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The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part One

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part One




"The devil!" cried her father impatiently. "Didn't you tell him--"

"Yes; but he says he can't come back. If you want to see him you
must come now."

"Then you think there's a chance?--"

She nodded.

He turned and looked at Wyant, who was writing assiduously.

"You will stay here, Sybilla; I shall be back in a moment."

He hurried out, locking the door behind him.

Wyant had looked up, wondering if Miss Lombard would show any
surprise at being locked in with him; but it was his turn to be
surprised, for hardly had they heard the key withdrawn when she
moved close to him, her small face pale and tumultuous.

"I arranged it--I must speak to you," she gasped. "He'll be back
in five minutes."

Her courage seemed to fail, and she looked at him helplessly.

Wyant had a sense of stepping among explosives. He glanced about
him at the dusky vaulted room, at the haunting smile of the
strange picture overhead, and at the pink-and-white girl
whispering of conspiracies in a voice meant to exchange
platitudes with a curate.

"How can I help you?" he said with a rush of compassion.

"Oh, if you would! I never have a chance to speak to any one;
it's so difficult--he watches me--he'll be back immediately."

"Try to tell me what I can do."

"I don't dare; I feel as if he were behind me." She turned away,
fixing her eyes on the picture. A sound startled her. "There he
comes, and I haven't spoken! It was my only chance; but it
bewilders me so to be hurried."

"I don't hear any one," said Wyant, listening. "Try to tell me."

"How can I make you understand? It would take so long to
explain." She drew a deep breath, and then with a plunge--"Will
you come here again this afternoon--at about five?" she
whispered.

"Come here again?"

"Yes--you can ask to see the picture,--make some excuse. He will
come with you, of course; I will open the door for you--and--and
lock you both in"--she gasped.

"Lock us in?"

"You see? You understand? It's the only way for me to leave the
house--if I am ever to do it"-- She drew another difficult
breath. "The key will be returned--by a safe person--in half an
hour,--perhaps sooner--"

She trembled so much that she was obliged to lean against the
settle for support.

"Wyant looked at her steadily; he was very sorry for her.

"I can't, Miss Lombard," he said at length.

"You can't?"

"I'm sorry; I must seem cruel; but consider--"

He was stopped by the futility of the word: as well ask a hunted
rabbit to pause in its dash for a hole!

Wyant took her hand; it was cold and nerveless.

"I will serve you in any way I can; but you must see that this
way is impossible. Can't I talk to you again? Perhaps--"

"Oh," she cried, starting up, "there he comes!"

Doctor Lombard's step sounded in the passage.

Wyant held her fast. "Tell me one thing: he won't let you sell
the picture?"

"No--hush!"

"Make no pledges for the future, then; promise me that."

"The future?"

"In case he should die: your father is an old man. You haven't
promised?"

She shook her head.

"Don't, then; remember that."

She made no answer, and the key turned in the lock.

As he passed out of the house, its scowling cornice and facade of
ravaged brick looked down on him with the startlingness of a
strange face, seen momentarily in a crowd, and impressing itself
on the brain as part of an inevitable future. Above the doorway,
the marble hand reached out like the cry of an imprisoned
anguish.

Wyant turned away impatiently.

"Rubbish!" he said to himself. "SHE isn't walled in; she can get
out if she wants to."



IV


Wyant had any number of plans for coming to Miss Lombard's aid:
he was elaborating the twentieth when, on the same afternoon, he
stepped into the express train for Florence. By the time the
train reached Certaldo he was convinced that, in thus hastening
his departure, he had followed the only reasonable course; at
Empoli, he began to reflect that the priest and the Levite had
probably justified themselves in much the same manner.

A month later, after his return to England, he was unexpectedly
relieved from these alternatives of extenuation and approval. A
paragraph in the morning paper announced the sudden death of
Doctor Lombard, the distinguished English dilettante who had long
resided in Siena. Wyant's justification was complete. Our
blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall
in with the course of events.

Wyant could now comfortably speculate on the particular
complications from which his foresight had probably saved him.
The climax was unexpectedly dramatic. Miss Lombard, on the brink
of a step which, whatever its issue, would have burdened her with
retrospective compunction, had been set free before her suitor's
ardor could have had time to cool, and was now doubtless planning
a life of domestic felicity on the proceeds of the Leonardo. One
thing, however, struck Wyant as odd--he saw no mention of the
sale of the picture. He had scanned the papers for an immediate
announcement of its transfer to one of the great museums; but
presently concluding that Miss Lombard, out of filial piety, had
wished to avoid an appearance of unseemly haste in the disposal
of her treasure, he dismissed the matter from his mind. Other
affairs happened to engage him; the months slipped by, and
gradually the lady and the picture dwelt less vividly in his
mind.

It was not till five or six years later, when chance took him
again to Siena, that the recollection started from some inner
fold of memory. He found himself, as it happened, at the head of
Doctor Lombard's street, and glancing down that grim
thoroughfare, caught an oblique glimpse of the doctor's house
front, with the Dead Hand projecting above its threshold.
The sight revived his interest, and that evening, over an
admirable frittata, he questioned his landlady about Miss
Lombard's marriage.

"The daughter of the English doctor? But she has never married,
signore."

"Never married? What, then, became of Count Ottaviano?"

"For a long time he waited; but last year he married a noble lady
of the Maremma."

"But what happened--why was the marriage broken?"

The landlady enacted a pantomime of baffled interrogation.

"And Miss Lombard still lives in her father's house?"

"Yes, signore; she is still there."

"And the Leonardo--"

"The Leonardo, also, is still there."

The next day, as Wyant entered the House of the Dead Hand, he
remembered Count Ottaviano's injunction to ring twice, and smiled
mournfully to think that so much subtlety had been vain. But
what could have prevented the marriage? If Doctor Lombard's
death had been long delayed, time might have acted as a
dissolvent, or the young lady's resolve have failed; but it
seemed impossible that the white heat of ardor in which Wyant had
left the lovers should have cooled in a few short weeks.

As he ascended the vaulted stairway the atmosphere of the place
seemed a reply to his conjectures. The same numbing air fell on
him, like an emanation from some persistent will-power, a
something fierce and imminent which might reduce to impotence
every impulse within its range. Wyant could almost fancy a hand
on his shoulder, guiding him upward with the ironical intent of
confronting him with the evidence of its work.

A strange servant opened the door, and he was presently
introduced to the tapestried room, where, from their usual seats
in the window, Mrs. Lombard and her daughter advanced to welcome
him with faint ejaculations of surprise.

Both had grown oddly old, but in a dry, smooth way, as fruits
might shrivel on a shelf instead of ripening on the tree. Mrs.
Lombard was still knitting, and pausing now and then to warm her
swollen hands above the brazier; and Miss Lombard, in rising, had
laid aside a strip of needle-work which might have been the same
on which Wyant had first seen her engaged.

Their visitor inquired discreetly how they had fared in the
interval, and learned that they had thought of returning to
England, but had somehow never done so.

"I am sorry not to see my aunts again," Mrs. Lombard said
resignedly; "but Sybilla thinks it best that we should not go
this year."

"Next year, perhaps," murmured Miss Lombard, in a voice which
seemed to suggest that they had a great waste of time to fill.

She had returned to her seat, and sat bending over her work. Her
hair enveloped her head in the same thick braids, but the rose
color of her cheeks had turned to blotches of dull red, like some
pigment which has darkened in drying.

"And Professor Clyde--is he well?" Mrs. Lombard asked affably;
continuing, as her daughter raised a startled eye: "Surely,
Sybilla, Mr. Wyant was the gentleman who was sent by Professor
Clyde to see the Leonardo?"

Miss Lombard was silent, but Wyant hastened to assure the elder
lady of his friend's well-being.

"Ah--perhaps, then, he will come back some day to Siena," she
said, sighing. Wyant declared that it was more than likely; and
there ensued a pause, which he presently broke by saying to Miss
Lombard: "And you still have the picture?"

She raised her eyes and looked at him. "Should you like to see
it?" she asked.

On his assenting, she rose, and extracting the same key from the
same secret drawer, unlocked the door beneath the tapestry. They
walked down the passage in silence, and she stood aside with a
grave gesture, making Wyant pass before her into the room. Then
she crossed over and drew the curtain back from the picture.

The light of the early afternoon poured full on it: its surface
appeared to ripple and heave with a fluid splendor. The colors
had lost none of their warmth, the outlines none of their pure
precision; it seemed to Wyant like some magical flower which had
burst suddenly from the mould of darkness and oblivion.

He turned to Miss Lombard with a movement of comprehension.

"Ah, I understand--you couldn't part with it, after all!" he cried.

"No--I couldn't part with it," she answered.

"It's too beautiful,--too beautiful,"--he assented.

"Too beautiful?" She turned on him with a curious stare. "I
have never thought it beautiful, you know."

He gave back the stare. "You have never--"

She shook her head. "It's not that. I hate it; I've always
hated it. But he wouldn't let me--he will never let me now."

Wyant was startled by her use of the present tense. Her look
surprised him, too: there was a strange fixity of resentment in
her innocuous eye. Was it possible that she was laboring under
some delusion? Or did the pronoun not refer to her father?

"You mean that Doctor Lombard did not wish you to part with the
picture?"

"No--he prevented me; he will always prevent me."

There was another pause. "You promised him, then, before his
death--"

"No; I promised nothing. He died too suddenly to make me." Her
voice sank to a whisper. "I was free--perfectly free--or I
thought I was till I tried."

"Till you tried?"

"To disobey him--to sell the picture. Then I found it was
impossible. I tried again and again; but he was always in the
room with me."

She glanced over her shoulder as though she had heard a step; and
to Wyant, too, for a moment, the room seemed full of a third
presence.

"And you can't"--he faltered, unconsciously dropping his voice to
the pitch of hers.

She shook her head, gazing at him mystically. "I can't lock him
out; I can never lock him out now. I told you I should never
have another chance."

Wyant felt the chill of her words like a cold breath in his hair.

"Oh"--he groaned; but she cut him off with a grave gesture.

"It is too late," she said; "but you ought to have helped me that day."

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