Edith Wharton - SSC 09 Read Free Page B

photographs of his father as a young man.”
                 She
drew out the little morocco case and offered it again for my contemplation. The
vague presentment of a child a few months old—and by its help she expected to
identify a man of nearly thirty!
                 Apparently
she had no clue beyond the fact that, all those years ago, the adoptive parents
were rumoured to have sojourned in Europe . She
was starting for Italy because she thought she remembered that they were said to have gone
there first—in itself a curious argument. Wherever there was an American consul
she meant to apply to him. First at Genoa ; then Milan ; then Florence , Rome and Naples . In one or the other of these cities she
would surely discover some one who could remember the passage there of an
American couple named Brown with the most beautiful baby boy in the world. Even
the long arm of coincidence could not have scattered so widely over southern
Europe American couples of the name of Brown, with a matchlessly beautiful baby
called Stephen.
                 Mrs.
Glenn set forth in a mood of almost mystical exaltation. She promised that I
should hear from her as soon as she had anything definite to communicate:
“which means that you will hear—and
soon!” she concluded with a happy laugh. But six months passed without my
receiving any direct news, though I was kept on her track by a succession of
letters addressed to my chief by various consuls who wrote to say that a Mrs.
Stephen Glenn had called with a letter of recommendation, but that unluckily it
had been impossible to give her any assistance “as she had absolutely no data
to go upon.” Alas poor lady—
                 And
then, one day, about eight months after her departure, there was a telegram.
“Found my boy. Unspeakably happy. Long to see you.” It
was signed Catherine Glenn, and dated from a mountain-cure in Switzerland .
                   
     
  IV.
 
 
                 That
summer, when the time came for my vacation, it was raining in Paris even harder than it had rained all the
preceding winter, and I decided to make a dash for the sun.
                 I
had read in the papers that the French Riviera was suffering from a six months’
drought; and though I didn’t half believe it, I took the next train for the
south. I got out at Les Calanques, a small bathing-place between Marseilles and Toulon , where there was a fairish hotel, and
pine-woods to walk in, and there, that very day, I saw seated on the beach the
majestic figure of Mrs. Stephen Glenn. The first thing that struck me was that
she had at last discarded her weeds. She wore a thin white dress, and a
wide-brimmed hat of russet straw shaded the fine oval of her face. She saw me
at once, and springing up advanced across the beach with a light step. The sun,
striking on her hat brim, cast a warm shadow on her face; and in that
semi-shade it glowed with recovered youth. “Dear Mr. Norcutt! How wonderful! Is
it really you? I’ve been meaning to write for weeks; but I think happiness has
made me lazy—and my days are so full,” she declared with a joyous smile.
                 I
looked at her with increased admiration. At the Consulate, I remembered, I had
said to myself that grief was what Nature had meant her features to express;
but that was only because I had never seen her happy. No; even when her husband
and her son Philip were alive, and the circle of her well-being seemed
unbroken, I had never seen her look as she looked now. And I understood that,
during all those years, the unsatisfied longing for her eldest child, the shame
at her own cowardice in disowning and deserting him, and perhaps her secret
contempt for her husband for having abetted (or more probably exacted) that
desertion, must have been eating into her soul, deeper, far deeper, than
satisfied affections could reach. Now everything in her was satisfied; I