Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,And all the air a solemn stillness holds....
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,And all the air a solemn stillness holds....
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,And all the air a solemn stillness holds....
Little sympathy as I felt for Mrs. Delane, I could not believe it was his marriage which had checked Delane’s interest in books. To judge from his very limited stock of allusions and quotations, his reading seemed to have ceased a good dealearlier than his first meeting with Leila Gracy. Exploring him like a geologist, I found, for several layers under the Leila stratum, no trace of any interest in letters; and I concluded that, like other men I knew, his mind had been receptive up to a certain age, and had then snapped shut on what it possessed, like a replete crustacean never reached by another high tide. People, I had by this time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many years longer they continued to be alive; and I suspected that Delane had stopped at about nineteen. That date would roughly coincide with the end of the civil war, and with his return to the common-place existence from which he had never since deviated. Those four years had apparently filled to the brim every crevice of his being. For I could not hold that he had gone through themunawares, as some famous figures, puppets of fate, have been tossed from heights to depths of human experience without once knowing what was happening to them—forfeiting a crown by the insistence on some prescribed ceremonial, or by carrying on their flight a certain monumental dressing-case.
No, Hayley Delane had felt the war, had been made different by it; how different I saw only when I compared him to the other “veterans” who, from being regarded by me as the dullest of my father’s dinner-guests, were now become figures of absorbing interest. Time was when, at my mother’s announcement that General Scole or Major Detrancy was coming to dine, I had invariably found a pretext for absenting myself; now, when I knew they were expected, my chief object was to persuade her to invite Delane.
“But he’s so much younger—he cares only for the sporting set. He won’t be flattered at being asked with old gentlemen.” And my mother, with a slight smile, would add: “If Hayley has a weakness, it’s the wish to be thought younger than he is—on his wife’s account, I suppose.”
Once, however, she did invite him, and he accepted; and we got over having to ask Mrs. Delane (who undoubtedlywouldhave been bored) by leaving out Mrs. Scole and Mrs. Ruscott, and making it a “man’s dinner” of the old-fashioned sort, with canvas-backs, a bowl of punch, and my mother the only lady present—the kind of evening my father still liked best.
I remember, at that dinner, how attentively I studied the contrasts, and tried to detect the points of resemblance, between General Scole, old Detrancy and Delane. Allusions to the war—anecdotes of Bull Run and Andersonville, of Lincoln, Seward and MacClellan, were often on Major Detrancy’s lips, especially after the punch had gone round. “When a fellow’s been through the war,” he used to say as a preface to almost everything, from expressing his opinion of last Sunday’s sermon to praising the roasting of a canvas-back. Not so General Scole. No one knew exactly why he had been raised to the rank he bore, but he tacitly proclaimed his right to it by never alluding to the subject. He was a tall and silent old gentleman with a handsome shock of white hair, half-shut blue eyes glinting between veined lids, and an impressively upright carriage. His manners were perfect—so perfect that they stood him in lieu of language, and people wouldsay afterward how agreeable he had been when he had only bowed and smiled, and got up and sat down again, with an absolute mastery of those difficult arts. He was said to be a judge of horses and Madeira, but he never rode, and was reported to give very indifferent wines to the rare guests he received in his grim old house in Irving Place.
He and Major Detrancy had one trait in common—the extreme caution of the old New Yorker. They viewed with instinctive distrust anything likely to derange their habits, diminish their comfort, or lay on them any unwonted responsibilities, civic or social; and slow as their other mental processes were, they showed a supernatural quickness in divining when a seemingly harmless conversation might draw them into “signing a paper,” backing up even the mildest attempt at municipal reform, or pledging them to support, on however small a scale, any new and unfamiliar cause.
According to their creed, gentlemen subscribed as handsomely as their means allowed to the Charity Organization Society, the Patriarchs Balls, the Children’s Aid, and their own parochial charities. Everything beyond savoured of “politics,” revivalist meetings, or the attempts of vulgar persons to buy their way into the circle of the elect; even the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, being of more recent creation, seemed open to doubt, and they thought it rash of certain members of the clergy to lend it their names. “But then,” as Major Detrancy said, “in this noisy age some people will do anything to attract notice.” And they breathed a joint sigh over the vanished “Old New York” of their youth,the exclusive and impenetrable New York to which Rubini and Jenny Lind had sung and Mr. Thackeray lectured, the New York which had declined to receive Charles Dickens, and which, out of revenge, he had so scandalously ridiculed.
Yet Major Detrancy and General Scole had fought all through the war, had participated in horrors and agonies untold, endured all manner of hardships and privations, suffered the extremes of heat and cold, hunger, sickness and wounds; and it had all faded like an indigestion comfortably slept off, leaving them perfectly commonplace and happy.
The same was true, with a difference, of Colonel Ruscott, who, though not by birth of the same group, had long since been received into it, partly because he was a companion in arms, partly because of having married a Hayley connection.I can see Colonel Ruscott still: a dapper handsome little fellow, rather too much of both, with a lustrous wave to his hair (or was it a wig?), and a dash too much of Cologne on too-fine cambric. He had been in the New York militia in his youth, had “gone out” with the great Seventh; and the Seventh, ever since, had been the source and centre of his being, as still, to some octogenarians, their University dinner is.
Colonel Ruscott specialized in chivalry. For him the war was “the blue and the grey,” the rescue of lovely Southern girls, anecdotes about Old Glory, and the carrying of vital despatches through the enemy lines. Enchantments seemed to have abounded in his path during the four years which had been so drab and desolate to many; and the punch (to the amusement of us youngsters, who were not abovedrawing him) always evoked from his memory countless situations in which by prompt, respectful yet insinuating action, he had stamped his image indelibly on some proud Southern heart, while at the same time discovering where Jackson’s guerillas lay, or at what point the river was fordable.
And there sat Hayley Delane, so much younger than the others, yet seeming at such times so much their elder that I thought to myself: “But ifhestopped growing up at nineteen, they’re still in long-clothes!” But it was only morally that he had gone on growing. Intellectually they were all on a par. When the last new play at Wallack’s was discussed, or my mother tentatively alluded to the last new novel by the author ofRobert Elsmere(it was her theory that, as long as the hostess was present at a man’s dinner, she should keep the talk at the highest level), Delane’s remarks were no more penetrating than his neighbours’—and he was almost sure not to have read the novel.
It was when any social question was raised: any of the problems concerning club administration, charity, or the relation between “gentlemen” and the community, that he suddenly stood out from them, not so much opposed as aloof.
He would sit listening, stroking my sister’s long skye-terrier (who, defying all rules, had jumped up to his knees at dessert), with a grave half-absent look on his heavy face; and just as my mother (I knew) was thinking how bored he was, that big smile of his would reach out and light up his dimple, and he would say, with enough diffidence to mark his respect for his elders, yet a complete independence of their views: “After all, whatdoes it matter who makes the first move? The thing is to get the business done.”
That was always the gist of it. To everyone else, my father included, what mattered in everything, from Diocesan Meetings to Patriarchs Balls, was just what Delane seemed so heedless of: the standing of the people who made up the committee or headed the movement. To Delane, only the movement itself counted; if the thing was worth doing, he pronounced in his slow lazy way, get it done somehow, even if its backerswereMethodists or Congregationalists, or people who dined in the middle of the day.
“If they were convicts from Sing Sing I shouldn’t care,” he affirmed, his hand lazily flattering the dog’s neck as I had seen it caress Byrne’s terrified poney.
“Or lunatics out of Bloomingdale—as these ‘reformers’ usually are,” my fatheradded, 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.
“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 youwould 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. Itisdead. 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 inthose 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 asshedoes—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 havemy 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 outwith 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 sohard.”
“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 asthat.” 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 wantthe 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 chapat 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. Therewassomething—
“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’llnever 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 youthink?” 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 hisvoice 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, “Ibelieve 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....”
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 thecountry! 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.
“Theyhadto 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, womenand 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 Idoknow 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, yetleft 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 concludedthat 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 BoltonByrne’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 thelittle 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 theirlittle 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 bypassementerie. On such fundamental observances old New York still took its stand.
As for Hayley Delane, he emerged older, heavier, more stooping, but otherwise unchanged, from the ordeal. I am not sure that anyone except myself was aware that there had been an ordeal. But my conviction remained. His wife’s return had changed him back into a card-playing, ball-going, race-frequenting elderly gentleman; but I had seen the waters part, and a granite rock thrust up from them. Twice the upheaval had takenplace; and each time in obedience to motives unintelligible to the people he lived among. Almost any man can take a stand on a principle his fellow-citizens are already occupying; but Hayley Delane held out for things his friends could not comprehend, and did it for reasons he could not explain. The central puzzle subsisted.
Does it subsist for me to this day? Sometimes, walking up town from the bank where in my turn I have become an institution, I glance through the rails of Trinity churchyard and wonder. He has lain there ten years or more now; his wife has married the President of a rising Western University, and grown intellectual and censorious; his children are scattered and established. Does the old Delane vault hold his secret, or did I surprise it one day; did he and I surprise it together?
It was one Sunday afternoon, I remember, not long after Bill Gracy’s edifying end. I had not gone out of town that week-end, and after a long walk in the frosty blue twilight of Central Park I let myself into my little flat. To my surprise I saw Hayley Delane’s big overcoat and tall hat in the hall. He used to drop in on me now and then, but mostly on the way home from a dinner where we happened to have met; and I was rather startled at his appearance at that hour and on a Sunday. But he lifted an untroubled face from the morning paper.
“You didn’t expect a call on a Sunday? Fact is, I’m out of a job. I wanted to go down to the country, as usual, but there’s some grand concert or other that Leila was booked for this afternoon; and a dinner tonight at Alstrop’s. So I dropped in topass the time of day. Whatisthere to do on a Sunday afternoon, anyhow?”
There he was, the same old usual Hayley, as much put to it as the merest fribble of his set to employ an hour unfilled by poker! I was glad he viewed me as a possible alternative, and laughingly told him so. He laughed too—we were on terms of brotherly equality—and told me to go ahead and read two or three notes which had arrived in my absence. “Gad—how they shower down on a fellow at your age!” he chuckled.
I broke the seals and was glancing through the letters when I heard an exclamation at my back.
“By Jove—there he is!” Hayley Delane shouted. I turned to see what he meant.
He had taken up a book—an unusual gesture, but it lay at his elbow, and I suppose he had squeezed the newspapers dry. He held the volume out to me without speaking, his forefinger resting on the open page; his swarthy face was in a glow, his hand shook a little. The page to which his finger pointed bore the steel engraving of a man’s portrait.
“It’s him to the life—I’d know those old clothes of his again anywhere,” Delane exulted, jumping up from his seat.
I took the book and stared first at the portrait and then at my friend.
“Your pal in Washington?”
He nodded excitedly. “That chap I’ve often told you about—yes!” I shall never forget the way his smile flew out and reached the dimple. There seemed a network of them spangling his happy face. His eyes had grown absent, as if gazing down invisible vistas. At length they travelled back to me.
“How on earth did the old boy get his portrait in a book? Has somebody been writing something about him?” His sluggish curiosity awakened, he stretched his hand for the volume. But I held it back.
“Lots of people have written about him; but this book is his own.”
“You mean he wrote it?” He smiled incredulously. “Why, the poor chap hadn’t any education!”
“Perhaps he had more than you think. Let me keep the book a moment longer, and read you something from it.”
He signed an assent, though I could see the apprehension of the printed page already clouding his interest.
“What sort of things did he write?”
“Things foryou. Now listen.”
He settled back into his armchair, composing a painfully attentive countenance, and I sat down and began:
A sight in camp in the day-break grey and dim.As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless,As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by the hospital tent,Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there, untended lying,Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woollen blanket,Grey and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.Curious, I halt, and silent stand:Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest, the first, just lift the blanket:Who are you, elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-grey’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?Who are you, my dear comrade?Then to the second I step—And who are you, my child and darling?Who are you, sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming?Then to the third—a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;Young man, I think I know you—I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ himself;Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.
A sight in camp in the day-break grey and dim.As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless,As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by the hospital tent,Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there, untended lying,Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woollen blanket,Grey and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.Curious, I halt, and silent stand:Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest, the first, just lift the blanket:Who are you, elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-grey’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?Who are you, my dear comrade?Then to the second I step—And who are you, my child and darling?Who are you, sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming?Then to the third—a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;Young man, I think I know you—I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ himself;Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.
A sight in camp in the day-break grey and dim.As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless,As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by the hospital tent,Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there, untended lying,Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woollen blanket,Grey and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
Curious, I halt, and silent stand:Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest, the first, just lift the blanket:Who are you, elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-grey’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?Who are you, my dear comrade?
Then to the second I step—And who are you, my child and darling?Who are you, sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming?
Then to the third—a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;Young man, I think I know you—I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ himself;Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.
I laid the open book on my knee, and stole a glance at Delane. His face was a blank, still composed in the heavy folds of enforced attention. No spark had been struck from him. Evidently the distance was too great between the far-off point at which he and English poetry had partedcompany, and this new strange form it had put on. I must find something which would bring the matter closely enough home to surmount the unfamiliar medium.