Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (11 page)

 
          
Charlotte
would certainly not have such a pretty
clock in her bedroom; but then she had not been used to pretty things. Her
father, who had died at thirty of lung-fever, was one of the “poor Lovells.”
His widow, burdened with a young family, and living all year round “up the
River,” could not do much for her eldest girl; and Charlotte had entered
society in her mother’s turned garments, and shod with satin sandals handed
down from a defunct aunt who had “opened a ball” with General Washington. The
old-fashioned Ralston furniture, which Delia already saw herself banishing,
would seem sumptuous to Chatty; very likely she would think Delia’s gay French
timepiece somewhat frivolous, or even not “quite nice.” Poor
Charlotte
had become so serious, so prudish almost,
since she had given up balls and taken to visiting the poor! Delia remembered,
with ever-recurring wonder, the abrupt change in her: the precise moment at
which it had been privately agreed in the family that, after all, Charlotte
Lovell was going to be an old maid.

 
          
They
had not thought so when she came out. Though her mother could not afford to
give her more than one new tarlatan dress, and though nearly everything in her
appearance was regrettable, from the too bright red of her hair to the too pale
brown of her eyes—not to mention the rounds of brick-rose on her cheek-bones,
which almost (preposterous thought!) made her look as if she painted—yet these
defects were redeemed by a slim waist, a light foot and a gay laugh; and when
her hair was well oiled and brushed for an evening party, so that it looked
almost brown, and lay smoothly along her delicate cheeks under a wreath of red
and white camellias, several eligible young men (Joe Ralston among them) were
known to have called her pretty.

 
          
Then
came
her illness. She caught cold on a moonlight
sleighing-party, the brick-rose circles deepened, and she began to cough. There
was a report that she was “going like her father,” and she was hurried off to a
remote village in
Georgia
, where she lived alone for a year with an old family governess. When
she came back everyone felt at once that there was a change in her. She was
pale, and thinner than ever, but with an exquisitely transparent cheek, darker
eyes and redder hair; and the oddness of her appearance was increased by plain
dresses of Quakerish cut. She had left off trinkets and
watch
chains, always wore the same grey cloak and small close bonnet, and displayed a
sudden zeal for visiting the indigent. The family explained that during her
year in the south she had been shocked by the hopeless degradation of the “poor
whites” and their children, and that this revelation of misery had made it
impossible for her to return to the light-hearted life of her young friends.
Everyone agreed, with significant glances that this unnatural state of mind
would “pass off in time”; and meanwhile old Mrs. Lovell, Chatty’s grandmother,
who understood her perhaps better than the others, gave her a little money for
her paupers, and lent her a room in the Lovell stables (at the back of the old
lady’s Mercer Street house) where she gathered about her, in what would
afterward have been called a “day-nursery,” some of the destitute children of
the neighbourhood. There was even, among them, the baby girl whose origin had
excited such intense curiosity two or three years earlier, when a veiled lady
in a handsome cloak had brought it to the hovel of Cyrus Washington, the Negro
handy-man whose wife Jessamine took in Dr. Lanskell’s washing. Dr. Lanskell,
the chief medical practitioner of the day, was presumably versed in the secret
history of every household from the Battery to Union Square; but, though beset
by inquisitive patients, he had invariably declared himself unable to identify
Jessamine’s “veiled lady,” or to hazard a guess as to the origin of the hundred
dollar bill pinned to the baby’s bib.

 
          
The
hundred dollars were never renewed, the lady never reappeared, but the baby
lived healthily and happily with Jessamine’s piccaninnies, and as soon as it
could toddle was brought to Chatty Lovell’s day-nursery, where it appeared
(like its fellow paupers) in little garments cut down from her old dresses, and
socks knitted by her untiring hands. Delia, absorbed in her own babies, had
nevertheless dropped in once or twice at the nursery, and had come away wishing
that Chatty’s maternal instinct might find its normal outlet in marriage. The
married cousin confusedly felt that her own affection for her handsome children
was a mild and measured sentiment compared with Chatty’s fierce passion for the
waifs in Grandmamma Lovell’s stable.

 
          
And
then, to the general surprise, Charlotte Lovell engaged herself to Joe Ralston.
It was known that Joe had “admired her” the year she came out. She was a
graceful dancer, and Joe, who was tall and nimble, had footed it with her
through many a reel and schottische. By the end of the winter all the
match-makers were predicting that something would come of it; but when Delia
sounded her cousin, the girl’s evasive answer and burning brow seemed to imply
that her suitor had changed his mind, and no further questions could be asked.
Now it was clear that there had, in fact, been an old romance between them,
probably followed by that exciting incident, a “misunderstanding”; but at last
all was well, and the bells of St. Mark’s were preparing to ring in happier
days for Charlotte. “Ah, when she has her first baby,” the Ralston mothers
chorused…

 
          
“Chatty!”
Delia exclaimed, pushing back her chair as she saw her cousin’s image reflected
in the glass over her shoulder.

 
          
Charlotte
Lovell had paused in the doorway. “They told me you were here—so I ran up.”

 
          
“Of course, darling.
How handsome you do look in your
poplin! I always said you needed rich materials. I’m so thankful to see you out
of grey cashmere.” Delia, lifting her hands, removed the white bonnet from her
dark polished head, and shook it gently to make the crystals glitter.

 
          
“I
hope you like it? It’s for your wedding,” she laughed.

 
          
Charlotte
Lovell stood motionless. In her mother’s old dove-coloured poplin, freshly
banded with narrow rows of crimson velvet ribbon, an ermine tippet crossed on
her bosom, and a new beaver bonnet with a falling feather, she had already
something of the assurance and majesty of a married woman.

 
          
“And
you know your hair certainly
is
darker, darling,” Delia added, still hopefully surveying her.

 
          
“Darker?
It’s grey,”
Charlotte
suddenly broke out in her deep voice. She
pushed back one of the pommaded bands that framed her face, and showed a white
lock on her temple. “You needn’t save up your bonnet; I’m not going to be
married,” she added, with a smile that showed her small white teeth in a
fleeting glare.

 
          
Delia
had just enough presence of mind to lay down the bonnet, marabout-up, before
she flung herself on her cousin.

 
          
“Not
going to be married?
Charlotte
, are you perfectly crazy?”

 
          
“Why
is it crazy to do what I think right?”

 
          
“But
people said you were going to marry him the year you came out. And no one
understood what happened then. And now—how can it possibly be right? You simply
can’t
!” Delia incoherently cried.

 
          
“Oh—people!”
said Charlotte Lovell wearily.

 
          
Her
married cousin looked at her with a start. Something thrilled in her voice that
Delia had never heard in it, or in any other human voice, before. Its echo
seemed to set their familiar world rocking, and the Axminster carpet actually heaved
under Delia’s shrinking slippers.

 
          
Charlotte
Lovell stood staring ahead of her with strained lids. In the pale brown of her
eyes Delia noticed the green specks that floated there when she was angry or
excited.

 
          
“
Charlotte
—where on earth have you come from?” she
questioned, drawing the girl down to the sofa.

 
          
“Come
from?”

 
          
“Yes.
You look as if you had seen a ghost—an army of ghosts.”

 
          
The
same snarling smile drew up
Charlotte
’s lip. “I’ve seen Joe,” she said.

 
          
“Well?—Oh
Chatty,” Delia exclaimed, abruptly illuminated, “you don’t mean to say that
you’re going to let any little thing in Joe’s past—? Not that I’ve ever heard
the least hint; never. But even if there were…” She drew a deep breath, and
bravely proceeded to extremities. “Even if you’ve heard that he’s been…that
he’s had a child—of course he would have provided for it before…”

 
          
The
girl shook her head. “I know: you needn’t go on. ‘Men will be men’; but it’s
not that.”

 
          
“Tell
me what it is.”

 
          
Charlotte
Lovell looked about the sunny prosperous room as if it were the image of her
world, and that world were a prison she must break out of. She lowered her
head. “I want—to get away,” she panted.

 
          
“Get
away?
From Joe?”

 
          
“From his ideas—the Ralston ideas.”

 
          
Delia
bridled—after all, she was a Ralston!
“The Ralston ideas?
I haven’t found them—so unbearably unpleasant to live with,” she smiled a
little tartly.

 
          
“No.
But it was different with you: they didn’t ask you to give up things.”

 
          
“What
things?” What in the world (Delia wondered) had poor
Charlotte
that any one would want her to give up? She
had always been in the position of taking rather than of having to surrender.

 
          
“Can’t
you explain to me, dear,” Delia urged.

 
          
“My
poor children—he says I’m to give them up,” cried the girl in a stricken
whisper.

 
          
“Give
them up? Give up helping them?”

 
          
“Seeing
them—looking after them. Give them up altogether. He got his mother to explain
to me. After—after we have children…he’s afraid…afraid our children might catch
things…He’ll give me money, of course, to pay some one…a hired person, to look
after them. He thought that handsome,”
Charlotte
broke out with a sob. She flung off her
bonnet and smothered her prostrate weeping in the cushions.

 
          
Delia
sat perplexed. Of all unforeseen complications this was surely the least
imaginable. And with all the acquired Ralston that was in her she could not
help seeing the force of Joe’s objection, could almost find
herself
agreeing with him. No one in
New York
had forgotten the death of the poor Henry
van der Luydens’ only child, who had caught small-pox at the circus to which an
unprincipled nurse had surreptitiously taken him. After such a warning as that,
parents felt justified in every precaution against contagion. And poor people
were so ignorant and careless, and their children, of course, so perpetually
exposed to everything catching. No, Joe Ralston was certainly right, and
Charlotte almost insanely unreasonable. But it would be useless to tell her so
now. Instinctively, Delia temporized.

 
          
“After
all,” she whispered to the prone ear, “if it’s only after you have children—you
may not have any—for some time.”

 
          
“Oh,
yes, I shall!” came back in anguish from the cushions.

 
          
Delia
smiled with matronly superiority. “Really, Chatty, I don’t quite see how you
can know. You don’t understand.”

 
          
Charlotte
Lovell lifted herself up. Her collar of
Brussels
lace had come undone and hung in a wisp on
her crumpled bodice, and through the disorder of her hair the white lock
glimmered haggardly. In her pale brown eyes the little green specks floated
like leaves in a trout-pool.