Edith Wharton - SSC 09 Read Free Page A

discredit Stephen…. We knew positively that our baby was in the best of hands. …”
                 “You
never saw him again?”
                 She
shook her head. “It was part of the agreement—with the persons who took him.
They wanted to imagine he was their own. We knew we were fortunate … to find
such a safe home, so entirely beyond suspicion … we had to accept the
conditions.” She looked up with a faint flicker of reassurance in her eyes. “In
a way it no longer makes any difference to me—the interval. It seems like
yesterday. I know he’s been well cared for, and I should recognise him
anywhere. No child ever had such eyes….” She fumbled in her bag, drew out a
small morocco case, opened it, and showed me the miniature of a baby a few
months old. “I managed, with the greatest difficulty, to get a photograph of
him—and this was done from it. Beautiful? Yes. I shall
be able to identify him anywhere…. It’s only twenty-seven years….”
                   
     
  III.
 
 
                 Our
talk was prolonged, the next day, at the quiet hotel where Mrs. Glenn was
staying; but it led—it could lead—to nothing definite.
                 The
unhappy woman could only repeat and amplify the strange confession stammered
out at the Consulate. As soon as her child was born it had been entrusted with
the utmost secrecy to a rich childless couple, who at once adopted it, and
disappeared forever. Disappeared, that is, in the sense that (as I guessed)
Stephen Glenn was as determined as they were that the child’s parents should
never hear of them again. Poor Catherine had been very ill at her baby’s birth.
Tortured by the need of concealment, of taking up her usual life at her uncle’s
as quickly as possible, of explaining her brief absence in such a way as to
avert suspicion, she had lived in a blur of fear and suffering, and by the time
she was herself again the child was gone, and the adoption irrevocable.
Thereafter, I gathered, Glenn made it clear that he wished to avoid the
subject, and she learned very little about the couple who had taken her child
except that they were of good standing, and came from somewhere in Pennsylvania . They had gone to Europe almost immediately, it appeared, and no
more was heard of them. Mrs. Glenn understood that Mr. Brown (their name was
Brown) was a painter, and that they went first to Italy , then to Spain —unless it was the other way round. Stephen
Glenn, it seemed, had heard of them through an old governess of his sister’s, a
family confidante, who was the sole recipient of poor Catherine’s secret. Soon
afterward the governess died, and with her disappeared the last trace of the
mysterious couple; for it was not going to be easy to wander about Europe
looking for a Mr. and Mrs. Brown who had gone to Italy or Spain with a baby
twenty-seven years ago. But that was what Mrs. Glenn meant to do. She had a
fair amount of money, she was desperately lonely, she had no aim or interest or
occupation or duty—except to find the child she had lost.
                 What
she wanted was some sort of official recommendation to our consuls in Italy and Spain , accompanied by a private letter hinting at
the nature of her errand. I took these papers to her and when I did so I tried
to point out the difficulties and risks of her quest, and suggested that she
ought to be accompanied by some one who could advise her—hadn’t she a man of
business, or a relation, a cousin, a nephew? No, she said; there was no one;
but for that matter she needed no one. If necessary she could apply to the
police, or employ private detectives; and any American consul to whom she
appealed would know how to advise her. “In any case,” she added, “I couldn’t be
mistaken—I should always recognise him. He was the very image of his father.
And if there were any possibility of my being in doubt, I have the miniature,
and