My Mortal Enemy/Part 2/Chapter 4
IV
One afternoon when I got home from school I found a note from Mrs. Henshawe under my door, and went to her at once. She greeted me and kissed me with unusual gravity.
“Nellie, dear, will you do a very special favour for me to-morrow? It is the fifteenth of April, the anniversary of Madame Modjeska’s death.” She gave me a key and asked me to open an old trunk in the corner. “Lift the tray, and in the bottom, at one end, you will find an old pair of long kid gloves, tied up like sacks. Please give them to me.”
I burrowed down under old evening wraps and dinner dresses and came upon the gloves, yellow with age and tied at both ends with corset lacings; they contained something heavy that jingled. Myra was watching my face and chuckled. “Is she thinking they are my wedding gloves, piously preserved? No, my dear; I went before a justice of the peace, and married without gloves, so to speak!” Untying the string, she shook out a little rain of ten- and twenty-dollar gold pieces.
“All old Irish women hide away a bit of money.” She took up a coin and gave it to me. “Will you go to St. Joseph’s Church and inquire for Father Fay; tell him you are from me, and ask him to celebrate a mass to-morrow for the repose of the soul of Helena Modjeska, Countess Bozenta-Chlapowska. He will remember; last year I hobbled there myself. You are surprised, Nellie? Yes, I broke with the Church when I broke with everything else and ran away with a German free-thinker; but I believe in holy words and holy rites all the same. It is a solace to me to know that to-morrow a mass will be said here in heathendom for the spirit of that noble artist, that beautiful and gracious woman.”
When I put the gold back into the trunk and started making the tea, she said: “Oswald, of course, doesn’t know the extent of my resources. We’ve often needed a hundred dollars or two so bitter bad; he wouldn’t understand. But that is money I keep for unearthly purposes; the needs of this world don’t touch it.”
As I was leaving she called me back: “Oh, Nellie, can’t we go to Gloucester’s cliff on Saturday, if it’s fine? I do long to!”
We went again, and again. Nothing else seemed to give her so much pleasure. But the third time I stopped for her, she declared she was not equal to it. I found her sitting in her chair, trying to write to an old friend, an Irish actress I had met at her apartment in New York, one of the guests at that New Year’s Eve party. Her son, a young actor, had shot himself in Chicago because of some sordid love affair. I had seen an account of it in the morning paper.
“It touches me very nearly,” Mrs. Henshawe told me. “Why, I used to keep Billy with me for weeks together when his mother was off on tour. He was the most truthful, noble-hearted little fellow. I had so hoped he would be happy. You remember his mother?”
I remembered her very well—large and jovial and hearty she was. Myra began telling me about her, and the son, whom she had not seen since he was sixteen.
“To throw his youth away like that, and shoot himself at twenty-three! People are always talking about the joys of youth—but, oh, how youth can suffer! I’ve not forgotten; those hot southern Illinois nights, when Oswald was in New York, and I had no word from him except through Liddy, and I used to lie on the floor all night and listen to the express trains go by. I’ve not forgotten.”
“Then I wonder why you are sometimes so hard on him now,” I murmured.
Mrs. Henshawe did not reply to me at once. The corners of her mouth trembled, then drew tight, and she sat with her eyes closed as if she were gathering herself for something.
At last she sighed, and looked at me wistfully. “It’s a great pity, isn’t it, Nellie, to reach out a grudging hand and try to spoil the past for any one? Yes, it’s a great cruelty. But I can’t help it. He’s a sentimentalist, always was; he can look back on the best of those days when we were young and loved each other, and make himself believe it was all like that. It wasn’t. I was always a grasping, worldly woman; I was never satisfied. All the same, in age, when the flowers are so few, it’s a great unkindness to destroy any that are left in a man’s heart.” The tears rolled down her cheeks, she leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. She had stopped speaking because her voice broke. Presently she began again resolutely. “But I’m made so. People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were. . . . A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other. Perhaps I can’t forgive him for the harm I did him. Perhaps that’s it. When there are children, that feeling goes through natural changes. But when it remains so personal . . . something gives way in one. In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”
“He hasn’t,” I suggested.
“He has asked you to speak for him, my dear? Then we have destroyed each other indeed!”
“Certainly he hasn’t, Mrs. Myra! But you are hard on him, you know, and when there are so many hard things, it seems a pity.”
“Yes, it’s a great pity.” She drew herself up in her chair. “And I’d rather you didn’t come any more for the time being, Nellie. I’ve been thinking the tea made me nervous.” She was smiling, but her mouth curled like a little snake, as I had seen it do long ago. “Will you be pleased to take your things and go, Mrs. Casey?” She said it with a laugh, but a very meaning one.
As I rose I watched for some sign of relenting, and I said humbly enough: “Forgive me, if I’ve said anything I shouldn’t. You know I love you very dearly.”
She mockingly bowed her tyrant’s head. “It’s owing to me infirmities, dear Mrs. Casey, that I’ll not be able to go as far as me door wid ye.”