Edith Wharton - SSC 09 Read online

  Mrs. Brown caught the unspoken whisper, and her exasperation rushed to meet it. “You don’t believe me? I knew you wouldn’t! Well, ask your friend here; ask Mr. Norcutt; you always believe everything he says. He’s known the truth for ever so long—long before Stephen died he knew he wasn’t your son.”

  I jumped up, as if to put myself between my friend and some bodily harm: but she held fast to my hand with her clinging twitching fingers. “As if she knew what it is to have a son! All those long months when he’s one with you … Mothers know,” she said.

  “Mothers, yes! I don’t say you didn’t have a son and desert him. I say that son wasn’t Stephen. Don’t you suppose I know? Sometimes I’ve wanted to laugh in your face at the way you went on about him … Sometimes I used to have to rush out of the room, just to have my laugh out by myself…”

  Mrs. Brown stopped with a gasp, as if the fury of the outburst had shaken her back to soberness, and she saw for the first time what she had done. Mrs. Glenn sat with her head bowed; her hand had grown cold in mine. I looked at Mrs. Brown and said: “Now won’t you leave us? I suppose there’s nothing left to say.”

  She blinked at me through her heavy lids; I saw she was wavering. But at the same moment Mrs. Glenn’s clutch tightened; she drew me down to her, and looked at me out of her deep eyes. “What does she mean when she says you knew about Stevie?”

  I pressed her hand without answering. All my mind was concentrated on the effort of silencing my antagonist and getting her out of the room. Mrs. Brown leaned in the window-frame and looked down on us. I could see that she was dismayed at what she had said, and yet exultant; and my business was to work on the dismay before the exultation mastered it. But Mrs. Glenn still held me down: her eyes seemed to be forcing their gaze into me. “Is it true?” she asked almost inaudibly.

  “True?” Mrs. Brown burst out. “Ask him to swear to you it’s not true—see what he looks like then! He was in the conspiracy, you old simpleton.”

  Mrs. Glenn’s head straightened itself again on her weak neck: her face wore a singular majesty. “You were my friend—” she appealed to me.

  “I’ve always been your friend.”

  “Then I don’t have to believe her.”

  Mrs. Brown seemed to have been gathering herself up for a last onslaught. She saw that I was afraid to try to force her from the room, and the discovery gave her a sense of hazy triumph, as if all that was left to her was to defy me. “Tell her I’m lying—why don’t you tell her I’m lying?” she taunted me.

  I knelt down by my old friend and put my arm about her. “Will you come away with me now—at once? I’ll take you wherever you want to go … I’ll look after you … I’ll always look after you.”

  Mrs. Glenn’s eyes grew wider. She seemed to weigh my words till their sense penetrated her; then she said, in the same low voice: “It is true, then?”

  “Come away with me; come away with me,” I repeated.

  I felt her trying to rise; but her feet failed under her and she sank back. “Yes, take me away from her,” she said.

  Mrs. Brown laughed. “Oh, that’s it, is it? ‘Come away from that bad woman, and I’ll explain everything, and make it all right’ … Why don’t you adopt him instead of Steve? I daresay that’s what he’s been after all the time. That’s the reason he was so determined we shouldn’t have your money …” She drew back, and pointed to the door. “You can go with him—who’s to prevent you? I couldn’t if I wanted to. I see now it’s for him we’ve been nursing your precious millions … Well, go with him, and he’ll tell you the whole story …”A strange secretive smile stole over her face. “All except one bit … there’s one bit he doesn’t know; but you’re going to know it now.”

  She stepped nearer, and I held up my hand; but she hurried on, her eyes on Mrs. Glenn. “What he doesn’t know is why we fixed the thing up. Steve wasn’t my adopted son any more than he was your real one. Adopted son, indeed! How old do you suppose I am? He was my lover. There—do you understand? My Lover! That’s why we faked up that ridiculous adoption story, and all the rest of it—because he was desperately ill, and down and out and we hadn’t a penny, the three of us, and I had to have money for him, and didn’t care how I got it, didn’t care for anything on earth but seeing him well again, and happy.” She stopped and drew a panting breath. “There—I’d rather have told you that than have your money. I’d rather you should know what Steve was to me than think any longer that you owned him …”

  I was still kneeling by Mrs. Glenn, my arm about her. Once I felt her heart give a great shake; then it seemed to stop altogether. Her eyes were no longer turned to me, but fixed in a wide stare on Mrs. Brown. A tremor convulsed her face; then, to my amazement, it was smoothed into an expression of childish serenity, and a faint smile, half playful, half ironic, stole over it.

  She raised her hand and pointed tremulously to the other’s disordered headgear. “My dear—your hat’s crooked,” she said.

  For a moment I was bewildered; then I saw that, very gently, she was at last returning the taunt that Mrs. Brown had so often addressed to her. The shot fired, she leaned back against me with the satisfied sigh of a child; and immediately I understood that Mrs. Brown’s blow had gone wide. A pitying fate had darkened Catherine Glenn’s intelligence at the exact moment when to see clearly would have been the final anguish.

  Mrs. Brown understood too. She stood looking at us doubtfully; then she said in a tone of feeble defiance: “Well, I had to tell her.”

  She turned and went out of the room, and I continued to kneel by Mrs. Glenn. Her eyes had gradually clouded, and I doubted if she still knew me; but her lips nursed their soft smile, and I saw that she must have been waiting for years to launch that little shaft at her enemy.

  

  The Day of the Funeral.

  I.

  His wife had said: “If you don’t give her up I’ll throw myself from the roof.” He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof.

  Nothing of this had of course come out at the inquest. Luckily Mrs. Trenham had left no letters or diary—no papers of any sort, in fact; not even a little mound of ashes on the clean hearth. She was the kind of woman who never seemed to have many material appurtenances or encumbrances. And Dr. Lanscomb, who had attended her ever since her husband had been called to his professorship at Kingsborough, testified that she had always been excessively emotional and high-strung, and never “quite right” since her only child had died. The doctor’s evidence closed the inquiry; the whole business had not lasted more than ten minutes.

  Then, after another endless interval of forty-eight hours, came the funeral. Ambrose Trenham could never afterward recall what he did during those forty-eight hours. His wife’s relations lived at the other end of the continent, in California; he himself had no immediate family; and the house—suddenly become strange and unfamiliar, a house that seemed never to have been his—had been given over to benevolent neighbours, soft-stepping motherly women, and to glib, subservient men who looked like a cross between book-agents and revivalists. These men took measures, discussed technical questions in undertones with the motherly women, and presently came back with a coffin with plated handles. Some one asked Trenham what was to be engraved on the plate on the lid, and he said: “Nothing.” He understood afterward that the answer had not been what was expected; but at the time every one evidently ascribed it to his being incapacitated by grief.

  Before the funeral one horrible moment stood out from the others, though all were horrible. It was when Mrs. Cossett, the wife of the professor of English Literature, came to him and said: “Do you want to see her?”

  “See her—?” Trenham gasped, not understanding.

  Mrs. Cossett looked surprised, and a little shocked. “The time has come—they must close the coffin …”

  “Oh, let them close it,” was on the tip of the widower’s tongue; but he saw from Mrs. Cossett’s expression that something very different wa
s expected of him. He got up and followed her out of the room and up the stairs…. He looked at his wife. Her face had been spared….

  That too was over now, and the funeral as well. Somehow, after all, the time had worn on. At the funeral, Trenham had discovered in himself—he, the absent-minded, the unobservant—an uncanny faculty for singling out every one whom he knew in the crowded church. It was incredible; sitting in the front pew, his head bowed forward on his hands, he seemed suddenly gifted with the power of knowing who was behind him and on either side. And when the service was over, and to the sound of O Paradise he turned to walk down the nave behind the coffin, though his head was still bowed, and he was not conscious of looking to the right or the left, face after face thrust itself forward into his field of vision—and among them, yes: of a sudden, Barbara Wake’s!

  The shock was terrible; Trenham had been so sure she would not come. Afterward he understood that she had had to—for the sake of appearances. “Appearances” still ruled at Kingsborough—where didn’t they, in the University world, and more especially in New England? But at the moment, and for a long time, Trenham had felt horrified, and outraged in what now seemed his holiest feelings. What right had she? How dared she? It was indecent. … In the reaction produced by the shock of seeing her, his remorse for what had happened hardened into icy hate of the woman who had been the cause of the tragedy. The sole cause—for in a flash Trenham had thrown off his own share in the disaster. “The woman tempted me—” Yes, she had! It was what his poor wronged Milly had always said: “You’re so weak; and she’s always tempting you—”

  He used to laugh at the idea of Barbara Wake as a temptress; one of poor Milly’s delusions! It seemed to him, then, that he was always pursuing, the girl evading; but now he saw her as his wife had seen her, and despised her accordingly. The indecency of her coming to the funeral! To have another look at him, he supposed…. She was insatiable … it was as if she could never fill her eyes with him. But, if he could help it, they should never be laid on him again….

  

  II.

  His indignation grew; it filled the remaining hours of the endless day, the empty hours after the funeral was over; it occupied and sustained him. The President of the University, an old friend, had driven him back to his lonely house, had wanted to get out and come in with him. But Trenham had refused, had shaken hands at the gate, and walked alone up the path to his front door. A cold lunch was waiting on the dining-room table. He left it untouched, poured out some whisky and water, carried the glass into his study, lit his pipe and sat down in his armchair to think, not of his wife, with whom the inquest seemed somehow to have settled his account, but of Barbara Wake. With her he must settle his account himself. And he had known at once how he would do it; simply by tying up all her letters, and the little photograph he always carried in his note-case (the only likeness he had of her), and sending them back without a word.

  A word! What word indeed could equal the emphasis of that silence? Barbara Wake had all the feminine passion for going over and over things; talking them inside out; in that respect she was as bad as poor Milly had been, and nothing would humiliate and exasperate her as much as an uncommented gesture of dismissal. It was so fortifying to visualize that scene—the scene of her opening the packet alone in her room—that Trenham’s sense of weariness disappeared, his pulses began to drum excitedly, and he was torn by a pang of hunger, the first he had felt in days. Was the cold meat still on the table, he wondered? Shamefacedly he stole back to the dining-room. But the table had been cleared, of course—just today! On ordinary days the maid would leave the empty dishes for hours unremoved; it was one of poor Milly’s household grievances. How often he had said to her, impatiently: “Good Lord, what does it matter?” and she had answered: “But, Ambrose, the flies!” … And now, of all days, the fool of a maid had cleared away everything. He went back to his study, sat down again, and suddenly felt too hungry to think of anything but his hunger. Even his vengeance no longer nourished him; he felt as if nothing would replace that slice of pressed beef, with potato salad and pickles, of which his eyes had rejected the disgusted glimpse an hour or two earlier.

  He fought his hunger for a while longer; then he got up and rang. Promptly, attentively, Jane, the middle-aged disapproving maid, appeared—usually one had to rip out the bell before she disturbed herself. Trenham felt sheepish at having to confess his hunger to her, as if it made him appear unfeeling, unheroic; but he could not help himself. He stammered out that he supposed he ought to eat something … and Jane, at once, was all tearful sympathy. “That’s right, sir; you must try … you must force yourself….” Yes, he said; he realized that. He would force himself. “We were saying in the kitchen, Katy and me, that you couldn’t go on any longer this way. …” He could hardly wait till she had used up her phrases and got back to the pantry…. Through the half-open dining-room door he listened avidly to her steps coming and going, to the clatter of china, the rattle of the knife-basket. He met her at the door when she returned to tell him that his lunch was ready … and that Katy had scrambled some eggs for him the way he liked them.

  At the dining-room table, when the door had closed on her, he squared his elbows, bent his head over his plate, and emptied every dish. Had he ever before known the complex exquisiteness of a slice of pressed beef? He filled his glass again, leaned luxuriously, waited without hurry for the cheese and biscuits, the black coffee, and a slice of apple-pie apologetically added from the maids’ dinner—and then—oh, resurrection!—felt for his cigar-case, and calmly, carelessly almost, under Jane’s moist and thankful eyes, cut his Corona and lit it.

  “Now he’s saved,” her devout look seemed to say.

  

  III.

  The letters must be returned at once. But to whom could he entrust them? Certainly not to either one of the maidservants. And there was no one else but the slow-witted man who looked after the garden and the furnace, and who would have been too much dazed by such a commission to execute it without first receiving the most elaborate and reiterated explanations, and then would probably have delivered the packet to Professor Wake, or posted it—the latter a possibility to be at all costs avoided, since Trenham’s writing might have been recognised by someone at the post-office, one of the chief centres of gossip at Kingsborough. How it complicated everything to live in a small, prying community! He had no reason to suppose that any one divined the cause of his wife’s death, yet he was aware that people had seen him more than once in out-of-the-way places, and at queer hours, with Barbara Wake; and if his wife knew, why should not others suspect? For a while, at any rate, it behoved him to avoid all appearance of wishing to communicate with the girl. Returning a packet to her on the very day of the funeral would seem particularly suspicious….

  Thus, after coffee and cigar, and a nip of old Cognac, argued the normal sensible man that Trenham had become again. But if his nerves had been steadied by food his will had been strengthened by it, and instead of a weak, vacillating wish to let Barbara Wake feel the weight of his scorn he was now animated by the furious resolution to crush her with it, and at once. That packet should be returned to her before night.

  He shut the study door, drew out his keys, and unlocked the cabinet in which he kept the letters. He had no need now to listen for his wife’s step, or to place himself between the cabinet and the door of the study, as he used to when he thought he heard her coming. Now, had he chosen, he could have spread the letters out all over the table. Jane and Katy were busy in the kitchen, and the rest of the house was his to do what he liked in. He could have sat down and read the serried pages one by one, lingeringly, gloatingly, as he had so often longed to do when the risk was too great—and now they were but so much noisome rubbish to him, to be crammed into a big envelope, and sealed up out of sight. He began to hunt for an envelope….

  God! What dozens and dozens of letters there were!

  And all written within eighteen months. No wond
er poor Milly … but what a blind reckless fool he had been! The reason of their abundance was, of course, the difficulty of meeting. … So often he and Barbara had had to write because they couldn’t contrive to see each other … but still, this bombardment of letters was monstrous, inexcusable…. He hunted for a long time for an envelope big enough to contain them; finally found one, a huge linen-lined envelope meant for college documents, and jammed the letters into it with averted head. But what, he thought suddenly, if she mistook his silence, imagined he had sent her the letters simply as a measure of prudence? No—that was hardly likely, now that all need of prudence was over; but she might affect to think so, use the idea as a pretext to write and ask what he meant, what she was to understand by his returning her letters without a word. It might give her an opening, which was probably what she was hoping for, and certainly what he was most determined she should not have.

  He found a sheet of note-paper, shook his fountain-pen, wrote a few words (hardly looking at the page as he did so), and thrust the note in among the letters. His hands turned clammy as he touched them; he felt cold and sick…. And the cursed flap of the envelope wouldn’t stick—those linen envelopes were always so stiff. And where the devil was the sealing-wax? He rummaged frantically among the odds and ends on his desk. A provision of sealing-wax used always to be kept in the lower left-hand drawer. He groped about in it and found only some yellowing newspaper cuttings. Milly used to be so careful about seeing that his writing-table was properly supplied; but lately—ah, his poor poor Milly! If she could only know how he was suffering and atoning already…. Some string, then…. He fished some string out of another drawer. He would have to make it do instead of sealing-wax; he would have to try to tie a double knot. But his fingers, always clumsy, were twitching like a drug-fiend’s; the letters seemed to burn them through the envelope. With a shaking hand he addressed the packet, and sat there, his eyes turned from it, while he tried again to think out some safe means of having it delivered….