Charlotte made no answer.
“Come back from where?” Delia doggedly repeated; and at that, with a long wail, the girl flung her hands up, screening her eyes. “He always thought you’d wait for him,” she sobbed out, “and then, when he found you hadn’t ... and that you were marrying Jim.... He heard it just as he was sailing.... He didn’t know it till Mrs. Mingott asked him to bring the clock back for your wedding....”
“Stop—stop,” Delia cried, springing to her feet. She had provoked the avowal, and now that it had come she felt that it had been gratuitously and indecently thrust upon her. Was this New York, her New York, her safe friendly hypocritical New York, was this James Ralston’s house, and this his wife listening to such revelations of dishonour?
Charlotte Lovell stood up in her turn. “I knew it—I knew it! You think worse of my baby now, instead of better.... Oh, why did you make me tell you? I knew you’d never understand. I’d always cared for him, ever since I came out; that was why I wouldn’t marry any one else. But I knew there was no hope for me ... he never looked at anybody but you. And then, when he came back four years ago, and there was no you for him any more, he began to notice me, to be kind, to talk to me about his life and his painting....” She drew a deep breath, and her voice cleared. “That’s over—all over. It’s as if I couldn’t either hate him or love him. There’s only the child now—my child. He doesn’t even know of it—why should he? It’s none of his business; it’s nobody’s business but mine. But surely you must see that I can’t give up my baby.”
Delia Ralston stood speechless, looking away from her cousin in a growing horror. She had lost all sense of reality, all feeling of safety and self-reliance. Her impulse was to close her ears to the other’s appeal as a child buries its head from midnight terrors. At last she drew herself up, and spoke with dry lips.
“But what do you mean to do? Why have you come to me? Why have you told me all this?”
“Because he loved you!” Charlotte Lovell stammered out; and the two women stood and faced each other.
Slowly the tears rose to Delia’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks, moistening her parched lips. Through the tears she saw her cousin’s haggard countenance waver and droop like a drowning face under water. Things half-guessed, obscurely felt, surged up from unsuspected depths in her. It was almost as if, for a moment, this other woman were telling her of her own secret past, putting into crude words all the trembling silences of her own heart.
The worst of it was, as Charlotte said, that they must act now; there was not a day to lose. Chatty was right—it was impossible that she should marry Joe if to do so meant giving up the child. But, in any case, how could she marry him without telling him the truth? And was it conceivable that, after hearing it, he should not repudiate her? All these questions spun agonizingly through Delia’s brain, and through them glimmered the persistent vision of the child—Clem Spender’s child—growing up on charity in a negro hovel, or herded in one of the plague-houses they called Asylums. No: the child came first—she felt it in every fibre of her body. But what should she do, of whom take counsel, how advise the wretched creature who had come to her in Clement’s name? Delia glanced about her desperately, and then turned back to her cousin.
“You must give me time. I must think. You ought not to marry him—and yet all the arrangements are made; and the wedding-presents.... There would be a scandal ... it would kill Granny Lovell....”