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 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.
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 meet? What
Latmian solitude hid their clandestine joys? In the exposed
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 to 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 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 Augustuses 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 Jim’s--”
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
mid-day 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 do 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
Halseys--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 slowly 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.
In reality, behind Delia’s assurance there was a tumult of doubts and
uncertainties. But she had once learned that one can do almost anything
(perhaps even murder) if one does not attempt to explain it; and the
lesson had never been forgotten. She had never explained the taking over
of the foundling baby; nor was she now going to explain its adoption.
She was just going about her business as if nothing had happened that
needed to be accounted for; and a long inheritance of moral modesty
helped her to keep her questionings to herself.
These questionings were in fact less concerned with public opinion than
with Charlotte Lovell’s private thoughts. Charlotte, after her first
moment of tragic resistance, had shown herself pathetically, almost
painfully, grateful. That she had reason to be, Tina’s attitude
abundantly revealed. Tina, during the first days after her return from
the Vandergrave ball, had shown a closed and darkened face that terribly
reminded Delia of the ghastliness of Charlotte Lovell’s sudden
reflection, years before, in Delia’s own bedroom mirror. The first
chapter of the mother’s history was already written in the daughter’s
eyes; and the Spender blood in Tina might well precipitate the sequence.
During those few days of silent observation Delia discovered, with
terror and compassion, the justification of Charlotte’s fears. The girl
had nearly been lost to them both: at all costs such a risk must not be
renewed.
The Halseys, on the whole, had behaved admirably. Lanning wished to
marry dear Delia Ralston’s protégée--who was shortly, it was understood,
to take her adopted mother’s name, and inherit her fortune. To what
better could a Halsey aspire than one more alliance with a Ralston? The
families had always inter-married. The Halsey parents gave their
blessing with a precipitation which showed that they too had their
anxieties, and that the relief of seeing Lanning “settled” would more
than compensate for the conceivable drawbacks of the marriage; though,
once it was decided on, they would not admit even to themselves that
such drawbacks existed. Old New York always thought away whatever
interfered with the perfect propriety of its arrangements.
Charlotte Lovell of course perceived and recognized all this. She
accepted the situation--in her private hours with Delia--as one more in
the long list of mercies bestowed on an undeserving sinner. And one
phrase of hers perhaps gave the clue to her acceptance: “Now at least
she’ll never suspect the truth.” It had come to be the poor creature’s
ruling purpose that her child should never guess the tie between
them....
But Delia’s chief support was the sight of Tina. The older woman, whose
whole life had been shaped and coloured by the faint reflection of a
rejected happiness, hung dazzled in the light of bliss accepted.
Sometimes, as she watched Tina’s changing face, she felt as though her
own blood were beating in it, as though she could read every thought
and emotion feeding those tumultuous currents. Tina’s love was a stormy
affair, with continual ups and downs of rapture and depression,
arrogance and self-abasement; Delia saw displayed before her, with an
artless frankness, all the visions, cravings and imaginings of her own
stifled youth.