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“You
might have known me better than to think I’d lecture you.”

 
          
“Oh,
I don’t know. Naturally the one person you care about in all this is—mother
Kit.”

 
          
“Your
mother,” I interposed.

 
          
He
raised his eyebrows with the familiar ironic movement; then they drew together
again over his sunken eyes. “I wanted to wait till I was up to discussing
things. I wanted to get this fever out of me.”

 
          
“You
don’t look feverish now.”

 
          
“No;
they’ve brought it down. But I’m down with it. I’m very low,” he said, with a
sort of chill impartiality, as though speaking of some one whose disabilities
did not greatly move him. I replied that the best way for him to pull himself
up again was to get out of his present quarters, and let himself be nursed and
looked after.

 
          
“Oh,
don’t argue!” he interrupted.

 
          
“Argue—?”

 
          
“You’re
going to tell me to go back to—to my mother.
To let her
fatten me up.
Well, it’s no use. I won’t take another dollar from
her—not one.”

 
          
I
met this in silence, and after a moment perceived that my silence irritated him
more than any attempt at argument. I did not want to irritate him, and I began:
“Then why don’t you go off again with the Browns? There’s nothing you can do
that your mother won’t understand—”

 
          
“And
suffer from!” he interjected.

 
          
“Oh,
as to suffering—she’s seasoned.”

 
          
He
bent his slow feverish stare on me. “So am I.”

 
          
“Well,
at any rate, you can spare her by going off at once into good air, and trying
your level best to get well. You know as well as I do that nothing else matters
to her. She’ll be glad to have you go away with the Browns—I’ll answer for
that.”

 
          
He
gave a short laugh, so harsh and disenchanted that I suddenly felt he was
right: to laugh like that he must be suffering as much as his mother. I laid my
hand on his thin wrist. “Old man—”

 
          
He
jerked away. “No, no. Go away with the Browns? I’d rather be dead. I’d rather
hang on here till I
am
dead.”

 
          
The
outburst was so unexpected that I sat in silent perplexity. Mrs. Brown had told
the truth, then, when she said he hated them too? Yet he saw them, he accepted
their money … The darkness deepened as I peered into it.

 
          
Stephen
lay with half-closed lids, and I saw that whatever enlightenment he had to give
would have to be forced from him. The perception made me take a sudden resolve.

 
          
“When
one is physically down and out one
is
raw, as you say: one hates everybody. I know you don’t really feel like that
about the Browns; but if they’ve got on your nerves, and you want to go off by
yourself, you might at least accept the money they’re ready to give you—”

 
          
He
raised himself on his elbow with an ironical stare.
“Money?
They borrow money; they don’t give it.”

 
          
“Ah—”
I thought; but aloud I continued: “They’re prepared to give it now. Mrs. Brown
tells me—”

 
          
He
lifted his hand with a gesture that cut me short; then he leaned back, and drew
a painful breath or two. Beads of moisture came out on his forehead. “If she
told you that, it means she’s got more out of Kit. Or out of Kit through
you
—is that it?” he brought out roughly.

 
          
His
clairvoyance frightened me almost as much as his physical distress—and the one
seemed, somehow, a function of the other, as though the wearing down of his
flesh had made other
people’s
diaphanous to him, and
he could see through it to their hearts. “Stephen—” I began imploringly.

 
          
Again
his lifted hand checked me. “No, wait.” He breathed hard again and shut his
eyes. Then he opened them and looked into mine. “There’s only one way out of
this.”

 
          
“For you to be reasonable.”

 
          
“Call
it that if you like. I’ve got to see mother Kit—and without their knowing it.”

 
          
My
perplexity grew, and my agitation with it. Could it be that the end of the
Browns was in sight? I tried to remember that my first business was to avoid
communicating my agitation to Stephen. In a tone that I did my best to keep
steady I said: “Nothing could make your mother happier. You’re all she lives
for.”

 
          
“She’ll
have to find something else soon.”

 
          
“No,
no. Only let her come, and she’ll make you well. Mothers work miracles—”

 
          
His
inscrutable gaze rested on mine. “So they say. Only, you see, she’s not my
mother.”

 
          
He
spoke so quietly, in such a low detached tone, that at first the words carried
no meaning to me. If he had been excited I should have suspected fever,
delirium; but voice and eyes were clear. “Now you understand,” he added.

 
          
I
sat beside him stupidly, speechless, unable to think. “I don’t understand
anything,” I stammered. Such a possibility as his words suggested had never
once occurred to me. Yet he wasn’t delirious, he wasn’t raving—it was I whose
brain was reeling as if in fever.

 
          
“Well,
I’m not the long-lost child. The Browns are not
her
Browns. It’s all a lie and an imposture. We faked it up between
us, Chrissy and I did—her simplicity made it so cursedly easy for us. Boy
didn’t have much to do with it; poor old Boy! He just sat back and took his
share …
Now
you do see,” he repeated,
in the cool explanatory tone in which he might have set forth some one else’s
shortcomings.

 
          
My
mind was still a blur while he poured out, in broken sentences, the details of
the conspiracy—the sordid tale of a trio of society adventurers come to the end
of their resources, and suddenly clutching at this unheard-of chance of rescue,
affluence, peace. But gradually, as I listened, the glare of horror with which
he was blinding me turned into a strangely clear and penetrating light, forcing
its way into obscure crannies, elucidating the incomprehensible, picking out
one by one the links that bound together his fragments of fact. I saw—but what
I saw my gaze shrank from.

 
          
“Well,”
I heard him say, between his difficult breaths, “
now
do you begin to believe me?”

 
          
“I
don’t know. I can’t tell. Why on earth,” I broke out, suddenly relieved at the
idea, “should you want to see your mother if this isn’t all a ghastly
invention?”

 
          
“To
tell her what I’ve just told you—make a clean breast of it. Can’t you see?”

 
          
“If
that’s the reason, I see you want to kill her—that’s all.”

 
          
He
grew paler under his paleness. “Norcutt, I can’t go on like this; I’ve got to
tell her. I want to do it at once. I thought I could keep up the lie a little
longer—let things go on drifting—but I can’t. I held out because I wanted to
get well first, and paint her picture—leave her that to be proud of, anyhow!
Now that’s all over, and there’s nothing left but the naked shame …” He opened
his eyes and fixed them again on mine. “I want you to bring her here
today—without
their
knowing it.
You’ve got to manage it somehow. It’ll be the first decent thing I’ve done in
years.”

 
          
“It
will be the most unpardonable,” I interrupted angrily. “The time’s past for
trying to square your own conscience. What you’ve got to do now is to go on
lying to her—you’ve got to get well, if only to go on lying to her!”

 
          
A
thin smile flickered over his face. “I can’t get well.”

 
          
“That’s
as it may be. You can spare her, anyhow.”

 
          
“By
letting things go on like this?” He lay for a long time silent; then his lips
drew up in a queer grimace. “It’ll be horrible enough to be a sort of
expiation—”

 
          
“It’s
the only one.”

 
          
“It’s
the worst.”

 
          
He
sank back wearily. I saw that fatigue had silenced him, and wondered if I ought
to steal away. My presence could not but be agitating; yet in his present state
it seemed almost as dangerous to leave him as to stay. I saw a flask of brandy
on the table, a glass beside it. I poured out some brandy and held it to his
lips. He emptied the glass slowly, and as his head fell back I heard him say:
“Before I knew her I thought I could pull it off … But, you see, her sweetness
…”

 
          
“If
she heard you say that it would make up for everything.”

 
          
“Even
for what I’ve just told you?”

 
          
“Even
for that. For God’s sake hold your tongue, and just let her come here and nurse
you.”

 
          
He
made no answer, but under his lids I saw a tear or two.

 
          
“Let
her come—let her come,” I pleaded, taking his dying hand in mine.

 
          
  

 

 
XI.
 
 

 
          
Nature
does not seem to care for dramatic climaxes. Instead of allowing Stephen to die
at once, his secret on his lips, she laid on him the harsher task of living on
through weary weeks, and keeping back the truth till the end.

 
          
As
the result of my visit, he consented, the next day, to be carried back in an
ambulance to Mrs. Glenn’s; and when I saw their meeting it seemed to me that
ties of blood were frail compared to what drew those two together. After she
had fallen on her knees at his bedside, and drawn his head to her breast, I was
almost sure he would not speak; and he did not.

 
          
I
was able to stay with Mrs. Glenn till Stephen died; then I had to hurry back to
my post in
Washington
. When I took leave of her she told me that
she was following on the next steamer with Stephen’s body. She wished her son
to have a
New
York
funeral, a funeral like his father’s, at which all their old friends could be
present. “Not like poor Phil’s, you know—” and I recalled the importance she
had attached to the presence of her husband’s friends at his funeral. “It’s
something to remember afterwards,” she said, with dry eyes. “And it will be
their only way of knowing my Stephen …” It was of course impossible to exclude
Mr. and Mrs. Brown from these melancholy rites; and accordingly they sailed
with her.

 
          
If
Stephen had recovered she had meant, as I knew, to reopen her
New York
house; but now that was not to be thought
of. She sold the house, and all it contained, and a few weeks later sailed once
more for
Paris
—again with the Browns.

 
          
I
had resolved, after Stephen’s death—when the first shock was over—to do what I
could toward relieving her of the Browns’ presence. Though I could not tell her
the truth about them, I might perhaps help her to effect some transaction which
would relieve her of their company. But I soon saw that this was out of the
question; and the reason deepened my perplexity. It was simply that the
Browns—or at least Mrs. Brown—had become Mrs. Glenn’s chief consolation in her
sorrow. The two women, so incessantly at odds while Stephen lived, were now
joined in a common desolation. It seemed like profaning Catherine Glenn’s grief
to compare Mrs. Brown’s to it; yet, in the first weeks after Stephen’s death, I
had to admit that Mrs. Brown mourned him as genuinely, as inconsolably, as his
supposed mother. Indeed, it would be nearer the truth to say that Mrs. Brown’s
grief was more hopeless and rebellious than the
other’s
.
After all, as Mrs. Glenn said, it was much worse for Chrissy. “She had so
little compared to me; and she gave as much, I suppose. Think what I had that
she’s never known; those precious months of waiting for him, when he was part
of me, when we were one body and one soul.
And then, years
afterward, when I was searching for him, and knowing all the while I should
find him; and after that, our perfect life together—our perfect understanding.
All that—there’s all that left to me! And what did she have? Why, when she
shows me his little socks and shoes (she’s kept them all so carefully) they’re
my
baby’s socks and shoes, not hers—and
I know she’s thinking of it when we cry over them. I see now that I’ve been unjust
to her … and cruel … For he
did
love
me best; and that ought to have made me kinder—”

BOOK: Edith Wharton - SSC 09
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