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Dante Alighieri - "Divina Commedia di Dante"

Sanctuary

E >> Edith Wharton >> Sanctuary





VII

She had indeed needed to be told: the surprise was complete and
overwhelming. She sat silent under it, her hands trembling in his, till the
blood mounted to his face and she felt his confident grasp relax.

"You didn't guess it, then?" he exclaimed, starting up and moving away from
her.

"No; I didn't guess it," she confessed in a dead-level voice.

He stood above her, half challenging, half defensive. "And you haven't a
word to say to me? Mother!" he adjured her.

She rose too, putting her arms about him with a kiss. "Dick! Dear Dick!"
she murmured.

"She imagines you don't like her; she says she's always felt it. And yet
she owns you've been delightful, that you've tried to make friends with
her. And I thought you knew how much it would mean to me, just now, to have
this uncertainty over, and that you'd actually been trying to help me, to
put in a good word for me. I thought it was you who had made her decide."

"I?"

"By your talk with her the other day. She told me of your talk with her."

His mother's hands slipped from his shoulders and she sank back into her
seat. She felt the cruelty of her silence, but only an inarticulate murmur
found a way to her lips. Before speaking she must clear a space in the
suffocating rush of her sensations. For the moment she could only repeat
inwardly that Clemence Verney had yielded before the final test, and that
she herself was somehow responsible for this fresh entanglement of fate.
For she saw in a flash how the coils of circumstance had tightened; and as
her mind cleared it was filled with the perception that this, precisely,
was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown
before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge
in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical inversion of the term.
Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the
astuteness of the girl's policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted
the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly owned that her interest in
Dick's future depended on his capacity for success, and in order to key him
up to his first achievement she had given him a foretaste of its results.

So much was almost immediately clear to Mrs. Peyton; but in a moment her
inferences had carried her a point farther. For it was now plain to her
that Miss Verney had not risked so much without first trying to gain her
point at less cost: that if she had had to give herself as a prize, it was
because no other bribe had been sufficient. This then, as the mother saw
with a throb of hope, meant that Dick, who since Darrow's death had held
to his purpose unwaveringly, had been deflected from it by the first hint
of Clemence Verney's connivance. Kate had not miscalculated: things had
happened as she had foreseen. In the light of the girl's approval his act
had taken an odious look. He had recoiled from it, and it was to revive his
flagging courage that she had had to promise herself, to take him in the
meshes of her surrender.

Kate, looking up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy's face, the
suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery she
said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and
that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same
hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What
right had she to stand in Dick's light? Who was she to decide between his
code and hers? She put out her hand and drew him down to her.

"She'll be the making of me, you know, mother," he said, as they leaned
together. "She'll put new life in me--she'll help me get my second wind.
Her talk is like a fresh breeze blowing away the fog in my head. I never
knew any one who saw so straight to the heart of things, who had such a
grip on values. She goes straight up to life and catches hold of it, and
you simply can't make her let go."

He got up and walked the length of the room; then he came back and stood
smiling above his mother.

"You know you and I are rather complicated people," he said. "We're always
walking around things to get new views of them--we're always rearranging
the furniture. And somehow she simplifies life so tremendously." He dropped
down beside her with a deprecating laugh. "Not that I mean, dear, that it
hasn't been good for me to argue things out with myself, as you've taught
me to--only the man who stops to talk is apt to get shoved aside nowadays,
and I don't believe Milton's archangels would have had much success in
active business."

He had begun in a strain of easy confidence, but as he went on she detected
an effort to hold the note, she felt that his words were being poured out
in a vain attempt to fill the silence which was deepening between them. She
longed, in her turn, to pour something into that menacing void, to bridge
it with a reconciling word or look; but her soul hung back, and she had to
take refuge in a vague murmur of tenderness.

"My boy! My boy!" she repeated; and he sat beside her without speaking,
their hand-clasp alone spanning the distance which had widened between
their thoughts.

* * * * *

The engagement, as Kate subsequently learned, was not to be made known till
later. Miss Verney had even stipulated that for the present there should
be no recognition of it in her own family or in Dick's. She did not wish
to interfere with his final work for the competition, and had made him
promise, as he laughingly owned, that he would not see her again till the
drawings were sent in. His mother noticed that he made no other allusion to
his work; but when he bade her good-night he added that he might not see
her the next morning, as he had to go to the office early. She took this as
a hint that he wished to be left alone, and kept her room the next day till
the closing door told her that he was out of the house.

She herself had waked early, and it seemed to her that the day was already
old when she came downstairs. Never had the house appeared so empty. Even
in Dick's longest absences something of his presence had always hung about
the rooms: a fine dust of memories and associations, which wanted only the
evocation of her thought to float into a palpable semblance of him. But now
he seemed to have taken himself quite away, to have broken every fibre by
which their lives had hung together. Where the sense of him had been there
was only a deeper emptiness: she felt as if a strange man had gone out of
her house.

She wandered from room to room, aimlessly, trying to adjust herself to
their solitude. She had known such loneliness before, in the years when
most women's hearts are fullest; but that was long ago, and the solitude
had after all been less complete, because of the sense that it might
still be filled. Her son had come: her life had brimmed over; but now the
tide ebbed again, and she was left gazing over a bare stretch of wasted
years. Wasted! There was the mortal pang, the stroke from which there was
no healing. Her faith and hope had been marsh-lights luring her to the
wilderness, her love a vain edifice reared on shifting ground.

In her round of the rooms she came at last to Dick's study upstairs. It was
full of his boyhood: she could trace the history of his past in its quaint
relics and survivals, in the school-books lingering on his crowded shelves,
the school-photographs and college-trophies hung among his later treasures.
All his successes and failures, his exaltations and inconsistencies, were
recorded in the warm huddled heterogeneous room. Everywhere she saw the
touch of her own hand, the vestiges of her own steps. It was she alone
who held the clue to the labyrinth, who could thread a way through the
confusions and contradictions of his past; and her soul rejected the
thought that his future could ever escape from her. She dropped down into
his shabby college armchair and hid her face in the papers on his desk.


VIII

The day dwelt in her memory as a long stretch of aimless hours: blind
alleys of time that led up to a dead wall of inaction.

Toward afternoon she remembered that she had promised to dine out and go to
the opera. At first she felt that the contact of life would be unendurable;
then she shrank from shutting herself up with her misery. In the end she
let herself drift passively on the current of events, going through the
mechanical routine of the day without much consciousness of what was
happening.

At twilight, as she sat in the drawing-room, the evening paper was brought
in, and in glancing over it her eye fell on a paragraph which seemed
printed in more vivid type than the rest. It was headed, _The New Museum
of Sculpture_, and underneath she read: "The artists and architects
selected to pass on the competitive designs for the new Museum will begin
their sittings on Monday, and tomorrow is the last day on which designs may
be sent in to the committee. Great interest is felt in the competition, as
the conspicuous site chosen for the new building, and the exceptionally
large sum voted by the city for its erection, offer an unusual field for
the display of architectural ability."

She leaned back, closing her eyes. It was as though a clock had struck,
loud and inexorably, marking off some irrecoverable hour. She was seized
by a sudden longing to seek Dick out, to fall on her knees and plead with
him: it was one of those physical obsessions against which the body has to
stiffen its muscles as well as the mind its thoughts. Once she even sprang
up to ring for a cab; but she sank back again, breathing as if after a
struggle, and gripping the arms of her chair to keep herself down.

"I can only wait for him--only wait for him--" she heard herself say; and
the words loosened the sobs in her throat.

At length she went upstairs to dress for dinner. A ghostlike self looked
back at her from her toilet-glass: she watched it performing the mechanical
gestures of the toilet, dressing her, as it appeared, without help from
her actual self. Each little act stood out sharply against the blurred
background of her brain: when she spoke to her maid her voice sounded
extraordinarily loud. Never had the house been so silent; or, stay--yes,
once she had felt the same silence, once when Dick, in his school-days, had
been ill of a fever, and she had sat up with him on the decisive night.
The silence had been as deep and as terrible then; and as she dressed she
had before her the vision of his room, of the cot in which he lay, of his
restless head working a hole in the pillow, his face so pinched and alien
under the familiar freckles. It might be his death-watch she was keeping:
the doctors had warned her to be ready. And in the silence her soul had
fought for her boy, her love had hung over him like wings, her abundant
useless hateful life had struggled to force itself into his empty veins.
And she had succeeded, she had saved him, she had poured her life into him;
and in place of the strange child she had watched all night, at daylight
she held her own boy to her breast.

That night had once seemed to her the most dreadful of her life; but she
knew now that it was one of the agonies which enrich, that the passion thus
spent grows fourfold from its ashes. She could not have borne to keep this
new vigil alone. She must escape from its sterile misery, must take refuge
in other lives till she regained courage to face her own. At the opera,
in the illumination of the first _entr'acte_, as she gazed about the
house, wondering through the numb ache of her wretchedness how others could
talk and smile and be indifferent, it seemed to her that all the jarring
animation about her was suddenly focussed in the face of Clemence Verney.
Miss Verney sat opposite, in the front of a crowded box, a box in which,
continually, the black-coated background shifted and renewed itself.
Mrs. Peyton felt a throb of anger at the girl's bright air of unconcern.
She forgot that she too was talking, smiling, holding out her hand to
newcomers, in a studied mimicry of life, while her real self played out
its tragedy behind the scenes. Then it occurred to her that, to Clemence
Verney, there was no tragedy in the situation. According to the girl's
calculations, Dick was virtually certain of success; and unsuccess was to
her the only conceivable disaster.

All through the opera the sense of that opposing force, that negation of
her own beliefs, burned itself into Mrs. Peyton's consciousness. The space
between herself and the girl seemed to vanish, the throng about them to
disperse, till they were face to face and alone, enclosed in their mortal
enmity. At length the feeling of humiliation and defeat grew unbearable to
Mrs. Peyton. The girl seemed to flout her in the insolence of victory, to
sit there as the visible symbol of her failure. It was better after all to
be at home alone with her thoughts.

As she drove away from the opera she thought of that other vigil which,
only a few streets away, Dick was perhaps still keeping. She wondered if
his work were over, if the final stroke had been drawn. And as she pictured
him there, signing his pact with evil in the loneliness of the conniving
night, an uncontrollable impulse possessed her. She must drive by his
windows and see if they were still alight. She would not go up to him,--she
dared not,--but at least she would pass near to him, would invisibly share
his watch and hover on the edge of his thoughts. She lowered the window and
called out the address to the coachman.

The tall office-building loomed silent and dark as she approached it; but
presently, high up, she caught a light in the familiar windows. Her heart
gave a leap, and the light swam on her through tears. The carriage drew up,
and for a moment she sat motionless. Then the coachman bent down toward
her, and she saw that he was asking if he should drive on. She tried to
shape a yes, but her lips refused it, and she shook her head. He continued
to lean down perplexedly, and at length, under the interrogation of his
attitude, it became impossible to sit still, and she opened the door and
stepped out. It was equally impossible to stand on the sidewalk, and her
next steps carried her to the door of the building. She groped for the
bell and rang it, feeling still dimly accountable to the coachman for some
consecutiveness of action, and after a moment the night watchman opened the
door, drawing back amazed at the shining apparition which confronted him.
Recognizing Mrs. Peyton, whom he had seen about the building by day, he
tried to adapt himself to the situation by a vague stammer of apology.

"I came to see if my son is still here," she faltered.

"Yes, ma'am, he's here. He's been here most nights lately till after
twelve."

"And is Mr. Gill with him?"

"No: Mr. Gill he went away just after I come on this evening."

She glanced up into the cavernous darkness of the stairs.

"Is he alone up there, do you think?"

"Yes, ma'am, I know he's alone, because I seen his men leaving soon after
Mr. Gill."

Kate lifted her head quickly. "Then I will go up to him," she said.

The watchman apparently did not think it proper to offer any comment on
this unusual proceeding, and a moment later she was fluttering and rustling
up through the darkness, like a night-bird hovering among rafters. There
were ten flights to climb: at every one her breath failed her, and she had
to stand still and press her hands against her heart. Then the weight on
her breast lifted, and she went on again, upward and upward, the great
dark building dropping away from her, in tier after tier of mute doors and
mysterious corridors. At last she reached Dick's floor, and saw the light
shining down the passage from his door. She leaned against the wall, her
breath coming short, the silence throbbing in her ears. Even now it was not
too late to turn back. She bent over the stairs, letting her eyes plunge
into the nether blackness, with the single glimmer of the watchman's lights
in its depths; then she turned and stole toward her son's door.

There again she paused and listened, trying to catch, through the hum of
her pulses, any noise that might come to her from within. But the silence
was unbroken--it seemed as though the office must be empty. She pressed her
ear to the door, straining for a sound. She knew he never sat long at his
work, and it seemed unaccountable that she should not hear him moving about
the drawing-board. For a moment she fancied he might be sleeping; but sleep
did not come to him readily after prolonged mental effort--she recalled the
restless straying of his feet above her head for hours after he returned
from his night work in the office.

She began to fear that he might be ill. A nervous trembling seized her, and
she laid her hand on the latch, whispering "Dick!"

Her whisper sounded loudly through the silence, but there was no answer,
and after a pause she called again. With each call the hush seemed to
deepen: it closed in on her, mysterious and impenetrable. Her heart was
beating in short frightened leaps: a moment more and she would have cried
out. She drew a quick breath and turned the door-handle.

The outer room, Dick's private office, with its red carpet and easy-chairs,
stood in pleasant lamp-lit emptiness. The last time she had entered it,
Darrow and Clemence Verney had been there, and she had sat behind the
urn observing them. She paused a moment, struck now by a fault sound
from beyond; then she slipped noiselessly across the carpet, pushed open
the swinging door, and stood on the threshold of the work-room. Here
the gas-lights hung a green-shaded circle of brightness over the great
draughting-table in the middle of the floor. Table and floor were strewn
with a confusion of papers--torn blue-prints and tracings, crumpled sheets
of tracing-paper wrenched from the draughting-boards in a sudden fury of
destruction; and in the centre of the havoc, his arms stretched across the
table and his face hidden in them, sat Dick Peyton.

He did not seem to hear his mother's approach, and she stood looking at
him, her breast tightening with a new fear.

"Dick!" she said, "Dick!--" and he sprang up, staring with dazed eyes. But
gradually, as his gaze cleared, a light spread in it, a mounting brightness
of recognition.

"You've come--you've come--" he said, stretching his hands to her; and all
at once she had him in her breast as in a shelter.

"You wanted me?" she whispered as she held him.

He looked up at her, tired, breathless, with the white radiance of the
runner near the goal.

"I _had_ you, dear!" he said, smiling strangely on her; and her heart
gave a great leap of understanding.

Her arms had slipped from his neck, and she stood leaning on him,
deep-suffused in the shyness of her discovery. For it might still be that
he did not wish her to know what she had done for him.

But he put his arm about her, boyishly, and drew her toward one of the hard
seats between the tables; and there, on the bare floor, he knelt before
her, and hid his face in her lap. She sat motionless, feeling the dear
warmth of his head against her knees, letting her hands stray in faint
caresses through his hair.

Neither spoke for awhile; then he raised his head and looked at her. "I
suppose you know what has been happening to me," he said.

She shrank from seeming to press into his life a hair's-breadth farther
than he was prepared to have her go. Her eyes turned from him toward the
scattered drawings on the table.

"You have given up the competition?" she said.

"Yes--and a lot more." He stood up, the wave of emotion ebbing, yet leaving
him nearer, in his recovered calmness, than in the shock of their first
moment.

"I didn't know, at first, how much you guessed," he went on quietly. "I was
sorry I'd shown you Darrow's letter; but it didn't worry me much because I
didn't suppose you'd think it possible that I should--take advantage of it.
It's only lately that I've understood that you knew everything." He looked
at her with a smile. "I don't know yet how I found it out, for you're
wonderful about keeping things to yourself, and you never made a sign.
I simply felt it in a kind of nearness--as if I couldn't get away from
you.--Oh, there were times when I should have preferred not having
you about--when I tried to turn my back on you, to see things from
other people's standpoint. But you were always there--you wouldn't be
discouraged. And I got tired of trying to explain things to you, of trying
to bring you round to my way of thinking. You wouldn't go away and you
wouldn't come any nearer--you just stood there and watched everything that
I was doing."

He broke off, taking one of his restless turns down the long room. Then he
drew up a chair beside her, and dropped into it with a great sigh.

"At first, you know, I hated it most awfully. I wanted to be let alone and
to work out my own theory of things. If you'd said a word--if you'd tried
to influence me--the spell would have been broken. But just because the
actual _you_ kept apart and didn't meddle or pry, the other, the you
in my heart, seemed to get a tighter hold on me. I don't know how to tell
you,--it's all mixed up in my head--but old things you'd said and done kept
coming back to me, crowding between me and what I was trying for, looking
at me without speaking, like old friends I'd gone back on, till I simply
couldn't stand it any longer. I fought it off till to-night, but when I
came back to finish the work there you were again--and suddenly, I don't
know how, you weren't an obstacle any longer, but a refuge--and I crawled
into your arms as I used to when things went against me at school."

His hands stole back into hers, and he leaned his head against her shoulder
like a boy.

"I'm an abysmally weak fool, you know," he ended; "I'm not worth the fight
you've put up for me. But I want you to know that it's your doing--that if
you had let go an instant I should have gone under--and that if I'd gone
under I should never have come up again alive."

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