Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (22 page)

 
          
Charlotte
’s reply was an inarticulate murmur.

 
          
The
two cousins remained silent,
Charlotte
as usual bolt upright, her thin hands clutched
on the arms of her old-fashioned rush-bottomed seat,
Delia
somewhat heavily sunk into the depths of a high-backed armchair. The two had
exchanged their last remarks on the preparations for the morrow; nothing more
remained to be said as to the number of guests, the brewing of the punch, the
arrangements for the robing of the clergy, and the disposal of the presents in
the best spare-room.

 
          
Only
one subject had not yet been touched upon, and Delia, as she watched her
cousin’s profile grimly cut upon the melting twilight, waited for
Charlotte
to speak. But
Charlotte
remained silent.

 
          
“I
have been thinking,” Delia at length began, a slight tremor in her voice, “that
I ought presently—”

 
          
She
fancied she saw
Charlotte
’s hands tighten on the knobs of the chair-arms.

 
          
“You
ought presently—?”

 
          
“Well,
before Tina goes to bed, perhaps go up for a few minutes—”

 
          
Charlotte
remained silent, visibly resolved on making
no effort to assist her.

 
          
“Tomorrow,”
Delia continued, “we shall be in such a rush from the earliest moment that I
don’t see how, in the midst of all the interruptions and excitement, I can
possibly—”

 
          
“Possibly?”
Charlotte
monotonously echoed.

 
          
Delia
felt her blush deepening through the dusk. “Well, I suppose you agree with me,
don’t you, that a word ought to be said to the child as to the new duties and
responsibilities that—well—what is usual, in fact, at such a time?” she
falteringly ended.

 
          
“Yes,
I have thought of that,”
Charlotte
answered. She said no more, but Delia divined in her tone the stirring
of that obscure opposition which, at the crucial moments of Tina’s life, seemed
automatically to declare itself. She could not understand why
Charlotte
should, at such times, grow so enigmatic
and inaccessible, and in the present case she saw no reason why this change of
mood should interfere with what she deemed to be her own duty. Tina must long
for her guiding hand into the new life as much as she herself yearned for the
exchange of half-confidences which would be her real farewell to her adopted
daughter. Her heart beating a little more quickly than usual, she rose and
walked through the open window into the shadowy drawing-room. The moon, between
the columns of the verandah, sent a broad band of light across the rows of
chairs, irradiated the lace-decked altar with its empty candlesticks and vases,
and outlined with silver Delia’s heavy reflection in the pier-glass.

 
          
She
crossed the room toward the hall.

 
          
“Delia!”
Charlotte
’s voice sounded behind her. Delia turned,
and the two women scrutinized each other in the revealing light.
Charlotte
’s face looked as it had looked on the
dreadful day when Delia had suddenly seen it in the looking-glass above her
shoulder.

 
          
“You
were going up now to speak to Tina?”
Charlotte
asked.

 
          
“I—yes.
It’s nearly nine. I thought…”

 
          
“Yes;
I understand.” Miss Lovell made a visible effort at self-control. “Please
understand me too, Delia, if I ask you—not to.”

 
          
Delia
looked at her cousin with a vague sense of apprehension. What new mystery did
this strange request conceal? But no—such a doubt as flitted across her mind
was inadmissible. She was too sure of her Tina!

 
          
“I
confess I don’t understand,
Charlotte
. You surely feel that, on the night before her wedding, a girl ought to
have a mother’s counsel, a mother’s…”

 
          
“Yes;
I feel that.” Charlotte Lovell took a hurried breath. “But the question is:
which of us is her mother
?”

 
          
Delia
drew back involuntarily. “Which of us—?” she stammered.

 
          
“Yes.
Oh, don’t imagine it’s the first time I’ve asked myself the question! There—I
mean to be calm, quite calm. I don’t intend to go back to the past. I’ve
accepted—accepted everything—gratefully. Only tonight—just tonight…”

 
          
Delia
felt the rush of pity which always prevailed over every other sensation in her
rare interchanges of truth with Charlotte Lovell. Her throat filled with tears,
and she remained silent.

 
          
“Just
tonight,”
Charlotte
concluded, “
I’m
her mother.”

 
          
“
Charlotte
! You’re not going to tell her so—not now?”
broke involuntarily from Delia.

 
          
Charlotte
gave a faint laugh. “If I did, should you
hate it as much as all that?”

 
          
“Hate
it? What a word, between us!”

 
          
“Between us?
But it’s the word that’s been between us since
the beginning—the very beginning! Since the day when you discovered that
Clement Spender hadn’t quite broken his heart because he wasn’t good enough for
you; since you found your revenge and your triumph in keeping me at your mercy,
and in taking his child from me!”
Charlotte
’s words flamed up as if from the depth of
the infernal fires; then the blaze dropped, her head sank forward, and she
stood before Delia dumb and stricken.

 
          
Delia’s
first movement was one of
an indignant
recoil. Where
she had felt only tenderness, compassion, the impulse to help and befriend,
these darknesses had been smouldering in the other’s breast! It was as if a
poisonous smoke had swept over some pure summer landscape…

 
          
Usually
such feelings were quickly followed by a reaction of sympathy. But now she felt
none. An utter weariness possessed her.

 
          
“Yes,”
she said slowly, “I sometimes believe you really have hated me from the very
first; hated me for everything I’ve tried to do for you.”

 
          
Charlotte
raised her head sharply.
“To
do for me?
But everything you’ve done has been done for Clement
Spender!”

 
          
Delia
stared at her with a kind of terror. “You are horrible,
Charlotte
. Upon my honour, I haven’t thought of
Clement Spender for years.”

 
          
“Ah, but you have—you have!
You’ve always thought of him in
thinking of Tina—of him and nobody else! A woman never stops thinking of the man
she loves. She thinks of him years afterward, in all sorts of unconscious ways,
in thinking of all sorts of things—books, pictures, sunsets, a flower or a
ribbon—or a clock on the mantelpiece,”
Charlotte
broke off with her sneering laugh. “That
was what I gambled on, you see—that’s why I came to you that day. I knew I was
giving Tina another mother.”

 
          
Again,
the poisonous smoke seemed to envelop Delia: that she and Charlotte, two spent
old women, should be standing before Tina’s bridal altar, and talking to each
other of hatred, seemed unimaginably hideous and degrading.

 
          
“You
wicked woman—you
are
wicked!” she
exclaimed.

 
          
Then
the evil mist cleared away, and through it she saw the baffled pitiful figure
of the mother who was not a mother, and who, for every benefit accepted, felt
herself
robbed of a privilege. She moved nearer to
Charlotte
and laid a hand on her arm.

 
          
“Not
here! Don’t let us talk like this here.”

 
          
The
other drew away from her.
“Wherever you please, then.
I’m not particular!”

 
          
“But
tonight,
Charlotte
—the night before Tina’s wedding? Isn’t
every place in this house full of her? How could we go on saying cruel things
to each other anywhere?”
Charlotte
was silent, and Delia continued in a steadier voice: “Nothing you say
can really hurt me—for long; and I don’t want to hurt you—I never did.”

 
          
“You
tell me that—and you’ve left nothing undone to divide me from my daughter! Do
you suppose it’s been easy, all these years, to hear her call you ‘mother’? Oh,
I know, I know—it was agreed that she must never guess…but if you hadn’t
perpetually come between us she’d have had no one but me, she’d have felt about
me as a child feels about its mother, she’d have
had
to love me better than anyone else. With all your forbearances
and your generosities you’ve ended by robbing me of my child. And I’ve put up
with it all for her sake—because I knew I had to. But tonight—tonight she
belongs to me. Tonight I can’t bear that she should call you ‘mother’.”

 
          
Delia
Ralston made no immediate reply. It seemed to her that for the first time she
had sounded the deepest depths of maternal passion, and she stood awed at the
echoes it gave back.

 
          
“How
you must love her—to say such things to me,” she murmured; then, with a final
effort: “Yes, you’re right. I won’t go up to her. It’s you who must go.”

 
          
Charlotte
started toward her impulsively; but with a
hand lifted as if in defense, Delia moved across the room and out again to the
verandah. As she sank down in her chair she heard the drawing-room door open
and close, and the sound of Charlotte’s feet on the stairs.

 
          
Delia
sat alone in the night. The last drop of her magnanimity had been spent, and
she tried to avert her shuddering mind from
Charlotte
. What was happening at this moment
upstairs? With what dark revelations were Tina’s bridal dreams to be defaced?
Well, that was not matter for conjecture either. She, Delia Ralston, had played
her part, done her utmost: there remained nothing now but to try to lift her
spirit above the embittering sense of failure.

 
          
There
was a strange element of truth in some of the things that
Charlotte
had said. With what divination her maternal
passion had endowed her! Her jealousy seemed to have a million feelers. Yes; it
was true that the sweetness and peace of Tina’s bridal eve had been filled, for
Delia, with visions of her own unrealized past. Softly, imperceptibly, it had
reconciled her to the memory of what she had missed. All these last days she
had been living the girl’s life, she had been Tina, and Tina had been her own
girlish self, the far-off Delia Lovell. Now for the first time, without shame,
without self-reproach, without a pang or a scruple, Delia could yield to that
vision of requited love from which her imagination had always turned away. She
had made her choice in youth, and she had accepted it in maturity; and here in
this bridal joy, so mysteriously her own, was the compensation for all she had
missed and yet never renounced.