Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (23 page)

 
          
Delia
understood now that
Charlotte
had guessed all this, and that the knowledge had filled her with a
fierce resentment.
Charlotte
had said long ago that Clement Spender had never really belonged to
her; now she had perceived that it was the same with Clement Spender’s child.
As the truth stole upon Delia her heart melted with the old compassion for
Charlotte
. She saw that it was a terrible, a
sacrilegious thing to interfere with another’s destiny, to lay the tenderest
touch upon any human being’s right to love and suffer after his own fashion.
Delia had twice intervened in Charlotte Lovell’s life: it was natural that
Charlotte
should be her enemy. If only she did not
revenge herself by wounding Tina!

 
          
The
adopted mother’s thoughts reverted painfully to the little white room upstairs.
She had meant her half-hour with Tina to leave the girl with thoughts as
fragrant as the flowers she was to find beside her when she woke.
And now—.

 
          
Delia
started up from her musing. There was a step on the stair—
Charlotte
coming down through the silent house. Delia
rose with a vague impulse of escape: she felt that she could not face her
cousin’s eyes. She turned the corner of the verandah, hoping to find the
shutters of the dining-room unlatched, and to slip away unnoticed to her room;
but in a moment
Charlotte
was beside her.

 
          
“Delia!”

 
          
“Ah,
it’s you? I was going up to bed.” For the life of her Delia could not keep an
edge of hardness from her voice.

 
          
“Yes:
it’s late. You must be very tired.”
Charlotte
paused; her own voice was strained and
painful.

 
          
“I
am
tired,” Delia acknowledged.

 
          
In
the moonlit hush the other went up to her, laying a timid touch on her arm.

 
          
“Not
till you’ve seen Tina.”

 
          
Delia
stiffened. “Tina? But it’s late! Isn’t she sleeping? I thought you’d stay with
her until—”

 
          
“I
don’t know if she’s sleeping.”
Charlotte
paused. “I haven’t been in—but there’s a
light under her door.”

 
          
“You
haven’t been in?”

 
          
“No:
I just stood in the passage, and tried—”

 
          
“Tried—?”

 
          
“To
think of something…something…to say to her without…without her guessing…” A sob
stopped her, but she pressed on with a final effort. “It’s no use. You were
right: there’s nothing I can say. You’re her real mother. Go to her. It’s not
your fault—or mine.”

 
          
“Oh—”
Delia cried.

 
          
Charlotte
clung to her in inarticulate abasement.
“You said I was wicked—I’m not wicked. After all, she was mine when she was
little!”

 
          
Delia
put an arm about her shoulder.

 
          
“Hush,
dear! We’ll go to her together.”

 
          
The
other yielded automatically to her touch, and side by side the two women
mounted the stairs,
Charlotte
timing her impetuous step to Delia’s stiffened movements. They walked
down the passage to Tina’s door; but there Charlotte Lovell paused and shook
her head.

 
          
“No—you,”
she whispered, and turned away.

 
          
Tina
lay in bed, her arms folded under her head, her happy eyes reflecting the
silver space of sky which filled the window. She smiled at Delia through her
dream.

 
          
“I
knew you’d come.”

 
          
Delia
sat down beside her, and their clasped hands lay upon the coverlet. They did
not say much, after all; or else their communion had no need of words. Delia
never knew how long she sat by the child’s side: she abandoned herself to the
spell of the moonlit hour.

 
          
But
suddenly she thought of
Charlotte
, alone behind the shut door of her own room, watching, struggling,
listening
. Delia must not, for her own pleasure, prolong
that tragic vigil. She bent down to kiss Tina goodnight; then she paused on the
threshold and turned back.

 
          
“Darling!
Just one thing more.”

 
          
“Yes?”
Tina murmured through her dream.

 
          
“I
want you to promise me—”

 
          
“Everything, everything, you darling mother!”

 
          
“Well,
then, that when you go away to morrow—at the very last moment, you understand—”

 
          
“Yes?”

 
          
“After
you’ve said goodbye to
me, and to everybody else—just
as Lanning helps you into the carriage—”

 
          
“Yes?”

 
          
“That you’ll give your last kiss to Aunt Charlotte.
Don’t
forget—the very last.”

 
          
  

 
          
The ’Sixties.

 
          
You
idiot!” said his wife, and threw down her cards.

 
          
I
turned my head away quickly, to avoid seeing Hayley Delane’s face; though why I
wished to avoid it I could not have told you, much less why I should have
imagined (if I did) that a man of his age and importance would notice what was
happening to the wholly negligible features of a youth like myself.

 
          
I
turned away so that he should not see how it hurt me to hear him called an
idiot, even in joke—well, at least half in joke; yet I often thought him an
idiot myself, and bad as my own poker was, I knew enough of the game to judge
that his—when he wasn’t attending—fully justified such an outburst from his
wife. Why her sally disturbed me I couldn’t have said; nor why, when it was
greeted by a shrill guffaw from her “latest,” young Bolton Byrne, I itched to
cuff the little bounder; nor why, when Hayley Delane, on whom banter always
dawned slowly but certainly, at length gave forth his low rich gurgle of appreciation—why
then, most of all, I wanted to blot the whole scene from my memory. Why?

 
          
There
they sat, as I had so often seen them, in Jack Alstrop’s luxurious bookless
library (I’m sure the rich rows behind the glass doors were hollow), while
beyond the windows the pale twilight thickened to blue over Long Island lawns
and woods and a moonlit streak of sea. No one ever looked out at
that
, except to conjecture what sort of
weather there would be the next day for polo, or hunting, or racing, or
whatever use the season required the face of nature to be put to; no one was
aware of the twilight, the moon or the blue shadows—and Hayley Delane least of
all. Day after day, night after night, he sat anchored at somebody’s
poker-table, and fumbled absently with his cards…

 
          
Yes;
that was the man. He didn’t even (as it was once said of a great authority on
heraldry) know his own silly business; which was to hang about in his wife’s
train, play poker with her friends, and giggle at her nonsense and theirs. No
wonder Mrs. Delane was sometimes exasperated. As she said,
she
hadn’t asked him to marry her! Rather not: all their
contemporaries could remember what a thunderbolt it had been on his side. The
first time he had seen her—at the theatre, I think: “Who’s that?
Over there—with the heaps of hair?”
—“Oh, Leila Gracy? Why,
she’s not
really
pretty…” “Well, I’m
going to marry her—” “Marry her? But her father’s that old scoundrel Bill
Gracy…the one…” “I’m going to marry her…” “The one who’s had to resign from all
his clubs…” “I’m going to marry her…” And he did; and it was she, if you
please, who kept him dangling, and who would and who wouldn’t, until some
whipper-snapper of a youth, who was meanwhile making up his mind about
her
, had finally decided in the
negative.

 
          
Such
had been Hayley Delane’s marriage; and such, I imagined, his way of conducting
most of the transactions of his futile clumsy life… Big bursts of
impulse—storms he couldn’t control—then long periods of drowsing calm, during
which, something made me feel, old regrets and remorses woke and stirred under
the indolent surface of his nature. And yet, wasn’t I simply romanticizing a
commonplace case? I turned back from the window to look at the group. The
bringing of candles to the card-tables had scattered pools of illumination
throughout the shadowy room; in their radiance Delane’s harsh head stood out
like a cliff from a flowery plain. Perhaps it was only his bigness, his
heaviness and swarthiness—perhaps his greater age, for he must have been at
least fifteen years older than his wife and most of her friends; at any rate, I
could never look at him without feeling that he belonged elsewhere, not so much
in another society as in another age. For there was no doubt that the society
he lived in suited him well enough. He shared cheerfully in all the amusements
of his little set—rode, played polo, hunted and drove his four-in-hand with the
best of them (you will see, by the last allusion, that we were still in the
archaic ’nineties). Nor could I guess what other occupations he would have
preferred, had he been given his choice. In spite of my admiration for him I
could not bring myself to think it was Leila Gracy who had subdued him to what
she worked in. What would he have chosen to do if he had not met her that night
at the play? Why, I rather thought, to meet and marry somebody else just like
her. No; the difference in him was not in his tastes—it was in something ever
so much deeper. Yet what is deeper in a man than his tastes?

 
          
In
another age, then, he would probably have been doing the equivalent of what he
was doing now: idling, taking much violent exercise, eating more than was good
for him, laughing at the same kind of nonsense, and worshipping, with the same
kind of dull routine-worship, the same kind of woman, whether dressed in a
crinoline, a farthingale, a peplum or the skins of beasts—it didn’t much matter
under what sumptuary dispensation one placed her. Only in that in that other
age there might have been outlets for other faculties, now dormant, perhaps even
atrophied, but which must—yes, really must—have had something to do with the
building of that big friendly forehead, the monumental nose, and the rich
dimple which now and then furrowed his cheek with light. Did the dimple even
mean no more than Leila Gracy?

 
          
Well,
perhaps it was
I
who was the idiot,
if she’d only known it; an idiot to believe in her husband, be obsessed by him,
oppressed by him, when, for thirty years now, he’d been only the Hayley Delane
whom everybody took for granted, and was glad to see, and immediately forgot.
Turning from my contemplation of that great structural head, I looked at his
wife. Her head was still like something in the making, something just
flowering, a girl’s head ringed with haze. Even the kindly candles betrayed the
lines in her face, the paint on her lips, the peroxide on her hair; but they
could not lessen her fluidity of outline, or the girlishness that lurked in her
eyes, floating up from their depths like a startled Naiad. There was an
irreducible innocence about her, as there so often is about women who have
spent their time in amassing sentimental experiences. As I looked at the
husband and wife, thus confronted above the cards, I marvelled more and more
that it was she who ruled and he who bent the neck. You will see by this how
young I still was.

 
          
So
young, indeed, that Hayley Delane had dawned on me in my school-days as an
accomplished fact, a finished monument: like
Trinity
Church
, the Reservoir or the Knickerbocker Club. A
New Yorker of my generation could no more imagine him altered or away than any
of those venerable institutions. And so I had continued to take him for granted
till, my Harvard days over, I had come back after an interval of
world-wandering to settle down in New York, and he had broken on me afresh as
something still not wholly accounted for, and more interesting than I had
suspected.

 
          
I
don’t say the matter kept me awake. I had my own business (in a down-town
office), and the pleasures of my age; I was hard at work discovering
New York
. But now and then the Hayley Delane riddle
would thrust itself between me and my other interests, as it had done tonight
just because his wife had sneered at him, and he had laughed and thought her
funny. And at such times I found myself moved and excited out of all proportion
to anything I knew about him, or had observed in him, to justify such emotions.

 
          
The
game was
over,
the dressing-bell had rung. It rang
again presently, with a discreet insistence: Alstrop, easy in all else,
preferred that his guests should not be more than half an hour late for dinner.

 
          
“I
say—
Leila
!” he finally remonstrated.

 
          
The
golden coils drooped above her chips. “Yes—yes.
Just a
minute.
Hayley, you’ll have to pay for
me
.
—There, I’m going!” She laughed and pushed
back her chair.

 
          
Delane,
laughing also, got up lazily. Byrne flew to open the door for Mrs. Delane; the
other women trooped out with her. Delane, having settled her debts, picked up
her gold-mesh bag and cigarette-case, and followed.

 
          
I
turned toward a window opening on the lawn. There was just time to stretch my
legs while curling-tongs and powder were being plied above stairs. Alstrop
joined me, and we stood staring up at a soft dishevelled sky in which the first
stars came and went.

 
          
“Curse
it—looks rotten for our match tomorrow!”

 
          
“Yes—but
what a good smell the coming rain does give to things!”

 
          
He
laughed. “You’re an optimist—like old Hayley.”

 
          
We
strolled across the lawn toward the woodland.

 
          
“Why
like old Hayley?”

 
          
“Oh,
he’s a regular philosopher, I’ve never seen him put out, have you?”

 
          
“No.
That must be what makes him look so sad,” I exclaimed.

 
          
“Sad?
Hayley?
Why, I was just saying—”

 
          
“Yes,
I know. But the only people who are never put out are the people who don’t
care; and not caring is about the saddest occupation there is. I’d like to see
him in a rage just once.”

 
          
My
host gave a faint whistle, and remarked: “By Jove, I believe the wind’s hauling
round to the north. If it does—” He moistened his finger and held it up.

 
          
I
knew there was no use in theorizing with Alstrop; but I tried another tack,
“What on earth has Delane done with himself all these years?” I asked. Alstrop
was forty, or thereabouts, and by a good many years better able than I to cast
a backward glance over the problem.

 
          
But
the effort seemed beyond him.
“Why—what years?”

 
          
“Well—ever
since he left college.”

 
          
“Lord!
How do I know? I wasn’t there. Hayley must be well past fifty.”

 
          
It
sounded formidable to my youth; almost like a geological era. And that suited
him, in a way—I could imagine him drifting, or silting, or something measurable
by aeons, at the rate of about a millimetre a century.

 
          
“How
long has he been married?” I asked.

 
          
“I
don’t know that either; nearly twenty years, I should say. The kids are growing
up. The boys are both at
Groton
. Leila doesn’t look it, I must say—not in some lights.”

 
          
“Well,
then, what’s he been doing since he married?”

 
          
“Why,
what should he have done? He’s always had money enough to do what he likes.
He’s got his partnership in the bank, of course. They say that rascally old
father-in-law, whom he refuses to see, gets a good deal of money out of him.
You know he’s awfully soft-hearted. But he can swing it all, I fancy. Then he
sits on lots of boards—Blind Asylum, Children’s Aid, S.P.C.A., and all the
rest. And there isn’t a better sport going.”

 
          
“But
that’s not what I mean,” I persisted.

 
          
Alstrop
looked at me through the darkness. “You don’t mean women? I never heard—but
then one wouldn’t, very likely. He’s a shut-up fellow.”

 
          
We
turned back to dress for dinner. Yes, that was the word I wanted; he was a
shut-up fellow. Even the rudimentary Alstrop felt it. But shut-up consciously,
deliberately—or only instinctively, congenitally? There the mystery lay