Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (6 page)

 
          
That
was the first time. Since then Charlotte had never been present when he had
received the letter. It usually came before he got home from his office, and
she had to go upstairs and leave it lying there. But even if she had not seen
it, she would have known it had come by the change in his face when he joined
her—which, on those evenings, he seldom did before they met for dinner.
Evidently, whatever the letter contained, he wanted to be by himself to deal
with it; and when he reappeared he looked years older, looked emptied of life
and courage, and hardly conscious of her presence. Sometimes he was silent for
the rest of the evening; and if he spoke, it was usually to hint some criticism
of her household arrangements, suggest some change in the domestic
administration, to ask, a little nervously, if she didn’t think Joyce’s nursery
governess was rather young and flighty, or if she herself always saw to it that
Peter—whose throat was delicate—was properly wrapped up when he went to school.
At such times Charlotte would remember the friendly warnings she had received
when she became engaged to Kenneth Ashby: “Marrying a heartbroken widower!
Isn’t that rather risky?

 
          
You
know Elsie Ashby absolutely dominated him”; and how she had jokingly replied:
“He may be glad of a little liberty for a change.” And in this respect she had
been right. She had needed no one to tell her, during the first months, that
her husband was perfectly happy with her. When they came back from their
protracted honeymoon the same friends said: “What have you done to Kenneth? He
looks twenty years younger”; and this time she answered with careless joy: “I
suppose I’ve got him out of his groove.”

 
          
But
what she noticed after the gray letters began to come was not so much his
nervous tentative faultfinding—which always seemed to be uttered against his
will—as the look in his eyes when he joined her after receiving one of the
letters. The look was not unloving, not even indifferent; it was the look of a
man who had been so far away from ordinary events that when he returns to
familiar things they seem strange. She minded that more than the faultfinding.

 
          
Though
she had been sure from the first that the handwriting on the gray envelope was
a woman’s, it was long before she associated the mysterious letters with any
sentimental secret. She was too sure of her husband’s love, too confident of
filling his life, for such an idea to occur to her. It seemed far more likely
that the letters—which certainly did not appear to cause him any sentimental
pleasure—were addressed to the busy lawyer than to the private person. Probably
they were from some tiresome client—women, he had often told her, were nearly
always tiresome as clients—who did not want her letters opened by his secretary
and therefore had them carried to his house. Yes; but in that case the unknown
female must be unusually troublesome, judging from the effect her letters
produced. Then again, though his professional discretion was exemplary, it was
odd that he had never uttered an impatient comment, never remarked to
Charlotte, in a moment of expansion, that there was a nuisance of a woman who
kept badgering him about a case that had gone against her. He had made more
than one semi-confidence of the kind—of course without giving names or details;
but concerning this mysterious correspondent his lips were sealed.

 
          
There
was another possibility: what is euphemistically called an “old entanglement”.
Charlotte Ashby was a sophisticated woman. She had few illusions about the
intricacies of the human heart; she knew that there were often old
entanglements. But when she had married Kenneth Ashby, her friends, instead of
hinting at such a possibility, had said: “You’ve got your work cut out for you.
Marrying a Don Juan is a sinecure to it. Kenneth’s never looked at another
woman since he first saw Elsie Corder. During all the years of their marriage
he was more like an unhappy lover than a comfortably contented husband. He’ll
never let you move an armchair or change the place of a lamp; and whatever you
venture to do, he’ll mentally compare with what Elsie would have done in your
place.”

 
          
Except
for an occasional nervous mistrust as to her ability to manage the children—a
mistrust gradually dispelled by her good humour and the children’s obvious
fondness for her—none of these forebodings had come true. The desolate widower,
of whom his nearest friends said that only his absorbing professional interests
had kept him from suicide after his first wife’s death, had fallen in love, two
years later, with Charlotte Gorse, and after an impetuous wooing had married
her and carried her off on a tropical honeymoon.
And ever
since he had been as tender and loverlike as during those first radiant weeks.
Before asking her to marry him he had spoken to her frankly of his great love
for his first wife and his despair after her sudden death; but even then he had
assumed no stricken attitude, or implied that life offered no possibility of
renewal. He had been perfectly simple and natural, and had confessed to
Charlotte that from the beginning he had hoped the future held new gifts for
him. And when, after their marriage, they returned to the house where his
twelve years with his first wife had been spent, he had told Charlotte at once
that he was sorry he couldn’t afford to do the place over for her, but that he
knew every woman had her own views about furniture and all sorts of household
arrangements a man would never notice, and had begged her to make any changes
she saw fit without bothering to consult him. As a result, she made as few as
possible; but his way of beginning their new life in the old setting was so
frank and unembarrassed that it put her immediately at her ease, and she was
almost sorry to find that the portrait of Elsie Ashby, which used to hang over
the desk in his library, had been transferred in their absence to the children’s
nursery. Knowing herself to be the indirect cause of this banishment, she spoke
of it to her husband; but he answered: “Oh, I thought they ought to grow up
with her looking down on them.” The answer moved Charlotte, and satisfied her;
and as time went by she had to confess that she felt more at home in her house,
more at ease and in confidence with her husband, since that long coldly
beautiful face on the library wall no longer followed her with guarded eyes. It
was as if Kenneth’s love had penetrated to the secret she hardly acknowledged
to her own heart—her passionate need to feel herself the sovereign even of his
past.

 
          
With
all this stored-up happiness to sustain her, it was curious that she had lately
found herself yielding to a nervous apprehension. But there the apprehension
was; and on this particular afternoon—perhaps because she was more tired than
usual, or because of the trouble of finding a new cook or, for some other
ridiculously trivial reason, moral or physical—she found herself unable to
react against the feeling. Latchkey in hand, she looked back down the silent
street to the whirl and illumination of the great thoroughfare beyond, and up
at the sky already aflare with the city’s nocturnal life. “Outside there,” she
thought, “sky-scrapers, advertisements, telephones, wireless, aeroplanes,
movies, motors, and all the rest of the twentieth century; and on the other
side of the door something I can’t explain, can’t relate to them. Something as
old as the world, as mysterious as life… Nonsense! What am I worrying about?
There hasn’t been a letter for three months now—not since the day we came back
from the country after Christmas… Queer that they always seem to come after our
holidays! … Why should I imagine there’s going to be one
tonight!
”

 
          
No
reason why, but that was the worst of it—one of the worst!—that there were days
when she would stand there cold and shivering with the premonition of something
inexplicable, intolerable, to be faced on the other side of the curtained
panes; and when she opened the door and went in, there would be nothing; and on
other days when she felt the same premonitory chill, it was justified by the
sight of the gray envelope. So that ever since the last had come she had taken
to feeling cold and premonitory every evening, because she never opened the
door without thinking the letter might be there.

 
          
Well,
she’d had enough of it; that was certain. She couldn’t go on like that. If her
husband turned white and had a headache on the days when the letter came, he
seemed to recover afterward; but she couldn’t. With her the strain had become
chronic, and the reason was not far to seek. Her husband knew from whom the
letter came and what was in it; he was prepared beforehand for whatever he had
to deal with, and master of the situation, however bad; whereas she was shut
out in the dark with her conjectures.

 
          
“I
can’t stand it! I can’t stand it another day!” she exclaimed aloud, as she put
her key in the lock. She turned the key and went in; and there, on the table,
lay the letter.

 
          
  

 
          
She
was almost glad of the sight. It seemed to justify everything, to put a seal of
definiteness on the whole blurred business. A letter for her husband; a letter
from a woman—no doubt another vulgar case of “old entanglement”. What a fool
she had been ever to doubt it, to rack her brains for less obvious
explanations! She took up the envelope with a steady contemptuous hand, looked
closely at the faint letters, held it against the light and just discerned the
outline of the folded sheet within. She knew that now she would have no peace
till she found out what was written on that sheet.

 
          
Her
husband had not come in; he seldom got back from his office before half-past
six or seven, and it was not yet six. She would have time to take the letter up
to the drawing-room, hold it over the tea-kettle which at that hour always
simmered by the fire in expectation of her
return
,
solve the mystery and replace the letter where she had found it. No one would
be the wiser, and her gnawing uncertainty would be over. The alternative, of
course, was to question her husband; but to do that seemed even more difficult.
She weighed the letter between thumb and finger, looked at it again under the
light, started up the stairs with the envelope—and came down again and laid it
on the table.

 
          
“No,
I evidently can’t,” she said, disappointed.

 
          
What
should she do, then? She couldn’t go up alone to that warm welcoming room, pour
out her tea, look over her correspondence, glance at a book or review—not with
that letter lying below and the knowledge that in a little while her husband
would come in, open it and turn into the library alone, as he always did on the
days when the gray envelope came.

 
          
Suddenly
she decided. She would wait in the library and see for herself; see what
happened between him and the letter when they thought themselves unobserved.
She wondered the idea had never occurred to her before. By leaving the door
ajar, and sitting in the corner behind it, she could watch him unseen… Well,
then, she would watch him! She drew a chair into the corner, sat down, her eyes
on the crack, and waited.

 
          
As
far as she could remember, it was the first time she had ever tried to surprise
another person’s secret, but she was conscious of no compunction. She simply felt
as if she were fighting her way through a stifling fog that she must at all
costs get out of.

 
          
At
length she heard Kenneth’s latchkey and jumped up. The impulse to rush out and
meet him had nearly made her forget why she was there; but she remembered in
time and sat down again. From her post she covered the whole range of his
movements—saw him enter the hall, draw the key from the door and take off his
hat and overcoat. Then he turned to throw his gloves on the hall table, and at
that moment he saw the envelope. The light was full on his face, and what
Charlotte first noted there was a look of surprise. Evidently he had not
expected the letter—had not thought of the possibility of its being there that
day. But though he had not expected it, now that he saw it he knew well enough
what it contained. He did not open it immediately, but stood motionless, the
colour slowly ebbing from his face. Apparently he could not make up his mind to
touch it; but at length he put out his hand, opened the envelope, and moved
with it to the light. In doing so he turned his back on Charlotte, and she saw
only his bent head and slightly stooping shoulders. Apparently all the writing
was on one page, for he did not turn the sheet but continued to stare at it for
so long that he must have reread it a dozen times—or so it seemed to the woman
breathlessly watching him. At length she saw him move; he raised the letter
still closer to his eyes, as though he had not fully deciphered it. Then he
lowered his head, and she saw his lips touch the sheet.