Edith Wharton - SSC 10

by The World Over (v2. 1)

  “Kenneth,” she said, her heart beating excitedly, “I waited here on purpose to see you come in. I wanted to watch you while you opened that letter.”

  His face, which had paled, turned to dark red; then it paled again. “That letter? Why especially that letter?”

  “Because I’ve noticed that whenever one of those letters comes it seems to have such a strange effect on you.”

  A line of anger she had never seen before came out between his eyes, and she said to herself: “The upper part of his face is too narrow; this is the first time I ever noticed it.”

  She heard him continue, in the cool and faintly ironic tone of the prosecuting lawyer making a point: “Ah; so you’re in the habit of watching people open their letters when they don’t know you’re there?”

  “Not in the habit. I never did such a thing before. But I had to find out what she writes to you, at regular intervals, in those gray envelopes.”

  He weighed this for a moment; then: “The intervals have not been regular,” he said.

  “Oh, I daresay you’ve kept a better account of the dates than I have,” she retorted, her magnanimity vanishing at his tone. “All I know is that every time that woman writes to you—”

  “Why do you assume it’s a woman?”

  “It’s a woman’s writing. Do you deny it?”

  He smiled. “No, I don’t deny it. I asked only because the writing is generally supposed to look more like a man’s.”

  Charlotte passed this over impatiently. “And this woman—what does she write to you about?”

  Again he seemed to consider a moment. “About business.”

  “Legal business?”

  “In a way, yes. Business in general.”

  “You look after her affairs for her?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve looked after them for a long time?”

  “Yes. A very long time.”

  “Kenneth, dearest, won’t you tell me who she is?”

  “No. I can’t.” He paused, and brought out, as if with a certain hesitation: “Professional secrecy.”

  The blood rushed from Charlotte’s heart to her temples. “Don’t say that—don’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I saw you kiss the letter.”

  The effect of the words was so disconcerting that she instantly repented having spoken them. Her husband, who had submitted to her cross-questioning with a sort of contemptuous composure, as though he were humouring an unreasonable child, turned on her a face of terror and distress. For a minute he seemed unable to speak; then, collecting himself with an effort, he stammered out: “The writing is very faint; you must have seen me holding the letter close to my eyes to try to decipher it.” “No; I saw you kissing it.” He was silent. “Didn’t I see you kissing it?”

  He sank back into indifference. “Perhaps.”

  “Kenneth! You stand there and say that—to me?”

  “What possible difference can it make to you? The letter is on business, as I told you. Do you suppose I’d lie about it? The writer is a very old friend whom I haven’t seen for a long time.”

  “Men don’t kiss business letters, even from women who are very old friends, unless they have been their lovers, and still regret them.”

  He shrugged his shoulders slightly and turned away, as if he considered the discussion at an end and were faintly disgusted at the turn it had taken.

  “Kenneth!” Charlotte moved toward him and caught hold of his arm.

  He paused with a look of weariness and laid his hand over hers. “Won’t you believe me?” he asked gently.

  “How can I? I’ve watched these letters come to you—for months now they’ve been coming. Ever since we came back from the West Indies—one of them greeted me the very day we arrived. And after each one of them I see their mysterious effect on you, I see you disturbed, unhappy, as if someone were trying to estrange you from me.”

  “No, dear; not that. Never!”

  She drew back and looked at him with passionate entreaty. “Well, then, prove it to me, darling. It’s so easy!”

  He forced a smile. “It’s not easy to prove anything to a woman who’s once taken an idea into her head.”

  “You’ve only got to show me the letter.”

  His hand slipped from hers and he drew back and shook his head.

  “You won’t?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then the woman who wrote it is your mistress.”

  “No, dear. No.”

  “Not now, perhaps. I suppose she’s trying to get you back, and you’re struggling, out of pity for me. My poor Kenneth!”

  “I swear to you she never was my mistress.”

  Charlotte felt the tears rushing to her eyes. “Ah, that’s worse, then—that’s hopeless! The prudent ones are the kind that keep their hold on a man. We all know that.” She lifted her hands and hid her face in them.

  Her husband remained silent; he offered neither consolation nor denial, and at length, wiping away her tears, she raised her eyes almost timidly to his.

  “Kenneth, think! We’ve been married such a short time. Imagine what you’re making me suffer. You say you can’t show me this letter. You refuse even to explain it.”

  “I’ve told you the letter is on business. I will swear to that too.”

  “A man will swear to anything to screen a woman. If you want me to believe you, at least tell me her name. If you’ll do that, I promise you I won’t ask to see the letter.”

  There was a long interval of suspense, during which she felt her heart beating against her ribs in quick admonitory knocks, as if warning her of the danger she was incurring.

  “I can’t,” he said at length.

  “Not even her name?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t tell me anything more?”

  “No.”

  Again a pause; this time they seemed both to have reached the end of their arguments and to be helplessly facing each other across a baffling waste of incomprehension.

  Charlotte stood breathing rapidly, her hands against her breast. She felt as if she had run a hard race and missed the goal. She had meant to move her husband and had succeeded only in irritating him; and this error of reckoning seemed to change him into a stranger, a mysterious incomprehensible being whom no argument or entreaty of hers could reach. The curious thing was that she was aware in him of no hostility or even impatience, but only of a remoteness, an inaccessibility, far more difficult to overcome. She felt herself excluded, ignored, blotted out of his life. But after a moment or two, looking at him more calmly, she saw that he was suffering as much as she was. His distant guarded face was drawn with pain; the coming of the gray envelope, though it always cast a shadow, had never marked him as deeply as this discussion with his wife.

  Charlotte took heart; perhaps, after all, she had not spent her last shaft. She drew nearer and once more laid her hand on his arm. “Poor Kenneth! If you knew how sorry I am for you—”

  She thought he winced slightly at this expression of sympathy, but he took her hand and pressed it.

  “I can think of nothing worse than to be incapable of loving long,” she continued; “to feel the beauty of a great love and to be too unstable to bear its burden.”

  He turned on her a look of wistful reproach. “Oh, don’t say that of me. Unstable!”

  She felt herself at last on the right tack, and her voice trembled with excitement as she went on: “Then what about me and this other woman? Haven’t you already forgotten Elsie twice within a year?”

  She seldom pronounced his first wife’s name; it did not come naturally to her tongue. She flung it out now as if she were flinging some dangerous explosive into the open space between them, and drew back a step, waiting to hear the mine go off.

  Her husband did not move; his expression grew sadder, but showed no resentment. “I have never forgotten Elsie,” he said.

  Charlotte could not repress a faint laugh. “Then, you poor
dear, between the three of us—”

  “There are not—” he began; and then broke off and put his hand to his forehead.

  “Not what?”

  “I’m sorry; I don’t believe I know what I’m saying. I’ve got a blinding headache.” He looked wan and furrowed enough for the statement to be true, but she was exasperated by his evasion.

  “Ah, yes; the gray-envelope headache!”

  She saw the surprise in his eyes. “I’d forgotten how closely I’ve been watched,” he said coldly. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go up and try an hour in the dark, to see if I can get rid of this neuralgia.”

  She wavered; then she said, with desperate resolution: “I’m sorry your head aches. But before you go I want to say that sooner or later this question must be settled between us.

  Someone is trying to separate us, and I don’t care what it costs me to find out who it is.” She looked him steadily in the eyes. “If it costs me your love, I don’t care! If I can’t have your confidence I don’t want anything from you.”

  He still looked at her wistfully. “Give me time.”

  “Time for what? It’s only a word to say.”

  “Time to show you that you haven’t lost my love or my confidence.”

  “Well, I’m waiting.”

  He turned toward the door, and then glanced back hesitatingly. “Oh, do wait, my love,” he said, and went out of the room.

  She heard his tired step on the stairs and the closing of his bedroom door above. Then she dropped into a chair and buried her face in her folded arms. Her first movement was one of compunction; she seemed to herself to have been hard, unhuman, unimaginative. “Think of telling him that I didn’t care if my insistence cost me his love! The lying rubbish!” She started up to follow him and unsay the meaningless words. But she was checked by a reflection. He had had his way, after all; he had eluded all attacks on his secret, and now he was shut up alone in his room, reading that other woman’s letter.

  

  III.

  She was still reflecting on this when the surprised parlourmaid came in and found her. No, Charlotte said, she wasn’t going to dress for dinner; Mr. Ashby didn’t want to dine. He was very tired and had gone up to his room to rest; later she would have something brought on a tray to the drawing-room. She mounted the stairs to her bedroom. Her dinner dress was lying on the bed, and at the sight the quiet routine of her daily life took hold of her and she began to feel as if the strange talk she had just had with her husband must have taken place in another world, between two beings who were not Charlotte Gorse and Kenneth Ashby, but phantoms projected by her fevered imagination. She recalled the year since her marriage—her husband’s constant devotion; his persistent, almost too insistent tenderness; the feeling he had given her at times of being too eagerly dependent on her, too searchingly close to her, as if there were not air enough between her soul and his. It seemed preposterous, as she recalled all this, that a few moments ago she should have been accusing him of an intrigue with another woman! But, then, what—

  Again she was moved by the impulse to go up to him, beg his pardon and try to laugh away the misunderstanding. But she was restrained by the tear of forcing herself upon his privacy. He was troubled and unhappy, oppressed by some grief or tear; and he had shown her that he wanted to fight out his battle alone. It would be wiser, as well as more generous, to respect his wish. Only, how strange, how unbearable, to be there, in the next room to his, and feel herself at the other end of the world! In her nervous agitation she almost regretted not having had the courage to open the letter and put it back on the hall table before he came in. At least she would have known what his secret was, and the bogy might have been laid. For she was beginning now to think of the mystery as something conscious, malevolent: a secret persecution before which he quailed, yet from which he could not free himself. Once or twice in his evasive eyes she thought she had detected a desire for help, an impulse of confession, instantly restrained and suppressed. It was as if he felt she could have helped him if she had known, and vet had been unable to tell her!

  There flashed through her mind the idea of going to his mother. She was very fond of old Mrs. Ashby, a firm-fleshed clear-eyed old lady, with an astringent bluntness of speech which responded to the forthright and simple in Charlotte’s own nature. There had been a tacit bond between them ever since the day when Mrs. Ashby senior, coming to lunch for the first time with her new daughter-in-law, had been received by Charlotte downstairs in the library, and glancing up at the empty wall above her son’s desk, had remarked laconically: “Elsie gone, eh?” adding, at Charlotte’s murmured explanation: “Nonsense. Don’t have her back. Two’s company.” Charlotte, at this reading of her thoughts, could hardly refrain from exchanging a smile of complicity with her mother-in-law; and it seemed to her now that Mrs. Ashby’s almost uncanny directness might pierce to the core of this new mystery. But here again she hesitated, for the idea almost suggested a betrayal. What right had she to call in any one, even so close a relation, to surprise a secret which her husband was trying to keep from her? “Perhaps, by and by, he’ll talk to his mother of his own accord,” she thought, and then ended: “But what does it matter? He and I must settle it between us.”

  She was still brooding over the problem when there was a knock on the door and her husband came in. He was dressed for dinner and seemed surprised to see her sitting there, with her evening dress lying unheeded on the bed.

  “Aren’t you coming down?”

  “I thought you were not well and had gone to bed,” she faltered.

  He forced a smile. “I’m not particularly well, but we’d better go down.” His face, though still drawn, looked calmer than when he had fled upstairs an hour earlier.

  “There it is; he knows what’s in the letter and has fought his battle out again, whatever it is,” she reflected, “while I’m still in darkness.” She rang and gave a hurried order that dinner should be served as soon as possible—just a short meal, whatever could be got ready quickly, as both she and Mr. Ashby were rather tired and not very hungry.

  Dinner was announced, and they sat down to it. At first neither seemed able to find a word to say; then Ashby began to make conversation with an assumption of ease that was more oppressive than his silence. “How tired he is! How terribly overtired!” Charlotte said to herself, pursuing her own thoughts while he rambled on about municipal politics, aviation, an exhibition of modern French painting, the health of an old aunt and the installing of the automatic telephone. “Good heavens, how tired he is!”

  When they dined alone they usually went into the library after dinner, and Charlotte curled herself up on the divan with her knitting while he settled down in his armchair under the lamp and lit a pipe. But this evening, by tacit agreement, they avoided the room in which their strange talk had taken place, and went up to Charlotte’s drawing-room.

  They sat down near the fire, and Charlotte said: “Your pipe?” after he had put down his hardly tasted coffee.

  He shook his head. “No, not tonight.”

  “You must go to bed early; you look terribly tired. I’m sure they overwork you at the office.”

  “I suppose we all overwork at times.”

  She rose and stood before him with sudden resolution. “Well, I’m not going to have you use up your strength slaving in that way. It’s absurd. I can see you’re ill.” She bent over him and laid her hand on his forehead. “My poor old Kenneth. Prepare to be taken away soon on a long holiday.”

  He looked up at her, startled. “A holiday?”

  “Certainly. Didn’t you know I was going to carry you off at Easter? We’re going to start in a fortnight on a month’s voyage to somewhere or other. On any one of the big cruising steamers.” She paused and bent closer, touching his forehead with her lips. “I’m tired, too, Kenneth.”

  He seemed to pay no heed to her last words, but sat, his hands on his knees, his head drawn back a little from her caress, and looked up
at her with a stare of apprehension. “Again? My dear, we can’t; I can’t possibly go away.”

  “I don’t know why you say ‘again’, Kenneth; we haven’t taken a real holiday this year.”

  “At Christmas we spent a week with the children in the country.”

  “Yes, but this time I mean away from the children, from servants, from the house. From everything that’s familiar and fatiguing. Your mother will love to have Joyce and Peter with her.”

  He frowned and slowly shook his head. “No, dear; I can’t leave them with my mother.”

  “Why, Kenneth, how absurd! She adores them. You didn’t hesitate to leave them with her for over two months when we went to the West Indies.”

  He drew a deep breath and stood up uneasily. “That was different.”

  “Different? Why?”

  “I mean, at that time I didn’t realize”—He broke off as if to choose his words and then went on: “My mother adores the children, as you say. But she isn’t always very judicious. Grandmothers always spoil children. And she sometimes talks before them without thinking.” He turned to his wife with an almost pitiful gesture of entreaty. “Don’t ask me to, dear.”

  Charlotte mused. It was true that the elder Mrs. Ashby had a fearless tongue, but she was the last woman in the world to say or hint anything before her grandchildren at which the most scrupulous parent could take offense. Charlotte looked at her husband in perplexity.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He continued to turn on her the same troubled and entreating gaze. “Don’t try to,” he muttered.

  “Not try to?”

  “Not now—not yet.” He put up his hands and pressed them against his temples. “Can’t you see that there’s no use in insisting? I can’t go away, no matter how much I might want to.”

  Charlotte still scrutinized him gravely. “The question is, do you want to?”

  He returned her gaze for a moment; then his lips began to tremble, and he said, hardly above his breath: “I want—anything you want.”

  “And yet—”

  “Don’t ask me. I can’t leave—I can’t!”