I smiled. “I shan’t hear it, you know. I shall be stone deaf.”
She gave a little screaming laugh, and her arms dropped to her sides. “Stone deaf, he says. And to the day of his death he’ll never get out of his ears what I’m going to tell him…” She moved forward again, lurching a little; she seemed to be trying to take the few steps back to the table, and I noticed that she had left her hand-bag on it. I took it up. “You want your bag?”
“My bag?” Her jaw fell slightly, and began to tremble again. “Yes, yes … my bag … give it to me. Then you’ll know all about Kate Spain…” She got as far as the armchair, dropped into it sideways, and sat with hanging head, and arms lolling at her sides. She seemed to have forgotten about the bag, though I had put it beside her.
I stared at her, horrified. Was she as drunk as all that—or was she ill, and desperately ill? I felt cold about the heart, and went up, and took hold of her. “Miss Wilpert—won’t you get up? Aren’t you well?”
Her swollen lips formed a thin laugh, and I saw a thread of foam in their corners. “Kate Spain… I’ll tell you…” Her head sank down onto her creased white throat. Her arms hung lifeless; she neither spoke nor moved.
VIII.
After the first moment of distress and bewilderment, and the two or three agitated hours spent in consultations, telephonings, engaging of nurses, and enquiring about nursing homes, I was at last able to have a few words with Mrs. Ingram.
Miss Wilpert’s case was clear enough; a stroke produced by sudden excitement, which would certainly—as the doctors summoned from Milan advised us—result in softening of the brain, probably followed by death in a few weeks. The direct cause had been the poor woman’s fit of rage against me; but the doctors told me privately that in her deteriorated condition any shock might have brought about the same result. Continual over-indulgence in food and drink—in drink especially—had made her, physiologically, an old woman before her time; all her organs were worn out, and the best that could be hoped was that the bodily resistance which sometimes develops when the mind fails would not keep her too long from dying.
I had to break this as gently as I could to Mrs. Ingram, and at the same time to defend myself against the painful inferences she might draw from the way in which the attack had happened. She knew—as the whole horrified pension knew—that Miss Wilpert had been taken suddenly ill in my room; and any one living on the same floor must have been aware that an angry discussion had preceded the attack. But Kate Ingram knew more; she, and she alone, knew why Cassie Wilpert had gone to my room, and when I found myself alone with her I instantly read that knowledge in her face. This being so, I thought it better to make no pretence.
“You saw Miss Wilpert, I suppose, before she came to me?” I asked.
She made a faint assenting motion; I saw that she was too shaken to speak.
“And she told you, probably, that she was going to tell me I must not marry you.”
“Yes—she told me.”
I sat down beside her and took her hand. “I don’t know what she meant,” I went on, “or how she intended to prevent it; for before she could say anything more—”
Kate Ingram turned to me quickly. I could see the life rushing back to her stricken face. “You mean—she didn’t say anything more?”
“She had no time to.”
“Not a word more?”
“Nothing—”
Mrs. Ingram gave me one long look; then her head sank between her hands. I sat beside her in silence, and at last she dropped her hands and looked up again. “You’ve been very good to me,” she said.
“Then, my dear, you must be good too. I want you to go to your room at once and take a long rest. Everything is arranged; the nurse has come. Early tomorrow morning the ambulance will be here. You can trust me to see that things are looked after.”
Her eyes rested on me, as if she were trying to grope for the thoughts beyond this screen of words. “You’re sure she said nothing more?” she repeated.
“On my honour, nothing.”
She got up and went obediently to her room.
It was perfectly clear to me that Mrs. Ingram’s docility during those first grim days was due chiefly to the fact of her own helplessness. Little of the practical experience of every-day life had come into her melancholy existence, and I was not surprised that, in a strange country and among unfamiliar faces, she should turn to me for support. The shock of what had occurred, and God knows what secret dread behind it, had prostrated the poor creature, and the painful details still to be dealt with made my nearness a necessity. But, as far as our personal relations were concerned, I knew that sooner or later an emotional reaction would come.
For the moment it was kept off by other cares. Mrs. Ingram turned to me as to an old friend, and I was careful to make no other claim on her. She was installed at the nursing-home in Milan to which her companion had been transported; and I saw her there two or three times daily. Happily for the sick woman, the end was near; she never regained consciousness, and before the month was out she was dead. Her life ended without a struggle, and Mrs. Ingram was spared the sight of protracted suffering; but the shock of the separation was inevitable. I knew she did not love Cassie Wilpert, and I measured her profound isolation when I saw that the death of this woman left her virtually alone.
When we returned from the funeral I drove her back to the hotel where she had engaged rooms, and she asked me to come to see her there the next afternoon.
At Orta, after Cassie Wilpert’s sudden seizure, and before the arrival of the doctors, I had handed her bag over to Mrs. Ingram, and had said: “You’d better lock it up. If she gets worse the police might ask for it.”
She turned ashy pale. “The police—?”
“Oh, you know there are endless formalities of that kind in all Latin countries. I should advise you to look through the bag yourself, and see if there’s anything in it she might prefer not to have you keep. If there is, you’d better destroy it.”
I knew at the time that she had guessed I was referring to some particular paper; but she took the bag from me without speaking. And now, when I came to the hotel at her summons, I wondered whether she would allude to the matter, whether in the interval it had passed out of her mind, or whether she had decided to say nothing. There was no doubt that the bag had contained something which Miss Wilpert was determined that I should see; but, after all, it might have been only a newspaper report of the Spain trial. The unhappy creature’s brain was already so confused that she might have attached importance to some document that had no real significance. I hoped it was so, for my one desire was to put out of my mind the memory of Cassie Wilpert, and of what her association with Mrs. Ingram had meant.
At the hotel I was asked to come up to Mrs. Ingram’s private sitting-room. She kept me waiting for a little while, and when she appeared she looked so frail and ill in her black dress that I feared she might be on the verge of a nervous break-down.
“You look too tired to see any one today. You ought to go straight to bed and let me send for the doctor,” I said.
“No—no.” She shook her head, and signed to me to sit down. “It’s only … the strangeness of everything. I’m not used to being alone. I think I’d better go away from here tomorrow,” she began excitedly.
“I think you had, dear. I’ll make any arrangements you like, if you’ll tell me where you want to go. And I’ll come and join you, and arrange as soon as possible about our marriage. Such matters can be managed fairly quickly in France.”
“In France?” she echoed absently, with a little smile.
“Or wherever else you like. We might go to Rome.”
She continued to smile; a strained mournful smile, which began to frighten me. Then she spoke. “I shall never forget what you’ve been to me. But we must say goodbye now. I can’t marry you. Cassie did what was right—she only wanted to spare me the pain of telling you.”
I looked at her steadi
ly. “When you say you can’t marry me,” I asked, “do you mean that you’re already married, and can’t free yourself?”
She seemed surprised. “Oh, no. I’m not married—I was never married.”
“Then, my dear—”
She raised one hand to silence me; with the other she opened her little black hand-bag and drew out a sealed envelope. “This is the reason. It’s what she meant to show you—”
I broke in at once: “I don’t want to see anything she meant to show me. I told her so then, and I tell you so now. Whatever is in that envelope, I refuse to look at it.”
Mrs. Ingram gave me a startled glance. “No, no. You must read it. Don’t force me to tell you—that would be worse…”
I jumped up and stood looking down into her anguished face. Even if I hadn’t loved her, I should have pitied her then beyond all mortal pity.
“Kate,” I said, bending over her, and putting my hand on her icy-cold one, “when I asked you to marry me I buried all such questions, and I’m not going to dig them up again today—or any other day. The past’s the past. It’s at an end for us both, and tomorrow I mean to marry you, and begin our future.”
She smiled again, strangely, I thought, and then suddenly began to cry. Then she flung her arms about my neck, and pressed herself against me. “Say goodbye to me now—say goodbye to Kate Spain,” she whispered.
“Goodbye to Kate Spain, yes; but not to Kate Severance.”
“There’ll never be a Kate Severance. There never can be. Oh, won’t you understand—won’t you spare me? Cassie was right; she tried to do her duty when she saw I couldn’t do it…”
She broke into terrible sobs, and I pressed my lips against hers to silence her. She let me hold her for a while, and when she drew back from me I saw that the battle was half won. But she stretched out her hand toward the envelope. “You must read it—”
I shook my head. “I won’t read it. But I’ll take it and keep it. Will that satisfy you, Kate Severance?” I asked. For it had suddenly occurred to me that, if I tore the paper up before her, I should only force her, in her present mood, to the more cruel alternative of telling me what it contained.
I saw at once that my suggestion quieted her. “You will take it, then? You’ll read it tonight? You’ll promise me?”
“No, my dear. All I promise you is to take it with me, and not to destroy it.”
She took a long sobbing breath, and drew me to her again. “It’s as if you’d read it already, isn’t it?” she said below her breath.
“It’s as if it had never existed—because it never will exist for me.” I held her fast, and kissed her again. And when I left her I carried the sealed envelope away with me.
IX.
All that happened seven years ago; and the envelope lies before me now, still sealed. Why should I have opened it?
As I carried it home that night at Milan, as I drew it out of my pocket and locked it away among my papers, it was as transparent as glass to me. I had no need to open it. Already it had given me the measure of the woman who, deliberately, determinedly, had thrust it into my hands. Even as she was in the act of doing so, I had understood that with Cassie Wilpert’s death the one danger she had to fear had been removed; and that, knowing herself at last free, at last safe, she had voluntarily placed her fate in my keeping.
“Greater love hath no man—certainly no woman,” I thought. Cassie Wilpert, and Cassie Wilpert alone, held Kate Spain’s secret—the secret which would doubtless have destroyed her in the eyes of the world, as it was meant to destroy her in mine. And that secret, when it had been safely buried with Cassie Wilpert, Kate Spain had deliberately dug up again, and put into my hands.
It took her some time to understand the use I meant to make of it. She did not dream, at first, that it had given me a complete insight into her character, and that that was all I wanted of it. Weeks of patient waiting, of quiet reasoning, of obstinate insistence, were required to persuade her that I was determined to judge her, not by her past, whatever it might have been, but by what she had unconsciously revealed of herself since I had known her and loved her.
“You can’t marry me—you know why you can’t marry me,” she had gone on endlessly repeating; till one day I had turned on her, and declared abruptly: “Whatever happens, this is to be our last talk on the subject. I will never return to it again, or let you return to it. But I swear one thing to you now; if you know how your father died, and have kept silence to shield some one—to shield I don’t care who—” I looked straight into her eyes as I said this—”if this is your reason for thinking you ought not to marry me, then I tell you now that it weighs nothing with me, and never will.”
She gave me back my look, long and deeply; then she bent and kissed my hands. That was all.
I had hazarded a great deal in saying what I did; and I knew the risk I was taking. It was easy to answer for the present; but how could I tell what the future, our strange incalculable future together, might bring? It was that which she dreaded, I knew; not for herself, but for me. But I was ready to risk it, and a few weeks after that final talk—for final I insisted on its being—I gained my point, and we were married.
We were married; and for five years we lived our strange perilous dream of happiness. That fresh unfading happiness which now and then mocks the lot of poor mortals; but not often—and never for long.
At the end of five years my wife died; and since then I have lived alone among memories so made of light and darkness that sometimes I am blind with remembered joy, and sometimes numb under present sorrow. I don’t know yet which will end by winning the day with me; but in my uncertainty I am putting old things in order—and there on my desk lies the paper I have never read, and beside it the candle with which I shall presently burn it.
(Storyteller 58, March 1936)
Roman Fever.
I.
From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval.
As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below. “Well, come along, then,” it cried, not to them but to an invisible companion, “and let’s leave the young things to their knitting,” and a voice as fresh laughed back: “Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting—” “Well, I mean figuratively,” rejoined the first. “After all, we haven’t left our poor parents much else to do.…” At that point the turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue.
The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling embarrassment, and the smaller and paler one shook her head and colored slightly.
“Barbara!” she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mocking voice in the stairway.
The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in color, with a small determined nose supported by vigorous black eyebrows, gave a good-humored laugh. “That’s what our daughters think of us.”
Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. “Not of us individually. We must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see—” Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. “One never knows,” she murmured. “The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill; and sometimes I get tired just looking—even at this.” Her gesture was now addressed to the stupendous scene at their feet.
The dark lady laughed again, and they both relapsed upon the view, contemplating it in silence, with a sort of diffused serenity which might have been borrowed from the spring effulgence of the Roman skies. The luncheon hour was long past, and the two had their end of the vast terrace to themselves. At its opposite extremity a few groups, detained by a lingering l
ook at the outspread city, were gathering up guidebooks and fumbling for tips. The last of them scattered, and the two ladies were alone on the air-washed height.
“Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t just stay here,” said Mrs. Slade, the lady of the high color and energetic brows. Two derelict basket chairs stood near, and she pushed them into the angle of the parapet, and settled herself in one, her gaze upon the Palatine. “After all, it’s still the most beautiful view in the world.”
“It always will be, to me,” assented her friend Mrs. Ansley, with so slight a stress on the “me” that Mrs. Slade, though she noticed it, wondered if it were not merely accidental, like the random underlinings of old-fashioned letter writers.
“Grace Ansley was always old-fashioned,” she thought; and added aloud, with a retrospective smile: “It’s a view we’ve both been familiar with for a good many years. When we first met here we were younger than our girls are now. You remember!”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” murmured Mrs. Ansley, with the same undefinable stress—”There’s that head-waiter wondering,” she interpolated. She was evidently far less sure than her companion of herself and of her rights in the world.
“I’ll cure him of wondering,” said Mrs. Slade, stretching her hand toward a bag as discreetly opulent-looking as Mrs. Ansley’s. Signing to the headwaiter, she explained that she and her friend were old lovers of Rome, and would like to spend the end of the afternoon looking down on the view—that is, if it did not disturb the service! The headwaiter, bowing over her gratuity, assured her that the ladies were most welcome, and would be still more so if they would condescend to remain for dinner. A full moon night, they would remember….
Mrs. Slade’s black brows drew together, as though references to the moon were out of place and even unwelcome. But she smiled away her frown as the headwaiter retreated. “Well, why not! We might do worse. There’s no knowing, I suppose, when the girls will be back. Do you even know back from where? I don’t!”
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