Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (24 page)

 
          
“I
was mad ever to doubt you, Cora…” She lifted the letter to her breast, and
slipped it in among her laces. “How did you manage to get it, you darling,
you?”

 
          
Dear
me, thinks I, and what if she asks me to get her another one like it, and then
another? I waited a moment, and then I spoke very gravely. “It’s not an easy
thing, ma’am, coaxing a letter like that from the dead.” And suddenly, with a
start, I saw that I’d spoken the truth. It
was
from the dead that I’d got it.

 
          
“No,
Cora; I can well believe it. But this is a treasure I can live on for years.
Only you must tell me how I can repay you… In a hundred years I could never do
enough for you,” she says.

 
          
Well,
that word went to my heart; but for a minute I didn’t know how to answer. For
it was true I’d risked my soul, and that was something she couldn’t pay me for;
but then maybe I’d saved hers, in getting her away from those foul people, so
the whole business was more of a puzzle to me than ever. But then I had a
thought that made me easier.

 
          
“Well,
ma’am, the day before yesterday I was with a young man about the age of—of your
Harry; a poor young man, without health or hope, lying sick in a mean
rooming-house. I used to go there and see him sometimes—”

 
          
Mrs.
Clingsland sat up in bed in a flutter of pity.
“Oh, Cora, how
dreadful!
Why did you never tell me? You must hire a better room for him
at once. Has he a doctor? Has he a nurse? Quick—give me my cheque-book!”

 
          
“Thank you, ma’am.
But he
don’t
need no nurse nor no doctor; and he’s in a room underground by now. All I
wanted to ask you for,” said I at length, though I knew I might have got a
king’s ransom from her, “is money enough to have a few masses said for his
soul—because maybe there’s no one else to do it.”

 
          
I
had hard work making her believe there was no end to the masses you could say
for a hundred dollars; but somehow it’s comforted me ever since that I took no
more from her that day. I saw to it that Father Divott said the masses and got
a good bit of the money; so he was a sort of accomplice too, though he never
knew it.

 
          
(
Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan 99
,
December 1935)

 
          
Duration

 
          
  

 
          
The
passage in his sister’s letter most perplexing to Henly Warbeck was that in
which she expressed her satisfaction that the date of his sailing from Lima
would land him in Boston in good time for cousin Martha Little’s birthday.

 
          
Puzzle
as he would, the returning Bostonian could get no light on it. “Why,” he
thought, after a third re-reading, “I didn’t suppose Martha
Little
had ever
had
a birthday since the
first one!”

 
          
Nothing
on the fairly flat horizon of Henly Warbeck’s youth had been more lacking in
relief than the figure of his father’s spinster cousin, Martha Little; and now,
returning home after many years in distant and exotic lands (during which,
however, contact by correspondence had never been long interrupted), Warbeck
could not imagine what change in either Martha Little’s character or in that of
Boston could have thrust her into even momentary prominence.

 
          
Even
in his own large family connection, where, to his impatient youth,
insignificance seemed endemic, Martha
Little
had
always been the most effaced, contourless, colourless. Nor had any accidental
advantage ever lifted her out of her congenital twilight: neither money, nor a
bad temper, nor a knack with her clothes, nor any of those happy hazards—chance
meetings with interesting people, the whim of a rich relation, the luck of
ministering in a street accident to somebody with money to bequeath—which
occasionally raise the most mediocre above their level. As far as Warbeck knew,
Martha Little’s insignificance had been unbroken, and accepted from the outset,
by herself and all the family, as the medium she was fated to live in: as a
person with weak eyes has to live with the blinds down, and be groped for by
stumbling visitors.

 
          
The
result had been that visitors were few; that Martha was more and more
forgotten, or remembered only when she could temporarily replace a nursery
governess on holiday, or “amuse” some fidgety child getting over an infantile
malady.

 
          
Then
the family took it for granted that she would step into the breach; but when
the governess came back, or the child recovered, she disappeared, and was again
immediately forgotten.

 
          
Once
only, as far as Warbeck knew, had she over-stepped the line thus drawn for her;
but that was so long ago that the occasion had already become a legend in his
boyhood. It was when old Mrs. Warbeck, Henly’s grandmother, gave the famous
ball at which her eldest granddaughter came out; the ball discussed for weeks
beforehand and months afterward from Chestnut Street to Bay State Road, not
because there was anything exceptional about it (save perhaps its massive
“handsomeness”), but simply because old Mrs. Warbeck had never given a ball
before, and Boston had never supposed she ever would give one, and there had
been hardly three months’ time in which to get used to the idea that she was
really going to—at last!

 
          
All
this, naturally, had been agitating, not to say upsetting, to Beacon Street and
Commonwealth Avenue, and absorbing to the whole immense Warbeck connection; the
innumerable Pepperels, Sturlisses and Syngletons, the Graysons, Wrigglesworths
and Perches—even to those remote and negligible Littlest whose name gave so
accurate a measure of their tribal standing. And to that ball there had been a
question of asking, not of course
all
the Littles—that would have been really out of proportion—but two or three
younger specimens of the tribe, whom circumstances had happened to bring into
closer contact with the Warbeck group.

 
          
“And
then,” one of the married daughters had suggested toward the end of the
consultation, “there’s Martha
Little
—”

 
          
“Martha?”
old Mrs. Warbeck echoed,
incredulous and ironic, as much as to say: “The name’s a slip of the tongue, of
course; but whom
did
you mean, my
dear, when you said ‘Martha’?”

 
          
But
the married daughter had continued, though more doubtfully: “Well, mother,
Martha does sometimes help us out of our difficulties. Last winter, you
remember, when Maggie’s baby had the chickenpox … and then, taking Sara’s
Charlotte
three times a week to her drawing-class …
and you know, as you invite her to stay with you at
Milton
every summer when we’re at the seaside…”

 
          
“Ah,
you regard that as helping you out of a difficulty?” Mrs. Warbeck drily
interposed.

 
          
“No, mother, not a difficulty, of course.
But it does make
us feel so
safe
to know that Martha’s
with you. And when she hears of the ball she might expect—”

 
          
“Expect
to
come?”
questioned Mrs. Warbeck.

 
          
“Oh, no—how absurd!
Only to be invited …” the daughters
chorussed in reply.

 
          
“She’d
like to show the invitation at her boarding-house…”

 
          
“She
hasn’t many pleasures, poor thing…”

 
          
“Well,
but,” the old lady insisted, sticking to her point, “if I did invite her, would
she come?”

 
          
“To a ball?
What an idea!” Martha
Little
at a ball! Daughters and daughters-in-law laughed. It was really too absurd.
But they all had their little debts to settle with Martha
Little
,
and the opportunity was too good to be missed. On the strength of their joint
assurances that no risk could possibly be incurred, old Mrs. Warbeck sent the
invitation.

 
          
The
night of the ball came; and so did Martha Little. She was among the first to
arrive, and she stayed till the last candle was blown out. The entertainment
remained for many years memorable in the annals of Beacon Street, and also in
the Warbeck family history, since it was the occasion of Sara’s eldest engaging
herself to the second of Jake Wrigglesworth’s boys (now, Warbeck reflected,
himself a grizzled grandparent), and of Phil Syngleton’s falling in love with
the second Grayson girl; but beyond and above these events towered the
formidable fact of Martha Little’s one glaring indelicacy. Like Mrs. Warbeck’s
ball, it was never repeated. Martha retired once more into the twilight in
which she belonged, emerging from it, as of old, only when some service was to
be rendered somewhere in the many-branched family connection. But the episode
of the ball remained fresh in every memory. Martha
Little
had been invited—
and she had come?
Henly Warbeck, as a little boy, had often heard his aunts describe her
appearance: the prim black silk, the antiquated seed-pearls and lace mittens,
the obvious “front”, more tightly crimped than usual; how she had pranced up
the illuminated stairs, an absurd velvet reticule over her wrist, greeted her
mighty kinswoman on the landing, and complacently mingled with the jewelled and
feathered throng under the wax candles of the many chandeliers, while Mrs.
Warbeck muttered to her daughters in a withering aside:
“I never should have thought it of Martha Little!”

 
          
The
escapade had done Martha
Little
more harm than good.
The following summer Mrs. Warbeck had chosen one of her own granddaughters to
keep her company at
Milton
when the family went to the seaside. It was hoped that this would make
Martha realize her fatal error; and it did. And though the following year, at
the urgent suggestion of the granddaughter chosen to replace her, she was
received back into grace, and had what she called her “lovely summer outing” at
Milton, there was certainly a shade of difference in her subsequent treatment.
The younger granddaughters especially resented the fact that old Mrs. Warbeck
had decided never to give another ball; and the old lady was fond of repeating
(before Martha Little) that no, really, she couldn’t; the family connection was
too large
—she hadn’t room for them
all. When the girls wanted to dance, their mothers must hire a public room; at
her age Mrs. Warbeck couldn’t be subjected to the fatigue, and the—the
over-crowding.

 
          
Martha
Little
took the hint. As the grand-children grew up
and married, her services were probably less often required, and by the time
that Henly Warbeck had graduated from the
Harvard
Law
School
, and begun his life of distant wanderings,
she had vanished into a still deeper twilight. Only once or twice, when some
member of the tribe had run across Henly abroad, had Martha’s name been
mentioned. “Oh, she’s as dull as Martha Little,” one contemptuous cousin had
said of somebody; and the last mention of her had been when Warbeck’s sister,
Mrs. Pepperel—the one to whom he was now returning—had mentioned, years ago,
that a remote Grayson cousin, of the Frostingham branch, had bequeathed to
Martha his little house at Frostingham—”so that now she’s off our minds.” And
out of our memories, the speaker might have added; for though Frostingham is
only a few miles from Boston it was not likely that many visitors would find
their way to Martha Little’s door.

 
          
No;
the allusion in this letter of Mrs. Pepperel’s remained cryptic to the
returning traveller. As the train approached
Boston
, he pulled it from his pocket, and re-read
it again. “Luckily you’ll get here in good time for Martha Little’s birthday,”
Mrs. Pepperel said.