Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (18 page)

 
          
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 steadily. “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.

 
          
  

 
          
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)

 
          
  

 
          
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 look 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!”

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley again colored slightly. “I think those young Italian aviators we met at
the Embassy invited them to fly to Tarquinia for tea. I suppose they’ll want to
wait and fly back by moonlight.”