CHARLOTTE LOVELL, at the sound of her cousin’s step, lifted a fevered face from the pillow.
The bedroom, dim and close, smelt of eau de Cologne and fresh linen. Delia, blinking in from the bright winter sun, had to feel her way through a twilight obstructed by dark mahogany.
“I want to see your face, Chatty: unless your head aches too much?”
Charlotte signed “No,” and Delia drew back the heavy window curtains and let in a ray of light. In it she saw the girl’s head, livid against the bed-linen, the brick-rose circles again visible under darkly shadowed lids. Just so, she remembered,poor cousin So-and-so had looked the week before she sailed for Italy!
“Delia!” Charlotte breathed.
Delia drew near the bed, and stood looking down at her cousin with new eyes. Yes: it had been easy enough, the night before, to dispose of Chatty’s future as if it were her own. But now?
“Darling—”
“Oh, begin, please,” the girl interrupted, “or I shall know that what’s coming is too dreadful!”
“Chatty, dearest, if I promised you too much—”
“Jim won’t let you take my child? I knew it! Shall I always go on dreaming things that can never be?”
Delia, her tears running down, knelt by the bed and gave her fresh hand into the other’s burning clutch.
“Don’t think that, dear: think only of what you’d like best....”
“Like best?” The girl sat up sharply against her pillows, alive to the hot fingertips.
“You can’t marry Joe, dear—can you—and keep little Tina?” Delia continued.
“Not keep her with me, no: but somewhere where I could slip off to see her—oh, I had hoped such follies!”
“Give up follies, Charlotte. Keep her where? See your own child in secret? Always in dread of disgrace? Of wrong to your other children? Have you ever thought of that?”
“Oh, my poor head won’t think! You’re trying to tell me that I must give her up?”
“No, dear; but that you must not marry Joe.”
Charlotte sank back on the pillow, her eyes half-closed. “I tell you I must makemy child a home. Delia, you’re too blest to understand!”
“Think yourself blest too, Chatty. You shan’t give up your baby. She shall live with you: you shall take care of her—for me.”
“For you?”
“I promised you I’d take her, didn’t I? But not that you should marry Joe. Only that I would make a home for your baby. Well, that’s done; you two shall be always together.”
Charlotte clung to her and sobbed. “But Joe—I can’t tell him, I can’t!” She put back Delia suddenly. “You haven’t told him of my—of my baby? I couldn’t bear to hurt him as much as that.”
“I told him that you coughed blood yesterday. He’ll see you presently: he’s dreadfully unhappy. He has been given to understand that, in view of your badhealth, the engagement is broken by your wish—and he accepts your decision; but if he weakens, or if you weaken, I can do nothing for you or for little Tina. For heaven’s sake remember that!”
Delia released her hold, and Charlotte leaned back silent, with closed eyes and narrowed lips. Almost like a corpse she lay there. On a chair near the bed hung the poplin with red velvet ribbons which had been made over in honour of her betrothal. A pair of new slippers of bronze kid peeped from beneath it. Poor Chatty! She had hardly had time to be pretty....
Delia sat by the bed motionless, her eyes on her cousin’s closed face. They followed the course of a tear that forced a way between Charlotte’s tight lids, hung on the lashes, glittered slowly down thecheeks. As the tear reached the narrowed lips they spoke.
“Shall I live with her somewhere, do you mean? Just she and I together?”
“Just you and she.”
“In a little house?”
“In a little house....”
“You’re sure, Delia?”
“Sure, my dearest.”
Charlotte once more raised herself on her elbow and sent a hand groping under the pillow. She drew out a narrow ribbon on which hung a diamond ring.
“I had taken it off already,” she said simply, and handed it to Delia.
YOU could always have told, every one agreed afterward, that Charlotte Lovell was meant to be an old maid. Even before her illness it had been manifest: there was something prim about her in spite of her fiery hair. Lucky enough for her, poor girl, considering her wretched health in her youth: Mrs. James Ralston’s contemporaries, for instance, remembered Charlotte as a mere ghost, coughing her lungs out—that, of course, had been the reason for her breaking her engagement with Joe Ralston.
True, she had recovered very rapidly, in spite of the peculiar treatment she was given. The Lovells, as every one knew,couldn’t afford to send her to Italy; the previous experiment in Georgia had been unsuccessful; and so she was packed off to a farm-house on the Hudson—a little place on the James Ralstons’ property—where she lived for five or six years with an Irish servant-woman and a foundling baby. The story of the foundling was another queer episode in Charlotte’s history. From the time of her first illness, when she was only twenty-two or three, she had developed an almost morbid tenderness for children, especially for the children of the poor. It was said—Dr. Lanskell was understood to have said—that the baffled instinct of motherhood was peculiarly intense in cases where lung-disease prevented marriage. And so, when it was decided that Chatty must break her engagement to Joe Ralston and go to live in the country, the doctor hadtold her family that the only hope of saving her lay in not separating her entirely from her pauper children, but in letting her choose one of them, the youngest and most pitiable, and devote herself to its care. So the James Ralstons had lent her their little farm-house, and Mrs. Jim, with her extraordinary gift of taking things in at a glance, had at once arranged everything, and even pledged herself to look after the baby if Charlotte died.
Charlotte did not die. She lived to grow robust and middle-aged, energetic and even tyrannical. And as the transformation in her character took place she became more and more like the typical old maid: precise, methodical, absorbed in trifles, and attaching an exaggerated importance to the smallest social and domestic observances. Such was her reputation as a vigilant house-wife that, when poor JimRalston was killed by a fall from his horse, and left Delia, still young, with a boy and girl to bring up, it seemed perfectly natural that the heart-broken widow should take her cousin to live with her and share her task. But Delia Ralston never did things quite like other people. When she took Charlotte she took Charlotte’s foundling too: a dark-haired child with pale brown eyes, and the odd incisive manner of children who have lived too much with their elders. The little girl was called Tina Lovell: it was vaguely supposed that Charlotte had adopted her. She grew up on terms of affectionate equality with her young Ralston cousins, and almost as much so—it might be said—with the two women who mothered her. But, impelled by an instinct of imitation which no one took the trouble to correct, she always called Delia Ralston “Mamma,” andCharlotte Lovell “Aunt Chatty.” She was a brilliant and engaging creature, and people marvelled at poor Chatty’s luck in having chosen so interesting a specimen among her foundlings (for she was by this time supposed to have had a whole asylum-full to choose from).
The agreeable elderly bachelor, Sillerton Jackson, returning from a prolonged sojourn in Paris (where he was understood to have been made much of by the highest personages) was immensely struck by Tina’s charms when he saw her at her coming-out ball, and asked Delia’s permission to come some evening and dine alone with her and her young people. He complimented the widow on the rosy beauty of her own young Delia; but the mother’s keen eye perceived that all the while he was watching Tina, and after dinner he confided to the older ladies thatthere was something “very French” in the girl’s way of doing her hair, and that in the capital of all the Elegances she would have been pronounced extremely stylish.
“Oh—” Delia deprecated, beamingly, while Charlotte Lovell sat bent over her work with pinched lips; but Tina, who had been laughing with her cousins at the other end of the room, was around upon her elders in a flash.
“I heard what Mr. Sillerton said! Yes, I did, Mamma: he says I do my hair stylishly. Didn’t I always tell you so? Iknowit’s more becoming to let it curl as it wants to than to plaster it down with bandoline like Aunty’s—”
“Tina, Tina—you always think people are admiring you!” Miss Lovell protested.
“Why shouldn’t I, when they do?” the girl laughingly challenged; and, turning her mocking eyes on Sillerton Jackson:“Do tell Aunt Charlotte not to be so dreadfully old-maidish!”
Delia saw the blood rise to Charlotte Lovell’s face. It no longer painted two brick-rose circles on her thin cheek-bones, but diffused a harsh flush over her whole countenance, from the collar fastened with an old-fashioned garnet brooch to the pepper-and-salt hair (with no trace of red left in it) flattened down over her hollow temples.
That evening, when they went up to bed, Delia called Tina into her room.
“You ought not to speak to your Aunt Charlotte as you did this evening, dear. It’s disrespectful—you must see that it hurts her.”
The girl overflowed with compunction. “Oh, I’m so sorry! Because I said she was an old maid? But sheis, isn’t she, Mamma? In her inmost soul, I mean. I don’t believe she’s ever been young—ever thought of fun or admiration or falling in love—do you? That’s why she never understands me, and you always do, you darling dear Mamma.” With one of her light movements, Tina was in the widow’s arms.
“Child, child,” Delia softly scolded, kissing the dark curls planted in five points on the girl’s forehead.
There was a soft foot-fall in the passage, and Charlotte Lovell stood in the door. Delia, without moving, sent her a glance of welcome over Tina’s shoulder.
“Come in, Charlotte. I’m scolding Tina for behaving like a spoilt baby before Sillerton Jackson. What will he think of her?”
“Just what she deserves, probably,” Charlotte returned with a cold smile. Tina went toward her, and her thin lips touched the girl’s proffered forehead just whereDelia’s warm kiss had rested. “Goodnight, child,” she said in her dry tone of dismissal.
The door closed on the two women, and Delia signed to Charlotte to take the armchair opposite to her own.
“Not so near the fire,” Miss Lovell answered. She chose a straight-backed seat, and sat down with folded hands. Delia’s eyes rested absently on the thin ringless fingers: she wondered why Charlotte never wore her mother’s jewels.
“I overheard what you were saying to Tina, Delia. You were scolding her because she called me an old maid.”
It was Delia’s turn to colour. “I scolded her for being disrespectful, dear; if you heard what I said you can’t think that I was too severe.”
“Not too severe: no. I’ve never thoughtyou too severe with Tina; on the contrary.”
“You think I spoil her?”
“Sometimes.”
Delia felt an unreasoning resentment. “What was it I said that you object to?”
Charlotte returned her glance steadily. “I would rather she thought me an old maid than—”
“Oh—” Delia murmured. With one of her quick leaps of intuition she had entered into the other’s soul, and once more measured its shuddering loneliness.
“What else,” Charlotte inexorably pursued, “canshe possibly be allowed to think me—ever?”
“I see ... I see ...” the widow faltered.
“A ridiculous narrow-minded old maid—nothing else,” Charlotte Lovell insisted,getting to her feet, “or I shall never feel safe with her.”
“Goodnight, my dear,” Delia said compassionately. There were moments when she almost hated Charlotte for being Tina’s mother, and others, such as this, when her heart was wrung by the tragic spectacle of that unavowed bond.
Charlotte seemed to have divined her thought.
“Oh, but don’t pity me! She’s mine,” she murmured, going.
DELIA RALSTON sometimes felt that the real events of her life did not begin until both her children had contracted—so safely and suitably—their irreproachable New York alliances. The boy had married first, choosing a Vandergrave in whose father’s bank at Albany he was to have an immediate junior partnership; and young Delia (as her mother had foreseen she would) had selected John Junius, the safest and soundest of the many young Halseys, and followed him to his parents’ house the year after her brother’s marriage.
After young Delia had left the house in Gramercy Park it was inevitable that Tinashould take the centre front of its narrow stage. Tina had reached the marriageable age, she was admired and sought after; but what hope was there of her finding a husband? The two watchful women did not propound this question to each other; but Delia Ralston, brooding over it day by day, and taking it up with her when she mounted at night to her bedroom, knew that Charlotte Lovell, at the same hour, carried the same problem with her to the floor above.
The two cousins, during their eight years of life together, had seldom openly disagreed. Indeed, it might almost have been said that there was nothing open in their relation. Delia would have had it otherwise: after they had once looked so deeply into each other’s souls it seemed unnatural that a veil should fall between them. But she understood that Tina’s ignorance of her origin must at all costs be preserved, and that Charlotte Lovell, abrupt, passionate and inarticulate, knew of no other security than to wall herself up in perpetual silence.
So far had she carried this self-imposed reticence that Mrs. Ralston was surprised at her suddenly asking, soon after young Delia’s marriage, to be allowed to move down into the small bedroom next to Tina’s that had been left vacant by the bride’s departure.
“But you’ll be so much less comfortable there, Chatty. Have you thought of that? Or is it on account of the stairs?”
“No; it’s not the stairs,” Charlotte answered with her usual bluntness. How could she avail herself of the pretext Delia offered her, when Delia knew that she still ran up and down the three flights like a girl? “It’s because I should be next toTina,” she said, in a low voice that jarred like an untuned string.
“Oh—very well. As you please.” Mrs. Ralston could not tell why she felt suddenly irritated by the request, unless it were that she had already amused herself with the idea of fitting up the vacant room as a sitting-room for Tina. She had meant to do it in pink and pale green, like an opening flower.
“Of course, if there is any reason—” Charlotte suggested, as if reading her thought.
“None whatever; except that—well, I’d meant to surprise Tina by doing the room up as a sort of little boudoir where she could have her books and things, and see her girl friends.”
“You’re too kind, Delia; but Tina mustn’t have boudoirs,” Miss Lovellanswered ironically, the green specks showing in her eyes.
“Very well: as you please,” Delia repeated, in the same irritated tone. “I’ll have your things brought down tomorrow.”
Charlotte paused in the doorway. “You’re sure there’s no other reason?”
“Other reason? Why should there be?” The two women looked at each other almost with hostility, and Charlotte turned to go.
The talk once over, Delia was annoyed with herself for having yielded to Charlotte’s wish. Why must it always be she who gave in, she who, after all, was the mistress of the house, and to whom both Charlotte and Tina might almost be said to owe their very existence, or at least all that made it worth having? Yet whenever any question arose about the girl itwas invariably Charlotte who gained her point, Delia who yielded: it seemed as if Charlotte, in her mute obstinate way, were determined to take every advantage of the dependence that made it impossible for a woman of Delia’s nature to oppose her.
In truth, Delia had looked forward more than she knew to the quiet talks with Tina to which the little boudoir would have lent itself. While her own daughter inhabited the room, Mrs. Ralston had been in the habit of spending an hour there every evening, chatting with the two girls while they undressed, and listening to their comments on the incidents of the day. She always knew beforehand exactly what her own girl would say; but Tina’s views and opinions were a perpetual delicious shock to her. Not that they were strange or unfamiliar; there were moments when they seemed to well straight up from the dumbdepths of Delia’s own past. Only they expressed feelings she had never uttered, ideas she had hardly avowed to herself: Tina sometimes said things which Delia Ralston, in far-off self-communions, had imagined herself saying to Clement Spender.
And now there would be an end to these evening talks: if Charlotte had asked to be lodged next to her daughter, might it not conceivably be because she wished them to end? It had never before occurred to Delia that her influence over Tina might be resented; now the discovery flashed a light far down into the abyss which had always divided the two women. But a moment later Delia reproached herself for attributing feelings of jealousy to her cousin. Was it not rather to herself that she should have ascribed them? Charlotte, as Tina’s mother, had every right to wishto be near her, near her in all senses of the word; what claim had Delia to oppose to that natural privilege? The next morning she gave the order that Charlotte’s things should be taken down to the room next to Tina’s.
That evening, when bedtime came, Charlotte and Tina went upstairs together; but Delia lingered in the drawing-room, on the pretext of having letters to write. In truth, she dreaded to pass the threshold where, evening after evening, the fresh laughter of the two girls used to waylay her while Charlotte Lovell already slept her old-maid sleep on the floor above. A pang went through Delia at the thought that henceforth she would be cut off from this means of keeping her hold on Tina.
An hour later, when she mounted the stairs in her turn, she was guiltily conscious of moving as noiselessly as she could along the heavy carpet of the corridor, and of pausing longer than was necessary over the putting out of the gas-jet on the landing. As she lingered she strained her ears for the sound of voices from the adjoining doors behind which Charlotte and Tina slept; she would have been secretly hurt at hearing talk and laughter from within. But none came, nor was there any light beneath the doors. Evidently Charlotte, in her hard methodical way, had said goodnight to her daughter, and gone straight to bed as usual. Perhaps she had never approved of Tina’s vigils, of the long undressing punctuated with mirth and confidences; she might have asked for the room next to her daughter’s simply because she did not want the girl to miss her “beauty sleep.”
Whenever Delia tried to explore thesecret of her cousin’s actions she returned from the adventure humiliated and abashed by the base motives she found herself attributing to Charlotte. How was it that she, Delia Ralston, whose happiness had been open and avowed to the world, so often found herself envying poor Charlotte the secret of her scanted motherhood? She hated herself for this movement of envy whenever she detected it, and tried to atone for it by a softened manner and a more anxious regard for Charlotte’s feelings; but the attempt was not always successful, and Delia sometimes wondered if Charlotte did not resent any show of sympathy as an indirect glance at her misfortune. The worst of suffering such as hers was that it left one sore to the gentlest touch....
Delia, slowly undressing before the same lace-draped toilet-glass which hadreflected her bridal image, was turning over these thoughts when she heard a light knock. She opened the door, and there stood Tina, in a dressing-gown, her dark curls falling over her shoulders.
With a happy heart-beat Delia held out her arms.
“I had to say goodnight, Mamma,” the girl whispered.
“Of course, dear.” Delia pressed a long kiss on her lifted forehead. “Run off now, or you might disturb your aunt. You know she sleeps badly, and you must be as quiet as a mouse now she’s next to you.”
“Yes, I know,” Tina acquiesced, with a grave glance that was almost of complicity.
She asked no further question, she did not linger: lifting Delia’s hand she held it a moment against her cheek, and then stole out as noiselessly as she had come.
“BUT you must see,” Charlotte Lovell insisted, laying aside theEvening Post, “that Tina has changed. You do see that?”
The two women were sitting alone by the drawing-room fire in Gramercy Park. Tina had gone to dine with her cousin, young Mrs. John Junius Halsey, and was to be taken afterward to a ball at the Vandergraves’, from which the John Juniuses had promised to see her home. Mrs. Ralston and Charlotte, their early dinner finished, had the long evening to themselves. Their custom, on such occasions, was for Charlotte to read the news aloud to her cousin, while the latter embroidered; but tonight, all through Charlotte’s conscientious progress from column to column, without a slip or an omission, Delia had felt her, for some special reason, alert to take advantage of her daughter’s absence.
To gain time before answering, Mrs. Ralston bent over a stitch in her delicate white embroidery.
“Tina changed? Since when?” she questioned.
The answer flashed out instantly. “Since Lanning Halsey has been coming here so much.”
“Lanning? I used to think he came for Delia,” Mrs. Ralston mused, speaking at random to gain still more time.
“It’s natural you should suppose that every one came for Delia,” Charlotte rejoined dryly; “but as Lanning continuesto seek every chance of being with Tina—”
Mrs. Ralston raised her head and stole a swift glance at her cousin. She had in truth noticed that Tina had changed, as a flower changes at the mysterious moment when the unopened petals flush from within. The girl had grown handsomer, shyer, more silent, at times more irrelevantly gay. But Delia had not associated these variations of mood with the presence of Lanning Halsey, one of the numerous youths who had haunted the house before young Delia’s marriage. There had, indeed, been a moment when Mrs. Ralston’s eye had been fixed, with a certain apprehension, on the handsome Lanning. Among all the sturdy and stolid Halsey cousins he was the only one to whom a prudent mother might have hesitated to entrust her daughter; it would have been hard to say why,except that he was handsomer and more conversable than the rest, chronically unpunctual, and totally unperturbed by the fact. Clem Spender had been like that; and what if young Delia—?
But young Delia’s mother was speedily reassured. The girl, herself arch and appetizing, took no interest in the corresponding graces except when backed by more solid qualities. A Ralston to the core, she demanded the Ralston virtues, and chose the Halsey most worthy of a Ralston bride.
Mrs. Ralston felt that Charlotte was waiting for her to speak. “It will be hard to get used to the idea of Tina’s marrying,” she said gently. “I don’t know what we two old women shall do, alone in this empty house—for it will be an empty house then. But I suppose we ought to face the idea.”
“Idoface it,” said Charlotte Lovell gravely.
“And you dislike Lanning? I mean, as a husband for Tina?”
Miss Lovell folded the evening paper, and stretched out a thin hand for her knitting. She glanced across the citron-wood work-table at her cousin. “Tina must not be too difficult—” she began.
“Oh—” Delia protested, reddening.
“Let us call things by their names,” the other evenly pursued. “That’s my way, when I speak at all. Usually, as you know, I say nothing.”
The widow made a sign of assent, and Charlotte went on: “It’s better so. But I’ve always known a time would come when we should have to talk this thing out.”
“Talk this thing out? You and I? What thing?”
“Tina’s future.”
There was a silence. Delia Ralston, who always responded instantly to the least appeal to her sincerity, breathed a deep sigh of relief. At last the ice in Charlotte’s breast was breaking up!
“My dear,” Delia murmured, “you know how much Tina’s happiness concerns me. If you disapprove of Lanning Halsey as a husband, have you any other candidate in mind?”
Miss Lovell smiled one of her faint hard smiles. “I am not aware that there is a queue at the door. Nor do I disapprove of Lanning Halsey as a husband. Personally, I find him very agreeable; I understand his attraction for Tina.”
“Ah—Tinaisattracted?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Ralston pushed aside her work and thoughtfully considered her cousin’s sharply-lined face. Never had Charlotte Lovell more completely presented the typical image of the old maid than as she sat there, upright on her straight-backed chair, with narrowed elbows and clicking needles, and imperturbably discussed her daughter’s marriage.
“I don’t understand, Chatty. Whatever Lanning’s faults are—and I don’t believe they’re grave—I share your liking for him. After all—” Mrs. Ralston paused—“what is it that people find so reprehensible in him? Chiefly, as far as I can hear, that he can’t decide on the choice of a profession. The New York view about that is rather narrow, as we know. Young men may have other tastes ... artistic ... literary ... they may even have difficulty in deciding....”
Both women coloured slightly, and Delia guessed that the same reminiscencewhich shook her own bosom also throbbed under Charlotte’s strait bodice.
Charlotte spoke. “Yes: I understand that. But hesitancy about a profession may cause hesitancy about ... other decisions....”
“What do you mean? Surely not that Lanning—?”
“Lanning has not asked Tina to marry him.”
“And you think he’s hesitating?”
Charlotte paused. The steady click of her needles punctuated the silence as once, years before, it had been punctuated by the tick of the Parisian clock on Delia’s mantel. As Delia’s memory fled back to that scene she felt its mysterious tension in the air.
Charlotte spoke. “Lanning is not hesitating any longer: he has decidednottomarry Tina. But he has also decided—not to give up seeing her.”
Delia flushed abruptly; she was irritated and bewildered by Charlotte’s oracular phrases, doled out between parsimonious lips.
“You don’t mean that he has offered himself and then drawn back? I can’t think him capable of such an insult to Tina.”
“He has not insulted Tina. He has simply told her that he can’t afford to marry. Until he chooses a profession his father will allow him only a few hundred dollars a year; and that may be suppressed if—if he marries against his parents’ wishes.”
It was Delia’s turn to be silent. The past was too overwhelmingly resuscitated in Charlotte’s words. Clement Spender stood before her, irresolute, impecunious,persuasive. Ah, if only she had let herself be persuaded!
“I’m very sorry that this should have happened to Tina. But as Lanning appears to have behaved honourably, and withdrawn without raising false expectations, we must hope ... we must hope....” Delia paused, not knowing what they must hope.
Charlotte Lovell laid down her knitting. “You know as well as I do, Delia, that every young man who is inclined to fall in love with Tina will find as good reasons for not marrying her.”
“Then you think Lanning’s excuses are a pretext?”
“Naturally. The first of many that will be found by his successors—for of course he will have successors. Tina—attracts.”
“Ah,” Delia murmured.
Here they were at last face to face withthe problem which, through all the years of silence and evasiveness, had lain as close to the surface as a corpse too hastily buried! Delia drew another deep breath, which again was almost one of relief. She had always known that it would be difficult, almost impossible, to find a husband for Tina; and much as she desired Tina’s happiness, some inmost selfishness whispered how much less lonely and purposeless the close of her own life would be should the girl be forced to share it. But how say this to Tina’s mother?
“I hope you exaggerate, Charlotte. There may be disinterested characters.... But, in any case, surely Tina need not be unhappy here, with us who love her so dearly.”
“Tina an old maid? Never!” Charlotte Lovell rose abruptly, her closed hand crashing down on the slender work-table.“My child shall have her life ... her own life ... whatever it costs me....”
Delia’s ready sympathy welled up. “I understand your feeling. I should want also ... hard as it will be to let her go. But surely there is no hurry—no reason for looking so far ahead. The child is not twenty. Wait.”
Charlotte stood before her, motionless, perpendicular. At such moments she made Delia think of lava struggling through granite: there seemed no issue for the fires within.
“Wait? But ifshedoesn’t wait?”
“But if he has withdrawn—what do you mean?”
“He has given up marrying her—but not seeing her.”
Delia sprang up in her turn, flushed and trembling.
“Charlotte! Do you know what you’re insinuating?”
“Yes: I know.”
“But it’s too outrageous. No decent girl—”
The words died on Delia’s lips. Charlotte Lovell held her eyes inexorably. “Girls are not always what you call decent,” she declared.
Mrs. Ralston turned slowly back to her seat. Her tambour frame had fallen to the floor; she stooped heavily to pick it up. Charlotte’s gaunt figure hung over her, relentless as doom.
“I can’t imagine, Charlotte, what is gained by saying such things—even by hinting them. Surely you trust your own child.”
Charlotte laughed. “My mother trusted me,” she said.
“How dare you—how dare you?” Deliabegan; but her eyes fell, and she felt a tremor of weakness in her throat.
“Oh, I dare anything for Tina, even to judging her as she is,” Tina’s mother murmured.
“As she is? She’s perfect!”
“Let us say then that she must pay for my imperfections. All I want is that she shouldn’t pay too heavily.”
Mrs. Ralston sat silent. It seemed to her that Charlotte spoke with the voice of all the dark destinies coiled under the safe surface of life; and that to such a voice there was no answer but an awed acquiescence.
“Poor Tina!” she breathed.
“Oh, I don’t intend that she shall suffer! It’s not for that that I’ve waited ... waited. Only I’ve made mistakes: mistakes that I understand now, and mustremedy. You’ve been too good to us—and we must go.”
“Go?” Delia gasped.
“Yes. Don’t think me ungrateful. You saved my child once—do you suppose I can forget? But now it’s my turn—it’s I who must save her. And it’s only by taking her away from everything here—from everything she’s known till now—that I can do it. She’s lived too long among unrealities: and she’s like me. They won’t content her.”
“Unrealities?” Delia echoed vaguely.
“Unrealities for her. Young men who make love to her and can’t marry her. Happy households where she’s welcomed till she’s suspected of designs on a brother or a husband—or else exposed to their insults. How could we ever have imagined, either of us, that the child could escape disaster? I thought only of her presenthappiness—of all the advantages, for both of us, of being with you. But this affair with young Halsey has opened my eyes. I must take Tina away. We must go and live somewhere where we’re not known, where we shall be among plain people, leading plain lives. Somewhere where she can find a husband, and make herself a home.”
Charlotte paused. She had spoken in a rapid monotonous tone, as if by rote; but now her voice broke and she repeated painfully: “I’m not ungrateful.”
“Oh, don’t let’s speak of gratitude! What place has it between you and me?”
Delia had risen and begun to move uneasily about the room. She longed to plead with Charlotte, to implore her not to be in haste, to picture to her the cruelty of severing Tina from all her habits and associations, of carrying her inexplicablyaway to lead “a plain life among plain people.” What chance was there, indeed, that a creature so radiant would tamely submit to such a fate, or find an acceptable husband in such conditions? The change might only precipitate a tragedy. Delia’s experience was too limited for her to picture exactly what might happen to a girl like Tina, suddenly cut off from all that sweetened life for her; but vague visions of revolt and flight—of a “fall” deeper and more irretrievable than Charlotte’s—flashed through her agonized imagination.
“It’s too cruel—it’s too cruel,” she cried, speaking to herself rather than to Charlotte.
Charlotte, instead of answering, glanced abruptly at the clock.
“Do you know what time it is? Past midnight. I mustn’t keep you sitting up for my foolish girl.”
Delia’s heart contracted. She saw that Charlotte wished to cut the conversation short, and to do so by reminding her that only Tina’s mother had a right to decide what Tina’s future should be. At that moment, though Delia had just protested that there could be no question of gratitude between them, Charlotte Lovell seemed to her a monster of ingratitude, and it was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: “Have all the years then given me no share in Tina?” But at the same instant she had put herself once more in Charlotte’s place, and was feeling the mother’s fierce terrors for her child. It was natural enough that Charlotte should resent the faintest attempt to usurp in private the authority she could never assert in public. With a pang of compassion Delia realized that she herself was literally the one being on earth before whomCharlotte could act the mother. “Poor thing—ah, let her!” she murmured inwardly.
“But why should you sit up for Tina? She has the key, and Delia is to bring her home.”
Charlotte Lovell did not immediately answer. She rolled up her knitting, looked severely at one of the candelabra on the mantelpiece, and crossed over to straighten it. Then she picked up her work-bag.
“Yes, as you say—why should any one sit up for her?” She moved about the room, putting out the lamps, covering the fire, assuring herself that the windows were bolted, while Delia passively watched her. Then the two cousins lit their bedroom candles and walked upstairs through the darkened house. Charlotte seemed determined to make no further allusion tothe subject of their talk. On the landing she paused, bending her head toward Delia’s nightly kiss.
“I hope they’ve kept up your fire,” she said, with her capable housekeeping air; and on Delia’s hasty reassurance the two murmured a simultaneous “Goodnight,” and Charlotte turned down the passage to her room.
DELIA’S fire had been kept up, and her dressing-gown was warming on an arm-chair near the hearth. But she neither undressed nor yet seated herself. Her conversation with Charlotte had filled her with a deep unrest.
For a few moments she stood in the middle of the floor, looking slowly about her. Nothing had ever been changed in the room which, even as a bride, she had planned to modernize. All her dreams of renovation had faded long ago. Some deep central indifference had gradually made her regard herself as a third person, living the life meant for another woman, a woman totally unrelated to the vividDelia Lovell who had entered that house so full of plans and visions. The fault, she knew, was not her husband’s. With a little managing and a little wheedling she would have gained every point as easily as she had gained the capital one of taking the foundling baby under her wing. The difficulty was that, after that victory, nothing else seemed worth trying for. The first sight of little Tina had somehow decentralized Delia Ralston’s whole life, making her indifferent to everything else, except indeed the welfare of her own husband and children. Ahead of her she saw only a future full of duties, and these she had gaily and faithfully accomplished. But her own life was over: she felt as detached as a cloistered nun.
The change in her was too deep not to be visible. The Ralstons openly gloried in dear Delia’s conformity. Each acquiescence passed for a concession, and the family doctrine was fortified by such fresh proofs of its durability. Now, as Delia glanced about her at the Léopold Robert lithographs, the family daguerreotypes, the rosewood and mahogany, she understood that she was looking at the walls of her own grave.
The change had come on the day when Charlotte Lovell, cowering on that very lounge, had made her terrible avowal. Then for the first time Delia, with a kind of fearful exaltation, had heard the blind forces of life groping and crying underfoot. But on that day also she had known herself excluded from them, doomed to dwell among shadows. Life had passed her by, and left her with the Ralstons.
Very well, then! She would make the best of herself, and of the Ralstons. The vow was immediate and unflinching; andfor nearly twenty years she had gone on observing it. Once only had she been not a Ralston but herself; once only had it seemed worth while. And now perhaps the same challenge had sounded again; again, for a moment, it might be worth while to live. Not for the sake of Clement Spender—poor Clement, married years ago to a plain determined cousin, who had hunted him down in Rome, and enclosing him in an unrelenting domesticity, had obliged all New York on the grand tour to buy his pictures with a resigned grimace. No, not for Clement Spender, hardly for Charlotte or even for Tina; but for her own sake, hers, Delia Ralston’s, for the sake of her one missed vision, her forfeited reality, she would once more break down the Ralston barriers and reach out into the world.
A faint sound through the silent housedisturbed her meditation. Listening, she heard Charlotte Lovell’s door open and her stiff petticoats rustle toward the landing. A light glanced under the door and vanished; Charlotte had passed Delia’s threshold on her way downstairs.
Without moving, Delia continued to listen. Perhaps the careful Charlotte had gone down to make sure that the front door was not bolted, or that she had really covered up the fire. If that were her object, her step would presently be heard returning. But no step sounded; and it became gradually evident that Charlotte had gone down to wait for her daughter. Why?
Delia’s bedroom was at the front of the house. She stole across the heavy carpet, drew aside the curtains and cautiously folded back the inner shutters. Below her lay the empty square, white with moon-night, its tree-trunks patterned on a freshsprinkling of snow. The houses opposite slept in darkness; not a footfall broke the white surface, not a wheel-track marred the brilliant street. Overhead a heaven full of stars swam in the moonlight.
Of the households around Gramercy Park Delia knew that only two others had gone to the ball: the Petrus Vandergraves and their cousins the young Parmly Ralstons. The Lucius Lannings had just entered on their three years of mourning for Mrs. Lucius’s mother (it was hard on their daughter Kate, just eighteen, who would be unable to “come out” till she was twenty-one); young Mrs. Marcy Mingott was “expecting her third,” and consequently secluded from the public eye for nearly a year; and the other denizens of the square belonged to the undifferentiated and uninvited.
Delia pressed her forehead against thepane. Before long carriages would turn the corner, the sleeping square ring with hoof-beats, fresh laughter and young farewells mount from the door-steps. But why was Charlotte waiting for her daughter downstairs in the darkness?
The Parisian clock struck one. Delia came back into the room, raked the fire, picked up a shawl, and, wrapped in it, returned to her vigil. Ah, how old she must have grown, that she should feel the cold at such a moment! It reminded her of what the future held for her: neuralgia, rheumatism, stiffness, accumulating infirmities. And never had she kept a moonlight watch with a lover’s arms to warm her....
The square still lay silent. Yet the ball must surely be ending: the gayest dances did not last long after one in the morning, and the drive from UniversityPlace to Gramercy Park was a short one. Delia leaned in the embrasure and listened.
Hoof-beats, muffled by the snow, sounded in Irving Place, and the Petrus 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 annoyedwith 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 lastvalse.
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 tiltingher 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 hersecret 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, sawthe 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 beenacted: 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 muterepresentation 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.
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 wassound; 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 youare,” 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 supposeyou 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 summonedCharlotte 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 shedid 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 foreseenand 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 upthis 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.