abrupt change in her: the
precise moment at which it had been privately agreed in the family that,
after all, Charlotte Lovell was going to be an old maid.
They had not thought so when she came out. Though her mother could not
afford to give her more than one new tarlatan dress, and though nearly
everything in her appearance was regrettable, from the too bright red of
her hair to the too pale brown of her eyes--not to mention the rounds of
brick-rose on her cheek-bones, which almost (preposterous thought!) made
her look as if she painted--yet these defects were redeemed by a slim
waist, a light foot and a gay laugh; and when her hair was well oiled
and brushed for an evening party, so that it looked almost brown, and
lay smoothly along her delicate cheeks under a wreath of red and white
camellias, several eligible young men (Joe Ralston among them) were
known to have called her pretty.
Then came her illness. She caught cold on a moonlight sleighing-party,
the brick-rose circles deepened, and she began to cough. There was a
report that she was “going like her father,” and she was hurried off to
a remote village in Georgia, where she lived alone for a year with an
old family governess. When she came back everyone felt at once that
there was a change in her. She was pale, and thinner than ever, but with
an exquisitely transparent cheek, darker eyes and redder hair; and the
oddness of her appearance was increased by plain dresses of Quakerish
cut. She had left off trinkets and watch-chains, always wore the same
grey cloak and small close bonnet, and displayed a sudden zeal for
visiting the indigent. The family explained that during her year in the
south she had been shocked by the hopeless degradation of the “poor
whites” and their children, and that this revelation of misery had made
it impossible for her to return to the light-hearted life of her young
friends. Everyone agreed, with significant glances, that this unnatural
state of mind would “pass off in time”; and meanwhile old Mrs. Lovell,
Chatty’s grandmother, who understood her perhaps better than the others,
gave her a little money for her paupers, and lent her a room in the
Lovell stables (at the back of the old lady’s Mercer Street house) where
she gathered about her, in what would afterward have been called a
“day-nursery,” some of the destitute children of the neighbourhood.
There was even, among them, the baby girl whose origin had excited such
intense curiosity two or three years earlier, when a veiled lady in a
handsome cloak had brought it to the hovel of Cyrus Washington, the
negro handy-man whose wife Jessamine took in Dr. Lanskell’s washing. Dr.
Lanskell, the chief medical practitioner of the day, was presumably
versed in the secret history of every household from the Battery to
Union Square; but, though beset by inquisitive patients, he had
invariably declared himself unable to identify Jessamine’s “veiled
lady,” or to hazard a guess as to the origin of the hundred dollar bill
pinned to the baby’s bib.
The hundred dollars were never renewed, the lady never reappeared, but
the baby lived healthily and happily with Jessamine’s piccaninnies, and
as soon as it could toddle was brought to Chatty Lovell’s day-nursery,
where it appeared (like its fellow paupers) in little garments cut down
from her old dresses, and socks knitted by her untiring hands. Delia,
absorbed in her own babies, had nevertheless dropped in once or twice at
the nursery, and had come away wishing that Chatty’s maternal instinct
might find its normal outlet in marriage. The married cousin confusedly
felt that her own affection for her handsome children was a mild and
measured sentiment compared with Chatty’s fierce passion for the waifs
in Grandmamma Lovell’s stable.
And then, to the general surprise, Charlotte Lovell engaged herself to
Joe Ralston. It was known that Joe had “admired her” the year she came
out. She was a graceful dancer, and Joe, who was tall and nimble, had
footed it with her through many a reel and _schottische_. By the end of
the winter all the match-makers were predicting that something would
come of it; but when Delia sounded her cousin, the girl’s evasive answer
and burning brow seemed to imply that her suitor had changed his mind,
and no further questions could be asked. Now it was clear that there
had, in fact, been an old romance between them, probably followed by
that exciting incident, a “misunderstanding”; but at last all was well,
and the bells of St. Mark’s were preparing to ring in happier days for
Charlotte. “Ah, when she has her first baby,” the Ralston mothers
chorused....
* * * * *
“Chatty!” Delia exclaimed, pushing back her chair as she saw her
cousin’s image reflected in the glass over her shoulder.
Charlotte Lovell had paused in the doorway. “They told me you were
here--so I ran up.”
“Of course, darling. How handsome you do look in your poplin! I always
said you needed rich materials. I’m so thankful to see you out of grey
cashmere.” Delia, lifting her hands, removed the white bonnet from her
dark polished head, and shook it gently to make the crystals glitter.
“I hope you like it? It’s for your wedding,” she laughed.
Charlotte Lovell stood motionless. In her mother’s old dove-coloured
poplin, freshly banded with narrow rows of crimson velvet ribbon, an
ermine tippet crossed on her bosom, and a new beaver bonnet with a
falling feather, she had already something of the assurance and majesty
of a married woman.
“And you know your hair certainly _is_ darker, darling,” Delia added,
still hopefully surveying her.
“Darker? It’s grey,” Charlotte suddenly broke out in her deep voice. She
pushed back one of the pommaded bands that framed her face, and showed a
white lock on her temple. “You needn’t save up your bonnet; I’m not
going to be married,” she added, with a smile that showed her small
white teeth in a fleeting glare.
Delia had just enough presence of mind to lay down the bonnet,
marabout-up, before she flung herself on her cousin.
“Not going to be married? Charlotte, are you perfectly crazy?”
“Why is it crazy to do what I think right?”
“But people said you were going to marry him the year you came out. And
no one understood what happened then. And now--how can it possibly be
right? You simply _can’t_!” Delia incoherently cried.
“Oh--people!” said Charlotte Lovell wearily.
Her married cousin looked at her with a start. Something thrilled in her
voice that Delia had never heard in it, or in any other human voice,
before. Its echo seemed to set their familiar world rocking, and the
Axminster carpet actually heaved under Delia’s shrinking slippers.
Charlotte Lovell stood staring ahead of her with strained lids. In the
pale brown of her eyes Delia noticed the green specks that floated there
when she was angry or excited.
“Charlotte--where on earth have you come from?” she questioned, drawing
the girl down to the sofa.
“Come from?”
“Yes. You look as if you had seen a ghost--an army of ghosts.”
The same snarling smile drew up Charlotte’s lip. “I’ve seen Joe,” she
said.
“Well?--Oh, Chatty,” Delia exclaimed, abruptly illuminated, “you don’t
mean to say that you’re going to let any little thing in Joe’s past--?
Not that I’ve ever heard the least hint; never. But even if there
were....” She drew a deep breath, and bravely proceeded to extremities.
“Even if you’ve heard that he’s been ... that he’s had a child--of
course he would have provided for it before....”
The girl shook her head. “I know: you needn’t go on. ‘Men will be men’;
but it’s not that.”
“Tell me what it is.”
Charlotte Lovell looked about the sunny prosperous room as if it were
the image of her world, and that world were a prison she must break out
of. She lowered her head. “I want--to get away,” she panted.
“Get away? From Joe?”
“From his ideas--the Ralston ideas.”
Delia bridled--after all, she was a Ralston! “The Ralston ideas? I
haven’t found them--so unbearably unpleasant to live with,” she smiled a
little tartly.
“No. But it was different with you: they didn’t ask you to give up
things.”
“What things?” What in the world (Delia wondered) had poor Charlotte
that any one could want her to give up? She had always been in the
position of taking rather than of having to surrender. “Can’t you
explain to me, dear?” Delia urged.
“My poor children--he says I’m to give them up,” cried the girl in a
stricken whisper.
“Give them up? Give up helping them?”
“Seeing them--looking after them. Give them up altogether. He got his
mother to explain to me. After--after we have children ... he’s afraid
... afraid our children might catch things.... He’ll give me money, of
course, to pay some one ... a hired person, to look after them. He
thought that handsome,” Charlotte broke out with a sob. She flung off
her bonnet and smothered her prostrate weeping in the cushions.
Delia sat perplexed. Of all unforeseen complications this was surely the
least imaginable. And with all the acquired Ralston that was in her she
could not help seeing the force of Joe’s objection, could almost find
herself agreeing with him. No one in New York had forgotten the death of
the poor Henry van der Luydens’ only child, who had caught small-pox at
the circus to which an unprincipled nurse had surreptitiously taken him.
After such a warning as that, parents felt justified in every precaution
against contagion. And poor people were so ignorant and careless, and
their children, of course, so perpetually exposed to everything
catching. No, Joe Ralston was certainly right, and Charlotte almost
insanely unreasonable. But it would be useless to tell her so now.
Instinctively, Delia temporized.
“After all,” she whispered to the prone ear, “if it’s only after you
have children--you may not have any--for some time.”
“Oh, yes, I shall!” came back in anguish from the cushions.
Delia smiled with matronly superiority. “Really, Chatty, I don’t quite
see how you can know. You don’t understand.”
Charlotte Lovell lifted herself up. Her collar of Brussels lace had
come undone and hung in a wisp on her crumpled bodice, and through the
disorder of her hair the white lock glimmered haggardly. In her pale
brown eyes the little green specks floated like leaves in a trout-pool.
“Poor girl,” Delia thought, “how old and ugly she looks! More than ever
like an old maid; and she doesn’t seem to realize in the least that
she’ll never have another chance.”
“You must try to be sensible, Chatty dear. After all, one’s own babies
have the first claim.”
“That’s just it.” The girl seized her fiercely by the wrists. “How can I
give up my own baby?”
“Your--your--?” Delia’s world again began to waver under her. “Which of
the poor little waifs, dearest, do you call your own baby?” she
questioned patiently.
Charlotte looked her straight in the eyes. “I call my own baby my own
baby.”
“Your own--? Take care--you’re hurting my wrists, Chatty!” Delia freed
herself, forcing a smile. “Your own--?”
“My own little girl. The one that Jessamine and Cyrus--”
“Oh--” Delia Ralston gasped.
The two cousins sat silent, facing each other; but Delia looked away. It
came over her with a shudder of repugnance that such things, even if
they had to be said, should not have been spoken in her bedroom, so near
the spotless nursery across the passage. Mechanically she smoothed the
organ-like folds of her silk skirt, which her cousin’s embrace had
tumbled. Then she looked again at Charlotte’s eyes, and her own melted.
“Oh, poor Chatty--my poor Chatty!” She held out her arms to her cousin.
II
The shepherd continued to steal his kiss from the shepherdess, and the
clock in the fallen trunk continued to tick out the minutes.
Delia, petrified, sat unconscious of their passing, her cousin clasped
to her. She was dumb with the horror and amazement of learning that her
own blood ran in the veins of the anonymous foundling, the “hundred
dollar baby” about whom New York had so long furtively jested and
conjectured. It was her first contact with the nether side of the smooth
social surface, and she sickened at the thought that such things were,
and that she, Delia Ralston, should be hearing of them in her own
house, and from the lips of the victim! For Chatty of course was a
victim--but whose? She had spoken no name, and Delia could put no
question: the horror of it sealed her lips. Her mind had instantly raced
back over Chatty’s past; but she saw no masculine figure in it but Joe
Ralston’s. And to connect Joe with the episode was obviously
unthinkable. Some one in the south, then--? But no: Charlotte had been
ill when she left--and in a flash Delia understood the real nature of
that illness, and of the girl’s disappearance. But from such
speculations too her mind recoiled, and instinctively she fastened on
something she could still grasp: Joe Ralston’s attitude about Chatty’s
paupers. Of course Joe could not let his wife risk bringing contagion
into their home--that was safe ground to dwell on. Her own Jim would
have felt in the same way; and she would certainly have agreed with
him.
Her eyes travelled back to the clock. She always thought of Clem Spender
when she looked at the clock, and suddenly she wondered--if things had
been different--what _he_ would have said if she had made such an appeal
to him as Charlotte had made to Joe. The thing was hard to imagine; yet
in a flash of mental readjustment Delia saw herself as Clem’s wife, she
saw her children as his, she pictured herself asking him to let her go
on caring for the poor waifs in the Mercer Street stable, and she
distinctly heard his laugh and his light answer: “Why on earth did you
ask, you little goose? Do you take me for such a Pharisee as that?”
Yes, that was Clem Spender all over--tolerant, reckless, indifferent to
consequences, always doing the kind thing at the moment, and too often
leaving others to pay the score. “There’s something cheap about Clem,”
Jim had once said in his heavy way. Delia Ralston roused herself and
pressed her cousin closer. “Chatty, tell me,” she whispered.
“There’s nothing more.”
“I mean, about yourself ... this thing ... this....” Clem Spender’s
voice was still in her ears. “You loved some one,” she breathed.
“Yes. That’s over--. Now it’s only the child.... And I could love
Joe--in another way.” Chatty Lovell straightened herself, wan and
frowning.
“I need the money--I must have it for my baby. Or else they’ll send it
to an Institution.” She paused. “But that’s not all. I want to marry--to
be a wife, like all of you. I should have loved Joe’s children--our
children. Life doesn’t stop....”
“No; I suppose not. But you speak as if ... as if ... the person who
took advantage of you....”
“No one took advantage of me. I was lonely and unhappy. I met some one
who was lonely and unhappy. People don’t all have your luck. We were
both too poor to marry each other ... and mother would never have
consented. And so one day ... one day before he said goodbye....”
“He said goodbye?”
“Yes. He was going to leave the country.”
“He left the country--knowing?”
“How was he to know? He doesn’t live here. He’d just come back--come
back to see his family--for a few weeks....”
She broke off, her thin lips pressed together upon her secret.
There was a silence. Blindly Delia stared at the bold shepherd.
“Come back from where?” she asked at length in a low tone.
“Oh, what does it matter? You wouldn’t understand,” Charlotte broke off,
in the very words her married cousin had compassionately addressed to
her virginity.
A slow blush rose to Delia’s cheek: she felt oddly humiliated by the
rebuke conveyed in that contemptuous retort. She seemed to herself shy,
ineffectual, as incapable as an ignorant girl of dealing with the
abominations that Charlotte was thrusting on her. But suddenly some
fierce feminine intuition struggled and woke in her. She forced her eyes
upon her cousin’s.
“You won’t tell me who it was?”
“What’s the use? I haven’t told anybody.”
“Then why have you come to me?”
Charlotte’s stony face broke up in weeping. “It’s for my baby ... my
baby....”
Delia did not heed her. “How can I help you if I don’t know?” she
insisted in a harsh dry voice: her heart-beats were so violent that they
seemed to send up throttling hands to her throat.
Charlotte made no answer.
“Come back from where?” Delia doggedly repeated; and at that, with a
long wail, the girl flung her hands up, screening her eyes. “He always
thought you’d wait for him,” she sobbed out, “and then, when he found
you hadn’t ... and that you were marrying Jim.... He heard it just as
he was sailing.... He didn’t know it till Mrs. Mingott asked him to
bring the clock back for your wedding....”
“Stop--stop,” Delia cried, springing to her feet. She had provoked the
avowal, and now that it had come she felt that it had been gratuitously
and indecently thrust upon her. Was this New York, _her_ New York, her
safe friendly hypocritical New York, was this James Ralston’s house, and
this his wife listening to such revelations of dishonour?
Charlotte Lovell stood up in her turn. “I knew it--I knew it! You think
worse of my baby now, instead of better.... Oh, why did you make me tell
you? I knew you’d never understand. I’d always cared for him, ever since
I came out; that was why I wouldn’t marry any one else. But I knew
there was no hope for me ... he never looked at anybody but you. And
then, when he came back four years ago, and there was no _you_ for him
any more, he began to notice me, to be kind, to talk to me about his
life and his painting....” She drew a deep breath, and her voice
cleared. “That’s over--all over. It’s as if I couldn’t either hate him
or love him. There’s only the child now--my child. He doesn’t even know
of it--why should he? It’s none of his business; it’s nobody’s business
but mine. But surely you must see that I can’t give up my baby.”
Delia Ralston stood speechless, looking away from her cousin in a
growing horror. She had lost all sense of reality, all feeling of safety
and self-reliance. Her impulse was to close her ears to the other’s
appeal as a child buries its head from midnight terrors. At last she
drew herself up, and spoke with dry lips.
“But what do you mean to do? Why have you come to me? Why have you told
me all this?”
“Because he loved you!” Charlotte Lovell stammered out; and the two
women stood and faced each other.
Slowly the tears rose to Delia’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks,
moistening her parched lips. Through the tears she saw her cousin’s
haggard countenance waver and droop like a drowning face under water.
Things half-guessed, obscurely felt, surged up from unsuspected depths
in her. It was almost as if, for a moment, this other woman were telling
her of her own secret past, putting into crude words all the trembling
silences of her own heart.
The worst of it was, as Charlotte said, that they must act now; there
was not a day to lose. Chatty was right--it was impossible that she
should marry Joe if to do so meant giving up the child. But, in any
case, how could she marry him without telling him the truth? And was it
conceivable that, after hearing it, he should not repudiate her? All
these questions spun agonizingly through Delia’s brain, and through them
glimmered the persistent vision of the child--Clem Spender’s
child--growing up on charity in a negro hovel, or herded in one of the
plague-houses they called Asylums. No: the child came first--she felt it
in every fibre of her body. But what should she do, of whom take
counsel, how advise the wretched creature who had come to her in
Clement’s name? Delia glanced about her desperately, and then turned
back to her cousin.
“You must give me time. I must think. You ought not to marry him--and
yet all the arrangements are made; and the wedding-presents.... There
would be a scandal ... it would kill Granny Lovell....”
Charlotte answered in a low voice: “There _is_ no time. I must decide
now.”
Delia pressed her hands against her breast. “I tell you I must think. I
wish you would go home.--Or, no: stay here: your mother mustn’t see your
eyes. Jim’s not coming home till late; you can wait in this room till I
come back.” She had opened the wardrobe and was reaching up for a plain
bonnet and heavy veil.
“Stay here? But where are you going?”
“I don’t know. I want to walk--to get the air. I think I want to be
alone.” Feverishly, Delia unfolded her Paisley shawl, tied on bonnet and
veil, thrust her mittened hands into her muff. Charlotte, without
moving, stared at her dumbly from the sofa.
“You’ll wait,” Delia insisted, on the threshold.
“Yes: I’ll wait.”
Delia shut the door and hurried down the stairs.
III
She had spoken the truth in saying that she did not know where she was
going. She simply wanted to get away from Charlotte’s unbearable face,
and from the immediate atmosphere of her tragedy. Outside, in the open,
perhaps it would be easier to think.
As she skirted the park-rails she saw her rosy children playing, under
their nurse’s eye, with the pampered progeny of other square-dwellers.
The little girl had on her new plaid velvet bonnet and white tippet, and
the boy his Highland cap and broad-cloth spencer. How happy and jolly
they looked! The nurse spied her, but she shook her head, waved at the
group and hurried on.
She walked and walked through the familiar streets decked with bright
winter sunshine. It was early afternoon, an hour when the gentlemen had
just returned to their offices, and there were few pedestrians in Irving
Place and Union Square. Delia crossed the Square to Broadway.
The Lovell house in Mercer Street was a sturdy old-fashioned brick
dwelling. A large stable adjoined it, opening on an alley such as Delia,
on her honey-moon trip to England, had heard called a “mews.” She turned
into the alley, entered the stable court, and pushed open a door. In a
shabby white-washed room a dozen children, gathered about a stove, were
playing with broken toys. The Irishwoman who had charge of them was
cutting out small garments on a broken-legged deal table. She raised a
friendly face, recognizing Delia as the lady who had once or twice been
to see the children with Miss Charlotte.
Delia paused, embarrassed.
“I--I came to ask if you need any new toys,” she stammered.
“That we do, ma’am. And many another thing too, though Miss Charlotte
tells me I’m not to beg of the ladies that comes to see our poor
darlin’s.”
“Oh, you may beg of me, Bridget,” Mrs. Ralston answered, smiling. “Let
me see your babies--it’s so long since I’ve been here.”
The children had stopped playing and, huddled against their nurse, gazed
up open-mouthed at the rich rustling lady. One little girl with pale
brown eyes and scarlet cheeks was dressed in a plaid alpaca frock
trimmed with imitation coral buttons that Delia remembered. Those
buttons had been on Charlotte’s “best dress” the year she came out.
Delia stopped and took up the child. Its curly hair was brown, the exact
colour of the eyes--thank heaven! But the eyes had the same little green
spangles floating in their transparency. Delia sat down, and the little
girl, standing on her knee, gravely fingered her watch-chain.
“Oh, ma’am--maybe her shoes’ll soil your skirt. The floor here ain’t
none too clean.”
Delia shook her head, and pressed the child against her. She had
forgotten the other gazing babies and their wardress. The little
creature on her knee was made of different stuff--it had not needed the
plaid alpaca and coral buttons to single her out. Her brown curls grew
in points on her high forehead, exactly as Clement Spender’s did. Delia
laid a burning cheek against the forehead.
“Baby want my lovely yellow chain?”
Baby did.
Delia unfastened the gold chain and hung it about the child’s neck. The
other babies clapped and crowed, but the little girl, gravely dimpling,
continued to finger the links in silence.
“Oh, ma’am, you can’t leave that fine chain on little Teeny. When she
has to go back to those blacks....”
“What is her name?”
“Teena they call her, I believe. It don’t seem a Christian name,
har’ly.”
Delia was silent.
“What I say is, her cheeks is too red. And she coughs too easy. Always
one cold and another. Here, Teeny, leave the lady go.”
Delia stood up, loosening the tender arms.
“She doesn’t want to leave go of you, ma’am. Miss Chatty ain’t been in
today, and the little thing’s kinder lonesome without her. She don’t
play like the other children, somehow.... Teeny, you look at that lovely
chain you’ve got ... there, there now....”
“Goodbye, Clementina,” Delia whispered below her breath. She kissed the
pale brown eyes, the curly crown, and dropped her veil on rushing tears.
In the stable-yard she dried them on her large embroidered handkerchief,
and stood hesitating. Then with a decided step she turned toward home.
The house was as she had left it, except that the children had come in;
she heard them romping in the nursery as she went down the passage to
her bedroom. Charlotte Lovell was seated on the sofa, upright and
rigid, as Delia had left her.
“Chatty--Chatty, I’ve thought it out. Listen. Whatever happens, the baby
shan’t stay with those people. I mean to keep her.”
Charlotte stood up, tall and white. The eyes in her thin face had grown
so dark that they seemed like spectral hollows in a skull. She opened
her lips to speak, and then, snatching at her handkerchief, pressed it
to her mouth, and sank down again. A red trickle dripped through the
handkerchief onto her poplin skirt.
“Charlotte--Charlotte,” Delia screamed, on her knees beside her cousin.
Charlotte’s head slid back against the cushions and the trickle ceased.
She closed her eyes, and Delia, seizing a vinaigrette from the
dressing-table, held it to her pinched nostrils. The room was filled
with an acrid aromatic scent.
Charlotte’s lids lifted. “Don’t be frightened. I still spit blood
sometimes--not often. My lung is nearly healed. But it’s the terror--”
“No, no: there’s to be no more terror. I tell you I’ve thought it all
out. Jim is going to let me take the baby.”
The girl raised herself haggardly. “Jim? Have you told him? Is that
where you’ve been?”
“No, darling. I’ve only been to see the baby.”
“Oh,” Charlotte moaned, leaning back again. Delia took her own
handkerchief, and wiped away the tears that were raining down her
cousin’s cheeks.
“You mustn’t cry, Chatty; you must be brave. Your little girl and
his--how could you think? But you must give me time: I must manage it
in my own way.... Only trust me....”
Charlotte’s lips stirred faintly.
“The tears ... don’t dry them, Delia.... I like to feel them....”
The two cousins continued to lean against each other without speaking.
The ormolu clock ticked out the measure of their mute communion in
minutes, quarters, a half-hour, then an hour: the day declined and
darkened, the shadows lengthened across the garlands of the Axminster
and the broad white bed. There was a knock.
“The children’s waiting to say their grace before supper, ma’am.”
“Yes, Eliza. Let them say it to you. I’ll come later.” As the nurse’s
steps receded Charlotte Lovell disengaged herself from Delia’s embrace.
“Now I can go,” she said.
“You’re not too weak, dear? I can send for a coach to take you home.”
“No, no; it would frighten mother. And I shall like walking now, in the
darkness. Sometimes the world used to seem all one awful glare to me.
There were days when I thought the sun would never set. And then there
was the moon at night.” She laid her hands on her cousin’s shoulders.
“Now it’s different. By and bye I shan’t hate the light.”
The two women kissed each other, and Delia whispered: “Tomorrow.”
IV
The Ralstons gave up old customs reluctantly, but once they had adopted
a new one they found it impossible to understand why everyone else did
not immediately do likewise.
When Delia, who came of the laxer Lovells, and was naturally inclined to
novelty, had first proposed to her husband to dine at six o’clock
instead of two, his malleable young face had become as relentless as
that of the old original Ralston in his grim Colonial portrait. But
after a two days’ resistance he had come round to his wife’s view, and
now smiled contemptuously at the obstinacy of those who clung to a
heavy mid-day meal and high tea.
“There’s nothing I hate like narrow-mindedness. Let people eat when they
like, for all I care: it’s their narrow-mindedness that I can’t stand.”
Delia was thinking of this as she sat in the drawing-room (her mother
would have called it the parlour) waiting for her husband’s return. She
had just had time to smooth her glossy braids, and slip on the
black-and-white striped moire with cherry pipings which was his
favourite dress. The drawing-room, with its Nottingham lace curtains
looped back under florid gilt cornices, its marble centre-table on a
carved rosewood foot, and its old-fashioned mahogany armchairs covered
with one of the new French silk damasks in a tart shade of apple-green,
was one for any young wife to be proud of. The rosewood what-nots on
each side of the folding doors that led into the dining-room were
adorned with tropical shells, feld-spar vases, an alabaster model of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa, a pair of obelisks made of scraps of porphyry and
serpentine picked up by the young couple in the Roman Forum, a bust of
Clytie in chalk-white biscuit de Sèvres, and four old-fashioned figures
of the Seasons in Chelsea ware, that had to be left among the newer
ornaments because they had belonged to great-grandmamma Ralston. On the
walls hung large dark steel-engravings of Cole’s “Voyage of Life,” and
between the windows stood the life-size statue of “A Captive Maiden”
executed for Jim Ralston’s father by the celebrated Harriet Hosmer,
immortalized in Hawthorne’s novel of the Marble Faun. On the table lay
handsomely tooled copies of Turner’s Rivers of France, Drake’s Culprit
Fay, Crabbe’s Tales, and the Book of Beauty containing portraits of the
British peeresses who had participated in the Earl of Eglinton’s
tournament.
As Delia sat there, before the hard-coal fire in its arched opening of
black marble, her citron-wood work-table at her side, and one of the new
French lamps shedding a pleasant light on the centre-table from under a
crystal-fringed shade, she asked herself how she could have passed, in
such a short time, so completely out of her usual circle of impressions
and convictions--so much farther than ever before beyond the Ralston
horizon. Here it was, closing in on her again, as if the very plaster
ornaments of the ceiling, the forms of the furniture, the cut of her
dress, had been built out of Ralston prejudices, and turned to adamant
by the touch of Ralston hands.
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 Ralstons 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.