Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (18 page)

 
          
“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 with the 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 if
she
doesn’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if he has withdrawn—what do you mean?”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?” Delia began; 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
must remedy. 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 present happiness—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
inexplicably away 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
whom
Charlotte
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 to the 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 vivid Delia 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 Leopold 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; and for 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.