The New York Stories of Edith Wharton Page 6

  “So much the worse,” he retorted; and the door shut on him with a crash that was conclusive.

  Helfenridge, whose work (he was a clerk in the same establishment which had been the scene of Maurice’s brief commercial experience) often delayed him downtown long after his dinner hour, did not reach his friend’s house until eight o’clock on the following evening. As he started on his long ascent of the steep tenement stairs someone ran against him on the first landing, and he drew back in surprise, recognizing Maurice in the flare of the gas jet against the whitewashed wall.

  “Hullo, Maurice! Didn’t Mrs. Birkton tell you that I was coming this evening?”

  “I—yes—the fact is, I was just going out,” Birkton said, confusedly.

  Helfenridge glanced at him, marking his evasive eye.

  “Oh, very well. If you’re going out I’ll try again.”

  “No—no. You’d better come up after all. I’d rather see you now. I’ve got something to say to you.”

  “Are you sure?” said Helfenridge. “I’d rather not be taken on sufferance.”

  “I want to see you,” Birkton repeated, with sudden force; and the two men climbed the stairs together in silence.

  “Come this way,” said Maurice, leading Helfenridge into his bedroom.

  He put a match to the gas burner, and another to the stove, and pushed his only easy chair forward within the radius of the dry, yellow heat, while Helfenridge threw aside his hat and overcoat, which were fringed with frozen snow.

  “You don’t look well, Maurice,” he said, taking the seat proffered by his friend.

  “It’s because I’m new at it, I suppose,” the other returned, dryly.

  “New at what? What do you mean?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Maurice; “I want to show you something first.”

  He opened the door as he spoke, and Helfenridge heard him walk along the narrow passageway to the kitchen; then came the opening of another door, which launched a confusion of soft, gay tones upon the intervening obscurity. “Oh, no, no,” Helfenridge heard a young voice half laughingly protest; then an older tone interposed, gently urgent, mingled with an odd unfamiliar laugh from Maurice; lastly the door of the bedroom was suddenly thrown wide, and Maurice reappeared, pushing before him his sister, clad from head to foot in white muslin, her flat, childish waist defined by a wide white sash, even her little feet shod in immaculate ivory kid.

  Above all this whiteness her flushed face emerged like a pink crocus from a snow drift; her lips were parted in tremulous, inarticulate apologies, but no explanatory word reached Helfenridge.

  “Why, Miss Annette, how lovely!” he exclaimed at random, questioning Maurice with his eyes.

  “There—doesn’t she look nice?” the brother asked, retaining his grasp of her white shoulders. “That’s her confirmation dress, if you please! She’s going to be confirmed next Sunday at the Church of the Precious Blood, and you’ve got to be there to see it.”

  “Oh, Maurice,” murmured Annette.

  “Of course I shall be there,” said Helfenridge, warmly. “But what a beautiful dress! Are all confirmation dresses as beautiful as that?”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Helfenridge; but Maurice—”

  “Father Thurifer likes all the girls in the class to be dressed like that,” Maurice quickly interposed. “And now run off before your finery gets tumbled,” he added, pushing her out of the room with a smile which softened the abruptness of the gesture.

  He shut the door and the two men stood looking at each other.

  “She’s lovely,” said Helfenridge, gently.

  “Poor little girl,” said Maurice. “Isn’t it pretty fancy to dress them all in white?”

  “Yes—I suppose it’s a High Church idea?”

  “I suppose so. I never knew anything about it until the other day—until two days ago, in fact. Then I found that Father Thurifer had requested all the girls who are to be confirmed to dress in white muslin; and we hadn’t a penny between us to buy her a dress with.”

  “Yes?” said Helfenridge, tentatively.

  “Annette’s a very good little girl, you know—immensely religious. Father Thurifer says he never saw a more religious nature. And it nearly killed her not to have a white dress—not to appear worthy of the day. She regards it as the most solemn day of her life. Can you understand how she must have felt? I couldn’t at first, but I think I do now. After all, she’s only a child.”

  “I understand,” said Helfenridge.

  “Well, neither my mother nor I had a copper left. There was no way of getting the dress—and it seemed to me she had to have it.”

  “Yes?”

  “I said the other day that I didn’t know what would happen if one of us fell ill; but in a way it would have been simpler than this. Annette, now—if Annette had been ill we could have sent her to the hospital. My mother is too sensible to have any prejudice against hospitals. But this is different—there was no other way of getting the dress; and it had to be got somehow. I don’t believe her wedding dress will seem half so important to her—there’s so little perspective at fifteen.”

  “Well?” said Helfenridge after a pause.

  “Well, so I—good God, Helfenridge, won’t you understand?”

  Both men were silent; Helfenridge sat with his hands clenched on the arms of his chair.

  Suddenly he said, as if in a flash of remembrance: “You sent that thing to Baker Buley—the thing about Mrs. Tolquitt?”

  “Yes,” said Maurice.

  A long pause followed, in which the thoughts of the two men cried aloud to each other.

  At length Maurice exclaimed, “I wish you’d speak out—say what you think.”

  “I don’t know,” said Helfenridge, in a low tone.

  “You don’t know? You mean you don’t know what to say?”

  “What to think.”

  “What to think of a man who’s sold his soul?”

  “I’m not sure if you have. It seems to me that I’m not sure of anything,” Helfenridge said.

  “I am—I’m sure that Annette had to have her dress,” said Maurice, with a defiant laugh.

  “When does it come out?”

  “It’s out already—it came out this morning. It’s all over town by this time.”

  “Do they know?” asked Helfenridge, suddenly.

  “My mother and Annette? God forbid. Do you suppose they would have touched the money?”

  “How did you account to them for having it?”

  “I told them that was my secret—that they shouldn’t know for the present. Of course the—the thing in the Kite is not signed; and later, if one of my poems ever finds its way into print, they’ll think it’s that—but they’ll have to wait.”

  Helfenridge rose. “I must be going,” he said.

  “Why do you go? Because you’re afraid to tell me what you think? You may say what you please—it can’t make any difference. Annette had to have the dress. I’ve been trying to avoid you for two days because I was afraid to tell you, but now I’d rather talk about it—that is if you care to have anything more to do with me. Because, after all, I’m no better than a blackguard now, you know—there’s no getting around that fact. You’ve a perfect right to cut me.”

  Helfenridge was mechanically pulling on his overcoat.

  “At what time does the confirmation take place?” he asked. “Tell Miss Annette that I shall certainly be there.”

  On the ensuing Sunday morning, punctually at half-past ten o’clock, a closed carriage from the nearest livery stable drew up before the house occupied by the Birktons. It was snowing hard, and Annette’s spotless draperies and flowing veil were concealed under an old cloak of her mother’s as, sheltered by Maurice’s umbrella, she stepped across the sidewalk, clasping her prayer book in one tremulous, white-gloved hand. Mrs. Birkton followed, her shabby bonnet refurbished with fresh velvet strings, and a glow of excitement on her small effaced features. She and her son placed themselves on the front s
eat, leaving Annette to expand her crisp robe over the width of the opposite cushions; and the carriage rolled off heavily through the deepening snow.

  All three sat silent during their slow, noiseless drive. Maurice was looking out of the window, so that the women saw only his uncommunicative profile. Mrs. Birkton sat wiping away the tears from her flushed face. They were pleasant tears, and she let them roll gently down her cheeks before she dried them. As for Annette, her face was pale, with the candid pallor of an intense but scarce-comprehended emotion. She sat bolt upright, in a kind of Pre-Raphaelite rigidity which accorded with the primitive inexpressiveness of her rapt young features and the shadowless chalk-like mass of her dress and veil.

  At length the carriage paused behind a train of others; and after some moments of delay, which seemed to lend a preparatory solemnity to their approach, Maurice, in the wake of his mother and sister, passed from the snowy crudeness of the outer world into the rich and complex atmosphere of the Church of the Precious Blood.

  The raw, sunless daylight, mellowed by the jeweled opacity of stained-glass windows, fell with a caressing brilliance across the aisles, streaking the clustered shafts with heraldic emblazonments of gules and azure and leaving the intervening spaces swathed in a velvety dusk. On the altar, with its embroidered hanging, the candle flames hovered like yellow moths over the white lilies rigidly disposed in tall silver vases; while in their midst, relieved against the sculptured intricacies of the reredos of grayish stone, rose the outstretched arms of the great golden crucifix.

  The church was already crowded; but a ribbon, latitudinally dividing the central aisle, indicated that the foremost rows of chairs (there were no pews in the Church of the Precious Blood) had been reserved for the candidates for confirmation and their relations. Thither Maurice followed his mother and Annette, passing through a dove-like subsidence of feathery white and a double row of innocent young faces to the seats assigned to them by the verger. Glancing about as he moved up the aisle he had caught a glimpse of Helfenridge seated far back, with his head against a pillar; and the sight lent him some momentary comfort.

  Maurice cast down his eyes while Mrs. Birkton and Annette knelt to pray; and when he looked up the long white procession of choristers, preceded by the crucifer, was winding toward the chancel, while the first notes of the hymn

  How bright these glorious spirits shine!

  Whence all their white array?

  leapt jubilantly out of the expectant hush.

  Maurice, observing his sister, saw the gravity of her vague young profile intensified to awe as the procession swept past their seats, closed by the sumptuous grouping of the ample-sleeved bishop with his attendant clergy in their embroidered vestments, and seen through the mauve mist of drifting incense fumes. To him it was like fingering the leaves of a missal in some Umbrian sacristy, speculating idly, as he looked, upon the meaning of the delicate miniatures, wherein serene-visaged personages, saintly or seraphic, enacted their mysterious drama in a setting of fanciful white architecture or against a blue background tarred with gold. But to Annette, he perceived, it was something real, as real as physical birth or death. Through the symbolic phantasmagoria, which she perhaps understood still less than he, ran a thread of actuality, linking her timid being to the occult significance of the whole splendid scene; and Maurice saw her tremble with the sense of that august alliance. Perhaps, after all, he reflected, it was the white dress which formed the actual point of contact. At least he was glad to think that it made her a part of the pageant, a conscious factor in the gorgeous sacrifice of praise and prayer.

  As he mused thus his unquiet eyes again began to wander; and suddenly they fell upon a lady who sat near by with a little girl in white muslin at her side. The lady’s face was very familiar to him, though he had never before seen it composed into its present expression of devotional repose. It was a pretty face, crowned by abrupt waves of reddish hair just dashed here and there with a streak of gray, and lit by an insinuating, agate-colored glance; but the sight of it burned Maurice’s eyeballs like vitriol, for it was the face of Mrs. Tolquitt.

  He had never seen her thus before, with sober lips and modestly meditative lids; nor had he ever seen the small, solemn replica of herself now seated beside her in billows of clean white muslin. The sight was an intolerable rebuke, and he would have given the world to hear her familiar laugh rattle derisively through the high quietude of the aisles. As he gazed she turned her head, fixing upon him an absent look which gradually melted into a subdued smile of recognition. Then she made a slight sideward motion of her eyes, which plainly said, “This is my little girl.”

  Maurice noticed that she showed no surprise at seeing him there; she seemed to consider his presence as much a matter of course as her own, and with a shudder he said to himself, “Good heavens, perhaps she thinks I have come to see her daughter confirmed!”

  The service rolled on, with its bursts of music and interludes of prayer, its mystical moving of brilliant figures and flitting of lights about the altar; and at length Maurice was aware of a pause, followed by a stirring of the white dovecote in whose midst he sat. He saw Mrs. Birkton glance tearfully at Annette. The girl’s lips and eyelids were trembling, and for a moment she seemed unable to move. At length she looked up, fixing her eyes on the golden crucifix above the altar; then, as if hypnotized by the sight, she rose and glided into the aisle, mingling with the fluctuant mass of white-veiled figures which had begun to move slowly toward the apse.

  Presently they were all kneeling together on the chancel step, settling their dresses with the quick motions of a flock of birds; and above them, whitely hovering, Maurice saw the pontifical head and voluminous sleeves of the bishop. Annette knelt so that he could just see her between the intervening piers; but Mrs. Tolquitt’s daughter was hidden from him, lost in the impersonal array of white veils and bowed heads.

  The organ murmured a soft accompaniment, above which rose the monotonous cadence of the episcopal supplication, “Defend, O Lord, this thy child.... Defend, O Lord, this thy child....” reiterated like an incantation, as the invoking hands passed slowly down the line of motionless young heads.

  Maurice saw the hands sway above Annette’s pale braids, which shone like winter sunshine through her veil; then they moved on, and his eyes turned involuntarily to Mrs. Tolquitt. But she did not see him now; she was crying, not daintily, for the gallery, but in genuine self-surrender, her shoulders shaking, her handkerchief pressed against her face.

  There came over Maurice an uncontrollable longing to escape; the smoke of the incense and the strong fragrance of the lilies sickened him, and Mrs. Tolquitt’s sobs seemed to be choking in his own throat.

  At length the white line about the chancel swayed, broke, and dissolved itself; the choir burst into another victorious hymn, and the little veiled figures came fluttering back to their seats. In the ensuing disturbance, Maurice rose with a quick whisper to his mother—“Let me pass—I’m going out. I can’t stand the incense”—and while Mrs. Birkton made way for him, startled and disappointed, his glance fell for a moment on Annette’s illuminated face, as she moved toward her seat with fixed eyes and folded hands. Her whole gaze was bent upon the inner vision; she did not even see him as he brushed her dress in passing out.

  It was like a new birth to get out into the snow again, and Maurice, after a sharp breath or two, stepped forth rapidly against the wind, courting the tingle of the barbed flakes upon his face.

  He did not go home until late that evening, and when he entered the kitchen, he was met by the festal spectacle of the supper table adorned with a cluster of white lilies and a delicate array of fruit and angel cake. Annette, in her habitual dress of dark stuff, looked more familiar and less supernal than before, and though her face still shone, it now seemed to Maurice that he could discern the mingling of a gratified childish vanity with the mystical emotions of the morning.

  “I’m so glad you have come, dear,” Mrs. Birkton exclaimed, her coun
tenance still dewy with a pleasant agitation. “Annette, is the chicken ready? We have a broiled chicken for you, Maurice, dear, and a little mayonnaise of tomatoes.”

  As she spoke her eye turned toward the supper table, dumbly challenging his praise.

  “How nice it looks,” he murmured, obediently.

  “It is all owing to you, dear,” his mother replied. “We asked Mr. Helfenridge to come to supper, too; we thought you would like to have him.”

  “Is he coming?” Maurice asked, abruptly.

  “No, he couldn’t, unfortunately. He said he had promised to go to his sister’s.”

  They sat down, Annette mutely radiant at the head of the table, with her mother and Maurice at the sides; but to the dismay of the two women Maurice refused to partake of the delicacies which they had prepared. He had a headache, he said; but he sat watching them eat, in spite of his mother’s entreaties that he should go and lie down in his own room.

  When supper was over, however, he rose and bade them good night; Annette’s kiss was mingled with an inarticulate whisper of gratitude, but he pushed her gently aside, and the women heard him cross the passageway and shut himself into his own room.

  In a few moments, however, he was aroused by a timorous knock, which he recognized as his mother’s.

  “Come in,” he called, and Mrs. Birkton stepped apologetically across the threshold.

  “Maurice, is your head very bad?”

  “No, no—it’s not bad at all. I only want to be quiet.”

  “I know, dear, and I’m very sorry to disturb you. But here is the rest of this money—I can’t keep it, you know, Maurice. Annette’s dress and shoes and veil, and the carriage and supper, and the new strings for my bonnet, only cost twenty-seven dollars and a half, and I can’t possibly keep the rest unless you will let me use it for the household expenses, as usual.”

  Maurice sprang up, white to the lips.

  “For God’s sake mother, understand me. I don’t want the money—I won’t touch it. I can provide plenty for the household; I haven’t let you starve yet. And this is Annette’s, yours and hers. If you won’t spend it for yourself let Annette put it in the savings bank; or let her throw it into the street; I don’t care what becomes of it—but don’t speak to me of it again. I’m sick to death of hearing about it!”