Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (12 page)

 
          
“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.

 
          
  

 
          
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.
Someone 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 someone 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.