Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (25 page)

 
          
“No
hurry—dinner put off till nine,” he said cheerfully; and added, on a note of
inexpressible relief: “We’ve had a tough job of it—
ouf
!”

 
          
The
room looked as if they had: the card tables stood untouched, and the deep
armchairs, gathered into confidential groups, seemed still deliberating on the
knotty problem. I noticed that a good deal of whiskey and soda had gone toward
its solution.

 
          
“What
happened? Has Byrne left?”

 
          
“Byrne?
No—thank goodness!” Alstrop looked at me almost
reproachfully. “Why should he? That was just what we wanted to avoid.”

 
          
“I
don’t understand. You don’t mean that
he’s
stayed and the Delanes have gone?”

 
          
“Lord
forbid
! Why should they, either?
Hayley’s
apologized!”

 
          
My
jaw fell, and I returned my host’s stare.

 
          
“Apologized?
To that hound?
For what?”

 
          
Alstrop
gave an impatient shrug. “Oh, for God’s sake don’t reopen the cursed question,”
it seemed to say. Aloud he echoed: “For what? Why, after all, a man’s got a
right to thrash his own poney, hasn’t he? It was beastly unsportsmanlike, of
course—but it’s nobody’s business if Byrne chooses to be that kind of a cad.
That’s what Hayley saw—when he cooled down.”

 
          
“Then
I’m sorry he cooled down.”

 
          
Alstrop
looked distinctly annoyed. “I don’t follow you. We had a hard enough job. You
said you wanted to see him in a rage just once; but you don’t want him to go on
making an ass of himself, do you?”

 
          
“I
don’t call it making an ass of
himself
to thrash
Byrne.”

 
          
“And to advertise his conjugal difficulties all over
Long Island
, with twenty newspaper
reporters at his heels?”

 
          
I
stood silent, baffled but incredulous. “I don’t believe he ever gave that a
thought. I wonder who put it to him first in that
way?
”

 
          
Alstrop
twisted his unlit cigarette about in his fingers. “We all did—as delicately as
we could. But it was Leila who finally convinced him. I must say Leila was very
game.”

 
          
I
still pondered: the scene in the paddock rose again before me, the quivering
agonized animal, and the way Delane’s big hand had been laid reassuringly on
its neck.

 
          
“Nonsense!
I don’t believe a word of it!” I declared.

 
          
“A
word of what I’ve been telling you?”

 
          
“Well,
of the official version of the case.”

 
          
To
my surprise, Alstrop met my glance with an eye neither puzzled nor resentful. A
shadow seemed to be lifted from his honest face.

 
          
“What
do
you believe?” he asked.

 
          
“Why
that
Delane
thrashed that cur for ill-treating the
poney, and not in the least for being too attentive to Mrs. Delane. I was
there, I tell you—I saw him.”

 
          
Alstrop’s
brow cleared completely. “There’s something to be said for that theory,” he
agreed, smiling over the match he was holding to his cigarette.

 
          
“Well, then—what was there to apologize for?”

 
          
“Why,
for
that
—butting in between Byrne and
his horse. Don’t you see, you young idiot? If Hayley hadn’t apologized, the mud
was bound to stick to his wife. Everybody would have said the row was on her
account. It’s as plain as the knob on the door—there wasn’t anything else for
him to do. He saw it well enough after she’d said a dozen words to him—”

 
          
“I
wonder what those words were,” I muttered.

 
          
“Don’t
know. He and she came downstairs together. He looked a hundred years old, poor
old chap. ‘It’s the cruelty, it’s the cruelty,’ he kept saying; ‘I hate
cruelty.’ I rather think he knows we’re all on his side. Anyhow, it’s all
patched up and well patched up; and I’ve ordered my last ’eighty-four Georges
Goulet brought up for dinner. Meant to keep it for my own wedding-breakfast;
but since this afternoon I’ve rather lost interest in that festivity,” Alstrop
concluded with a celibate grin.

 
          
“Well,”
I repeated, as though it were a relief to say, “I could swear he did it for the
poney.”

 
          
“Oh,
so could I,” my host acquiesced as we went upstairs together.

 
          
On
my threshold, he took me by the arm and followed me in. I saw there was still
something on his mind.

 
          
“Look
here, old chap—you say you were in there when it happened?”

 
          
“Yes,
Close by—”

 
          
“Well,”
he interrupted, “for the Lord’s sake don’t allude to the subject tonight, will
you?”

 
          
“Of course not.”

 
          
“Thanks
a lot. Truth is, it was a narrow squeak, and I couldn’t help admiring the way
Leila played up. She was in a fury with Hayley; but she got herself in hand in
no time, and behaved very decently. She told me privately he was often like
that—flaring out all of a sudden like a madman. You wouldn’t imagine it, would
you, with that quiet way of his? She says she thinks it’s his old wound.”

 
          
“What
old wound?”

 
          
“Didn’t
you know he was wounded—where was it?
Bull Run
, I
believe. In the head—”

 
          
No,
I hadn’t known; hadn’t even heard, or remembered, that Delane had been in the
Civil War. I stood and stared in my astonishment.

 
          
“Hayley
Delane?
In the war?”

 
          
“Why,
of course.
All through it.”

 
          
“But
Bull Run
—
Bull Run
was at the very beginning.” I broke off to go through a rapid mental
calculation. “Look here, Jack, it can’t be; he’s not over fifty-five. You told
me so yourself. If he was in it from the beginning he must have gone into it as
a schoolboy.”

 
          
“Well,
that’s just what he
did
: ran away from school to
volunteer. His family didn’t know what had become of him till he was wounded. I
remember hearing my people talk about it.
Great old sport,
Hayley.
I’d have given a lot not to have this thing happen; not at my
place anyhow; but it
has
, and there’s
no help for it. Look here, you swear you won’t make a sign, will you? I’ve got
all the others into line, and if you’ll back us up we’ll have a regular Happy
Family Evening. Jump into your clothes—it’s nearly nine.”

 
          
  

 
          
This
is not a story-teller’s story; it is not even the kind of episode capable of
being shaped into one. Had it been, I should have reached my climax, or at any
rate its first stage, in the incident at the Polo Club, and what I have left to
tell would be the effect of that incident on the lives of the three persons
concerned.

 
          
It
is not a story, or anything in the semblance of a story, but merely an attempt
to depict for you—and in so doing, perhaps make clearer to myself—the aspect
and character of a man whom I loved, perplexedly but faithfully, for many
years. I make no apology, therefore, for the fact that Bolton Byrne, whose evil
shadow ought to fall across all my remaining pages, never again appears in
them; and that the last I saw of him (for my purpose) was when, after our
exaggeratedly cheerful and even noisy dinner that evening at Jack Alstrop’s, I
observed him shaking hands with Hayley Delane, and declaring, with pinched lips
and a tone of falsetto cordiality: “Bear malice? Well, rather not—why, what
rot! All’s fair in—in polo, ain’t it? I should say so! Yes—off first thing
tomorrow. S’pose of course you’re staying on with Jack over Sunday? I wish I
hadn’t promised the Gildermeres—.” And therewith he vanishes, having served his
purpose as a passing lantern-flash across the twilight of Hayley Delane’s
character.

 
          
All
the while, I continued to feel that it was not Bolton Byrne who mattered. While
clubs and drawing-rooms twittered with the episode, and friends grew portentous
in trying to look unconscious, and said “I don’t know what you mean,” with eyes
beseeching you to speak if you knew more than they did, I had already discarded
the whole affair, as I was sure Delane had. “It was the poney and nothing but
the poney,” I chuckled to myself, as pleased as if I had owed Mrs. Delane a
grudge, and were exulting in her abasement; and still there ran through my mind
the phrase which Alstrop said Delane had kept repeating: “It was the cruelty—it
was the cruelty. I hate cruelty.”

 
          
How
it fitted in, now, with the other fact my host had let drop—the fact that
Delane had fought all through the civil war! It seemed incredible that it
should have come to me as a surprise; that I should have forgotten, or perhaps
never even known, this phase of his history. Yet in young men like myself, just
out of college in the ’nineties, such ignorance was more excusable than now
seems possible.

 
          
That
was the dark time of our national indifference, before the country’s awakening;
no doubt the war seemed much farther from us, much less a part of us, than it
does to the young men of today. Such was the case, at any rate, in old
New York
, and more particularly, perhaps, in the
little clan of well-to-do and indolent old New Yorkers among whom I had grown
up. Some of these, indeed, had fought bravely through the four years:
New York
had borne her part, a memorable part, in
the long struggle. But I remember with what perplexity I first wakened to the
fact—it was in my school-days—that if certain of my father’s kinsmen and contemporaries
had been in the war, others—how many!—had stood aside. I recall especially the
shock with which, at school, I had heard a boy explain his father’s lameness:
“He’s never got over that shot in the leg he got at
Chancellorsville
.”

 
          
I
stared; for my friend’s father was just my own father’s age. At the moment (it
was at a school foot-ball match) the two men were standing side by side, in
full sight of us—
his
father stooping,
halt and old, mine, even to filial eyes, straight and youthful. Only an hour
before I had been bragging to my friend about the wonderful shot my father was
(he had taken me down to his
North Carolina
shooting at Christmas); but now I stood
abashed.

 
          
The
next time I went home for the holidays I said to my mother, one day when we
were alone: “Mother, why didn’t father fight in the war?” My heart was beating
so hard that I thought she must have seen my excitement and been shocked. But
she raised an untroubled face from her embroidery.

 
          
“You
father, dear?
Why, because he was a married man.”
She
had a reminiscent smile. “Molly was born already—she was six months old when
Fort
Sumter
fell. I remember I was nursing her when
Papa came in with the news. We couldn’t believe it.” She paused to match a silk
placidly. “Married men weren’t called upon to fight,” she explained.