Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (15 page)

 
          
“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.

 
          
  

 
          
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
finger-tips.

 
          
“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
of
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.

 
          
  

 
          
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 Ralston’s 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).