discover. She had been given, at fourteen, the current version of her
origin, and had accepted it as carelessly as a happy child accepts some
remote and inconceivable fact which does not alter the familiar order of
things. And she accepted her adoption in the same spirit. She knew that
the name of Ralston had been given to her to facilitate her marriage
with Lanning Halsey; and Delia had the impression that all irrelevant
questionings were submerged in an overwhelming gratitude. “I’ve always
thought of you as my Mamma; and now, you dearest, you really are,” Tina
had whispered, her cheek against Delia’s; and Delia had laughed back:
“Well, if the lawyers can make me so!” But there the matter dropped,
swept away on the current of Tina’s bliss. They were all, in those days,
Delia, Charlotte, even the gallant Lanning, rather like straws whirling
about on a sunlit torrent.
The golden flood bore them onward, nearer and nearer to the enchanted
date; and Delia, deep in bridal preparations, wondered at the
comparative indifference with which she had ordered and inspected her
own daughter’s twelve-dozen-of-everything. There had been nothing to
quicken the pulse in young Delia’s placid bridal; but as Tina’s wedding
day approached imagination burgeoned like the year. The wedding was to
be celebrated at Lovell Place, the old house on the Sound where Delia
Lovell had herself been married, and where, since her mother’s death,
she spent her summers. Although the neighbourhood was already overspread
with a net-work of mean streets, the old house, with its thin colonnaded
verandah, still looked across an uncurtailed lawn and leafy shrubberies
to the narrows of Hell Gate; and the drawing-rooms kept their frail
slender settees, their Sheraton consoles and cabinets. It had been
thought useless to discard them for more fashionable furniture, since
the growth of the city made it certain that the place must eventually be
sold.
Tina, like Mrs. Ralston, was to have a “house-wedding,” though
Episcopalian society was beginning to disapprove of such ceremonies,
which were regarded as the despised _pis-aller_ of Baptists, Methodists,
Unitarians and the other altarless sects. In Tina’s case, however, both
Delia and Charlotte felt that the greater privacy of a marriage in the
house made up for its more secular character; and the Halseys favoured
their decision. The ladies accordingly settled themselves at Lovell
Place before the end of June, and every morning young Lanning Halsey’s
catboat was seen beating across the bay, and furling its sail at the
anchorage below the lawn.
* * * * *
There had never been a fairer June in any one’s memory. The damask roses
and mignonette below the verandah had never sent such a breath of summer
through the tall French windows; the gnarled orange-trees brought out
from the old arcaded orange-house had never been so thickly blossomed;
the very haycocks on the lawn gave out whiffs of Araby.
The evening before the wedding Delia Ralston sat on the verandah
watching the moon rise across the Sound. She was tired with the
multitude of last preparations, and sad at the thought of Tina’s going.
On the following evening the house would be empty: till death came, she
and Charlotte would sit alone together beside the evening lamp. Such
repinings were foolish--they were, she reminded herself, “not like her.”
But too many memories stirred and murmured in her: her heart was
haunted. As she closed the door on the silent drawing-room--already
transformed into a chapel, with its lace-hung altar, the tall alabaster
vases awaiting their white roses and June lilies, the strip of red
carpet dividing the rows of chairs from door to chancel--she felt that
it had perhaps been a mistake to come back to Lovell Place for the
wedding. She saw herself again, in her high-waisted “India mull”
embroidered with daisies, her flat satin sandals, her Brussels veil--saw
again her reflection in the sallow pier-glass as she had left that same
room on Jim Ralston’s triumphant arm, and the one terrified glance she
had exchanged with her own image before she took her stand under the
bell of white roses in the hall, and smiled upon the congratulating
company. Ah, what a different image the pier-glass would reflect
tomorrow!
Charlotte Lovell’s brisk step sounded indoors, and she came out and
joined Mrs. Ralston.
“I’ve been to the kitchen to tell Melissa Grimes that she’d better count
on at least two hundred plates of ice-cream.”
“Two hundred? Yes--I suppose she had, with all the Philadelphia
connection coming.” Delia pondered. “How about the doylies?” she
enquired.
“With your aunt Cecilia Vandergrave’s we shall manage beautifully.”
“Yes.--Thank you, Charlotte, for taking all this trouble.”
“Oh--” Charlotte protested, with her flitting sneer; and Delia perceived
the irony of thanking a mother for occupying herself with the details of
her own daughter’s wedding.
“Do sit down, Chatty,” she murmured, feeling herself redden at her
blunder.
Charlotte, with a sigh of fatigue, sat down on the nearest chair.
“We shall have a beautiful day tomorrow,” she said, pensively surveying
the placid heaven.
“Yes. Where is Tina?”
“She was very tired. I’ve sent her upstairs to lie down.”
This seemed so eminently suitable that Delia made no immediate answer.
After an interval she said: “We shall miss her.”
Charlotte’s reply was an inarticulate murmur.
The two cousins remained silent, Charlotte as usual bolt upright, her
thin hands clutched on the arms of her old-fashioned rush-bottomed seat,
Delia somewhat heavily sunk into the depths of a high-backed armchair.
The two had exchanged their last remarks on the preparations for the
morrow; nothing more remained to be said as to the number of guests, the
brewing of the punch, the arrangements for the robing of the clergy, and
the disposal of the presents in the best spare-room.
Only one subject had not yet been touched upon, and Delia, as she
watched her cousin’s profile grimly cut upon the melting twilight,
waited for Charlotte to speak. But Charlotte remained silent.
“I have been thinking,” Delia at length began, a slight tremor in her
voice, “that I ought presently--”
She fancied she saw Charlotte’s hands tighten on the knobs of the
chair-arms.
“You ought presently--?”
“Well, before Tina goes to bed, perhaps go up for a few minutes--”
Charlotte remained silent, visibly resolved on making no effort to
assist her.
“Tomorrow,” Delia continued, “we shall be in such a rush from the
earliest moment that I don’t see how, in the midst of all the
interruptions and excitement, I can possibly--”
“Possibly?” Charlotte monotonously echoed.
Delia felt her blush deepening through the dusk. “Well, I suppose you
agree with me, don’t you, that a word ought to be said to the child as
to the new duties and responsibilities that--well--what is usual, in
fact, at such a time?” she falteringly ended.
“Yes, I have thought of that,” Charlotte answered. She said no more, but
Delia divined in her tone the stirring of that obscure opposition which,
at the crucial moments of Tina’s life, seemed automatically to declare
itself. She could not understand why Charlotte should, at such times,
grow so enigmatic and inaccessible, and in the present case she saw no
reason why this change of mood should interfere with what she deemed to
be her own duty. Tina must long for her guiding hand into the new life
as much as she herself yearned for the exchange of half-confidences
which would be her real farewell to her adopted daughter. Her heart
beating a little more quickly than usual, she rose and walked through
the open window into the shadowy drawing-room. The moon, between the
columns of the verandah, sent a broad band of light across the rows of
chairs, irradiated the lace-decked altar with its empty candlesticks and
vases, and outlined with silver Delia’s heavy reflection in the
pier-glass.
She crossed the room toward the hall.
“Delia!” Charlotte’s voice sounded behind her. Delia turned, and the two
women scrutinized each other in the revealing light. Charlotte’s face
looked as it had looked on the dreadful day when Delia had suddenly seen
it in the looking-glass above her shoulder.
“You were going up now to speak to Tina?” Charlotte asked.
“I--yes. It’s nearly nine. I thought....”
“Yes; I understand.” Miss Lovell made a visible effort at self-control.
“Please understand me too, Delia, if I ask you--not to.”
Delia looked at her cousin with a vague sense of apprehension. What new
mystery did this strange request conceal? But no--such a doubt as
flitted across her mind was inadmissible. She was too sure of her Tina!
“I confess I don’t understand, Charlotte. You surely feel that, on the
night before her wedding, a girl ought to have a mother’s counsel, a
mother’s....”
“Yes; I feel that.” Charlotte Lovell took a hurried breath. “But the
question is: _which of us is her mother?_”
Delia drew back involuntarily. “Which of us--?” she stammered.
“Yes. Oh, don’t imagine it’s the first time I’ve asked myself the
question! There--I mean to be calm; quite calm. I don’t intend to go
back to the past. I’ve accepted--accepted everything--gratefully. Only
tonight--just tonight....”
Delia felt the rush of pity which always prevailed over every other
sensation in her rare interchanges of truth with Charlotte Lovell. Her
throat filled with tears, and she remained silent.
“Just tonight,” Charlotte concluded, “_I’m_ her mother.”
“Charlotte! You’re not going to tell her so--not now?” broke
involuntarily from Delia.
Charlotte gave a faint laugh. “If I did, should you hate it as much as
all that?”
“Hate it? What a word, between us!”
“Between us? But it’s the word that’s been between us since the
beginning--the very beginning! Since the day when you discovered that
Clement Spender hadn’t quite broken his heart because he wasn’t good
enough for you; since you found your revenge and your triumph in keeping
me at your mercy, and in taking his child from me!” Charlotte’s words
flamed up as if from the depth of the infernal fires; then the blaze
dropped, her head sank forward, and she stood before Delia dumb and
stricken.
Delia’s first movement was one of an indignant recoil. Where she had
felt only tenderness, compassion, the impulse to help and befriend,
these darknesses had been smouldering in the other’s breast! It was as
if a poisonous smoke had swept over some pure summer landscape....
Usually such feelings were quickly followed by a reaction of sympathy.
But now she felt none. An utter weariness possessed her.
“Yes,” she said slowly, “I sometimes believe you really have hated me
from the very first; hated me for everything I’ve tried to do for you.”
Charlotte raised her head sharply. “To do for me? But everything you’ve
done has been done for Clement Spender!”
Delia stared at her with a kind of terror. “You are horrible, Charlotte.
Upon my honour, I haven’t thought of Clement Spender for years.”
“Ah, but you have--you have! You’ve always thought of him in thinking of
Tina--of him and nobody else! A woman never stops thinking of the man
she loves. She thinks of him years afterward, in all sorts of
unconscious ways, in thinking of all sorts of things--books, pictures,
sunsets, a flower or a ribbon--or a clock on the mantelpiece,” Charlotte
broke off with her sneering laugh. “That was what I gambled on, you
see--that’s why I came to you that day. I knew I was giving Tina
another mother.”
Again the poisonous smoke seemed to envelop Delia: that she and
Charlotte, two spent old women, should be standing before Tina’s bridal
altar and talking to each other of hatred, seemed unimaginably hideous
and degrading.
“You wicked woman--you _are_ wicked!” she exclaimed.
Then the evil mist cleared away, and through it she saw the baffled
pitiful figure of the mother who was not a mother, and who, for every
benefit accepted, felt herself robbed of a privilege. She moved nearer
to Charlotte and laid a hand on her arm.
“Not here! Don’t let us talk like this here.”
The other drew away from her. “Wherever you please, then. I’m not
particular!”
“But tonight, Charlotte--the night before Tina’s wedding? Isn’t every
place in this house full of her? How could we go on saying cruel things
to each other anywhere?” Charlotte was silent, and Delia continued in a
steadier voice: “Nothing you say can really hurt me--for long; and I
don’t want to hurt you--I never did.”
“You tell me that--and you’ve left nothing undone to divide me from my
daughter! Do you suppose it’s been easy, all these years, to hear her
call you ‘mother’? Oh, I know, I know--it was agreed that she must never
guess ... but if you hadn’t perpetually come between us she’d have had
no one but me, she’d have felt about me as a child feels about its
mother, she’d have _had_ to love me better than any one else. With all
your forbearances and your generosities you’ve ended by robbing me of
my child. And I’ve put up with it all for her sake--because I knew I had
to. But tonight--tonight she belongs to me. Tonight I can’t bear that
she should call you ‘mother’.”
Delia Ralston made no immediate reply. It seemed to her that for the
first time she had sounded the deepest depths of maternal passion, and
she stood awed at the echoes it gave back.
“How you must love her--to say such things to me,” she murmured; then,
with a final effort: “Yes, you’re right. I won’t go up to her. It’s you
who must go.”
Charlotte started toward her impulsively; but with a hand lifted as if
in defense, Delia moved across the room and out again to the verandah.
As she sank down in her chair she heard the drawing room door open and
close, and the sound of Charlotte’s feet on the stairs.
Delia sat alone in the night. The last drop of her magnanimity had been
spent, and she tried to avert her shuddering mind from Charlotte. What
was happening at this moment upstairs? With what dark revelations were
Tina’s bridal dreams to be defaced? Well, that was not matter for
conjecture either. She, Delia Ralston, had played her part, done her
utmost: there remained nothing now but to try to lift her spirit above
the embittering sense of failure.
There was a strange element of truth in some of the things that
Charlotte had said. With what divination her maternal passion had
endowed her! Her jealousy seemed to have a million feelers. Yes; it was
true that the sweetness and peace of Tina’s bridal eve had been filled,
for Delia, with visions of her own unrealized past. Softly,
imperceptibly, it had reconciled her to the memory of what she had
missed. All these last days she had been living the girl’s life, she had
been Tina, and Tina had been her own girlish self, the far-off Delia
Lovell. Now for the first time, without shame, without self-reproach,
without a pang or a scruple, Delia could yield to that vision of
requited love from which her imagination had always turned away. She had
made her choice in youth, and she had accepted it in maturity; and here
in this bridal joy, so mysteriously her own, was the compensation for
all she had missed and yet never renounced.
Delia understood now that Charlotte had guessed all this, and that the
knowledge had filled her with a fierce resentment. Charlotte had said
long ago that Clement Spender had never really belonged to her; now she
had perceived that it was the same with Clement Spender’s child. As the
truth stole upon Delia her heart melted with the old compassion for
Charlotte. She saw that it was a terrible, a sacrilegious thing to
interfere with another’s destiny, to lay the tenderest touch upon any
human being’s right to love and suffer after his own fashion. Delia had
twice intervened in Charlotte Lovell’s life: it was natural that
Charlotte should be her enemy. If only she did not revenge herself by
wounding Tina!
The adopted mother’s thoughts reverted painfully to the little white
room upstairs. She had meant her half-hour with Tina to leave the girl
with thoughts as fragrant as the flowers she was to find beside her when
she woke. And now--.
Delia started up from her musing. There was a step on the
stair--Charlotte coming down through the silent house. Delia rose with a
vague impulse of escape: she felt that she could not face her cousin’s
eyes. She turned the corner of the verandah, hoping to find the shutters
of the dining-room unlatched, and to slip away unnoticed to her room;
but in a moment Charlotte was beside her.
“Delia!”
“Ah, it’s you? I was going up to bed.” For the life of her Delia could
not keep an edge of hardness from her voice.
“Yes: it’s late. You must be very tired.” Charlotte paused; her own
voice was strained and painful.
“I _am_ tired,” Delia acknowledged.
In the moonlit hush the other went up to her, laying a timid touch on
her arm.
“Not till you’ve seen Tina.”
Delia stiffened. “Tina? But it’s late! Isn’t she sleeping? I thought
you’d stay with her until--”
“I don’t know if she’s sleeping.” Charlotte paused. “I haven’t been
in--but there’s a light under her door.”
“You haven’t been in?”
“No: I just stood in the passage, and tried--”
“Tried--?”
“To think of something ... something to say to her without ... without
her guessing....” A sob stopped her, but she pressed on with a final
effort. “It’s no use. You were right: there’s nothing I can say. You’re
her real mother. Go to her. It’s not your fault--or mine.”
“Oh--” Delia cried.
Charlotte clung to her in inarticulate abasement. “You said I was
wicked--I’m not wicked. After all, she was mine when she was little!”
Delia put an arm about her shoulder.
“Hush, dear! We’ll go to her together.”
The other yielded automatically to her touch, and side by side the two
women mounted the stairs, Charlotte timing her impetuous step to Delia’s
stiffened movements. They walked down the passage to Tina’s door; but
there Charlotte Lovell paused and shook her head.
“No--you,” she whispered, and turned away.
* * * * *
Tina lay in bed, her arms folded under her head, her happy eyes
reflecting the silver space of sky which filled the window. She smiled
at Delia through her dream.
“I knew you’d come.”
Delia sat down beside her, and their clasped hands lay upon the
coverlet. They did not say much, after all; or else their communion had
no need of words. Delia never knew how long she sat by the child’s
side: she abandoned herself to the spell of the moonlit hour.
But suddenly she thought of Charlotte, alone behind the shut door of her
own room, watching, struggling, listening. Delia must not, for her own
pleasure, prolong that tragic vigil. She bent down to kiss Tina
goodnight; then she paused on the threshold and turned back.
“Darling! Just one thing more.”
“Yes?” Tina murmured through her dream.
“I want you to promise me--”
“Everything, everything, you darling mother!”
“Well, then, that when you go away tomorrow--at the very last moment,
you understand--”
“Yes?”
“After you’ve said goodbye to me, and to everybody else--just as
Lanning helps you into the carriage--”
“Yes?”
“That you’ll give your last kiss to Aunt Charlotte. Don’t forget--the
very last.”
THE END