father added, softening the remark with his indulgent smile.
“Oh, well,” Delane murmured, his attention flagging, “I daresay we’re
well enough off as we are.”
“Especially,” added Major Detrancy with a playful sniff, “with the punch
in the offing, as I perceive it to be.”
The punch struck the note for my mother’s withdrawal. She rose with her
shy circular smile, while the gentlemen, all on their feet, protested
gallantly at her desertion.
“Abandoning us to go back to Mr. Elsmere--we shall be jealous of the
gentleman!” Colonel Ruscott declared, chivalrously reaching the door
first; and as he opened it my father said, again with his indulgent
smile: “Ah, my wife--she’s a great reader.”
Then the punch was brought.
IV
“You’ll admit,” Mrs. Delane challenged me, “that Hayley’s perfect.”
Don’t imagine you have yet done with Mrs. Delane, any more than Delane
had, or I. Hitherto I have shown you only one side, or rather one phase,
of her; that during which, for obvious reasons, Hayley became an
obstacle or a burden. In the intervals between her great passions, when
somebody had to occupy the vacant throne in her bosom, her husband was
always reinstated there; and during these inter-lunar periods he and the
children were her staple subjects of conversation. If you had met her
then for the first time you would have taken her for the perfect wife
and mother, and wondered if Hayley ever got a day off; and you would not
have been far wrong in conjecturing that he seldom did.
Only these intervals were rather widely spaced, and usually of short
duration; and at other times, his wife being elsewhere engaged, it was
Delane who elder-brothered his big boys and their little sister.
Sometimes, on these occasions--when Mrs. Delane was abroad or at
Newport--Delane used to carry me off for a week to the quiet old house
in the New Jersey hills, full of Hayley and Delane portraits, of heavy
mahogany furniture and the mingled smell of lavender bags and
leather--leather boots, leather gloves, leather luggage, all the aromas
that emanate from the cupboards and passages of a house inhabited by
hard riders.
When his wife was at home he never seemed to notice the family portraits
or the old furniture. Leila carried off her own regrettable origin by
professing a democratic scorn of ancestors in general. “I know enough
bores in the flesh without bothering to remember all the dead ones,” she
said one day, when I had asked her the name of a stern-visaged old
forbear in breast-plate and buff jerkin who hung on the library wall:
and Delane, so practised in sentimental duplicities, winked jovially at
the children, as who should say: “There’s the proper American spirit for
you, my dears! That’s the way we all ought to feel.”
Perhaps, however, he detected a tinge of irritation in my own look, for
that evening, as we sat over the fire after Leila had yawned herself off
to bed, he glanced up at the armoured image, and said: “That’s old
Durward Hayley--the friend of Sir Harry Vane the Younger and all that
lot. I have some curious letters somewhere.... But Leila’s right, you
know,” he added loyally.
“In not being interested?”
“In regarding all that old past as dead. It _is_ dead. We’ve got no use
for it over here. That’s what that queer fellow in Washington always
used to say to me....”
“What queer fellow in Washington?”
“Oh, a sort of big backwoodsman who was awfully good to me when I was in
hospital ... after Bull Run....”
I sat up abruptly. It was the first time that Delane had mentioned his
life during the war. I thought my hand was on the clue; but it wasn’t.
“You were in hospital in Washington?”
“Yes; for a longish time. They didn’t know much about disinfecting
wounds in those days.... But Leila,” he resumed, with his smiling
obstinacy, “Leila’s dead right, you know. It’s a better world now. Think
of what has been done to relieve suffering since then!” When he
pronounced the word “suffering” the vertical furrows in his forehead
deepened as though he felt the actual pang of his old wound. “Oh, I
believe in progress every bit as much as _she_ does--I believe we’re
working out toward something better. If we weren’t....” He shrugged his
mighty shoulders, reached lazily for the adjoining tray, and mixed my
glass of whiskey-and-soda.
“But the war--you were wounded at Bull Run?”
“Yes.” He looked at his watch. “But I’m off to bed now. I promised the
children to take them for an early canter tomorrow, before lessons, and
I have to have my seven or eight hours of sleep to feel fit. I’m
getting on, you see. Put out the lights when you come up.”
No; he wouldn’t talk about the war.
* * * * *
It was not long afterward that Mrs. Delane appealed to me to testify to
Hayley’s perfection. She had come back from her last absence--a six
weeks’ flutter at Newport--rather painfully subdued and pinched-looking.
For the first time I saw in the corners of her mouth that middle-aged
droop which has nothing to do with the loss of teeth. “How
common-looking she’ll be in a few years!” I thought uncharitably.
“Perfect--perfect,” she insisted; and then, plaintively: “And yet--”
I echoed coldly: “And yet?”
“With the children, for instance. He’s everything to them. He’s cut me
out with my own children.” She was half joking, half whimpering.
Presently she stole an eye-lashed look at me, and added: “And at times
he’s so _hard_.”
“Delane?”
“Oh, I know you won’t believe it. But in business matters--have you
never noticed? You wouldn’t admit it, I suppose. But there are times
when one simply can’t move him.” We were in the library, and she glanced
up at the breast-plated forbear. “He’s as hard to the touch as _that_.”
She pointed to the steel convexity.
“Not the Delane I know,” I murmured, embarrassed by these confidences.
“Ah, you think you know him?” she half-sneered; then, with a dutiful
accent: “I’ve always said he was a perfect father--and he’s made the
children think so. And yet--”
He came in, and dropping a pale smile on him she drifted away, calling
to her children.
I thought to myself: “She’s getting on, and something has told her so at
Newport. Poor thing!”
Delane looked as preoccupied as she did; but he said nothing till after
she had left us that evening. Then he suddenly turned to me.
“Look here. You’re a good friend of ours. Will you help me to think out
a rather bothersome question?”
“Me, sir?” I said, surprised by the “ours,” and overcome by so solemn an
appeal from my elder.
He made a wan grimace. “Oh, don’t call me ‘sir’; not during this talk.”
He paused, and then added: “You’re remembering the difference in our
ages. Well, that’s just why I’m asking you. I want the opinion of
somebody who hasn’t had time to freeze into his rut--as most of my
contemporaries have. The fact is, I’m trying to make my wife see that
we’ve got to let her father come and live with us.”
My open-mouthed amazement must have been marked enough to pierce his
gloom, for he gave a slight laugh. “Well, yes--”
I sat dumbfounded. All New York knew what Delane thought of his suave
father-in-law. He had married Leila in spite of her antecedents; but
Bill Gracy, at the outset, had been given to understand that he would
not be received under the Delane roof. Mollified by the regular payment
of a handsome allowance, the old gentleman, with tears in his eyes, was
wont to tell his familiars that personally he didn’t blame his
son-in-law. “Our tastes differ: that’s all. Hayley’s not a bad chap at
heart; give you my word he isn’t.” And the familiars, touched by such
magnanimity, would pledge Hayley in the champagne provided by his last
remittance.
Delane, as I still remained silent, began to explain. “You see,
somebody’s got to look after him--who else is there?”
“But--” I stammered.
“You’ll say he’s always needed looking after? Well, I’ve done my best;
short of having him here. For a long time that seemed impossible; I
quite agreed with Leila--” (So it was Leila who had banished her
father!) “But now,” Delane continued, “it’s different. The poor old
chap’s getting on: he’s been breaking up very fast this last year. And
some bloodsucker of a woman has got hold of him, and threatened to rake
up old race-course rows, and I don’t know what. If we don’t take him in
he’s bound to go under. It’s his last chance--he feels it is. He’s
scared; he wants to come.”
I was still silent, and Delane went on: “You think, I suppose, what’s
the use? Why not let him stew in his own juice? With a decent allowance,
of course. Well, I can’t say ... I can’t tell you ... only I feel it
mustn’t be....”
“And Mrs. Delane?”
“Oh, I see her point. The children are growing up; they’ve hardly known
their grandfather. And having him in the house isn’t going to be like
having a nice old lady in a cap knitting by the fire. He takes up room,
Gracy does; it’s not going to be pleasant. She thinks we ought to
consider the children first. But I don’t agree. The world’s too ugly a
place; why should anyone grow up thinking it’s a flower-garden?
Let ’em take their chance.... And then”--he hesitated, as if
embarrassed--“well, you know her; she’s fond of society. Why shouldn’t
she be? She’s made for it. And of course it’ll cut us off, prevent our
inviting people. She won’t like that, though she doesn’t admit that it
has anything to do with her objecting.”
So, after all, he judged the wife he still worshipped! I was beginning
to see why he had that great structural head, those large quiet
movements. There _was_ something--
“What alternative does Mrs. Delane propose?”
He coloured. “Oh, more money. I sometimes fancy,” he brought out, hardly
above a whisper, “that she thinks I’ve suggested having him here because
I don’t want to give more money. She won’t understand, you see, that
more money would just precipitate things.”
I coloured too, ashamed of my own thought. Had she not, perhaps,
understood; was it not her perspicacity which made her hold out? If her
father was doomed to go under, why prolong the process? I could not be
sure, now, that Delane did not suspect this also, and allow for it.
There was apparently no limit to what he allowed for.
“_You’ll_ never be frozen into a rut,” I ventured, smiling.
“Perhaps not frozen; but sunk down deep. I’m that already. Give me a
hand up, do!” He answered my smile.
I was still in the season of cocksureness, and at a distance could no
doubt have dealt glibly with the problem. But at such short range, and
under those melancholy eyes, I had a chastening sense of inexperience.
“You don’t care to tell me what you think?” He spoke almost
reproachfully.
“Oh, it’s not that.... I’m trying to. But it’s so--so awfully
evangelical,” I brought out--for some of us were already beginning to
read the Russians.
“Is it? Funny, that, too. For I have an idea I got it, with other
things, from an old heathen; that chap I told you about, who used to
come and talk to me by the hour in Washington.”
My interest revived. “That chap in Washington--was he a heathen?”
“Well, he didn’t go to church.” Delane did, regularly taking the
children, while Leila slept off the previous night’s poker, and joining
in the hymns in a robust barytone, always half a tone flat.
He seemed to guess that I found his reply inadequate, and added
helplessly: “You know I’m no scholar: I don’t know what you’d call him.”
He lowered his voice to add: “I don’t think he believed in our Lord.
Yet he taught me Christian charity.”
“He must have been an unusual sort of man, to have made such an
impression on you. What was his name?”
“There’s the pity! I must have heard it, but I was all foggy with fever
most of the time, and can’t remember. Nor what became of him either. One
day he didn’t turn up--that’s all I recall. And soon afterward I was off
again, and didn’t think of him for years. Then, one day, I had to settle
something with myself, and, by George, there he was, telling me the
right and wrong of it! Queer--he comes like that, at long intervals;
turning-points, I suppose.” He frowned, his heavy head sunk forward, his
eyes distant, pursuing the vision.
“Well--hasn’t he come this time?”
“Rather! That’s my trouble--I can’t see things in any way but his. And I
want another eye to help me.”
My heart was beating rather excitedly. I felt small, trivial and
inadequate, like an intruder on some grave exchange of confidences.
I tried to postpone my reply, and at the same time to satisfy another
curiosity. “Have you ever told Mrs. Delane about--about him?”
Delane roused himself and turned to look at me. He lifted his shaggy
eyebrows slightly, protruded his lower lip, and sank once more into
abstraction.
“Well, sir,” I said, answering the look, “_I_ believe in him.”
The blood rose in his dark cheek. He turned to me again, and for a
second the dimple twinkled through his gloom. “That’s your answer?”
I nodded breathlessly.
He got up, walked the length of the room, and came back, pausing in
front of me. “He just vanished. I never even knew his name....”
V
Delane was right; having Bill Gracy under one’s roof was not like
harbouring a nice old lady. I looked on at the sequence of our talk and
marvelled.
New York--the Delanes’ New York--sided unhesitatingly with Leila.
Society’s attitude toward drink and dishonesty was still inflexible: a
man who had had to resign from his clubs went down into a pit presumably
bottomless. The two or three people who thought Delane’s action “rather
fine” made haste to add: “But he ought to have taken a house for the old
man in some quiet place in the country.” Bill Gracy cabined in a quiet
place in the country! Within a week he would have set the neighbourhood
on fire. He was simply not to be managed by proxy; Delane had understood
that, and faced it.
Nothing in the whole unprecedented situation was more odd, more
unexpected and interesting, than Mr. Gracy’s own perception of it. He
too had become aware that his case was without alternative.
“They _had_ to have me here, by gad; I see that myself. Old firebrand
like me ... couldn’t be trusted! Hayley saw it from the first--fine
fellow, my son-in-law. He made no bones about telling me so. Said: I
can’t trust you, father’ ... said it right out to me. By gad, if he’d
talked to me like that a few years sooner I don’t answer for the
consequences! But I ain’t my own man any longer.... I’ve got to put up
with being treated like a baby.... I forgave him on the spot, sir--on
the spot.” His fine eye filled, and he stretched a soft old hand, netted
with veins and freckles, across the table to me.
In the virtual seclusion imposed by his presence I was one of the few
friends the Delanes still saw. I knew Leila was grateful to me for
coming; but I did not need that incentive. It was enough that I could
give even a negative support to Delane. The first months were horrible;
but he was evidently saying to himself: “Things will settle down
gradually,” and just squaring his great shoulders to the storm.
Things didn’t settle down; as embodied in Bill Gracy they continued in a
state of effervescence. Filial care, good food and early hours restored
the culprit to comparative health; he became exuberant, arrogant and
sly. Happily his first imprudence caused a relapse alarming even to
himself. He saw that his powers of resistance were gone, and,
tremulously tender over his own plight, he relapsed into a plaintive
burden. But he was never a passive one. Some part or other he had to
play, usually to somebody’s detriment.
One day a strikingly dressed lady forced her way in to see him, and the
house echoed with her recriminations. Leila objected to the children’s
assisting at such scenes, and when Christmas brought the boys home she
sent them to Canada with a tutor, and herself went with the little girl
to Florida. Delane, Gracy and I sat down alone to our Christmas turkey,
and I wondered what Delane’s queer friend of the Washington hospital
would have thought of that festivity. Mr. Gracy was in a melting mood,
and reviewed his past with an edifying prolixity. “After all, women and
children have always loved me,” he summed up, a tear on his lashes. “But
I’ve been a curse to you and Leila, and I know it, Hayley. That’s my
only merit, I suppose--that I _do_ know it! Well, here’s to turning over
a new leaf ...” and so forth.
One day, a few months later, Mr. Broad, the head of the firm, sent for
me. I was surprised, and somewhat agitated, at the summons, for I was
not often called into his august presence.
“Mr. Delane has a high regard for your ability,” he began affably.
I bowed, thrilled at what I supposed to be a hint of promotion; but Mr.
Broad went on: “I know you are at his house a great deal. In spite of
the difference in age he always speaks of you as an old friend.” Hopes
of promotion faded, yet left me unregretful. Somehow, this was even
better. I bowed again.
Mr. Broad was becoming embarrassed. “You see Mr. William Gracy rather
frequently at his son-in-law’s?”
“He’s living there,” I answered bluntly.
Mr. Broad heaved a sigh. “Yes. It’s a fine thing of Mr. Delane ... but
does he quite realize the consequences? His own family side with his
wife. You’ll wonder at my speaking with such frankness ... but I’ve been
asked ... it has been suggested....”
“If he weren’t there he’d be in the gutter.”
Mr. Broad sighed more deeply. “Ah, it’s a problem.... You may ask why I
don’t speak directly to Mr. Delane ... but it’s so delicate, and he’s so
uncommunicative. Still, there are Institutions.... You don’t feel
there’s anything to be done?”
I was silent, and he shook hands, murmured: “This is confidential,” and
made a motion of dismissal. I withdrew to my desk, feeling that the
situation must indeed be grave if Mr. Broad could so emphasize it by
consulting me.
* * * * *
New York, to ease its mind of the matter, had finally decided that
Hayley Delane was “queer.” There were the two of them, madmen both,
hobnobbing together under his roof; no wonder poor Leila found the place
untenable! That view, bruited about, as such things are, with a
mysterious underground rapidity, prepared me for what was to follow.
One day during the Easter holidays I went to dine with the Delanes, and
finding my host alone with old Gracy I concluded that Leila had again
gone off with the children. She had: she had been gone a week, and had
just sent a letter to her husband saying that she was sailing from
Montreal with the little girl. The boys would be sent back to Groton
with a trusted servant. She would add nothing more, as she did not wish
to reflect unkindly on what his own family agreed with her in thinking
an act of ill-advised generosity. He knew that she was worn out by the
strain he had imposed on her, and would understand her wishing to get
away for a while....
She had left him.
Such events were not, in those days, the matters of course they have
since become; and I doubt if, on a man like Delane, the blow would ever
have fallen lightly. Certainly that evening was the grimmest I ever
passed in his company. I had the same impression as on the day of
Bolton Byrne’s chastisement: the sense that Delane did not care a fig
for public opinion. His knowing that it sided with his wife did not, I
believe, affect him in the least; nor did her own view of his
conduct--and for that I was unprepared. What really ailed him, I
discovered, was his loneliness. He missed her, he wanted her back--her
trivial irritating presence was the thing in the world he could least
dispense with. But when he told me what she had done he simply added: “I
see no help for it; we’ve both of us got a right to our own opinion.”
Again I looked at him with astonishment. Another voice seemed to be
speaking through his lips, and I had it on mine to say: “Was that what
your old friend in Washington would have told you?” But at the door of
the dining-room, where we had lingered, Mr. Gracy’s flushed countenance
and unreverend auburn locks appeared between us.
“Look here, Hayley; what about our little game? If I’m to be packed off
to bed at ten like a naughty boy you might at least give me my hand of
poker first.” He winked faintly at me as we passed into the library, and
added, in a hoarse aside: “If he thinks he’s going to boss me like Leila
he’s mistaken. Flesh and blood’s one thing; now she’s gone I’ll be
damned if I take any bullying.”
That threat was the last flare of Mr. Gracy’s indomitable spirit. The
act of defiance which confirmed it brought on a severe attack of
pleurisy. Delane nursed the old man with dogged patience, and he emerged
from the illness diminished, wizened, the last trace of auburn gone from
his scant curls, and nothing left of his old self but a harmless dribble
of talk.
Delane taught him to play patience, and he used to sit for hours by the
library fire, puzzling over the cards, or talking to the children’s
parrot, which he fed and tended with a touching regularity. He also
devoted a good deal of time to collecting stamps for his youngest
grandson, and his increasing gentleness and playful humour so endeared
him to the servants that a trusted housemaid had to be dismissed for
smuggling cocktails into his room. On fine days Delane, coming home
earlier from the bank, would take him for a short stroll; and one day,
happening to walk up Fifth Avenue behind them, I noticed that the
younger man’s broad shoulders were beginning to stoop like the other’s,
and that there was less lightness in his gait than in Bill Gracy’s
jaunty shamble. They looked like two old men doing their daily mile on
the sunny side of the street. Bill Gracy was no longer a danger to the
community, and Leila might have come home. But I understood from Delane
that she was still abroad with her daughter.
* * * * *
Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it
without explanation. I had noticed that Delane never explained; his
chief strength lay in that negative quality. He was probably hardly
aware that people were beginning to say: “Poor old Gracy--after all,
he’s making a decent end. It was the proper thing for Hayley to do--but
his wife ought to come back and share the burden with him.” In important
matters he was so careless of public opinion that he was not likely to
notice its veering. He wanted Leila to come home; he missed her and the
little girl more and more; but for him there was no “ought” about the
matter.
And one day she came. Absence had rejuvenated her, she had some dazzling
new clothes, she had made the acquaintance of a charming Italian
nobleman who was coming to New York on the next steamer ... she was
ready to forgive her husband, to be tolerant, resigned and even fond.
Delane, with his amazing simplicity, took all this for granted; the
effect of her return was to make him feel he had somehow been in the
wrong, and he was ready to bask in her forgiveness. Luckily for her own
popularity she arrived in time to soothe her parent’s declining moments.
Mr. Gracy was now a mere mild old pensioner and Leila used to drive out
with him regularly, and refuse dull invitations “because she had to be
with Papa.” After all, people said, she had a heart. Her husband
thought so too, and triumphed in the conviction. At that time life under
the Delane roof, though melancholy, was idyllic; it was a pity old Gracy
could not have been kept alive longer, so miraculously did his presence
unite the household it had once divided. But he was beyond being aware
of this, and from a cheerful senility sank into coma and death. The
funeral was attended by the whole of New York, and Leila’s crape veil
was of exactly the right length--a matter of great importance in those
days.
* * * * *
Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins. In
less time than seemed possible in so slow-moving a society, the Delane’s
family crisis had been smothered and forgotten. Nothing seemed changed
in the mutual attitude of husband and wife, or in that of their little
group toward the couple. If anything, Leila had gained in popular esteem
by her assiduity at her father’s bedside; though as a truthful
chronicler I am bound to add that she partly forfeited this advantage by
plunging into a flirtation with the Italian nobleman before her crape
trimmings had been replaced by _passementerie_. On such fundamental
observances old New York still took its stand.