Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (14 page)

 
          
As
Delia sat there, before the hard-coal fire in its arched opening of black
marble, her citron-wood work-table at her side and one of the new French lamps
shedding a pleasant light on the centre-table from under a crystal-fringed
shade, she asked herself how she could have passed, in such a short time, so
completely out of her usual circle of impressions and convictions—so much
farther than ever before beyond the Ralston horizon. Here it was, closing in on
her again, as if the very plaster ornaments of the ceiling, the forms of the
furniture, the cut of her dress, had been built out of Ralston prejudices, and
turned to adamant by the touch of Ralston hands.

 
          
She
must have been mad, she thought, to have committed herself so far to
Charlotte
; yet, turn about as she would in the
ever-tightening circle of the problem, she could still find no other issue.
Somehow, it lay with her to save Clem Spender’s baby.

 
          
She
heard the sound of the latch-key (her heart had never beat so high at it), and
the putting down of a tall hat on the hall console—or of two tall hats, was it?
The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men
came in: two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much
her husband and his cousin Joe were alike; it made her feel how justified she
was in always thinking of the Ralston’s collectively.

 
          
She
would not have been young and tender, and a happy wife, if she had not thought
Joe but an indifferent copy of her Jim; yet, allowing for defects in the
reproduction, there remained a striking likeness between the two tall athletic
figures, the short sanguine faces with straight noses, straight whiskers,
straight brows, candid blue eyes and sweet selfish smiles. Only, at the present
moment, Joe looked like Jim with a tooth-ache.

 
          
“Look
here, my dear: here’s a young man who’s asked to take pot-luck with us,” Jim
smiled, with the confidence of a well-nourished husband who knows that he can
always bring a friend home.

 
          
“How
nice of you, Joe!—Do you suppose he can put up with oyster soup and a stuffed
goose?” Delia beamed upon her husband.

 
          
“I
knew it! I told you so, my dear chap! He said you wouldn’t like it—that you’d
be fussed about the dinner. Wait till you’re married, Joseph Ralston—.” Jim
brought down a genial paw on his cousin’s bottle-green shoulder, and Joe
grimaced as if the tooth had stabbed him.

 
          
“It’s
excessively kind of you,
cousin
Delia, to take me in
this evening. The fact is—”

 
          
“Dinner, first, my boy, if you don’t mind!
A bottle of
Burgundy
will brush away the blue devils. Your arm
to your cousin, please; I’ll just go and see that the wine is brought up.”

 
          
Oyster
soup, broiled bass, stuffed goose, apple fritters and green peppers, followed
by one of Grandmamma Ralston’s famous caramel custards: through all her mental
anguish, Delia was faintly aware of a secret pride in her achievement.
Certainly it would serve to confirm the rumour that Jim Ralston could always
bring a friend home to dine without notice. The Ralston and Lovell wines
rounded off the effect, and even Joe’s drawn face had mellowed by the time the
Lovell Madeira started westward. Delia marked the change when the two young men
rejoined her in the drawing-room.

 
          
“And
now, my dear fellow, you’d better tell her the whole story,” Jim counselled,
pushing an armchair toward his cousin.

 
          
The
young woman, bent above her wool-work, listened with lowered lids and flushed
cheeks. As a married woman—as a mother—Joe hoped she would think him justified
in speaking to her frankly: he had her husband’s authority to do so.

 
          
“Oh,
go ahead, go ahead,” chafed the exuberant after-dinner Jim from the hearth-rug.

 
          
Delia
listened, considered, let the bridegroom flounder on through his
embarrassed
exposition. Her needle hung like a sword of
Damocles above the canvas; she saw at once that Joe depended on her trying to
win
Charlotte
over to his way of thinking. But he was
very much in love: at a word from Delia, she understood that he would yield,
and
Charlotte
gain her point, save the child, and marry
him…

 
          
How
easy it was, after all! A friendly welcome, a good dinner, a ripe wine, and the
memory of
Charlotte
’s eyes—so much the more expressive for all
that they had looked upon. A secret envy stabbed the wife who had lacked this
last enlightenment.

 
          
How
easy it was—and yet it must not be! Whatever happened, she could not let
Charlotte Lovell marry Joe Ralston. All the traditions of honour and probity in
which she had been brought up forbade her to connive at such a plan. She could
conceive—had already conceived—of high-handed measures, swift and adroit
defiances of precedent, subtle revolts against the heartlessness of the social
routine. But a lie she could never connive at. The idea of
Charlotte
’s marrying Joe Ralston—her own Jim’s
cousin—without revealing her past to him, seemed to Delia as dishonourable as
it would have seemed to any Ralston. And to tell him the truth would at once
put an end to the marriage; of that even Chatty was aware. Social tolerance was
not dealt in the same measure to men and to women, and neither Delia nor
Charlotte had ever wondered why: like all the young women of their class they
simply bowed to the ineluctable.

 
          
No;
there was no escape from the dilemma. As clearly as it was Delia’s duty to save
Clem Spender’s child, so clearly, also, she seemed destined to sacrifice his
mistress. As the thought pressed on her she remembered
Charlotte
’s wistful cry: “I want to be married, like
all of you,” and her heart tightened. But yet it must not be.

 
          
“I
make every allowance” (Joe was droning on) “for my sweet girl’s ignorance and
inexperience—for her lovely purity. How could a man wish his future wife to
be—to be otherwise? You’re with me, Jim?
And Delia?
I’ve told her, you understand, that she shall always have a special sum set
apart for her poor children—in addition to her pin money; on that she may
absolutely count. God! I’m willing to draw up a deed, a settlement, before a
lawyer, if she says so. I admire, I appreciate her generosity. But I ask you,
Delia, as a mother—mind
you,
now, I want your frank
opinion. If you think I can stretch a point—can let her go on giving her
personal care to these children until…until…” A flush of pride suffused the
potential father’s brow…“till nearer duties claim her, why, I’m more than
ready…if you’ll tell her so. I undertake,” Joe proclaimed, suddenly tingling
with the memory of his last glass, “to make it right with my mother, whose
prejudices, of course, while I respect them, I can never allow to—to come
between me and my own convictions.” He sprang to his feet, and beamed on his
dauntless double in the chimney-mirror. “My convictions,” he flung back at it.

 
          
“Hear,
hear!” cried Jim emotionally.

 
          
Delia’s
needle gave the canvas a sharp prick, and she pushed her work aside.

 
          
“I
think I understand you both, Joe. Certainly, in
Charlotte
’s place, I could never give up those
children.”

 
          
“There
you are, my dear fellow!” Jim triumphed, as proud of this vicarious courage as
of the perfection of the dinner.

 
          
“Never,”
said Delia. “Especially, I mean, the foundlings—there are two, I think. Those
children always die if they are sent to asylums. That is what is haunting
Chatty.”

 
          
“Poor innocents!
How I love her for loving them! That there
should be such scoundrels upon this earth unpunished—. Delia, will you tell her
that I’ll do whatever—”

 
          
“Gently,
old man, gently,” Jim admonished him, with a flash of Ralston caution.

 
          
“Well,
that is to say, whatever—in reason—”

 
          
Delia
lifted an arresting hand. “I’ll tell her, Joe: she will be grateful. But it’s
of no use—”

 
          
“No
use? What more—?”

 
          
“Nothing
more: except this.
Charlotte
has had a return of her old illness. She coughed blood here today. You
must not marry her.”

 
          
There:
it was done. She stood up, trembling in every bone, and feeling herself pale to
the lips. Had she done right? Had she done wrong? And would she ever know?

 
          
Poor
Joe turned on her a face as wan as hers: he clutched the back of his armchair,
his head drooping forward like an old man’s. His lips moved, but made no sound.

 
          
“My God!”
Jim stammered. “But you know you’ve got to buck
up, old boy.”

 
          
“I’m—I’m
so sorry for you, Joe. She’ll tell you herself tomorrow,” Delia faltered, while
her husband continued to proffer heavy consolations.

 
          
“Take
it like a man, old chap. Think of yourself—your future. Can’t be, you know.
Delia’s right; she always
is
. Better
get it over—better face the music now than later.”

 
          
“Now
than later,” Joe echoed with a tortured grin; and it occurred to Delia that
never before in the course of his easy good-natured life had he had—any more
than her Jim—to give up anything his heart was set on. Even the
vocabulary of renunciation, and its conventional gestures, were
unfamiliar to him.

 
          
“But
I don’t understand. I can’t give her up,” he declared, blinking away a boyish
tear.

 
          
“Think
of the children, my dear fellow; it’s your duty,” Jim insisted, checking a
glance of pride at Delia’s wholesome comeliness.

 
          
In
the long conversation that followed between the cousins—argument,
counter-argument, sage counsel and hopeless protest—Delia took but an
occasional part. She knew well enough what the end would be. The bridegroom who
had feared that his bride might bring home contagion from her visits to the
poor would not knowingly implant disease in his race.
Nor was
that all.
Too many sad instances of mothers prematurely fading, and
leaving their husbands alone with a young flock to rear, must be pressing upon
Joe’s memory. Ralstons, Lovells, Lannings, Archers, van der Luydens—which one
of them had not some grave to care for in a distant cemetery: graves of young
relatives “in a decline,” sent abroad to be cured by balmy Italy? The
Protestant grave-yards of
Rome
and
Pisa
were full of
New York
names; the vision of that familiar
pilgrimage with a dying wife was one to turn the most ardent Ralston cold. And
all the while, as she listened with bent head, Delia kept repeating to herself:
“This is easy; but how am I going to tell
Charlotte
?”

 
          
When
poor Joe, late that evening, wrung her hand with a stammered farewell, she
called him back abruptly from the threshold.

 
          
“You
must let me see her first, please; you must wait till she sends for you—” and
she winced a little at the alacrity of his acceptance. But no amount of
rhetorical bolstering-up could make it easy for a young man to face what lay
ahead of Joe; and her final glance at his was one of compassion…

 
          
The
front door closed upon Joe, and she was roused by her husband’s touch on her
shoulder.