Perhaps, however, he detected a tinge of irritation in my own look, for that evening, as we sat over the fire after Leila had yawned herself off to bed, he glanced up at the armoured image, and said: “That’s old Durward Hayley—the friend of Sir Harry Vane the Younger and all that lot. I have some curious letters somewhere… But Leila’s right, you know,” he added loyally.
“In not being interested?”
“In regarding all that old past as dead. It is dead. We’ve got no use for it over here. That’s what that queer fellow in Washington always used to say to me…”
“What queer fellow in Washington?”
“Oh, a sort of big backwoodsman who was awfully good to me when I was in hospital…after Bull Run…”
I sat up abruptly. It was the first time that Delane had mentioned his life during the war. I thought my hand was on the clue; but it wasn’t.
“You were in hospital in Washington?”
“Yes; for a longish time. They didn’t know much about disinfecting wounds in those days…But Leila,” he resumed, with his smiling obstinacy, “Leila’s dead right, you know. It’s a better world now. Think of what has been done to relieve suffering since then!” When he pronounced the word “suffering” the vertical furrows in his forehead deepened as though he felt the actual pang of his old wound. “Oh, I believe in progress every bit as much as she does—I believe we’re working out toward something better. If we weren’t…” He shrugged his mighty shoulders, reached lazily for the adjoining tray, and mixed my glass of whiskey-and-soda.
“But the war—you were wounded at Bull Run?”
“Yes.” He looked at his watch. “But I’m off to bed now. I promised the children to take them for an early canter tomorrow, before lessons, and I have to have my seven or eight hours of sleep to feel fit. I’m getting on, you see. Put out the lights when you come up.”
No; he wouldn’t talk about the war.
It was not long afterward that Mrs. Delane appealed to me to testify to Hayley’s perfection. She had come back from her last absence—a six weeks’ flutter at Newport—rather painfully subdued and pinched-looking. For the first time I saw in the corners of her mouth that middle-aged droop which has nothing to do with the loss of teeth. “How common-looking she’ll be in a few years!” I thought uncharitably.
“Perfect—perfect,” she insisted; and then, plaintively: “And yet—”
I echoed coldly: “And yet?”
“With the children, for instance. He’s everything to them. He’s cut me out with my own children.” She was half joking, half whimpering.
Presently she stole an eye-lashed look at me, and added: “And at times he’s so hard.”
“Delane?”
“Oh, I know you won’t believe it. But in business matters—have you never noticed? You wouldn’t admit it, I suppose. But there are times when one simply can’t move him.” We were in the library, and she glanced up at the breast-plated forbear. “He’s as hard to the touch as that.” She pointed to the steel convexity.
“Not the Delane I know,” I murmured, embarrassed by these confidences.
“Ah, you think you know him?” she half-sneered; then, with a dutiful accent: “I’ve always said he was a perfect father—and he’s made the children think so. And yet—”
He came in, and dropping a pale smile on him she drifted away, calling to her children.
I thought to myself: “She’s getting on, and something has told her so at Newport. Poor thing!”
Delane looked as preoccupied as she did; but he said nothing till after she had left us that evening. Then he suddenly turned to me.
“Look here. You’re a good friend of ours. Will you help me to think out a rather bothersome question?”
“Me, sir?” I said, surprised by the “ours,” and overcome by so solemn an appeal from my elder.
He made a wan grimace. “Oh, don’t call me ‘sir’; not during this talk.” He paused, and then added: “You’re remembering the difference in our ages. Well, that’s just why I’m asking you. I want the opinion of somebody who hasn’t had time to freeze into his rut—as most of my contemporaries have. The fact is, I’m trying to make my wife see that we’ve got to let her father come and live with us.”
My open-mouthed amazement must have been marked enough to pierce his gloom, for he gave a slight laugh. “Well, yes—”
I sat dumbfounded. All New York knew what Delane thought of his suave father-in-law. He had married Leila in spite of her antecedents; but Bill Gracy, at the outset, had been given to understand that he would not be received under the Delane roof. Mollified by the regular payment of a handsome allowance, the old gentleman, with tears in his eyes, was wont to tell his familiars that personally he didn’t blame his son-in-law. “Our tastes differ: that’s all. Hayley’s not a bad chap at heart; give you my word he isn’t.” And the familiars, touched by such magnanimity, would pledge Hayley in the champagne provided by his last remittance.
Delane, as I still remained silent, began to explain. “You see, somebody’s got to look after him—who else is there?
“But—” I stammered.
“You’ll say he’s always needed looking after? Well, I’ve done my best; short of having him here. For a long time that seemed impossible; I quite agreed with Leila—” (So it was Leila who had banished her father!) “But now,” Delane continued, “it’s different. The poor old chap’s getting on: he’s been breaking up very fast this last year. And some blood-sucker of a woman has got hold of him, and threatened to rake up old race-course rows, and I don’t know what. If we don’t take him in he’s bound to go under. It’s his last chance—he feels it is. He’s scared; he wants to come.”
I was still silent, and Delane went on: “You think, I suppose, what’s the use? Why not let him stew in his own juice? With a decent allowance, of course. Well, I can’t say…I can’t tell you…only I feel it mustn’t be…”
“And Mrs. Delane?”
“Oh, I see her point. The children are growing up; they’ve hardly known their grandfather. And having him in the house isn’t going to be like having a nice old lady in a cap knitting by the fire. He takes up room, Gracy does; it’s not going to be pleasant. She thinks we ought to consider the children first. But I don’t agree. The world’s too ugly a place; why should anyone grow up thinking it’s a flower-garden? Let ’em take their chance….And then”—he hesitated, as if embarrassed—“well, you know her; she’s fond of society. Why shouldn’t she be? She’s made for it. And of course it’ll cut us off, prevent our inviting people. She won’t like that, though she doesn’t admit that it has anything to do with her objecting.”
So, after all, he judged the wife he still worshipped! I was beginning to see why he had that great structural head, those large quiet movements. There was something—
“What alternative does Mrs. Delane propose?”
He coloured. “Oh, more money. I sometimes fancy,” he brought out, hardly above a whisper, “that she thinks I’ve suggested having him here because I don’t want to give more money. She won’t understand, you see, that more money would just precipitate things.”
I coloured too, ashamed of my own thought. Had she not, perhaps, understood; was it not her perspicacity which made her hold out? If her father was doomed to go under, why prolong the process? I could not be sure, now, that Delane did not suspect this also, and allow for it. There was apparently no limit to what he allowed for.
“You’ll never be frozen into a rut,” I ventured, smiling.
“Perhaps not frozen; but sunk down deep. I’m that already. Give me a hand up, do!” He answered my smile.
I was still in the season of cocksureness, and at a distance could no doubt have dealt glibly with the problem. But at such short range, and under those melancholy eyes, I had a chastening sense of inexperience.
“You don’t care to tell me what you think?” He spoke almost reproachfully.
“Oh, it’s not that…I’m trying to. But it’s
so—so awfully evangelical,” I brought out—for some of us were already beginning to read the Russians.
“Is it? Funny, that, too. For I have an idea I got it, with other things, from an old heathen; that chap I told you about, who used to come and talk to me by the hour in Washington.”
My interest revived. “That chap in Washington—was he a heathen?”
“Well, he didn’t go to church.” Delane did, regularly taking the children, while Leila slept off the previous night’s poker, and joining in the hymns in a robust barytone, always half a tone flat.
He seemed to guess that I found his reply inadequate, and added helplessly: “You know I’m no scholar: I don’t know what you’d call him.” He lowered his voice to add: “I don’t think he believed in our Lord. Yet he taught me Christian charity.”
“He must have been an unusual sort of man, to have made such an impression on you. What was his name?”
“There’s the pity! I must have heard it, but I was all foggy with fever most of the time, and can’t remember. Nor what became of him either. One day he didn’t turn up—that’s all I recall. And soon afterward I was off again, and didn’t think of him for years. Then, one day, I had to settle something with myself, and, by George, there he was telling me the right and wrong of it! Queer—he comes like that, at long intervals; turning-points, I suppose.” He frowned his heavy head sunk forward, his eyes distant, pursuing the vision.
“Well—hasn’t he come this time?”
“Rather! That’s my trouble—I can’t see things in any way but his. And I want another eye to help me!”
My heart was beating rather excitedly. I felt small, trivial and inadequate, like an intruder on some grave exchange of confidences.
I tried to postpone my reply, and at the same time to satisfy another curiosity. “Have you ever told Mrs. Delane about—about him?”
Delane roused himself and turned to look at me. He lifted his shaggy eyebrows slightly, protruded his lower lip, and sank once more into abstraction.
“Well, sir,” I said, answering the look, “I believe in him.”
The blood rose in his dark cheek. He turned to me again and for a second the dimple twinkled through his gloom. “That’s your answer?”
I nodded breathlessly.
He got up, walked the length of the room, and came back, pausing in front of me. “He just vanished. I never even knew his name…”
V.
Delane was right; having Bill Gracy under one’s roof was not like harbouring a nice old lady. I looked on at the sequence of our talk and marvelled.
New York—the Delanes’ New York—sided unhesitatingly with Leila. Society’s attitude toward drink and dishonesty was still inflexible: a man who had had to resign from his clubs went down into a pit presumably bottomless. The two or three people who thought Delane’s action “rather fine” made haste to add: “But he ought to have taken a house for the old man in some quiet place in the country.” Bill Gracy cabined in a quiet place in the country! Within a week he would have set the neighbourhood on fire. He was simply not to be managed by proxy: Delane had understood that, and faced it.
Nothing in the whole unprecedented situation was more odd, more unexpected and interesting, than Mr. Gracy’s own perception of it. He too had become aware that his case was without alternative.
“They had to have me here, by gad; I see that myself. Old firebrand like me…couldn’t be trusted! Hayley saw it from the first—fine fellow, my son-in-law. He made no bones about telling me so. Said: ‘I can’t trust you, father’…said it right out to me. By gad, if he’d talked to me like that a few years sooner I don’t answer for the consequences! But I ain’t my own man any longer…I’ve got to put up with being treated like a baby…I forgave him on the spot, sir—on the spot.” His fine eye filled, and he stretched a soft old hand, netted with veins and freckles, across the table to me.
In the virtual seclusion imposed by his presence I was one of the few friends the Delanes still saw. I knew Leila was grateful to me for coming; but I did not need that incentive. It was enough that I could give even a negative support to Delane. The first months were horrible; but he was evidently saying to himself: “Things will settle down gradually,” and just squaring his great shoulders to the storm.
Things didn’t settle down; as embodied in Bill Gracy they continued in a state of effervescence. Filial care, good food and early hours restored the culprit to comparative health; he became exuberant, arrogant and sly. Happily his first imprudence caused a relapse alarming even to himself. He saw that his powers of resistance were gone, and, tremulously tender over his own plight, he relapsed into a plaintive burden. But he was never a passive one. Some part or other he had to play, usually to somebody’s detriment.
One day a strikingly dressed lady forced her way in to see him, and the house echoed with her recriminations. Leila objected to the children’s assisting at such scenes, and when Christmas brought the boys home she sent them to Canada with a tutor, and herself went with the little girl to Florida. Delane, Gracy and I sat down alone to our Christmas turkey, and I wondered what Delane’s queer friend of the Washington hospital would have thought of that festivity. Mr. Gracy was in a melting mood, and reviewed his past with an edifying prolixity. “After all, women and children have always loved me,” he summed up, a tear on his lashes. “But I’ve been a curse to you and Leila, and I know it, Hayley. That’s my only merit, I suppose—that I do know it! Well, here’s to turning over a new leaf…” and so forth.
One day, a few months later, Mr. Broad, the head of the firm, sent for me. I was surprised, and somewhat agitated, at the summons, for I was not often called into his august presence.
“Mr. Delane has a high regard for your ability,” he began affably.
I bowed, thrilled at what I supposed to be a hint of promotion; but Mr. Broad went on: “I know you are at his house a great deal. In spite of the difference in age he always speaks of you as an old friend.” Hopes of promotion faded, yet left me unregretful. Somehow, this was even better. I bowed again.
Mr. Broad was becoming embarrassed. “You see Mr. William Gracy rather frequently at his son-in-law’s?”
“He’s living there,” I answered bluntly.
Mr. Broad heaved a sigh. “Yes. It’s a fine thing of Mr. Delane… but does he quite realize the consequences? His own family side with his wife. You’ll wonder at my speaking with such frankness… but I’ve been asked…it has been suggested…”
“If he weren’t there he’d be in the gutter.”
Mr. Broad sighed more deeply. “Ah, it’s a problem…You may ask why I don’t speak directly to Mr. Delane…but it’s so delicate, and he’s so uncommunicative. Still, there are Institutions… You don’t feel there’s anything to be done?”
I was silent, and he shook hands, murmured: “This is confidential,” and made a motion of dismissal. I withdrew to my desk, feeling that the situation must indeed be grave if Mr. Broad could so emphasize it by consulting me.
New York, to ease its mind of the matter, had finally decided that Hayley Delane was “queer.” There were the two of them, madmen both, hobnobbing together under his roof; no wonder poor Leila found the place untenable! That view, bruited about, as such things are, with a mysterious underground rapidity, prepared me for what was to follow.
One day during the Easter holidays I went to dine with the Delanes, and finding my host alone with old Gracy I concluded that Leila had again gone off with the children. She had: she had been gone a week, and had just sent a letter to her husband saying that she was sailing from Montreal with the little girl. The boys would be sent back to Groton with a trusted servant. She would add nothing more, as she did not wish to reflect unkindly on what his own family agreed with her in thinking an act of ill-advised generosity. He knew that she was worn out by the strain he had imposed on her, and would understand her wishing to get away for a while…
She had left him.
Such events were not, in those days, the matters of course they have since become; and I doubt if, on a man like Delane, the blow would ever have fallen lightly. Certainly that evening was the grimmest I ever passed in his company. I had the same impression as on the day of Bolton Bryne’s chastisement: the sense that Delane did not care a fig for public opinion. His knowing that it sided with his wife did not, I believe, affect him in the least; nor did her own view of his conduct—and for that I was unprepared. What really ailed him, I discovered, was his loneliness. He missed her, he wanted her back—her trivial irritating presence was the thing in the world he could least dispense with. But when he told me what she had done he simply added: “I see no help for it; we’ve both of us got a right to our own opinion.”
Again I looked at him with astonishment. Another voice seemed to be speaking through his lips, and I had it on mine to say: “Was that what your old friend in Washington would have told you?” But at the door of the dining-room where we had lingered, Mr. Gracy’s flushed countenance and unreverend auburn locks appeared between us.
“Look here, Hayley; what about our little game? If I’m to be packed off to bed at ten like a naughty boy you might at least give me my hand of poker first.” He winked faintly at me as we passed into the library, and added, in a hoarse aside: “If he thinks he’s going to boss me like Leila he’s mistaken. Flesh and blood’s one thing; now she’s gone I’ll be damned if I take any bullying.”
That threat was the last flare of Mr. Gracy’s indomitable spirit. The act of defiance which confirmed it brought on a severe attack of pleurisy. Delane nursed the old man with dogged patience, and he emerged from the illness diminished, wizened, the last trace of auburn gone from his scant curls, and nothing left of his old self but a harmless dribble of talk.
Delane taught him to play patience, and he used to sit for hours by the library fire, puzzling over the cards, or talking to the children’s parrot, which he fed and tended with a touching regularity. He also devoted a good deal of time to collecting stamps for his youngest grandson, and his increasing gentleness and playful humour so endeared him to the servants that a trusted housemaid had to be dismissed for smuggling cocktails into his room. On fine days Delane, coming home earlier from the bank, would take him for a short stroll; and one day, happening to walk up Fifth Avenue behind them, I noticed that the younger man’s broad shoulders were beginning to stoop like the other’s, and that there was less lightness in his gait than in Bill Gracy’s jaunty shamble. They looked like two old men doing their daily mile on the sunny side of the street. Bill Gracy was no longer a danger to the community, and Leila might have come home. But I understood from Delane that she was still abroad with her daughter.
Edith Wharton - Novel 15 Page 17