Edith Wharton - SSC 10

by The World Over (v2. 1)

  Remember it? Of course I remembered every detail of it, with a precision which startled me, considering I had never, to my knowledge, given the Kate Spain trial a thought since the talk about it had died out with the woman’s acquittal. Now it all came back to me, every scrap of evidence, all the sordid and sinister gossip let loose by the trial: the tale of Ezra Spain, the wealthy miser and tyrant, of whom no one in his native town had a good word to say, who was reported to have let his wife die of neglect because he would not send for a doctor till it was too late, and who had been too mean to supply her with food and medicines, or to provide a trained nurse for her. After his wife’s death his daughter had continued to live with him, brow-beaten and starved in her turn, and apparently lacking the courage to cast herself penniless and inexperienced upon the world. It had been almost with a sense of relief that Cayuga had learned of the old man’s murder by a wandering tramp who had found him alone in the house, and had killed him in his sleep, and got away with what little money there was. Now at last, people said, that poor persecuted daughter with the wistful eyes and the frightened smile would be free, would be rich, would be able to come out of her prison, and marry and enjoy her life, instead of wasting and dying as her mother had died. And then came the incredible rumour that, instead of coming out of prison—the prison of her father’s house—she was to go into another, the kind one entered in hand-cuffs, between two jailers: was to go there accused of her father’s murder.

  “I’ve got it now! Cassie Donovan—that was the servant’s name,” Shreve suddenly exclaimed. “Don’t you remember?”

  “No, I don’t. But this woman’s name, as I’ve told you, isn’t Donovan—it’s Wilpert, Miss Wilpert.”

  “Her new name, you mean? Yes. And Kate Spain’s new name, you say, is Mrs. Ingram. Can’t you see that the first thing they’d do, when they left Cayuga, would be to change their names?”

  “Why should they, when nothing was proved against them? And you say yourself you didn’t recognize Miss Wilpert,” I insisted, struggling to maintain my incredulity.

  “No; I didn’t remember that she might have got fat and dyed her hair. I guess they do themselves like fighting cocks now, to make up for past privations. They say the old man cut up even fatter than people expected. But prosperity hasn’t changed Kate Spain. I knew her at once; I’d have known her anywhere. And she knew me.”

  “She didn’t know you,” I broke out; “she said she was mistaken.”

  Shreve pounced on this in a flash. “Ah—so at first she thought she did?” He laughed. “I don’t wonder she said afterward she was mistaken. I don’t dye my hair yet, but I’m afraid I’ve put on nearly as much weight as Cassie Donovan.” He paused again, and then added: “All the same, Severance, she did know me.”

  I looked at the little journalist and laughed back at him.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “At you. At such a perfect case of professional deformation. Wherever you go you’re bound to spot a criminal; but I should have thought even Mont Soleil could have produced a likelier specimen than my friend Mrs. Ingram.”

  He looked a little startled at my tone. “Oh, see here; if she’s such a friend I’m sorry I said anything.”

  I rose to heights of tolerance. “Nothing you can say can harm her, my dear fellow.”

  “Harm her? Why on earth should it? I don’t want to harm her.”

  “Then don’t go about spreading such ridiculous gossip. I don’t suppose any one cares to be mistaken for a woman who’s been tried for her life; and if I were a relation of Mrs. Ingram’s I’m bound to tell you I should feel obliged to put a stop to your talk.”

  He stared in surprise, and I thought he was going to retort in the same tone; but he was a fair-minded little fellow, and after a moment I could see he’d understood. “All right, Severance; of course I don’t want to do anything that’ll bother her…”

  “Then don’t go on talking as if you still thought she was Kate Spain.”

  He gave a hopeless shrug. “All right. I won’t. Only she is, you know; what’ll you bet on it, old man?”

  “Good night,” I said with a nod, and turned away. It was obviously a fixed idea with him; and what harm could such a crank do to me, much less to a woman like Mrs. Ingram?

  As I left him he called after me: “If she ain’t, who is she? Tell me that, and I’ll believe you.”

  I walked away without answering.

  

  IV.

  I went up to bed laughing inwardly at poor Jimmy Shreve. His craving for the sensational had certainly deformed his critical faculty. How it would amuse Mrs. Ingram to hear that he had identified her with the wretched Kate Spain! Well, she should hear it; we’d laugh over it together the next day. For she had said, in bidding me goodnight: “You’ll tell me the rest in the morning.” And that meant—could only mean—that she was going to listen to me, and if she were going to listen, she must be going to answer as I wished her to…

  Those were my thoughts as I went up to my room. They were scarcely less confident while I was undressing. I had the hope, the promise almost, of what, at the moment, I most wished for—the only thing I wished for, in fact. I was amazed at the intensity with which I wished it. From the first I had tried to explain away my passion by regarding it as the idle man’s tendency to fall into sentimental traps; but I had always known that what I felt was not of that nature. This quiet woman with the wide pale eyes and melancholy mouth had taken possession of me; she seemed always to have inhabited my mind and heart; and as I lay down to sleep I tried to analyze what it was in her that made her seem already a part of me.

  But as soon as my light was out I knew I was going to lie awake all night; and all sorts of unsought problems instantly crowded out my sentimental musings. I had laughed at Shreve’s inept question: “If she ain’t Kate Spain, who is she?” But now an insistent voice within me echoed: Who is she? What, in short, did I know of her? Not one single fact which would have permitted me to disprove his preposterous assertion. Who was she? Was she married, unmarried, divorced, a widow? Had she children, parents, relations distant or near? Where had she lived before going to California, and when had she gone there? I knew neither her birthplace, nor her maiden name, or indeed any fact about her except the all-dominating fact of herself.

  In rehearsing our many talks with the pitiless lucidity of sleeplessness I saw that she had the rare gift of being a perfect listener; the kind whose silence supplies the inaudible questions and answers most qualified to draw one on. And I had been drawn on; ridiculously, fatuously, drawn on. She was in possession of all the chief facts of my modest history. She knew who I was, where I came from, who were my friends, my family, my antecedents; she was fully informed as to my plans, my hopes, my preferences, my tastes and hobbies. I had even confided to her my passion for Brahms and for book-collecting, and my dislike for the wireless, and for one of my brothers-in-law. And in return for these confidences she had given me—what? An understanding smile, and the occasional murmur: “Oh, do you feel that too? I’ve always felt it.”

  Such was the actual extent of my acquaintance with Mrs. Ingram; and I perceived that, though I had laughed at Jimmy Shreve’s inept assertion, I should have been utterly unable to disprove it. I did not know who Mrs. Ingram was, or even one single fact about her.

  From that point to supposing that she could be Kate Spain was obviously a long way. She might be—well, let’s say almost anything; but not a woman accused of murder, and acquitted only because the circumstantial evidence was insufficient to hang her. I dismissed the grotesque supposition at once; there were problems enough to keep me awake without that.

  When I said that I knew nothing of Mrs. Ingram I was mistaken. I knew one fact about her; that she could put up with Cassie Wilpert. It was only a clue, but I had felt from the first that it was a vital one. What conceivable interest or obligation could make a woman like Mrs. Ingram endure such an intimacy? If I knew that, I should know all I cared t
o know about her; not only about her outward circumstances but her inmost self.

  Hitherto, in indulging my feeling for her, I had been disposed to slip past the awkward obstacle of Cassie Wilpert; but now I was resolved to face it. I meant to ask Kate Ingram to marry me. If she refused, her private affairs were obviously no business of mine; but if she accepted I meant to have the Wilpert question out with her at once.

  It seemed a long time before daylight came; and then there were more hours to be passed before I could reasonably present myself to Mrs. Ingram. But at nine I sent a line to ask when she would see me; and a few minutes later my note was returned to me by the floor-waiter.

  “But this isn’t an answer; it’s my own note,” I exclaimed.

  Yes; it was my own note. He had brought it back because the lady had already left the hotel.

  “Left? Gone out, you mean?”

  “No; left with all her luggage. The two ladies went an hour ago.”

  In a few minutes I was dressed and had hurried down to the concierges. It was a mistake, I was sure; of course Mrs. Ingram had not left. The floor-waiter, whom I had long since classed as an idiot, had simply gone to the wrong door. But no; the concierges shook his head. It was not a mistake. Mrs. Ingram and Miss Wilpert had gone away suddenly that morning by motor. The chauffeur’s orders were to take them to Italy; to Baveno or Stresa, he thought; but he wasn’t sure, and the ladies had left no address. The hotel servants said they had been up all night packing. The heavy luggage was to be sent to Milan; the concierges had orders to direct it to the station. That was all the information he could give—and I thought he looked at me queerly as he gave it.

  

  V.

  I did not see Jimmy Shreve again before leaving Mont Soleil that day; indeed I exercised all my ingenuity in keeping out of his way. If I were to ask any further explanations, it was of Mrs. Ingram that I meant to ask them. Either she was Kate Spain, or she was not; and either way, she was the woman to whom I had declared my love. I should have thought nothing of Shreve’s insinuations if I had not recalled Mrs. Ingram’s start when she first saw him. She herself had owned that she had taken him for some one she knew; but even this would not have meant much if she and her companion had not disappeared from the hotel a few hours later, without leaving a message for me, or an address with the hall-porter.

  I did not for a moment suppose that this disappearance was connected with my talk of the previous evening with Mrs. Ingram. She herself had expressed the wish to prolong that talk when Miss Wilpert interrupted it; and failing that, she had spontaneously suggested that we should meet again the next morning. It would have been less painful to think that she had fled before the ardour of my wooing than before the dread of what Shreve might reveal about her; but I knew the latter reason was the more likely.

  The discovery stunned me. It took me some hours to get beyond the incredible idea that this woman, whose ways were so gentle, with whose whole nature I felt myself in such delightful harmony, had stood her trial as a murderess—and the murderess of her own father. But the more I revolved this possibility the less I believed in it. There might have been other—and perhaps not very creditable—reasons for her abrupt flight; but that she should be flying because she knew that Shreve had recognized her seemed, on further thought, impossible.

  Then I began to look at the question from another angle. Supposing she were Kate Spain? Well, her father had been assassinated by a passing tramp; so the jury had decided. Probably suspicion would never have rested on her if it had not been notorious in Cayuga that the old man was a selfish miser, who for years had made his daughter’s life intolerable. To those who knew the circumstances it had seemed conceivable, seemed almost natural, that the poor creature should finally turn against him. Yet she had had no difficulty in proving her innocence; it was clearly established that she was out of the house when the crime was committed. Her having been suspected, and tried, was simply one of those horrible blunders of which innocent persons have so often been the victims. Do what she would to live it down, her name would always remain associated with that sordid tragedy; and wasn’t it natural that she should flee from any reminder of it, any suspicion that she had been recognized, and her identity proclaimed by a scandal-mongering journalist? If she were Kate Spain, the dread of having the fact made known to every one in that crowded hotel was enough to drive her out of it. But if her departure had another cause, in no way connected with Shreve’s arrival, might it not have been inspired by a sudden whim of Cassie Wilpert’s? Mrs. Ingram had told me that Cassie was bored and wanted to get away; and it was all too clear that, however loudly she proclaimed her independence, she always ended by obeying Miss Wilpert.

  It was a melancholy alternative. Poor woman—poor woman either way, I thought. And by the time I had reached this conclusion, I was in the train which was hurrying me to Milan. Whatever happened I must see her, and hear from her own lips what she was flying from.

  I hadn’t much hope of running down the fugitives at Stresa or Baveno. It was not likely that they would go to either of the places they had mentioned to the concierges; but I went to both the next morning, and carried out a minute inspection of all the hotel lists. As I had foreseen, the travellers were not to be found, and I was at a loss to know where to turn next. I knew, however, that the luggage the ladies had sent to Milan was not likely to arrive till the next day, and concluded that they would probably wait for it in the neighbourhood; and suddenly I remembered that I had once advised Mrs. Ingram—who was complaining that she was growing tired of fashionable hotels—to try a little pension on the lake of Orta, where she would be miles away from “palaces”, and from the kind of people who frequent them. It was not likely that she would have remembered this place; but I had put a pencil stroke beside the name in her guide-book, and that might recall it to her. Orta, at any rate, was not far off; and I decided to hire a car at Stresa, and go there before carrying on my journey.

  

  VI.

  I don’t suppose I shall ever get out of my eyes the memory of the public sitting-room in the pension at Orta. It was there that I waited for Mrs. Ingram to come down, wondering if she would, and what we should say to each other when she did.

  There were three windows in a row, with clean heavily starched Nottingham lace curtains carefully draped to exclude the best part of the matchless view over lake and mountains. To make up for this privation the opposite wall was adorned with a huge oil-painting of a Swiss water-fall. In the middle of the room was a table of sham ebony, with ivory inlays, most of which had long since worked out of their grooves, and on the table the usual dusty collection of tourist magazines, fashion papers, and tattered copies of Zion’s Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor.

  What is the human mind made of, that mine, at such a moment, should have minutely and indelibly registered these depressing details? I even remember smiling at the thought of the impression my favourite pension must have made on travellers who had just moved out of the most expensive suite in the Mont Soleil Palace.

  And then Mrs. Ingram came in.

  My first impression was that something about her dress or the arrangement of her hair had changed her. Then I saw that two dabs of rouge had been unskilfully applied to her pale cheeks, and a cloud of powder dashed over the dark semicircles under her eyes. She must have undergone some terrible moral strain since our parting to feel the need of such a disguise.

  “I thought I should find you here,” I said.

  She let me take her two hands, but at first she could not speak. Then she said, in an altered voice: “You must have wondered—”

  “Yes; I wondered.”

  “It was Cassie who suddenly decided—”

  “I supposed so.”

  She looked at me beseechingly. “But she was right, you know.”

  “Right—about what?”

  Her rouged lips began to tremble, and she drew her hands out of mine.

  “Before you say anything els
e,” I interrupted, “there’s one thing you must let me say. I want you to marry me.”

  I had not meant to bring it out so abruptly; but something in her pitiful attempt to conceal her distress had drawn me closer to her, drawn me past all doubts and distrusts, all thought of evasion or delay.

  She looked at me, still without speaking, and two tears ran over her lids, and streaked the untidy powder on her cheeks.

  “No—no—no!” she exclaimed, lifting her thin hand and pressing it against my lips. I drew it down and held it fast.

  “Why not? You knew I was going to ask you, the day before yesterday, and when we were interrupted you promised to hear me the next morning. You yourself said: ‘tomorrow morning’.”

  “Yes; but I didn’t know then—”

  “You didn’t know—?”

  I was still holding her, and my eyes were fixed on hers. She gave me back my look, deeply and desperately. Then she freed herself.

  “Let me go. I’m Kate Spain,” she said.

  We stood facing each other without speaking. Then I gave a laugh, and answered, in a voice that sounded to me as though I were shouting: “Well, I want to marry you, Kate Spain.”

  She shrank back, her hands clasped across her breast. “You knew already? That man told you?”

  “Who—Jimmy Shreve? What does it matter if he did? Was that the reason you ran away from me?” She nodded.

  “And you thought I wouldn’t find you?”

  “I thought you wouldn’t try.”

  “You thought that, having told you one day that I loved you, I’d let you go out of my life the next?”