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Title: The Old Maid
       (The 'Fifties)

Author: Edith Wharton

Illustrator: E. C. Caswell

Release Date: February 2, 2020 [EBook #61290]

Language: English

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                            _OLD NEW YORK_

                             THE OLD MAID

                           (_The ’Fifties_)




                          _By EDITH WHARTON_


                           OLD NEW YORK

                              FALSE DAWN
                              THE OLD MAID
                              THE SPARK
                              NEW YEAR’S DAY

                           THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON

                           THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

                           SUMMER

                           THE REEF

                           THE MARNE

                           FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING




                             OLD NEW YORK

                             THE OLD MAID

                           (_The ’Fifties_)

                                  BY

                             EDITH WHARTON

                AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC.

                     DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                     NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV

                          COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

     _Copyright, 1922, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporation_
                       (_The Red Book Magazine_)

                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                             THE OLD MAID

                           (_The ’Fifties_)

                                PART I




                             THE OLD MAID

                           (_The ’Fifties_)




I


In the old New York of the ’fifties a few families ruled, in simplicity
and affluence. Of these were the Ralstons.

The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to
produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things
handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious
world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants,
shipbuilders and ship-chandlers. Those well-fed slow-moving people, who
seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only because the
caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and
strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of
which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then
enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted
key-boards, on which Fate played without a sound.

In this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the
largest areas was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications. The
Ralstons were of middle-class English stock. They had not come to the
colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank-account. The result
had been beyond their hopes, and their religion was tinged by their
success. An edulcorated Church of England which, under the conciliatory
name of the “Episcopal Church of the United States of America,” left
out the coarser allusions in the Marriage Service, slid over the
comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and thought it more
respectful to say “Our Father _who_” than “_which_” in the Lord’s
Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the
Ralstons had built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same
instinctive recoil from new religions as from unaccounted-for people.
Institutional to the core, they represented the conservative element
that holds new societies together as seaplants bind the seashore.

Compared with the Ralstons, even such traditionalists as the Lovells,
the Halseys or the Vandergraves appeared careless, indifferent to money,
almost reckless in their impulses and indecisions. Old John Frederick
Ralston, the stout founder of the race, had perceived the difference,
and emphasized it to his son, Frederick John, in whom he had scented a
faint leaning toward the untried and unprofitable.

“You let the Lannings and the Dagonets and the Spenders take risks and
fly kites. It’s the county-family blood in ’em: we’ve nothing to do with
that. Look how they’re petering out already--the men, I mean. Let your
boys marry their girls, if you like (they’re wholesome and handsome);
though I’d sooner see my grandsons take a Lovell or a Vandergrave, or
any of our own kind. But don’t let your sons go mooning around after
their young fellows, horse-racing, and running down south to those d----d
Springs, and gambling at New Orleans, and all the rest of it. That’s
how you’ll build up the family, and keep the weather out. The way we’ve
always done it.”

Frederick John listened, obeyed, married a Halsey, and passively
followed in his father’s steps. He belonged to the cautious generation
of New York gentlemen who revered Hamilton and served Jefferson, who
longed to lay out New York like Washington, and who laid it out instead
like a gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people
they secretly looked down upon. Shopkeepers to the marrow, they put in
their windows the wares there was most demand for, keeping their private
opinions for the back-shop, where through lack of use, they gradually
lost substance and colour.

The fourth generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of
convictions save an acute sense of honour in private and business
matters; on the life of the community and the state they took their
daily views from the newspapers, and the newspapers they already
despised. The Ralstons had done little to shape the destiny of their
country, except to finance the Cause when it had become safe to do so.
They were related to many of the great men who had built the Republic;
but no Ralston had so far committed himself as to be great. As old John
Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they
regarded heroism as a form of gambling. Yet by merely being so numerous
and so similar they had come to have a weight in the community. People
said: “The Ralstons” when they wished to invoke a precedent. This
attribution of authority had gradually convinced the third generation of
its collective importance, and the fourth, to which Delia Ralston’s
husband belonged, had the ease and simplicity of a ruling class.

Within the limits of their universal caution, the Ralstons fulfilled
their obligations as rich and respected citizens. They figured on the
boards of all the old-established charities, gave handsomely to thriving
institutions, had the best cooks in New York, and when they travelled
abroad ordered statuary of the American sculptors in Rome whose
reputation was already established. The first Ralston who had brought
home a statue had been regarded as a wild fellow; but when it became
known that the sculptor had executed several orders for the British
aristocracy it was felt in the family that this too was a three per cent
investment.

Two marriages with the Dutch Vandergraves had consolidated these
qualities of thrift and handsome living, and the carefully built-up
Ralston character was now so congenital that Delia Ralston sometimes
asked herself whether, were she to turn her own little boy loose in a
wilderness, he would not create a small New York there, and be on all
its boards of directors.

Delia Lovell had married James Ralston at twenty. The marriage, which
had taken place in the month of September, 1840, had been solemnized, as
was then the custom, in the drawing-room of the bride’s country home, at
what is now the corner of Avenue A and Ninety-first Street, overlooking
the Sound. Thence her husband had driven her (in Grandmamma Lovell’s
canary-coloured coach with a fringed hammer-cloth) through spreading
suburbs and untidy elm-shaded streets to one of the new houses in
Gramercy Park, which the pioneers of the younger set were just beginning
to affect; and there, at five-and-twenty, she was established, the
mother of two children, the possessor of a generous allowance of
pin-money, and, by common consent, one of the handsomest and most
popular “young matrons” (as they were called) of her day.

She was thinking placidly and gratefully of these things as she sat one
afternoon in her handsome bedroom in Gramercy Park. She was too near to
the primitive Ralstons to have as clear a view of them as, for instance,
the son in question might one day command: she lived under them as
unthinkingly as one lives under the laws of one’s country. Yet that
tremor of the muted key-board, that secret questioning which sometimes
beat in her like wings, would now and then so divide her from them that
for a fleeting moment she could survey them in their relation to other
things. The moment was always fleeting; she dropped back from it
quickly, breathless and a little pale, to her children, her
house-keeping, her new dresses and her kindly Jim.

She thought of him today with a smile of tenderness, remembering how he
had told her to spare no expense on her new bonnet. Though she was
twenty-five, and twice a mother, her image was still surprisingly fresh.
The plumpness then thought seemly in a young wife stretched the grey
silk across her bosom, and caused her heavy gold watch-chain--after it
left the anchorage of the brooch of St. Peter’s in mosaic that fastened
her low-cut Cluny collar--to dangle perilously in the void above a tiny
waist buckled into a velvet waist-band. But the shoulders above sloped
youthfully under her Cashmere scarf, and every movement was as quick as
a girl’s.

Mrs. Jim Ralston approvingly examined the rosy-cheeked oval set in the
blonde ruffles of the bonnet on which, in compliance with her husband’s
instructions, she had spared no expense. It was a cabriolet of white
velvet tied with wide satin ribbons and plumed with a crystal-spangled
marabout--a wedding bonnet ordered for the marriage of her cousin,
Charlotte Lovell, which was to take place that week at St.
Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Charlotte was making a match exactly like
Delia’s own: marrying a Ralston, of the Waverly Place branch, than which
nothing could be safer, sounder or more--well, usual. Delia did not know
why the word had occurred to her, for it could hardly be postulated,
even of the young women of her own narrow clan, that they “usually”
married Ralstons; but the soundness, safeness, suitability of the
arrangement, did make it typical of the kind of alliance which a nice
girl in the nicest set would serenely and blushingly forecast for
herself.

Yes--and afterward?

Well--what? And what did this new question mean? Afterward: why, of
course, there was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible
exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek
in return for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the
terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his
shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions,
insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the
reminder of the phrase “to obey” in the glittering blur of the Marriage
Service; a week or a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed
pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the
matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed,
the early morning discussions and consultations through that
dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a fiery pit
scorching the brow of innocence.

And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to “make up for
everything,” and didn’t--though they were such darlings, and one had no
definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they
were to make up for.

Yes: Charlotte’s fate would be just like hers. Joe Ralston was so like
his second cousin Jim (Delia’s James), that Delia could see no reason
why life in the squat brick house in Waverly Place should not exactly
resemble life in the tall brownstone house in Gramercy Park. Only
Charlotte’s bedroom would certainly not be as pretty as hers.

She glanced complacently at the French wall-paper that reproduced a
watered silk, with a “valanced” border, and tassels between the loops.
The mahogany bedstead, covered with a white embroidered counterpane, was
symmetrically reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe which matched it.
Coloured lithographs of the “Four Seasons” by Léopold Robert surmounted
groups of family daguerreotypes in deeply-recessed gilt frames. The
ormolu clock represented a shepherdess sitting on a fallen trunk, a
basket of flowers at her feet. A shepherd, stealing up, surprised her
with a kiss, while her little dog barked at him from a clump of roses.
One knew the profession of the lovers by their crooks and the shape of
their hats. This frivolous time-piece had been a wedding-gift from
Delia’s aunt, Mrs. Manson Mingott, a dashing widow who lived in Paris
and was received at the Tuileries. It had been entrusted by Mrs. Mingott
to young Clement Spender, who had come back from Italy for a short
holiday just after Delia’s marriage; the marriage which might never have
been, if Clem Spender could have supported a wife, or if he had
consented to give up painting and Rome for New York and the law. The
young man (who looked, already, so odd and foreign and sarcastic) had
laughingly assured the bride that her aunt’s gift was “the newest thing
in the Palais Royal”; and the family, who admired Mrs. Manson Mingott’s
taste though they disapproved of her “foreignness,” had criticized
Delia’s putting the clock in her bedroom instead of displaying it on the
drawing-room mantel. But she liked, when she woke in the morning, to see
the bold shepherd stealing his kiss.

Charlotte would certainly not have such a pretty clock in her bedroom;
but then she had not been used to pretty things. Her father, who had
died at thirty of lung-fever, was one of the “poor Lovells.” His widow,
burdened with a young family, and living all the year round “up the
River,” could not do much for her eldest girl; and Charlotte had entered
society in her mother’s turned garments, and shod with satin sandals
handed down from a defunct aunt who had “opened a ball” with General
Washington. The old-fashioned Ralston furniture, which Delia already saw
herself banishing, would seem sumptuous to Chatty; very likely she would
think Delia’s gay French time-piece somewhat frivolous, or even not
“quite nice.” Poor Charlotte had become so serious, so prudish almost,
since she had given up balls and taken to visiting the poor! Delia
remembered, with ever-recurring wonder, the abrupt change in her: the
precise moment at which it had been privately agreed in the family that,
after all, Charlotte Lovell was going to be an old maid.

They had not thought so when she came out. Though her mother could not
afford to give her more than one new tarlatan dress, and though nearly
everything in her appearance was regrettable, from the too bright red of
her hair to the too pale brown of her eyes--not to mention the rounds of
brick-rose on her cheek-bones, which almost (preposterous thought!) made
her look as if she painted--yet these defects were redeemed by a slim
waist, a light foot and a gay laugh; and when her hair was well oiled
and brushed for an evening party, so that it looked almost brown, and
lay smoothly along her delicate cheeks under a wreath of red and white
camellias, several eligible young men (Joe Ralston among them) were
known to have called her pretty.

Then came her illness. She caught cold on a moonlight sleighing-party,
the brick-rose circles deepened, and she began to cough. There was a
report that she was “going like her father,” and she was hurried off to
a remote village in Georgia, where she lived alone for a year with an
old family governess. When she came back everyone felt at once that
there was a change in her. She was pale, and thinner than ever, but with
an exquisitely transparent cheek, darker eyes and redder hair; and the
oddness of her appearance was increased by plain dresses of Quakerish
cut. She had left off trinkets and watch-chains, always wore the same
grey cloak and small close bonnet, and displayed a sudden zeal for
visiting the indigent. The family explained that during her year in the
south she had been shocked by the hopeless degradation of the “poor
whites” and their children, and that this revelation of misery had made
it impossible for her to return to the light-hearted life of her young
friends. Everyone agreed, with significant glances, that this unnatural
state of mind would “pass off in time”; and meanwhile old Mrs. Lovell,
Chatty’s grandmother, who understood her perhaps better than the others,
gave her a little money for her paupers, and lent her a room in the
Lovell stables (at the back of the old lady’s Mercer Street house) where
she gathered about her, in what would afterward have been called a
“day-nursery,” some of the destitute children of the neighbourhood.
There was even, among them, the baby girl whose origin had excited such
intense curiosity two or three years earlier, when a veiled lady in a
handsome cloak had brought it to the hovel of Cyrus Washington, the
negro handy-man whose wife Jessamine took in Dr. Lanskell’s washing. Dr.
Lanskell, the chief medical practitioner of the day, was presumably
versed in the secret history of every household from the Battery to
Union Square; but, though beset by inquisitive patients, he had
invariably declared himself unable to identify Jessamine’s “veiled
lady,” or to hazard a guess as to the origin of the hundred dollar bill
pinned to the baby’s bib.

The hundred dollars were never renewed, the lady never reappeared, but
the baby lived healthily and happily with Jessamine’s piccaninnies, and
as soon as it could toddle was brought to Chatty Lovell’s day-nursery,
where it appeared (like its fellow paupers) in little garments cut down
from her old dresses, and socks knitted by her untiring hands. Delia,
absorbed in her own babies, had nevertheless dropped in once or twice at
the nursery, and had come away wishing that Chatty’s maternal instinct
might find its normal outlet in marriage. The married cousin confusedly
felt that her own affection for her handsome children was a mild and
measured sentiment compared with Chatty’s fierce passion for the waifs
in Grandmamma Lovell’s stable.

And then, to the general surprise, Charlotte Lovell engaged herself to
Joe Ralston. It was known that Joe had “admired her” the year she came
out. She was a graceful dancer, and Joe, who was tall and nimble, had
footed it with her through many a reel and _schottische_. By the end of
the winter all the match-makers were predicting that something would
come of it; but when Delia sounded her cousin, the girl’s evasive answer
and burning brow seemed to imply that her suitor had changed his mind,
and no further questions could be asked. Now it was clear that there
had, in fact, been an old romance between them, probably followed by
that exciting incident, a “misunderstanding”; but at last all was well,
and the bells of St. Mark’s were preparing to ring in happier days for
Charlotte. “Ah, when she has her first baby,” the Ralston mothers
chorused....

       *       *       *       *       *

“Chatty!” Delia exclaimed, pushing back her chair as she saw her
cousin’s image reflected in the glass over her shoulder.

Charlotte Lovell had paused in the doorway. “They told me you were
here--so I ran up.”

“Of course, darling. How handsome you do look in your poplin! I always
said you needed rich materials. I’m so thankful to see you out of grey
cashmere.” Delia, lifting her hands, removed the white bonnet from her
dark polished head, and shook it gently to make the crystals glitter.

“I hope you like it? It’s for your wedding,” she laughed.

Charlotte Lovell stood motionless. In her mother’s old dove-coloured
poplin, freshly banded with narrow rows of crimson velvet ribbon, an
ermine tippet crossed on her bosom, and a new beaver bonnet with a
falling feather, she had already something of the assurance and majesty
of a married woman.

“And you know your hair certainly _is_ darker, darling,” Delia added,
still hopefully surveying her.

“Darker? It’s grey,” Charlotte suddenly broke out in her deep voice. She
pushed back one of the pommaded bands that framed her face, and showed a
white lock on her temple. “You needn’t save up your bonnet; I’m not
going to be married,” she added, with a smile that showed her small
white teeth in a fleeting glare.

Delia had just enough presence of mind to lay down the bonnet,
marabout-up, before she flung herself on her cousin.

“Not going to be married? Charlotte, are you perfectly crazy?”

“Why is it crazy to do what I think right?”

“But people said you were going to marry him the year you came out. And
no one understood what happened then. And now--how can it possibly be
right? You simply _can’t_!” Delia incoherently cried.

“Oh--people!” said Charlotte Lovell wearily.

Her married cousin looked at her with a start. Something thrilled in her
voice that Delia had never heard in it, or in any other human voice,
before. Its echo seemed to set their familiar world rocking, and the
Axminster carpet actually heaved under Delia’s shrinking slippers.

Charlotte Lovell stood staring ahead of her with strained lids. In the
pale brown of her eyes Delia noticed the green specks that floated there
when she was angry or excited.

“Charlotte--where on earth have you come from?” she questioned, drawing
the girl down to the sofa.

“Come from?”

“Yes. You look as if you had seen a ghost--an army of ghosts.”

The same snarling smile drew up Charlotte’s lip. “I’ve seen Joe,” she
said.

“Well?--Oh, Chatty,” Delia exclaimed, abruptly illuminated, “you don’t
mean to say that you’re going to let any little thing in Joe’s past--?
Not that I’ve ever heard the least hint; never. But even if there
were....” She drew a deep breath, and bravely proceeded to extremities.
“Even if you’ve heard that he’s been ... that he’s had a child--of
course he would have provided for it before....”

The girl shook her head. “I know: you needn’t go on. ‘Men will be men’;
but it’s not that.”

“Tell me what it is.”

Charlotte Lovell looked about the sunny prosperous room as if it were
the image of her world, and that world were a prison she must break out
of. She lowered her head. “I want--to get away,” she panted.

“Get away? From Joe?”

“From his ideas--the Ralston ideas.”

Delia bridled--after all, she was a Ralston! “The Ralston ideas? I
haven’t found them--so unbearably unpleasant to live with,” she smiled a
little tartly.

“No. But it was different with you: they didn’t ask you to give up
things.”

“What things?” What in the world (Delia wondered) had poor Charlotte
that any one could want her to give up? She had always been in the
position of taking rather than of having to surrender. “Can’t you
explain to me, dear?” Delia urged.

“My poor children--he says I’m to give them up,” cried the girl in a
stricken whisper.

“Give them up? Give up helping them?”

“Seeing them--looking after them. Give them up altogether. He got his
mother to explain to me. After--after we have children ... he’s afraid
... afraid our children might catch things.... He’ll give me money, of
course, to pay some one ... a hired person, to look after them. He
thought that handsome,” Charlotte broke out with a sob. She flung off
her bonnet and smothered her prostrate weeping in the cushions.

Delia sat perplexed. Of all unforeseen complications this was surely the
least imaginable. And with all the acquired Ralston that was in her she
could not help seeing the force of Joe’s objection, could almost find
herself agreeing with him. No one in New York had forgotten the death of
the poor Henry van der Luydens’ only child, who had caught small-pox at
the circus to which an unprincipled nurse had surreptitiously taken him.
After such a warning as that, parents felt justified in every precaution
against contagion. And poor people were so ignorant and careless, and
their children, of course, so perpetually exposed to everything
catching. No, Joe Ralston was certainly right, and Charlotte almost
insanely unreasonable. But it would be useless to tell her so now.
Instinctively, Delia temporized.

“After all,” she whispered to the prone ear, “if it’s only after you
have children--you may not have any--for some time.”

“Oh, yes, I shall!” came back in anguish from the cushions.

Delia smiled with matronly superiority. “Really, Chatty, I don’t quite
see how you can know. You don’t understand.”

Charlotte Lovell lifted herself up. Her collar of Brussels lace had
come undone and hung in a wisp on her crumpled bodice, and through the
disorder of her hair the white lock glimmered haggardly. In her pale
brown eyes the little green specks floated like leaves in a trout-pool.

“Poor girl,” Delia thought, “how old and ugly she looks! More than ever
like an old maid; and she doesn’t seem to realize in the least that
she’ll never have another chance.”

“You must try to be sensible, Chatty dear. After all, one’s own babies
have the first claim.”

“That’s just it.” The girl seized her fiercely by the wrists. “How can I
give up my own baby?”

“Your--your--?” Delia’s world again began to waver under her. “Which of
the poor little waifs, dearest, do you call your own baby?” she
questioned patiently.

Charlotte looked her straight in the eyes. “I call my own baby my own
baby.”

“Your own--? Take care--you’re hurting my wrists, Chatty!” Delia freed
herself, forcing a smile. “Your own--?”

“My own little girl. The one that Jessamine and Cyrus--”

“Oh--” Delia Ralston gasped.

The two cousins sat silent, facing each other; but Delia looked away. It
came over her with a shudder of repugnance that such things, even if
they had to be said, should not have been spoken in her bedroom, so near
the spotless nursery across the passage. Mechanically she smoothed the
organ-like folds of her silk skirt, which her cousin’s embrace had
tumbled. Then she looked again at Charlotte’s eyes, and her own melted.

“Oh, poor Chatty--my poor Chatty!” She held out her arms to her cousin.




II


The shepherd continued to steal his kiss from the shepherdess, and the
clock in the fallen trunk continued to tick out the minutes.

Delia, petrified, sat unconscious of their passing, her cousin clasped
to her. She was dumb with the horror and amazement of learning that her
own blood ran in the veins of the anonymous foundling, the “hundred
dollar baby” about whom New York had so long furtively jested and
conjectured. It was her first contact with the nether side of the smooth
social surface, and she sickened at the thought that such things were,
and that she, Delia Ralston, should be hearing of them in her own
house, and from the lips of the victim! For Chatty of course was a
victim--but whose? She had spoken no name, and Delia could put no
question: the horror of it sealed her lips. Her mind had instantly raced
back over Chatty’s past; but she saw no masculine figure in it but Joe
Ralston’s. And to connect Joe with the episode was obviously
unthinkable. Some one in the south, then--? But no: Charlotte had been
ill when she left--and in a flash Delia understood the real nature of
that illness, and of the girl’s disappearance. But from such
speculations too her mind recoiled, and instinctively she fastened on
something she could still grasp: Joe Ralston’s attitude about Chatty’s
paupers. Of course Joe could not let his wife risk bringing contagion
into their home--that was safe ground to dwell on. Her own Jim would
have felt in the same way; and she would certainly have agreed with
him.

Her eyes travelled back to the clock. She always thought of Clem Spender
when she looked at the clock, and suddenly she wondered--if things had
been different--what _he_ would have said if she had made such an appeal
to him as Charlotte had made to Joe. The thing was hard to imagine; yet
in a flash of mental readjustment Delia saw herself as Clem’s wife, she
saw her children as his, she pictured herself asking him to let her go
on caring for the poor waifs in the Mercer Street stable, and she
distinctly heard his laugh and his light answer: “Why on earth did you
ask, you little goose? Do you take me for such a Pharisee as that?”

Yes, that was Clem Spender all over--tolerant, reckless, indifferent to
consequences, always doing the kind thing at the moment, and too often
leaving others to pay the score. “There’s something cheap about Clem,”
Jim had once said in his heavy way. Delia Ralston roused herself and
pressed her cousin closer. “Chatty, tell me,” she whispered.

“There’s nothing more.”

“I mean, about yourself ... this thing ... this....” Clem Spender’s
voice was still in her ears. “You loved some one,” she breathed.

“Yes. That’s over--. Now it’s only the child.... And I could love
Joe--in another way.” Chatty Lovell straightened herself, wan and
frowning.

“I need the money--I must have it for my baby. Or else they’ll send it
to an Institution.” She paused. “But that’s not all. I want to marry--to
be a wife, like all of you. I should have loved Joe’s children--our
children. Life doesn’t stop....”

“No; I suppose not. But you speak as if ... as if ... the person who
took advantage of you....”

“No one took advantage of me. I was lonely and unhappy. I met some one
who was lonely and unhappy. People don’t all have your luck. We were
both too poor to marry each other ... and mother would never have
consented. And so one day ... one day before he said goodbye....”

“He said goodbye?”

“Yes. He was going to leave the country.”

“He left the country--knowing?”

“How was he to know? He doesn’t live here. He’d just come back--come
back to see his family--for a few weeks....”

She broke off, her thin lips pressed together upon her secret.

There was a silence. Blindly Delia stared at the bold shepherd.

“Come back from where?” she asked at length in a low tone.

“Oh, what does it matter? You wouldn’t understand,” Charlotte broke off,
in the very words her married cousin had compassionately addressed to
her virginity.

A slow blush rose to Delia’s cheek: she felt oddly humiliated by the
rebuke conveyed in that contemptuous retort. She seemed to herself shy,
ineffectual, as incapable as an ignorant girl of dealing with the
abominations that Charlotte was thrusting on her. But suddenly some
fierce feminine intuition struggled and woke in her. She forced her eyes
upon her cousin’s.

“You won’t tell me who it was?”

“What’s the use? I haven’t told anybody.”

“Then why have you come to me?”

Charlotte’s stony face broke up in weeping. “It’s for my baby ... my
baby....”

Delia did not heed her. “How can I help you if I don’t know?” she
insisted in a harsh dry voice: her heart-beats were so violent that they
seemed to send up throttling hands to her throat.

Charlotte made no answer.

“Come back from where?” Delia doggedly repeated; and at that, with a
long wail, the girl flung her hands up, screening her eyes. “He always
thought you’d wait for him,” she sobbed out, “and then, when he found
you hadn’t ... and that you were marrying Jim.... He heard it just as
he was sailing.... He didn’t know it till Mrs. Mingott asked him to
bring the clock back for your wedding....”

“Stop--stop,” Delia cried, springing to her feet. She had provoked the
avowal, and now that it had come she felt that it had been gratuitously
and indecently thrust upon her. Was this New York, _her_ New York, her
safe friendly hypocritical New York, was this James Ralston’s house, and
this his wife listening to such revelations of dishonour?

Charlotte Lovell stood up in her turn. “I knew it--I knew it! You think
worse of my baby now, instead of better.... Oh, why did you make me tell
you? I knew you’d never understand. I’d always cared for him, ever since
I came out; that was why I wouldn’t marry any one else. But I knew
there was no hope for me ... he never looked at anybody but you. And
then, when he came back four years ago, and there was no _you_ for him
any more, he began to notice me, to be kind, to talk to me about his
life and his painting....” She drew a deep breath, and her voice
cleared. “That’s over--all over. It’s as if I couldn’t either hate him
or love him. There’s only the child now--my child. He doesn’t even know
of it--why should he? It’s none of his business; it’s nobody’s business
but mine. But surely you must see that I can’t give up my baby.”

Delia Ralston stood speechless, looking away from her cousin in a
growing horror. She had lost all sense of reality, all feeling of safety
and self-reliance. Her impulse was to close her ears to the other’s
appeal as a child buries its head from midnight terrors. At last she
drew herself up, and spoke with dry lips.

“But what do you mean to do? Why have you come to me? Why have you told
me all this?”

“Because he loved you!” Charlotte Lovell stammered out; and the two
women stood and faced each other.

Slowly the tears rose to Delia’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks,
moistening her parched lips. Through the tears she saw her cousin’s
haggard countenance waver and droop like a drowning face under water.
Things half-guessed, obscurely felt, surged up from unsuspected depths
in her. It was almost as if, for a moment, this other woman were telling
her of her own secret past, putting into crude words all the trembling
silences of her own heart.

The worst of it was, as Charlotte said, that they must act now; there
was not a day to lose. Chatty was right--it was impossible that she
should marry Joe if to do so meant giving up the child. But, in any
case, how could she marry him without telling him the truth? And was it
conceivable that, after hearing it, he should not repudiate her? All
these questions spun agonizingly through Delia’s brain, and through them
glimmered the persistent vision of the child--Clem Spender’s
child--growing up on charity in a negro hovel, or herded in one of the
plague-houses they called Asylums. No: the child came first--she felt it
in every fibre of her body. But what should she do, of whom take
counsel, how advise the wretched creature who had come to her in
Clement’s name? Delia glanced about her desperately, and then turned
back to her cousin.

“You must give me time. I must think. You ought not to marry him--and
yet all the arrangements are made; and the wedding-presents.... There
would be a scandal ... it would kill Granny Lovell....”

Charlotte answered in a low voice: “There _is_ no time. I must decide
now.”

Delia pressed her hands against her breast. “I tell you I must think. I
wish you would go home.--Or, no: stay here: your mother mustn’t see your
eyes. Jim’s not coming home till late; you can wait in this room till I
come back.” She had opened the wardrobe and was reaching up for a plain
bonnet and heavy veil.

“Stay here? But where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I want to walk--to get the air. I think I want to be
alone.” Feverishly, Delia unfolded her Paisley shawl, tied on bonnet and
veil, thrust her mittened hands into her muff. Charlotte, without
moving, stared at her dumbly from the sofa.

“You’ll wait,” Delia insisted, on the threshold.

“Yes: I’ll wait.”

Delia shut the door and hurried down the stairs.




III


She had spoken the truth in saying that she did not know where she was
going. She simply wanted to get away from Charlotte’s unbearable face,
and from the immediate atmosphere of her tragedy. Outside, in the open,
perhaps it would be easier to think.

As she skirted the park-rails she saw her rosy children playing, under
their nurse’s eye, with the pampered progeny of other square-dwellers.
The little girl had on her new plaid velvet bonnet and white tippet, and
the boy his Highland cap and broad-cloth spencer. How happy and jolly
they looked! The nurse spied her, but she shook her head, waved at the
group and hurried on.

She walked and walked through the familiar streets decked with bright
winter sunshine. It was early afternoon, an hour when the gentlemen had
just returned to their offices, and there were few pedestrians in Irving
Place and Union Square. Delia crossed the Square to Broadway.

The Lovell house in Mercer Street was a sturdy old-fashioned brick
dwelling. A large stable adjoined it, opening on an alley such as Delia,
on her honey-moon trip to England, had heard called a “mews.” She turned
into the alley, entered the stable court, and pushed open a door. In a
shabby white-washed room a dozen children, gathered about a stove, were
playing with broken toys. The Irishwoman who had charge of them was
cutting out small garments on a broken-legged deal table. She raised a
friendly face, recognizing Delia as the lady who had once or twice been
to see the children with Miss Charlotte.

Delia paused, embarrassed.

“I--I came to ask if you need any new toys,” she stammered.

“That we do, ma’am. And many another thing too, though Miss Charlotte
tells me I’m not to beg of the ladies that comes to see our poor
darlin’s.”

“Oh, you may beg of me, Bridget,” Mrs. Ralston answered, smiling. “Let
me see your babies--it’s so long since I’ve been here.”

The children had stopped playing and, huddled against their nurse, gazed
up open-mouthed at the rich rustling lady. One little girl with pale
brown eyes and scarlet cheeks was dressed in a plaid alpaca frock
trimmed with imitation coral buttons that Delia remembered. Those
buttons had been on Charlotte’s “best dress” the year she came out.
Delia stopped and took up the child. Its curly hair was brown, the exact
colour of the eyes--thank heaven! But the eyes had the same little green
spangles floating in their transparency. Delia sat down, and the little
girl, standing on her knee, gravely fingered her watch-chain.

“Oh, ma’am--maybe her shoes’ll soil your skirt. The floor here ain’t
none too clean.”

Delia shook her head, and pressed the child against her. She had
forgotten the other gazing babies and their wardress. The little
creature on her knee was made of different stuff--it had not needed the
plaid alpaca and coral buttons to single her out. Her brown curls grew
in points on her high forehead, exactly as Clement Spender’s did. Delia
laid a burning cheek against the forehead.

“Baby want my lovely yellow chain?”

Baby did.

Delia unfastened the gold chain and hung it about the child’s neck. The
other babies clapped and crowed, but the little girl, gravely dimpling,
continued to finger the links in silence.

“Oh, ma’am, you can’t leave that fine chain on little Teeny. When she
has to go back to those blacks....”

“What is her name?”

“Teena they call her, I believe. It don’t seem a Christian name,
har’ly.”

Delia was silent.

“What I say is, her cheeks is too red. And she coughs too easy. Always
one cold and another. Here, Teeny, leave the lady go.”

Delia stood up, loosening the tender arms.

“She doesn’t want to leave go of you, ma’am. Miss Chatty ain’t been in
today, and the little thing’s kinder lonesome without her. She don’t
play like the other children, somehow.... Teeny, you look at that lovely
chain you’ve got ... there, there now....”

“Goodbye, Clementina,” Delia whispered below her breath. She kissed the
pale brown eyes, the curly crown, and dropped her veil on rushing tears.
In the stable-yard she dried them on her large embroidered handkerchief,
and stood hesitating. Then with a decided step she turned toward home.

The house was as she had left it, except that the children had come in;
she heard them romping in the nursery as she went down the passage to
her bedroom. Charlotte Lovell was seated on the sofa, upright and
rigid, as Delia had left her.

“Chatty--Chatty, I’ve thought it out. Listen. Whatever happens, the baby
shan’t stay with those people. I mean to keep her.”

Charlotte stood up, tall and white. The eyes in her thin face had grown
so dark that they seemed like spectral hollows in a skull. She opened
her lips to speak, and then, snatching at her handkerchief, pressed it
to her mouth, and sank down again. A red trickle dripped through the
handkerchief onto her poplin skirt.

“Charlotte--Charlotte,” Delia screamed, on her knees beside her cousin.
Charlotte’s head slid back against the cushions and the trickle ceased.
She closed her eyes, and Delia, seizing a vinaigrette from the
dressing-table, held it to her pinched nostrils. The room was filled
with an acrid aromatic scent.

Charlotte’s lids lifted. “Don’t be frightened. I still spit blood
sometimes--not often. My lung is nearly healed. But it’s the terror--”

“No, no: there’s to be no more terror. I tell you I’ve thought it all
out. Jim is going to let me take the baby.”

The girl raised herself haggardly. “Jim? Have you told him? Is that
where you’ve been?”

“No, darling. I’ve only been to see the baby.”

“Oh,” Charlotte moaned, leaning back again. Delia took her own
handkerchief, and wiped away the tears that were raining down her
cousin’s cheeks.

“You mustn’t cry, Chatty; you must be brave. Your little girl and
his--how could you think? But you must give me time: I must manage it
in my own way.... Only trust me....”

Charlotte’s lips stirred faintly.

“The tears ... don’t dry them, Delia.... I like to feel them....”

The two cousins continued to lean against each other without speaking.
The ormolu clock ticked out the measure of their mute communion in
minutes, quarters, a half-hour, then an hour: the day declined and
darkened, the shadows lengthened across the garlands of the Axminster
and the broad white bed. There was a knock.

“The children’s waiting to say their grace before supper, ma’am.”

“Yes, Eliza. Let them say it to you. I’ll come later.” As the nurse’s
steps receded Charlotte Lovell disengaged herself from Delia’s embrace.

“Now I can go,” she said.

“You’re not too weak, dear? I can send for a coach to take you home.”

“No, no; it would frighten mother. And I shall like walking now, in the
darkness. Sometimes the world used to seem all one awful glare to me.
There were days when I thought the sun would never set. And then there
was the moon at night.” She laid her hands on her cousin’s shoulders.
“Now it’s different. By and bye I shan’t hate the light.”

The two women kissed each other, and Delia whispered: “Tomorrow.”




IV


The Ralstons gave up old customs reluctantly, but once they had adopted
a new one they found it impossible to understand why everyone else did
not immediately do likewise.

When Delia, who came of the laxer Lovells, and was naturally inclined to
novelty, had first proposed to her husband to dine at six o’clock
instead of two, his malleable young face had become as relentless as
that of the old original Ralston in his grim Colonial portrait. But
after a two days’ resistance he had come round to his wife’s view, and
now smiled contemptuously at the obstinacy of those who clung to a
heavy mid-day meal and high tea.

“There’s nothing I hate like narrow-mindedness. Let people eat when they
like, for all I care: it’s their narrow-mindedness that I can’t stand.”

Delia was thinking of this as she sat in the drawing-room (her mother
would have called it the parlour) waiting for her husband’s return. She
had just had time to smooth her glossy braids, and slip on the
black-and-white striped moire with cherry pipings which was his
favourite dress. The drawing-room, with its Nottingham lace curtains
looped back under florid gilt cornices, its marble centre-table on a
carved rosewood foot, and its old-fashioned mahogany armchairs covered
with one of the new French silk damasks in a tart shade of apple-green,
was one for any young wife to be proud of. The rosewood what-nots on
each side of the folding doors that led into the dining-room were
adorned with tropical shells, feld-spar vases, an alabaster model of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa, a pair of obelisks made of scraps of porphyry and
serpentine picked up by the young couple in the Roman Forum, a bust of
Clytie in chalk-white biscuit de Sèvres, and four old-fashioned figures
of the Seasons in Chelsea ware, that had to be left among the newer
ornaments because they had belonged to great-grandmamma Ralston. On the
walls hung large dark steel-engravings of Cole’s “Voyage of Life,” and
between the windows stood the life-size statue of “A Captive Maiden”
executed for Jim Ralston’s father by the celebrated Harriet Hosmer,
immortalized in Hawthorne’s novel of the Marble Faun. On the table lay
handsomely tooled copies of Turner’s Rivers of France, Drake’s Culprit
Fay, Crabbe’s Tales, and the Book of Beauty containing portraits of the
British peeresses who had participated in the Earl of Eglinton’s
tournament.

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 Ralstons 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 him was one of
compassion....

       *       *       *       *       *

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

“I never admired you more, darling. My wise Delia!”

Her head bent back, she took his kiss, and then drew apart. The sparkle
in his eyes she understood to be as much an invitation to her bloom as a
tribute to her sagacity.

She held him at arms’ length. “What should you have done, Jim, if I’d
had to tell you about myself what I’ve just told Joe about Chatty?”

A slight frown showed that he thought the question negligible, and
hardly in her usual taste. “Come,” his strong arm entreated her.

She continued to stand away from him, with grave eyes. “Poor Chatty!
Nothing left now--”

His own eyes grew grave, in instant sympathy. At such moments he was
still the sentimental boy whom she could manage.

“Ah, poor Chatty, indeed!” He groped for the readiest panacea. “Lucky,
now, after all, that she has those paupers, isn’t it? I suppose a woman
_must_ have children to love--somebody else’s if not her own.” It was
evident that the thought of the remedy had already relieved his pain.

“Yes,” Delia agreed, “I see no other comfort for her. I’m sure Joe will
feel that too. Between us, darling--” and now she let him have her
hands--“between us, you and I must see to it that she keeps her babies.”

“Her babies?” He smiled at the possessive pronoun. “Of course, poor
girl! Unless indeed she’s sent to Italy?”

“Oh, she won’t be that--where’s the money to come from? And, besides,
she’d never leave Aunt Lovell. But I thought, dear, if I might tell her
tomorrow--you see, I’m not exactly looking forward to my talk with
her--if I might tell her that you would let me look after the baby
she’s most worried about, the poor little foundling girl who has no
name and no home--if I might put aside a fixed sum from my
pin-money....”

Their hands flowed together, she lifted her flushing face to his. Manly
tears were in his eyes; ah, how he triumphed in her health, her wisdom,
her generosity!

“Not a penny from your pin-money--never!”

She feigned discouragement and wonder. “Think, dear--if I’d had to give
you up!”

“Not a penny from your pin-money, I say--but as much more as you need,
to help poor Chatty’s pauper. There--will that content you?”

“Dearest! When I think of our own, upstairs!” They held each other, awed
by that evocation.




V


Charlotte Lovell, at the sound of her cousin’s step, lifted a fevered
face from the pillow.

The bedroom, dim and close, smelt of eau de Cologne and fresh linen.
Delia, blinking in from the bright winter sun, had to feel her way
through a twilight obstructed by dark mahogany.

“I want to see your face, Chatty: unless your head aches too much?”

Charlotte signed “No,” and Delia drew back the heavy window curtains and
let in a ray of light. In it she saw the girl’s head, livid against the
bed-linen, the brick-rose circles again visible under darkly shadowed
lids. Just so, she remembered, poor cousin So-and-so had looked the
week before she sailed for Italy!

“Delia!” Charlotte breathed.

Delia drew near the bed, and stood looking down at her cousin with new
eyes. Yes: it had been easy enough, the night before, to dispose of
Chatty’s future as if it were her own. But now?

“Darling--”

“Oh, begin, please,” the girl interrupted, “or I shall know that what’s
coming is too dreadful!”

“Chatty, dearest, if I promised you too much--”

“Jim won’t let you take my child? I knew it! Shall I always go on
dreaming things that can never be?”

Delia, her tears running down, knelt by the bed and gave her fresh hand
into the other’s burning clutch.

“Don’t think that, dear: think only of what you’d like best....”

“Like best?” The girl sat up sharply against her pillows, alive to the
hot fingertips.

“You can’t marry Joe, dear--can you--and keep little Tina?” Delia
continued.

“Not keep her with me, no: but somewhere where I could slip off to see
her--oh, I had hoped such follies!”

“Give up follies, Charlotte. Keep her where? See your own child in
secret? Always in dread of disgrace? Of wrong to your other children?
Have you ever thought of that?”

“Oh, my poor head won’t think! You’re trying to tell me that I must give
her up?”

“No, dear; but that you must not marry Joe.”

Charlotte sank back on the pillow, her eyes half-closed. “I tell you I
must make my child a home. Delia, you’re too blest to understand!”

“Think yourself blest too, Chatty. You shan’t give up your baby. She
shall live with you: you shall take care of her--for me.”

“For you?”

“I promised you I’d take her, didn’t I? But not that you should marry
Joe. Only that I would make a home for your baby. Well, that’s done; you
two shall be always together.”

Charlotte clung to her and sobbed. “But Joe--I can’t tell him, I can’t!”
She put back Delia suddenly. “You haven’t told him of my--of my baby? I
couldn’t bear to hurt him as much as that.”

“I told him that you coughed blood yesterday. He’ll see you presently:
he’s dreadfully unhappy. He has been given to understand that, in view
of your bad health, the engagement is broken by your wish--and he
accepts your decision; but if he weakens, or if you weaken, I can do
nothing for you or for little Tina. For heaven’s sake remember that!”

Delia released her hold, and Charlotte leaned back silent, with closed
eyes and narrowed lips. Almost like a corpse she lay there. On a chair
near the bed hung the poplin with red velvet ribbons which had been made
over in honour of her betrothal. A pair of new slippers of bronze kid
peeped from beneath it. Poor Chatty! She had hardly had time to be
pretty....

Delia sat by the bed motionless, her eyes on her cousin’s closed face.
They followed the course of a tear that forced a way between Charlotte’s
tight lids, hung on the lashes, glittered slowly down the cheeks. As
the tear reached the narrowed lips they spoke.

“Shall I live with her somewhere, do you mean? Just she and I together?”

“Just you and she.”

“In a little house?”

“In a little house....”

“You’re sure, Delia?”

“Sure, my dearest.”

Charlotte once more raised herself on her elbow and sent a hand groping
under the pillow. She drew out a narrow ribbon on which hung a diamond
ring.

“I had taken it off already,” she said simply, and handed it to Delia.




                                PART II




VI


You could always have told, every one agreed afterward, that Charlotte
Lovell was meant to be an old maid. Even before her illness it had been
manifest: there was something prim about her in spite of her fiery hair.
Lucky enough for her, poor girl, considering her wretched health in her
youth: Mrs. James Ralston’s contemporaries, for instance, remembered
Charlotte as a mere ghost, coughing her lungs out--that, of course, had
been the reason for her breaking her engagement with Joe Ralston.

True, she had recovered very rapidly, in spite of the peculiar treatment
she was given. The Lovells, as every one knew, couldn’t afford to send
her to Italy; the previous experiment in Georgia had been unsuccessful;
and so she was packed off to a farm-house on the Hudson--a little place
on the James Ralstons’ property--where she lived for five or six years
with an Irish servant-woman and a foundling baby. The story of the
foundling was another queer episode in Charlotte’s history. From the
time of her first illness, when she was only twenty-two or three, she
had developed an almost morbid tenderness for children, especially for
the children of the poor. It was said--Dr. Lanskell was understood to
have said--that the baffled instinct of motherhood was peculiarly
intense in cases where lung-disease prevented marriage. And so, when it
was decided that Chatty must break her engagement to Joe Ralston and go
to live in the country, the doctor had told her family that the only
hope of saving her lay in not separating her entirely from her pauper
children, but in letting her choose one of them, the youngest and most
pitiable, and devote herself to its care. So the James Ralstons had lent
her their little farm-house, and Mrs. Jim, with her extraordinary gift
of taking things in at a glance, had at once arranged everything, and
even pledged herself to look after the baby if Charlotte died.

Charlotte did not die. She lived to grow robust and middle-aged,
energetic and even tyrannical. And as the transformation in her
character took place she became more and more like the typical old maid:
precise, methodical, absorbed in trifles, and attaching an exaggerated
importance to the smallest social and domestic observances. Such was her
reputation as a vigilant house-wife that, when poor Jim Ralston was
killed by a fall from his horse, and left Delia, still young, with a boy
and girl to bring up, it seemed perfectly natural that the heart-broken
widow should take her cousin to live with her and share her task. But
Delia Ralston never did things quite like other people. When she took
Charlotte she took Charlotte’s foundling too: a dark-haired child with
pale brown eyes, and the odd incisive manner of children who have lived
too much with their elders. The little girl was called Tina Lovell: it
was vaguely supposed that Charlotte had adopted her. She grew up on
terms of affectionate equality with her young Ralston cousins, and
almost as much so--it might be said--with the two women who mothered
her. But, impelled by an instinct of imitation which no one took the
trouble to correct, she always called Delia Ralston “Mamma,” and
Charlotte Lovell “Aunt Chatty.” She was a brilliant and engaging
creature, and people marvelled at poor Chatty’s luck in having chosen so
interesting a specimen among her foundlings (for she was by this time
supposed to have had a whole asylum-full to choose from).

The agreeable elderly bachelor, Sillerton Jackson, returning from a
prolonged sojourn in Paris (where he was understood to have been made
much of by the highest personages) was immensely struck by Tina’s charms
when he saw her at her coming-out ball, and asked Delia’s permission to
come some evening and dine alone with her and her young people. He
complimented the widow on the rosy beauty of her own young Delia; but
the mother’s keen eye perceived that all the while he was watching Tina,
and after dinner he confided to the older ladies that there was
something “very French” in the girl’s way of doing her hair, and that in
the capital of all the Elegances she would have been pronounced
extremely stylish.

“Oh--” Delia deprecated, beamingly, while Charlotte Lovell sat bent over
her work with pinched lips; but Tina, who had been laughing with her
cousins at the other end of the room, was around upon her elders in a
flash.

“I heard what Mr. Sillerton said! Yes, I did, Mamma: he says I do my
hair stylishly. Didn’t I always tell you so? I _know_ it’s more becoming
to let it curl as it wants to than to plaster it down with bandoline
like Aunty’s--”

“Tina, Tina--you always think people are admiring you!” Miss Lovell
protested.

“Why shouldn’t I, when they do?” the girl laughingly challenged; and,
turning her mocking eyes on Sillerton Jackson: “Do tell Aunt Charlotte
not to be so dreadfully old-maidish!”

Delia saw the blood rise to Charlotte Lovell’s face. It no longer
painted two brick-rose circles on her thin cheek-bones, but diffused a
harsh flush over her whole countenance, from the collar fastened with an
old-fashioned garnet brooch to the pepper-and-salt hair (with no trace
of red left in it) flattened down over her hollow temples.

That evening, when they went up to bed, Delia called Tina into her room.

“You ought not to speak to your Aunt Charlotte as you did this evening,
dear. It’s disrespectful--you must see that it hurts her.”

The girl overflowed with compunction. “Oh, I’m so sorry! Because I said
she was an old maid? But she _is_, isn’t she, Mamma? In her inmost soul,
I mean. I don’t believe she’s ever been young--ever thought of fun or
admiration or falling in love--do you? That’s why she never understands
me, and you always do, you darling dear Mamma.” With one of her light
movements, Tina was in the widow’s arms.

“Child, child,” Delia softly scolded, kissing the dark curls planted in
five points on the girl’s forehead.

There was a soft foot-fall in the passage, and Charlotte Lovell stood in
the door. Delia, without moving, sent her a glance of welcome over
Tina’s shoulder.

“Come in, Charlotte. I’m scolding Tina for behaving like a spoilt baby
before Sillerton Jackson. What will he think of her?”

“Just what she deserves, probably,” Charlotte returned with a cold
smile. Tina went toward her, and her thin lips touched the girl’s
proffered forehead just where Delia’s warm kiss had rested. “Goodnight,
child,” she said in her dry tone of dismissal.

The door closed on the two women, and Delia signed to Charlotte to take
the armchair opposite to her own.

“Not so near the fire,” Miss Lovell answered. She chose a
straight-backed seat, and sat down with folded hands. Delia’s eyes
rested absently on the thin ringless fingers: she wondered why Charlotte
never wore her mother’s jewels.

“I overheard what you were saying to Tina, Delia. You were scolding her
because she called me an old maid.”

It was Delia’s turn to colour. “I scolded her for being disrespectful,
dear; if you heard what I said you can’t think that I was too severe.”

“Not too severe: no. I’ve never thought you too severe with Tina; on
the contrary.”

“You think I spoil her?”

“Sometimes.”

Delia felt an unreasoning resentment. “What was it I said that you
object to?”

Charlotte returned her glance steadily. “I would rather she thought me
an old maid than--”

“Oh--” Delia murmured. With one of her quick leaps of intuition she had
entered into the other’s soul, and once more measured its shuddering
loneliness.

“What else,” Charlotte inexorably pursued, “_can_ she possibly be
allowed to think me--ever?”

“I see ... I see ...” the widow faltered.

“A ridiculous narrow-minded old maid--nothing else,” Charlotte Lovell
insisted, getting to her feet, “or I shall never feel safe with her.”

“Goodnight, my dear,” Delia said compassionately. There were moments
when she almost hated Charlotte for being Tina’s mother, and others,
such as this, when her heart was wrung by the tragic spectacle of that
unavowed bond.

Charlotte seemed to have divined her thought.

“Oh, but don’t pity me! She’s mine,” she murmured, going.




VII


Delia Ralston sometimes felt that the real events of her life did not
begin until both her children had contracted--so safely and
suitably--their irreproachable New York alliances. The boy had married
first, choosing a Vandergrave in whose father’s bank at Albany he was to
have an immediate junior partnership; and young Delia (as her mother had
foreseen she would) had selected John Junius, the safest and soundest of
the many young Halseys, and followed him to his parents’ house the year
after her brother’s marriage.

After young Delia had left the house in Gramercy Park it was inevitable
that Tina should take the centre front of its narrow stage. Tina had
reached the marriageable age, she was admired and sought after; but what
hope was there of her finding a husband? The two watchful women did not
propound this question to each other; but Delia Ralston, brooding over
it day by day, and taking it up with her when she mounted at night to
her bedroom, knew that Charlotte Lovell, at the same hour, carried the
same problem with her to the floor above.

The two cousins, during their eight years of life together, had seldom
openly disagreed. Indeed, it might almost have been said that there was
nothing open in their relation. Delia would have had it otherwise: after
they had once looked so deeply into each other’s souls it seemed
unnatural that a veil should fall between them. But she understood that
Tina’s ignorance of her origin must at all costs be preserved, and that
Charlotte Lovell, abrupt, passionate and inarticulate, knew of no other
security than to wall herself up in perpetual silence.

So far had she carried this self-imposed reticence that Mrs. Ralston was
surprised at her suddenly asking, soon after young Delia’s marriage, to
be allowed to move down into the small bedroom next to Tina’s that had
been left vacant by the bride’s departure.

“But you’ll be so much less comfortable there, Chatty. Have you thought
of that? Or is it on account of the stairs?”

“No; it’s not the stairs,” Charlotte answered with her usual bluntness.
How could she avail herself of the pretext Delia offered her, when Delia
knew that she still ran up and down the three flights like a girl? “It’s
because I should be next to Tina,” she said, in a low voice that jarred
like an untuned string.

“Oh--very well. As you please.” Mrs. Ralston could not tell why she felt
suddenly irritated by the request, unless it were that she had already
amused herself with the idea of fitting up the vacant room as a
sitting-room for Tina. She had meant to do it in pink and pale green,
like an opening flower.

“Of course, if there is any reason--” Charlotte suggested, as if reading
her thought.

“None whatever; except that--well, I’d meant to surprise Tina by doing
the room up as a sort of little boudoir where she could have her books
and things, and see her girl friends.”

“You’re too kind, Delia; but Tina mustn’t have boudoirs,” Miss Lovell
answered ironically, the green specks showing in her eyes.

“Very well: as you please,” Delia repeated, in the same irritated tone.
“I’ll have your things brought down tomorrow.”

Charlotte paused in the doorway. “You’re sure there’s no other reason?”

“Other reason? Why should there be?” The two women looked at each other
almost with hostility, and Charlotte turned to go.

The talk once over, Delia was annoyed with herself for having yielded to
Charlotte’s wish. Why must it always be she who gave in, she who, after
all, was the mistress of the house, and to whom both Charlotte and Tina
might almost be said to owe their very existence, or at least all that
made it worth having? Yet whenever any question arose about the girl it
was invariably Charlotte who gained her point, Delia who yielded: it
seemed as if Charlotte, in her mute obstinate way, were determined to
take every advantage of the dependence that made it impossible for a
woman of Delia’s nature to oppose her.

In truth, Delia had looked forward more than she knew to the quiet talks
with Tina to which the little boudoir would have lent itself. While her
own daughter inhabited the room, Mrs. Ralston had been in the habit of
spending an hour there every evening, chatting with the two girls while
they undressed, and listening to their comments on the incidents of the
day. She always knew beforehand exactly what her own girl would say; but
Tina’s views and opinions were a perpetual delicious shock to her. Not
that they were strange or unfamiliar; there were moments when they
seemed to well straight up from the dumb depths of Delia’s own past.
Only they expressed feelings she had never uttered, ideas she had hardly
avowed to herself: Tina sometimes said things which Delia Ralston, in
far-off self-communions, had imagined herself saying to Clement Spender.

And now there would be an end to these evening talks: if Charlotte had
asked to be lodged next to her daughter, might it not conceivably be
because she wished them to end? It had never before occurred to Delia
that her influence over Tina might be resented; now the discovery
flashed a light far down into the abyss which had always divided the two
women. But a moment later Delia reproached herself for attributing
feelings of jealousy to her cousin. Was it not rather to herself that
she should have ascribed them? Charlotte, as Tina’s mother, had every
right to wish to be near her, near her in all senses of the word; what
claim had Delia to oppose to that natural privilege? The next morning
she gave the order that Charlotte’s things should be taken down to the
room next to Tina’s.

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening, when bedtime came, Charlotte and Tina went upstairs
together; but Delia lingered in the drawing-room, on the pretext of
having letters to write. In truth, she dreaded to pass the threshold
where, evening after evening, the fresh laughter of the two girls used
to waylay her while Charlotte Lovell already slept her old-maid sleep on
the floor above. A pang went through Delia at the thought that
henceforth she would be cut off from this means of keeping her hold on
Tina.

An hour later, when she mounted the stairs in her turn, she was guiltily
conscious of moving as noiselessly as she could along the heavy carpet
of the corridor, and of pausing longer than was necessary over the
putting out of the gas-jet on the landing. As she lingered she strained
her ears for the sound of voices from the adjoining doors behind which
Charlotte and Tina slept; she would have been secretly hurt at hearing
talk and laughter from within. But none came, nor was there any light
beneath the doors. Evidently Charlotte, in her hard methodical way, had
said goodnight to her daughter, and gone straight to bed as usual.
Perhaps she had never approved of Tina’s vigils, of the long undressing
punctuated with mirth and confidences; she might have asked for the room
next to her daughter’s simply because she did not want the girl to miss
her “beauty sleep.”

Whenever Delia tried to explore the secret of her cousin’s actions she
returned from the adventure humiliated and abashed by the base motives
she found herself attributing to Charlotte. How was it that she, Delia
Ralston, whose happiness had been open and avowed to the world, so often
found herself envying poor Charlotte the secret of her scanted
motherhood? She hated herself for this movement of envy whenever she
detected it, and tried to atone for it by a softened manner and a more
anxious regard for Charlotte’s feelings; but the attempt was not always
successful, and Delia sometimes wondered if Charlotte did not resent any
show of sympathy as an indirect glance at her misfortune. The worst of
suffering such as hers was that it left one sore to the gentlest
touch....

Delia, slowly undressing before the same lace-draped toilet-glass which
had reflected her bridal image, was turning over these thoughts when
she heard a light knock. She opened the door, and there stood Tina, in a
dressing-gown, her dark curls falling over her shoulders.

With a happy heart-beat Delia held out her arms.

“I had to say goodnight, Mamma,” the girl whispered.

“Of course, dear.” Delia pressed a long kiss on her lifted forehead.
“Run off now, or you might disturb your aunt. You know she sleeps badly,
and you must be as quiet as a mouse now she’s next to you.”

“Yes, I know,” Tina acquiesced, with a grave glance that was almost of
complicity.

She asked no further question, she did not linger: lifting Delia’s hand
she held it a moment against her cheek, and then stole out as
noiselessly as she had come.




VIII


“But you must see,” Charlotte Lovell insisted, laying aside the _Evening
Post_, “that Tina has changed. You do see that?”

The two women were sitting alone by the drawing-room fire in Gramercy
Park. Tina had gone to dine with her cousin, young Mrs. John Junius
Halsey, and was to be taken afterward to a ball at the Vandergraves’,
from which the John Juniuses had promised to see her home. Mrs. Ralston
and Charlotte, their early dinner finished, had the long evening to
themselves. Their custom, on such occasions, was for Charlotte to read
the news aloud to her cousin, while the latter embroidered; but
tonight, all through Charlotte’s conscientious progress from column to
column, without a slip or an omission, Delia had felt her, for some
special reason, alert to take advantage of her daughter’s absence.

To gain time before answering, Mrs. Ralston bent over a stitch in her
delicate white embroidery.

“Tina changed? Since when?” she questioned.

The answer flashed out instantly. “Since Lanning Halsey has been coming
here so much.”

“Lanning? I used to think he came for Delia,” Mrs. Ralston mused,
speaking at random to gain still more time.

“It’s natural you should suppose that every one came for Delia,”
Charlotte rejoined dryly; “but as Lanning continues to seek every
chance of being with Tina--”

Mrs. Ralston raised her head and stole a swift glance at her cousin. She
had in truth noticed that Tina had changed, as a flower changes at the
mysterious moment when the unopened petals flush from within. The girl
had grown handsomer, shyer, more silent, at times more irrelevantly gay.
But Delia had not associated these variations of mood with the presence
of Lanning Halsey, one of the numerous youths who had haunted the house
before young Delia’s marriage. There had, indeed, been a moment when
Mrs. Ralston’s eye had been fixed, with a certain apprehension, on the
handsome Lanning. Among all the sturdy and stolid Halsey cousins he was
the only one to whom a prudent mother might have hesitated to entrust
her daughter; it would have been hard to say why, except that he was
handsomer and more conversable than the rest, chronically unpunctual,
and totally unperturbed by the fact. Clem Spender had been like that;
and what if young Delia--?

But young Delia’s mother was speedily reassured. The girl, herself arch
and appetizing, took no interest in the corresponding graces except when
backed by more solid qualities. A Ralston to the core, she demanded the
Ralston virtues, and chose the Halsey most worthy of a Ralston bride.

Mrs. Ralston felt that Charlotte was waiting for her to speak. “It will
be hard to get used to the idea of Tina’s marrying,” she said gently. “I
don’t know what we two old women shall do, alone in this empty
house--for it will be an empty house then. But I suppose we ought to
face the idea.”

“I _do_ face it,” said Charlotte Lovell gravely.

“And you dislike Lanning? I mean, as a husband for Tina?”

Miss Lovell folded the evening paper, and stretched out a thin hand for
her knitting. She glanced across the citron-wood work-table at her
cousin. “Tina must not be too difficult--” she began.

“Oh--” Delia protested, reddening.

“Let us call things by their names,” the other evenly pursued. “That’s
my way, when I speak at all. Usually, as you know, I say nothing.”

The widow made a sign of assent, and Charlotte went on: “It’s better so.
But I’ve always known a time would come when we should have to talk this
thing out.”

“Talk this thing out? You and I? What thing?”

“Tina’s future.”

There was a silence. Delia Ralston, who always responded instantly to
the least appeal to her sincerity, breathed a deep sigh of relief. At
last the ice in Charlotte’s breast was breaking up!

“My dear,” Delia murmured, “you know how much Tina’s happiness concerns
me. If you disapprove of Lanning Halsey as a husband, have you any other
candidate in mind?”

Miss Lovell smiled one of her faint hard smiles. “I am not aware that
there is a queue at the door. Nor do I disapprove of Lanning Halsey as a
husband. Personally, I find him very agreeable; I understand his
attraction for Tina.”

“Ah--Tina _is_ attracted?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Ralston pushed aside her work and thoughtfully considered her
cousin’s sharply-lined face. Never had Charlotte Lovell more completely
presented the typical image of the old maid than as she sat there,
upright on her straight-backed chair, with narrowed elbows and clicking
needles, and imperturbably discussed her daughter’s marriage.

“I don’t understand, Chatty. Whatever Lanning’s faults are--and I don’t
believe they’re grave--I share your liking for him. After all--” Mrs.
Ralston paused--“what is it that people find so reprehensible in him?
Chiefly, as far as I can hear, that he can’t decide on the choice of a
profession. The New York view about that is rather narrow, as we know.
Young men may have other tastes ... artistic ... literary ... they may
even have difficulty in deciding....”

Both women coloured slightly, and Delia guessed that the same
reminiscence which shook her own bosom also throbbed under Charlotte’s
strait bodice.

Charlotte spoke. “Yes: I understand that. But hesitancy about a
profession may cause hesitancy about ... other decisions....”

“What do you mean? Surely not that Lanning--?”

“Lanning has not asked Tina to marry him.”

“And you think he’s hesitating?”

Charlotte paused. The steady click of her needles punctuated the silence
as once, years before, it had been punctuated by the tick of the
Parisian clock on Delia’s mantel. As Delia’s memory fled back to that
scene she felt its mysterious tension in the air.

Charlotte spoke. “Lanning is not hesitating any longer: he has decided
_not_ to marry Tina. But he has also decided--not to give up seeing
her.”

Delia flushed abruptly; she was irritated and bewildered by Charlotte’s
oracular phrases, doled out between parsimonious lips.

“You don’t mean that he has offered himself and then drawn back? I can’t
think him capable of such an insult to Tina.”

“He has not insulted Tina. He has simply told her that he can’t afford
to marry. Until he chooses a profession his father will allow him only a
few hundred dollars a year; and that may be suppressed if--if he marries
against his parents’ wishes.”

It was Delia’s turn to be silent. The past was too overwhelmingly
resuscitated in Charlotte’s words. Clement Spender stood before her,
irresolute, impecunious, persuasive. Ah, if only she had let herself be
persuaded!

“I’m very sorry that this should have happened to Tina. But as Lanning
appears to have behaved honourably, and withdrawn without raising false
expectations, we must hope ... we must hope....” Delia paused, not
knowing what they must hope.

Charlotte Lovell laid down her knitting. “You know as well as I do,
Delia, that every young man who is inclined to fall in love with Tina
will find as good reasons for not marrying her.”

“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.




IX


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 Léopold 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.

A faint sound through the silent house disturbed her meditation.
Listening, she heard Charlotte Lovell’s door open and her stiff
petticoats rustle toward the landing. A light glanced under the door and
vanished; Charlotte had passed Delia’s threshold on her way downstairs.

Without moving, Delia continued to listen. Perhaps the careful Charlotte
had gone down to make sure that the front door was not bolted, or that
she had really covered up the fire. If that were her object, her step
would presently be heard returning. But no step sounded; and it became
gradually evident that Charlotte had gone down to wait for her daughter.
Why?

Delia’s bedroom was at the front of the house. She stole across the
heavy carpet, drew aside the curtains and cautiously folded back the
inner shutters. Below her lay the empty square, white with moon-night,
its tree-trunks patterned on a fresh sprinkling of snow. The houses
opposite slept in darkness; not a footfall broke the white surface, not
a wheel-track marred the brilliant street. Overhead a heaven full of
stars swam in the moonlight.

Of the households around Gramercy Park Delia knew that only two others
had gone to the ball: the Petrus Vandergraves and their cousins the
young Parmly Ralstons. The Lucius Lannings had just entered on their
three years of mourning for Mrs. Lucius’s mother (it was hard on their
daughter Kate, just eighteen, who would be unable to “come out” till she
was twenty-one); young Mrs. Marcy Mingott was “expecting her third,” and
consequently secluded from the public eye for nearly a year; and the
other denizens of the square belonged to the undifferentiated and
uninvited.

Delia pressed her forehead against the pane. Before long carriages
would turn the corner, the sleeping square ring with hoof-beats, fresh
laughter and young farewells mount from the door-steps. But why was
Charlotte waiting for her daughter downstairs in the darkness?

The Parisian clock struck one. Delia came back into the room, raked the
fire, picked up a shawl, and, wrapped in it, returned to her vigil. Ah,
how old she must have grown, that she should feel the cold at such a
moment! It reminded her of what the future held for her: neuralgia,
rheumatism, stiffness, accumulating infirmities. And never had she kept
a moonlight watch with a lover’s arms to warm her....

The square still lay silent. Yet the ball must surely be ending: the
gayest dances did not last long after one in the morning, and the drive
from University Place to Gramercy Park was a short one. Delia leaned in
the embrasure and listened.

Hoof-beats, muffled by the snow, sounded in Irving Place, and the Petrus
Vandergraves’ family coach drew up before the opposite house. The
Vandergrave girls and their brother sprang out and mounted the steps;
then the coach stopped again a few doors farther on, and the Parmly
Ralstons, brought home by their cousins, descended at their own door.
The next carriage that rounded the corner must therefore be the John
Juniuses’, bringing Tina.

The gilt clock struck half-past one. Delia wondered, knowing that young
Delia, out of regard for John Junius’s business hours, never stayed late
at evening parties. Doubtless Tina had delayed her; Mrs. Ralston felt a
little annoyed with Tina’s thoughtlessness in keeping her cousin up.
But the feeling was swept away by an immediate wave of sympathy. “We
must go away somewhere, and lead plain lives among plain people.” If
Charlotte carried out her threat--and Delia knew she would hardly have
spoken unless her resolve had been taken--it might be that at that very
moment poor Tina was dancing her last _valse_.

Another quarter of an hour passed; then, just as the cold was finding a
way through Delia’s shawl, she saw two people turn into the deserted
square from Irving Place. One was a young man in opera hat and ample
cloak. To his arm clung a figure so closely wrapped and muffled that,
until the corner light fell on it, Delia hesitated. After that, she
wondered that she had not at once recognized Tina’s dancing step, and
her manner of tilting her head a little sideways to look up at the
person she was talking to.

Tina--Tina and Lanning Halsey, walking home alone in the small hours
from the Vandergrave ball! Delia’s first thought was of an accident: the
carriage might have broken down, or else her daughter been taken ill and
obliged to return home. But no; in the latter case she would have sent
the carriage on with Tina. And if there had been an accident of any sort
the young people would have been hastening to apprise Mrs. Ralston;
instead of which, through the bitter brilliant night, they sauntered
like lovers in a midsummer glade, and Tina’s thin slippers might have
been falling on daisies instead of snow.

Delia began to tremble like a girl. In a flash she had the answer to a
question which had long been the subject of her secret conjectures. How
did lovers like Charlotte and Clement Spender contrive to meet? What
Latmian solitude hid their clandestine joys? In the exposed
compact little society to which they all belonged, how was it
possible--literally--for such encounters to take place? Delia would
never have dared to put the question to Charlotte; there were moments
when she almost preferred not to know, not even to hazard a guess. But
now, at a glance, she understood. How often Charlotte Lovell, staying
alone in town with her infirm grandmother, must have walked home from
evening parties with Clement Spender, how often have let herself and him
into the darkened house in Mercer Street, where there was no one to spy
upon their coming but a deaf old lady and her aged servants, all
securely sleeping overhead! Delia, at the thought, saw the grim
drawing-room which had been their moonlit forest, the drawing-room into
which old Mrs. Lovell no longer descended, with its swathed chandelier
and hard Empire sofas, and the eyeless marble caryatids of the mantel;
she pictured the shaft of moonlight falling across the swans and
garlands of the faded carpet, and in that icy light two young figures in
each other’s arms.

Yes: it must have been some such memory that had roused Charlotte’s
suspicions, excited her fears, sent her down in the darkness to confront
the culprits. Delia shivered at the irony of the confrontation. If Tina
had but known! But to Tina, of course, Charlotte was still what she had
long since resolved to be: the image of prudish spinsterhood. And Delia
could imagine how quietly and decently the scene below stairs would
presently be enacted: no astonishment, no reproaches, no insinuations,
but a smiling and resolute ignoring of excuses.

“What, Tina? You walked home with Lanning? You imprudent child--in this
wet snow! Ah, I see: Delia was worried about the baby, and ran off
early, promising to send back the carriage--and it never came? Well, my
dear, I congratulate you on finding Lanning to see you home.... Yes--I
sat up because I couldn’t for the life of me remember whether you’d
taken the latch-key--was there ever such a flighty old aunt? But don’t
tell your Mamma, dear, or she’d scold me for being so forgetful, and for
staying downstairs in the cold.... You’re quite sure you have the key?
Ah, Lanning has it? Thank you, Lanning; so kind! Goodnight--or one
really ought to say, good morning.”

As Delia reached this point in her mute representation of Charlotte’s
monologue the front door slammed below, and young Lanning Halsey walked
slowly away across the square. Delia saw him pause on the opposite
pavement, look up at the house-front, and then turn lingeringly away.
His dismissal had taken exactly as long as Delia had calculated it
would. A moment later she saw a passing light under her door, heard the
starched rustle of Charlotte’s petticoats, and knew that mother and
daughter had reached their rooms.

Slowly, with stiff motions, she began to undress, blew out her candles,
and knelt by her bedside, her face hidden.




X


Lying awake till morning, Delia lived over every detail of the fateful
day when she had assumed the charge of Charlotte’s child. At the time
she had been hardly more than a child herself, and there had been no one
for her to turn to, no one to fortify her resolution, or to advise her
how to put it into effect. Since then, the accumulated experiences of
twenty years ought to have prepared her for emergencies, and taught her
to advise others instead of seeking their guidance. But these years of
experience weighed on her like chains binding her down to her narrow
plot of life; independent action struck her as more dangerous, less
conceivable, than when she had first ventured on it. There seemed to be
so many more people to “consider” now (“consider” was the Ralston word):
her children, their children, the families into which they had married.
What would the Halseys say, and what the Ralstons? Had she then become a
Ralston through and through?

       *       *       *       *       *

A few hours later she sat in old Dr. Lanskell’s library, her eyes on his
sooty Smyrna rug. For some years now Dr. Lanskell had no longer
practised: at most, he continued to go to a few old patients, and to
give consultations in “difficult” cases. But he remained a power in his
former kingdom, a sort of lay Pope or medical Elder to whom the patients
he had once healed of physical ills often returned for moral medicine.
People were agreed that Dr. Lanskell’s judgment was sound; but what
secretly drew them to him was the fact that, in the most totem-ridden of
communities, he was known not to be afraid of anything.

Now, as Delia sat and watched his massive silver-headed figure moving
ponderously about the room, between rows of medical books in calf
bindings and the Dying Gladiators and Young Augustuses of grateful
patients, she already felt the reassurance given by his mere bodily
presence.

“You see, when I first took Tina I didn’t perhaps consider
sufficiently--”

The Doctor halted behind his desk and brought his fist down on it with a
genial thump. “Thank goodness you didn’t! There are considerers enough
in this town without you, Delia Lovell.”

She looked up quickly. “Why do you call me Delia Lovell?”

“Well, because today I rather suspect you _are_,” he rejoined astutely;
and she met this with a wistful laugh.

“Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before--I mean, if I’d always been a
prudent deliberate Ralston it would have been kinder to Tina in the
end.”

Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the armchair behind his desk, and
beamed at her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses:
they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”

She pondered. “Of course I realize that if I adopt Tina--”

“Yes?”

“Well, people will say....” A deep blush rose to her throat, covered her
cheeks and brow, and ran like fire under her decently-parted hair.

He nodded: “Yes.”

“Or else--” the blush darkened--“that she’s Jim’s--”

Again Dr. Lanskell nodded. “That’s what they’re more likely to think;
and what’s the harm if they do? I know Jim: he asked you no questions
when you took the child--but he knew whose she was.”

She raised astonished eyes. “He knew--?”

“Yes: he came to me. And--well--in the baby’s interest I violated
professional secrecy. That’s how Tina got a home. You’re not going to
denounce me, are you?”

“Oh, Dr. Lanskell--” Her eyes filled with painful tears. “Jim knew? And
didn’t tell me?”

“No. People didn’t tell each other things much in those days, did they?
But he admired you enormously for what you did. And if you assume--as I
suppose you do--that he’s now in a world of completer enlightenment,
why not take it for granted that he’ll admire you still more for what
you’re going to do? Presumably,” the Doctor concluded sardonically,
“people realize in heaven that it’s a devilish sight harder, on earth,
to do a brave thing at forty-five than at twenty-five.”

“Ah, that’s what I was thinking this morning,” she confessed.

“Well, you’re going to prove the contrary this afternoon.” He looked at
his watch, stood up and laid a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “Let
people think what they choose; and send young Delia to me if she gives
you any trouble. Your boy won’t, you know, nor John Junius either; it
must have been a woman who invented that third-and-fourth generation
idea....”

An elderly maid-servant looked in, and Delia rose; but on the threshold
she halted.

“I have an idea it’s Charlotte I may have to send to you.”

“Charlotte?”

“She’ll hate what I’m going to do, you know.”

Dr. Lanskell lifted his silver eyebrows. “Yes: poor Charlotte! I suppose
she’s jealous? That’s where the truth of the third-and-fourth generation
business comes in, after all. Somebody always has to foot the bill.”

“Ah--if only Tina doesn’t!”

“Well--that’s just what Charlotte will come to recognize in time. So
your course is clear.”

He guided her out through the dining-room, where some poor people and
one or two old patients were already waiting.

       *       *       *       *       *

Delia’s course, in truth, seemed clear enough till, that afternoon, she
summoned Charlotte alone to her bedroom. Tina was lying down with a
headache: it was in those days the accepted state of young ladies in
sentimental dilemmas, and greatly simplified the communion of their
elders.

Delia and Charlotte had exchanged only conventional phrases over their
mid-day meal; but Delia still had the sense that her cousin’s decision
was final. The events of the previous evening had no doubt confirmed
Charlotte’s view that the time had come for such a decision.

Miss Lovell, closing the bedroom door with her dry deliberateness,
advanced toward the chintz lounge between the windows.

“You wanted to see me, Delia?”

“Yes.--Oh, don’t sit there,” Mrs. Ralston exclaimed uncontrollably.

Charlotte stared: was it possible that she did not remember the sobs of
anguish she had once smothered in those very cushions?

“Not--?”

“No; come nearer to me. Sometimes I think I’m a little deaf,” Delia
nervously explained, pushing a chair up to her own.

“Ah.” Charlotte seated herself. “I hadn’t remarked it. But if you are,
it may have saved you from hearing at what hour of the morning Tina came
back from the Vandergraves’ last night. She would never forgive
herself--inconsiderate as she is--if she thought she’d waked you.”

“She didn’t wake me,” Delia answered. Inwardly she thought: “Charlotte’s
mind is made up; I shan’t be able to move her.”

“I suppose Tina enjoyed herself very much at the ball?” she continued.

“Well, she’s paying for it with a headache. Such excitements are not
meant for her, I’ve already told you--”

“Yes,” Mrs. Ralston interrupted. “It’s to continue our talk of last
night that I’ve asked you to come up.”

“To continue it?” The brick-red circles appeared on Charlotte’s dried
cheeks. “Is it worth while? I think I ought to tell you at once that my
mind’s made up. I suppose you’ll admit that I know what’s best for
Tina.”

“Yes; of course. But won’t you at least allow me a share in your
decision?”

“A share?”

Delia leaned forward, laying a warm hand on her cousin’s interlocked
fingers. “Charlotte, once in this room, years ago, you asked me to help
you--you believed I could. Won’t you believe it again?”

Charlotte’s lips grew rigid. “I believe the time has come for me to help
myself.”

“At the cost of Tina’s happiness?”

“No; but to spare her greater unhappiness.”

“But, Charlotte, Tina’s happiness is all I want.”

“Oh, I know. You’ve done all you could do for my child.”

“No; not all.” Delia rose, and stood before her cousin with a kind of
solemnity. “But now I’m going to.” It was as if she had pronounced a
vow.

Charlotte Lovell looked up at her with a glitter of apprehension in her
hunted eyes.

“If you mean that you’re going to use your influence with the
Halseys--I’m very grateful to you; I shall always be grateful. But I
don’t want a compulsory marriage for my child.”

Delia flushed at the other’s incomprehension. It seemed to her that her
tremendous purpose must be written on her face. “I’m going to adopt
Tina--give her my name,” she announced.

Charlotte Lovell stared at her stonily. “Adopt her--adopt her?”

“Don’t you see, dear, the difference it will make? There’s my mother’s
money--the Lovell money; it’s not much, to be sure; but Jim always
wanted it to go back to the Lovells. And my Delia and her brother are so
handsomely provided for. There’s no reason why my little fortune
shouldn’t go to Tina. And why she shouldn’t be known as Tina Ralston.”
Delia paused. “I believe--I think I know--that Jim would have approved
of that too.”

“_Approved?_”

“Yes. Can’t you see that when he let me take the child he must have
foreseen and accepted whatever--whatever might eventually come of it?”

Charlotte stood up also. “Thank you, Delia. But nothing more must come
of it, except our leaving you; our leaving you now. I’m sure that’s what
Jim would have approved.”

Mrs. Ralston drew back a step or two. Charlotte’s cold resolution
benumbed her courage, and she could find no immediate reply.

“Ah, then it’s easier for you to sacrifice Tina’s happiness than your
pride?” she exclaimed.

“My pride? I’ve no right to any pride, except in my child. And that I’ll
never sacrifice.”

“No one asks you to. You’re not reasonable. You’re cruel. All I want is
to be allowed to help Tina, and you speak as if I were interfering with
your rights.”

“My rights?” Charlotte echoed the words with a desolate laugh. “What are
they? I have no rights, either before the law or in the heart of my own
child.”

“How can you say such things? You know how Tina loves you.”

“Yes; compassionately--as I used to love my old-maid aunts. There were
two of them--you remember? Like withered babies! We children used to be
warned never to say anything that might shock Aunt Josie or Aunt Nonie;
exactly as I heard you telling Tina the other night--”

“Oh--” Delia murmured.

Charlotte Lovell continued to stand before her, haggard, rigid,
unrelenting. “No, it’s gone on long enough. I mean to tell her
everything; and to take her away.”

“To tell her about her birth?”

“I was never ashamed of it,” Charlotte panted.

“You do sacrifice her, then--sacrifice her to your desire for mastery?”

The two women faced each other, both with weapons spent. Delia, through
the tremor of her own indignation, saw her antagonist slowly waver, step
backward, sink down with a broken murmur on the lounge. Charlotte hid
her face in the cushions, clenching them with violent hands. The same
fierce maternal passion that had once flung her down upon those same
cushions was now bowing her still lower, in the throes of a bitterer
renunciation. Delia seemed to hear the old cry: “But how can I give up
my baby?” Her own momentary resentment melted, and she bent over the
mother’s labouring shoulders.

“Chatty--it won’t be like giving her up this time. Can’t we just go on
loving her together?”

Charlotte did not answer. For a long time she lay silent, immovable, her
face hidden: she seemed to fear to turn it to the face bent down to her.
But presently Delia was aware of a gradual relaxing of the stretched
muscles, and saw that one of her cousin’s arms was faintly stirring and
groping. She lowered her hand to the seeking fingers, and it was caught
and pressed to Charlotte’s lips.




XI


Tina Lovell--now Miss Clementina Ralston--was to be married in July to
Lanning Halsey. The engagement had been announced only in the previous
April; and the female elders of the tribe had begun by crying out
against the indelicacy of so brief a betrothal. It was unanimously
agreed in the New York of those times that “young people should be given
the chance to get to know each other”; though the greater number of the
couples constituting New York society had played together as children,
and been born of parents as long and as familiarly acquainted, yet some
mysterious law of decorum required that the newly affianced should
always be regarded as being also newly known to each other. In the
southern states things were differently conducted: headlong engagements,
even runaway marriages, were not uncommon in their annals; but such
rashness was less consonant with the sluggish blood of New York, where
the pace of life was still set with a Dutch deliberateness.

In a case as unusual as Tina Ralston’s, however, it was no great
surprise to any one that tradition should have been disregarded. In the
first place, everybody knew that she was no more Tina Ralston than you
or I; unless, indeed, one were to credit the rumours about poor Jim’s
unsuspected “past,” and his widow’s magnanimity. But the opinion of the
majority was against this. People were reluctant to charge a dead man
with an offense from which he could not clear himself; and the Ralstons
unanimously declared that, thoroughly as they disapproved of Mrs. James
Ralston’s action, they were convinced that she would not have adopted
Tina if her doing so could have been construed as “casting a slur” on
her late husband.

No: the girl was perhaps a Lovell--though even that idea was not
generally held--but she was certainly not a Ralston. Her brown eyes and
flighty ways too obviously excluded her from the clan for any formal
excommunication to be needful. In fact, most people believed that--as
Dr. Lanskell had always affirmed--her origin was really undiscoverable,
that she represented one of the unsolved mysteries which occasionally
perplex and irritate well-regulated societies, and that her adoption by
Delia Ralston was simply one more proof of the Lovell clannishness,
since the child had been taken in by Mrs. Ralston only because her
cousin Charlotte was so attached to it. To say that Mrs. Ralston’s son
and daughter were pleased with the idea of Tina’s adoption would be an
exaggeration; but they abstained from comment, minimizing the effect of
their mother’s whim by a dignified silence. It was the old New York way
for families thus to screen the eccentricities of an individual member,
and where there was “money enough to go round” the heirs would have been
thought vulgarly grasping to protest at the alienation of a small sum
from the general inheritance.

Nevertheless, Delia Ralston, from the moment of Tina’s adoption, was
perfectly aware of a different attitude on the part of both her
children. They dealt with her patiently, almost parentally, as with a
minor in whom one juvenile lapse has been condoned, but who must be
subjected, in consequence, to a stricter vigilance; and society treated
her in the same indulgent but guarded manner.

She had (it was Sillerton Jackson who first phrased it) an undoubted way
of “carrying things off”; since that dauntless woman, Mrs. Manson
Mingott, had broken her husband’s will, nothing so like her attitude had
been seen in New York. But Mrs. Ralston’s method was different, and less
easy to analyze. What Mrs. Manson Mingott had accomplished by dint of
epigram, invective, insistency and runnings to and fro, the other
achieved without raising her voice or seeming to take a step from the
beaten path. When she had persuaded Jim Ralston to take in the foundling
baby, it had been done in the turn of a hand, one didn’t know when or
how; and the next day he and she were as untroubled and beaming as
usual. And now, this adoption--! Well, she had pursued the same method;
as Sillerton Jackson said, she behaved as if her adopting Tina had
always been an understood thing, as if she wondered that people should
wonder. And in face of her wonder theirs seemed foolish, and they
gradually desisted.

In reality, behind Delia’s assurance there was a tumult of doubts and
uncertainties. But she had once learned that one can do almost anything
(perhaps even murder) if one does not attempt to explain it; and the
lesson had never been forgotten. She had never explained the taking over
of the foundling baby; nor was she now going to explain its adoption.
She was just going about her business as if nothing had happened that
needed to be accounted for; and a long inheritance of moral modesty
helped her to keep her questionings to herself.

These questionings were in fact less concerned with public opinion than
with Charlotte Lovell’s private thoughts. Charlotte, after her first
moment of tragic resistance, had shown herself pathetically, almost
painfully, grateful. That she had reason to be, Tina’s attitude
abundantly revealed. Tina, during the first days after her return from
the Vandergrave ball, had shown a closed and darkened face that terribly
reminded Delia of the ghastliness of Charlotte Lovell’s sudden
reflection, years before, in Delia’s own bedroom mirror. The first
chapter of the mother’s history was already written in the daughter’s
eyes; and the Spender blood in Tina might well precipitate the sequence.
During those few days of silent observation Delia discovered, with
terror and compassion, the justification of Charlotte’s fears. The girl
had nearly been lost to them both: at all costs such a risk must not be
renewed.

The Halseys, on the whole, had behaved admirably. Lanning wished to
marry dear Delia Ralston’s protégée--who was shortly, it was understood,
to take her adopted mother’s name, and inherit her fortune. To what
better could a Halsey aspire than one more alliance with a Ralston? The
families had always inter-married. The Halsey parents gave their
blessing with a precipitation which showed that they too had their
anxieties, and that the relief of seeing Lanning “settled” would more
than compensate for the conceivable drawbacks of the marriage; though,
once it was decided on, they would not admit even to themselves that
such drawbacks existed. Old New York always thought away whatever
interfered with the perfect propriety of its arrangements.

Charlotte Lovell of course perceived and recognized all this. She
accepted the situation--in her private hours with Delia--as one more in
the long list of mercies bestowed on an undeserving sinner. And one
phrase of hers perhaps gave the clue to her acceptance: “Now at least
she’ll never suspect the truth.” It had come to be the poor creature’s
ruling purpose that her child should never guess the tie between
them....

But Delia’s chief support was the sight of Tina. The older woman, whose
whole life had been shaped and coloured by the faint reflection of a
rejected happiness, hung dazzled in the light of bliss accepted.
Sometimes, as she watched Tina’s changing face, she felt as though her
own blood were beating in it, as though she could read every thought
and emotion feeding those tumultuous currents. Tina’s love was a stormy
affair, with continual ups and downs of rapture and depression,
arrogance and self-abasement; Delia saw displayed before her, with an
artless frankness, all the visions, cravings and imaginings of her own
stifled youth.

What the girl really thought of her adoption it was not easy to
discover. She had been given, at fourteen, the current version of her
origin, and had accepted it as carelessly as a happy child accepts some
remote and inconceivable fact which does not alter the familiar order of
things. And she accepted her adoption in the same spirit. She knew that
the name of Ralston had been given to her to facilitate her marriage
with Lanning Halsey; and Delia had the impression that all irrelevant
questionings were submerged in an overwhelming gratitude. “I’ve always
thought of you as my Mamma; and now, you dearest, you really are,” Tina
had whispered, her cheek against Delia’s; and Delia had laughed back:
“Well, if the lawyers can make me so!” But there the matter dropped,
swept away on the current of Tina’s bliss. They were all, in those days,
Delia, Charlotte, even the gallant Lanning, rather like straws whirling
about on a sunlit torrent.

The golden flood bore them onward, nearer and nearer to the enchanted
date; and Delia, deep in bridal preparations, wondered at the
comparative indifference with which she had ordered and inspected her
own daughter’s twelve-dozen-of-everything. There had been nothing to
quicken the pulse in young Delia’s placid bridal; but as Tina’s wedding
day approached imagination burgeoned like the year. The wedding was to
be celebrated at Lovell Place, the old house on the Sound where Delia
Lovell had herself been married, and where, since her mother’s death,
she spent her summers. Although the neighbourhood was already overspread
with a net-work of mean streets, the old house, with its thin colonnaded
verandah, still looked across an uncurtailed lawn and leafy shrubberies
to the narrows of Hell Gate; and the drawing-rooms kept their frail
slender settees, their Sheraton consoles and cabinets. It had been
thought useless to discard them for more fashionable furniture, since
the growth of the city made it certain that the place must eventually be
sold.

Tina, like Mrs. Ralston, was to have a “house-wedding,” though
Episcopalian society was beginning to disapprove of such ceremonies,
which were regarded as the despised _pis-aller_ of Baptists, Methodists,
Unitarians and the other altarless sects. In Tina’s case, however, both
Delia and Charlotte felt that the greater privacy of a marriage in the
house made up for its more secular character; and the Halseys favoured
their decision. The ladies accordingly settled themselves at Lovell
Place before the end of June, and every morning young Lanning Halsey’s
catboat was seen beating across the bay, and furling its sail at the
anchorage below the lawn.

       *       *       *       *       *

There had never been a fairer June in any one’s memory. The damask roses
and mignonette below the verandah had never sent such a breath of summer
through the tall French windows; the gnarled orange-trees brought out
from the old arcaded orange-house had never been so thickly blossomed;
the very haycocks on the lawn gave out whiffs of Araby.

The evening before the wedding Delia Ralston sat on the verandah
watching the moon rise across the Sound. She was tired with the
multitude of last preparations, and sad at the thought of Tina’s going.
On the following evening the house would be empty: till death came, she
and Charlotte would sit alone together beside the evening lamp. Such
repinings were foolish--they were, she reminded herself, “not like her.”
But too many memories stirred and murmured in her: her heart was
haunted. As she closed the door on the silent drawing-room--already
transformed into a chapel, with its lace-hung altar, the tall alabaster
vases awaiting their white roses and June lilies, the strip of red
carpet dividing the rows of chairs from door to chancel--she felt that
it had perhaps been a mistake to come back to Lovell Place for the
wedding. She saw herself again, in her high-waisted “India mull”
embroidered with daisies, her flat satin sandals, her Brussels veil--saw
again her reflection in the sallow pier-glass as she had left that same
room on Jim Ralston’s triumphant arm, and the one terrified glance she
had exchanged with her own image before she took her stand under the
bell of white roses in the hall, and smiled upon the congratulating
company. Ah, what a different image the pier-glass would reflect
tomorrow!

Charlotte Lovell’s brisk step sounded indoors, and she came out and
joined Mrs. Ralston.

“I’ve been to the kitchen to tell Melissa Grimes that she’d better count
on at least two hundred plates of ice-cream.”

“Two hundred? Yes--I suppose she had, with all the Philadelphia
connection coming.” Delia pondered. “How about the doylies?” she
enquired.

“With your aunt Cecilia Vandergrave’s we shall manage beautifully.”

“Yes.--Thank you, Charlotte, for taking all this trouble.”

“Oh--” Charlotte protested, with her flitting sneer; and Delia perceived
the irony of thanking a mother for occupying herself with the details of
her own daughter’s wedding.

“Do sit down, Chatty,” she murmured, feeling herself redden at her
blunder.

Charlotte, with a sigh of fatigue, sat down on the nearest chair.

“We shall have a beautiful day tomorrow,” she said, pensively surveying
the placid heaven.

“Yes. Where is Tina?”

“She was very tired. I’ve sent her upstairs to lie down.”

This seemed so eminently suitable that Delia made no immediate answer.
After an interval she said: “We shall miss her.”

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 any one 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.

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 tomorrow--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 END





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