Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

to poor Darrow. But she could not master her impulses; and now she caught herself indulging the thought that his illness would at least exclude him from the competition. But no—she remembered that he had said his work was finished. Come what might, he stood in the path of her boy’s success. She hated herself for the thought, but it would not down.

      Evening drew on, but there was no note from Dick. At length, in the shamed reaction from her fears, she rang for a carriage and went upstairs to dress. She could stand aloof no longer: she must go to Darrow, if only to escape from her wicked thoughts of him. As she came down again she heard Dick’s key in the door. She hastened her steps, and as she reached the hall he stood before her without speaking.

      She looked at him and the question died on her lips. He nodded, and walked slowly past her.

      “There was no hope from the first,” he said.

      The next day Dick was taken up with the preparations for the funeral. The distant aunt, who appeared to be Darrow’s only relation, had been duly notified of his death; but no answer having been received from her, it was left to his friend to fulfil the customary duties. He was again absent for the best part of the day; and when he returned at dusk Mrs. Peyton, looking up from the tea-table behind which she awaited him, was startled by the deep-lined misery of his face.

      Her own thoughts were too painful for ready expression, and they sat for a while in a mute community of wretchedness.

      “Is everything arranged?” she asked at length.

      “Yes. Everything.”

      “And you have not heard from the aunt?”

      He shook his head.

      “Can you find no trace of any other relations?”

      “None. I went over all his papers. There were very few, and I found no address but the aunt’s.” He sat thrown back in his chair, disregarding the cup of tea she had mechanically poured for him. “I found this, though,” he added after a pause, drawing a letter from his pocket and holding it out to her.

      She took it doubtfully. “Ought I to read it?”

      “Yes.”

      She saw then that the envelope, in Darrow’s hand, was addressed to her son. Within were a few pencilled words, dated on the first day of his illness, the morrow of the day on which she had last seen him.

      “Dear Dick,” she read, “I want you to use my plans for the museum if you can get any good out of them. Even if I pull out of this I want you to. I shall have other chances, and I have an idea this one means a lot to you.”

      Mrs. Peyton sat speechless, gazing at the date of the letter, which she had instantly connected with her last talk with Darrow. She saw that he had understood her, and the thought scorched her to the soul.

      “Wasn’t it glorious of him?” Dick said.

      She dropped the letter, and hid her face in her hands.

      —————

IV.

      The funeral took place the next morning, and on the return from the cemetery Dick told his mother that he must go and look over things at Darrow’s office. He had heard the day before from his friend’s aunt, a helpless person to whom telegraphy was difficult and travel inconceivable, and who, in eight pages of unpunctuated eloquence, made over to Dick what she called the melancholy privilege of winding up her nephew’s affairs.

      Mrs. Peyton looked anxiously at her son. “Is there no one who can do this for you? He must have had a clerk or some one who knows about his work.”

      Dick shook his head. “Not lately. He hasn’t had much to do this winter, and these last months he had chucked everything to work alone over his plans.”

      The word brought a faint colour to Mrs. Peyton’s cheek. It was the first allusion that either of them had made to Darrow’s bequest.

      “Oh, of course you must do all you can,” she murmured, turning alone into the house.

      The emotions of the morning had stirred her deeply, and she sat at home during the day, letting her mind dwell, in a kind of retrospective piety, on the thought of poor Darrow’s devotion. She had given him too little time while he lived, had acquiesced too easily in his growing habits of seclusion; and she felt it as a proof of insensibility that she had not been more closely drawn to the one person who had loved Dick as she loved him. The evidence of that love, as shown in Darrow’s letter, filled her with a vain compunction. The very extravagance of his offer lent it a deeper pathos. It was wonderful that, even in the urgency of affection, a man of his almost morbid rectitude should have overlooked the restrictions of professional honour, should have implied the possibility of his friend’s overlooking them. It seemed to make his sacrifice the more complete that it had, unconsciously, taken the form of a subtle temptation.

      The last word arrested Mrs. Peyton’s thoughts. A temptation? To whom? Not, surely, to one capable, as her son was capable, of rising to the height of his friend’s devotion. The offer, to Dick, would mean simply, as it meant to her, the last touching expression of an inarticulate fidelity: the utterance of a love which at last had found its formula. Mrs. Peyton dismissed as morbid any other view of the case. She was annoyed with herself for supposing that Dick could be ever so remotely affected by the possibility at which poor Darrow’s renunciation hinted. The nature of the offer removed it from practical issues to the idealizing region of sentiment.

      Mrs. Peyton had been sitting alone with these thoughts for the greater part of the afternoon, and dusk was falling when Dick entered the drawing-room. In the dim light, with his pallour heightened by the sombre effect of his mourning, he came upon her almost startlingly, with a revival of some long-effaced impression which, for a moment, gave her the sense of struggling among shadows. She did not, at first, know what had produced the effect; then she saw that it was his likeness to his father.

      “Well—is it over?” she asked, as he threw himself into a chair without speaking.

      “Yes: I’ve looked through everything.” He leaned back, crossing his hands behind his head, and gazing past her with a look of utter lassitude.

      She paused a moment, and then said tentatively: “To-morrow you will be able to go back to your work.”

      “Oh—my work,” he exclaimed, as if to brush aside an ill-timed pleasantry.

      “Are you too tired?”

      “No.” He rose and began to wander up and down the room. “I’m not tired.—Give me some tea, will you?” He paused before her while she poured the cup, and then, without taking it, turned away to light a cigarette.

      “Surely there is still time?” she suggested, with her eyes on him.

      “Time? To finish my plans? Oh, yes—there’s time. But they’re not worth it.”

      “Not worth it?” She started up, and then dropped back into her seat, ashamed of having betrayed her anxiety. “They are worth as much as they were last week,” she said with an attempt at cheerfulness.

      “Not to me,” he returned. “I hadn’t seen Darrow’s then.”

      There was a long silence. Mrs. Peyton sat with her eyes fixed on her clasped hands, and her son paced the room restlessly.

      “Are they so wonderful?” she asked at length.

      “Yes.”

      She paused again, and then said, lifting a tremulous glance to his face: “That makes his offer all the more beautiful.”

      Dick was lighting another cigarette, and his face was turned from her. “Yes—I suppose so,” he said in a low tone.

      “They were quite finished, he told me,” she continued, unconsciously dropping her voice to the pitch of his.

      “Yes.”