Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (13 page)

 
          
“
stay
here? But where are you going?”

 
          
“I
don’t know. I want to walk—to get the air. I think I want to be alone.”
Feverishly, Delia unfolded her Paisley shawl, tied on bonnet and
veil,
thrust her mittened hands into her muff.
Charlotte
, without moving, stared at her dumbly from
the sofa.

 
          
“You’ll
wait,” Delia insisted, on the threshold.

 
          
“Yes:
I’ll wait.”

 
          
Delia
shut the door and hurried down the stairs.

 
          
  

 
          
She
had spoken the truth in saying that she did not know where she was going. She
simply wanted to get away from
Charlotte
’s unbearable face, and from the immediate
atmosphere of her tragedy. Outside, in the open, perhaps it would be easier to
think.

 
          
As
she skirted the park-rails she saw her rosy children playing, under their
nurse’s eye, with the pampered progeny of other square-dwellers. The little
girl had on her new plaid velvet bonnet and white tippet, and the boy his
Highland
cap and broad-cloth spencer. How happy and
jolly they looked! The nurse spied her, but she shook her head, waved at the
group and hurried on.

 
          
She
walked and walked through the familiar streets decked with bright winter
sunshine. It was early afternoon, an hour when the gentlemen had just returned
to their offices, and there were few pedestrians in
Irving Place
and
Union Square
. Delia crossed the Square to Broadway.

 
          
The
Lovell house in
Mercer Street
was a sturdy old-fashioned brick dwelling. A large stable adjoined it,
opening on an alley such as Delia, on her honeymoon trip to
England
, had heard called a “mews.” She turned into
the alley, entered the stable court, and pushed open a door. In a shabby
white-washed room a dozen children, gathered about a stove, were playing with
broken toys. The Irishwoman who had charge of them was cutting out small
garments on a broken-legged deal table. She raised a friendly face, recognizing
Delia as the lady who had once or twice been to see the children with Miss
Charlotte.

 
          
Delia
paused, embarrassed.

 
          
“I—I
came to ask if you need any new toys,” she stammered.

 
          
“That
we do, ma’am. And many another
thing
too, though Miss
Charlotte tells me I’m not to beg of the ladies that comes to see our poor
darlin’s.”

 
          
“Oh,
you may beg of me, Bridget,” Mrs. Ralston answered, smiling. “Let me see your
babies—it’s so long since I’ve been here.”

 
          
The
children had stopped playing and, huddled against their nurse, gazed up
open-mouthed at the rich rustling lady. One little girl with pale brown eyes
and scarlet cheeks was dressed in a plaid alpaca frock trimmed with imitation
coral buttons that Delia remembered. Those buttons had been on
Charlotte
’s “best dress” the year she came out. Delia
stopped and took up the child. Its curly hair was brown, the exact colour of
the eyes—thank heaven! But the eyes had the same little green spangles floating
in their transparency. Delia sat down, and the little girl, standing on her
knee, gravely fingered her watch chain.

 
          
“Oh,
ma’am—maybe her shoes’ll soil your skirt. The floor here ain’t
none
too clean.”

 
          
Delia
shook her head, and pressed the child against her. She had forgotten the other
gazing babies and their wardress. The little creature on her knee was made of
different stuff—it had not needed the plaid alpaca and coral buttons to single
her out. Her brown curls grew in points on her high forehead, exactly as
Clement Spender’s did. Delia laid a burning cheek against the forehead.

 
          
“Baby
want
my lovely yellow chain?”

 
          
Baby
did.

 
          
Delia
unfastened the gold chain and hung it about the child’s neck. The other babies
clapped and crowed, but the little girl, gravely dimpling, continued to finger
the links in silence.

 
          
“Oh,
ma’am, you can’t leave that fine chain on little Teeny. When she has to go back
to those blacks…”

 
          
“What
is her name?”

 
          
“Teena
they call her, I believe. It
don’t
seem a Christian
name, har’ly.”

 
          
Delia
was silent.

 
          
“What
I say is, her
cheeks is
too red. And she coughs too
easy.
Always one cold and another.
Here, Teeny, leave
the lady go.”

 
          
Delia
stood up, loosening the tender arms.

 
          
“She
doesn’t want to leave go of you, ma’am. Miss Chatty ain’t been in today, and
the little thing’s kinder lonesome without her. She don’t play like the other
children, somehow…Teeny, you look at that lovely chain you’ve got…there
,…
there now…”

 
          
“Goodbye,
Clementina,” Delia whispered below her breath. She kissed the pale brown eyes,
the curly crown, and dropped her veil on rushing tears. In the stable-yard she
dried them on her large embroidered handkerchief, and stood hesitating. Then
with a decided step she turned toward home.

 
          
The
house was as she had left it, except that the children had come in; she heard
them romping in the nursery as she went down the passage to her bedroom.
Charlotte Lovell was seated on the sofa, upright and rigid, as Delia had left
her.

 
          
“Chatty—Chatty,
I’ve thought it out. Listen. Whatever happens, the baby shan’t stay with those
people. I mean to keep her.”

 
          
Charlotte
stood up, tall and white. The eyes in her
thin face had grown so dark that they seemed like spectral hollows in a skull.
She opened her lips to speak, and then, snatching at her handkerchief, pressed
it to her mouth, and sank down again. A red trickle dripped through the
handkerchief onto her poplin skirt.

 
          
“
Charlotte
—
Charlotte
,” Delia screamed, on her knees beside her
cousin.
Charlotte
’s head slid back against the cushions and
the trickle ceased. She closed her eyes, and Delia, seizing
a
vinaigrette
from the dressing-table, held it to her pinched nostrils.
The room was filled with an acrid aromatic scent.

 
          
Charlotte
’s lids lifted. “Don’t be frightened. I
still spit blood sometimes—not often. My lung is nearly healed. But it’s the
terror—”

 
          
“No,
no: there’s to be no more terror. I tell you I’ve thought it all out. Jim is
going to let me take the baby.”

 
          
The
girl raised herself haggardly. “Jim? Have you told him? Is that where you’ve
been?”

 
          
“No, darling.
I’ve only been to see the baby.”

 
          
“Oh,”
Charlotte
moaned, leaning back again. Delia took her
own handkerchief, and wiped away the tears that were raining down her cousin’s
cheeks.

 
          
“You
mustn’t cry, Chatty; you must be brave. Your little girl and his—how could you
think? But you must give me time: I must manage it in my own way…Only trust
me…”

 
          
Charlotte
’s lips stirred faintly.

 
          
“The
tears…don’t dry them, Delia….I like to feel them…”

 
          
The
two cousins continued to lean against each other without speaking. The ormolu
clock ticked out the measure of their mute communion in minutes, quarters, a
half-hour,
then
an hour: the day declined and
darkened, the shadows lengthened across the garlands of the Axminster and the
broad white bed. There was a knock.

 
          
“The
children’s waiting to say their grace before supper, ma’am.”

 
          
“Yes,
Eliza. Let them say it to you. I’ll come later.” As the nurse’s steps receded
Charlotte Lovell disengaged herself from Delia’s embrace.

 
          
“Now
I can go,” she said.

 
          
“You’re
not too weak, dear? I can send for a coach to take you home.”

 
          
“No,
no; it would frighten mother. And I shall like walking now, in the darkness.
Sometimes the world used to seem all one awful glare to me. There were days
when I thought the sun would never set. And then there was the moon at night.”
She laid her hands on her cousin’s shoulders. “Now it’s different. By and bye I
shan’t hate the light.”

 
          
The
two women kissed each other, and Delia whispered: “Tomorrow.”

 
          
  

 
          
The
Ralstons gave up old customs reluctantly, but once they had adopted a new one
they found it impossible to understand why everyone else did not immediately do
likewise.

 
          
When
Delia, who came of the laxer Lovells, and was naturally inclined to novelty,
had first proposed to her husband to dine at six o’ clock instead of two, his
malleable young face had become as relentless as that of the old original
Ralston in his grim Colonial portrait. But after a two days’ resistance he had
come round to his wife’s view, and now smiled contemptuously at the obstinacy
of those who clung to a heavy mid-day meal and high tea.

 
          
“There’s
nothing I hate like narrow-mindedness. Let people eat when they like, for all I
care: it’s their narrow-mindedness that I can’t stand.”

 
          
Delia
was thinking of this as she sat in the drawing-room (her mother would have
called it the parlour) waiting for her husband’s return. She had just had time
to smooth her glossy braids, and slip on the black-and-white striped moire with
cherry pipings which was his favourite dress. The drawing-room, with its
Nottingham
lace curtains looped back under florid gilt
cornices, its marble centre-table on a carved rosewood foot, and its
old-fashioned mahogany armchairs covered with one of the new French silk
damasks in a tart shade of apple-green, was one for any young wife to be proud
of. The rosewood what-nots on each side of the folding doors that led into the
dining-room were adorned with tropical shells, feld-spar vases, an alabaster
model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a pair of obelisks made of scraps of
porphyry and serpentine picked up by the young couple in the Roman Forum, a
bust of Clytie in chalk-white biscuit de Sevres, and four old-fashioned figures
of the seasons in Chelsea ware, that had to be left among the newer ornaments
because they had belonged to great-grandmamma Ralston. On the walls hung large
dark steel-engravings of Cole’s “Voyage of Life,” and between the windows stood
the life-sized statue of “A Captive Maiden” executed for Jim Ralston’s father
by the celebrated Harriet Hosmer, immortalized in
Hawthorne
’s novel of the Marble Faun. On the table
lay handsomely tooled copies of Turner’s
Rivers
of
France
, Drake’s Culprit Fay, Crabbe’s tales, and
the Book of Beauty containing portraits of the British peeresses who had
participated in the Earl of Eglinton’s tournament.