Part 5

Belhaven moved the smaller impedimenta of the tea-table about with restless fingers and frowned abstractedly as he viewed the teapot. "Astry says we ought to go off for a wedding journey; he's trying to drive us both to the last ditch, I suppose, to make you confess that you took me to shield--your sister."

"I think we'll cut out the wedding journey; Johnstone's very much like an Iroquois medicine-man; he wants to fire the splinters after driving them into the flesh."

"There are the conventionalities; people will talk; in fact, people are talking."

"I wish you'd remembered the conventionalities before," replied Rachel, with her first flash of indignation.

"I admit the justice of your reproach; it's quite in your power to dictate terms to me; I've admitted myself to be in the wrong."

Her face flushed. "I hate reproaches, I always try to avoid them, but--I'm very human!"

Belhaven still concerned himself with the tea things; he lifted the lid of the teapot mechanically and replaced it. "My suggestion was on your account," he said reluctantly; "it's to your interest, as well as mine, to concede something to appearances. If our real position is known, even to our friends, we'll become the target of curiosity and gossip, and the situation will soon be unendurable. Sympathy is a compound of curiosity and slander; let us avoid it."

Rachel regarded him attentively. "Do you mean that you're afraid that I'll seek sympathy? Confide my troubles to my intimates and so reveal our--our affairs?"

"Good Lord, no! I can't imagine you confiding in--in Mrs. Billop."

"I might possibly find some one beside Mrs. Billop but I don't propose to seek a confidante."

"I really meant that we must hedge ourselves in from curiosity, make some concessions to conventionality. I began by suggesting a wedding trip--"

"To Niagara?" interposed Rachel ironically.

In spite of himself he smiled. "Florida," he substituted.

"In June? Why not do a hundred inane things? I'm sorry I'm not conventional. You'll find that I crop up unexpectedly; I shall make you uncomfortable, no doubt. But, at least, I'll avoid anything outlandish. It's bad enough to be embarked together upon an enterprise of deception; let us save some shreds of truth. It's impossible to be always false; I won't pretend on a wedding journey, I won't play a part for public entertainment! I'll do my best and--" she paused, a slight, painful flush mounting in her pale cheeks again and deepening the charm of her face, "I shall always remember that I bear your name. You gave it against your will, but I accept it as a trust, and you may rest assured that I shall guard it as my own."

"I've never doubted that for a moment," he said hastily, "and believe me, I want to--I will--do the best I can to make it easy for you."

Rachel was on her way to the door; she had felt an irresistible desire to break off the interview. Her brain was reeling, she had not known an hour's rest, an hour to cry out to God for mercy. She stopped now, arrested by something she saw in his face, and held out her hand. Was he not her fellow sufferer? Was he not also shackled? Like two galley slaves their hands had been locked together.

"I'm sorry for you," she said sweetly; "you did wrong, you've injured my sister, deeply pained her,--poor, foolish child! But let no one say that you haven't suffered, that you're not punished. To have to marry me was hard indeed. We must make the best of it, fellow sufferer; let us forego reproaches!"

Belhaven pressed her cold fingers in silence and she went out; he saw her cross the hall and slowly ascend the staircase. She walked like one who dragged a weight; all the elasticity of her graceful figure seemed gone, and he realized at last that she had made a terrible sacrifice. Before this revelation, Belhaven's mind stopped short; he had been devoutly occupied in contemplating his own misery until, like the frog that looked at the cow, he had tried to distend his own importance to match its endless inflations. He had regarded himself from every standpoint but Rachel's; he was now suddenly to behold himself from hers. To her he apparently had no compensations, he was the climax of her misery, the last straw. Then he remembered her sympathy for him. It was quite genuine; she pitied him because he was married to her. Belhaven smiled bitterly to himself. She was a fine woman, an unusual woman, but she clearly meant it; he wondered how many women ever considered it a punishment to be married to them? Certainly not Eva.

Then he recalled how quickly Eva decided to sacrifice him to escape disgrace, how suddenly she had awakened to public opinion. Her vows and caresses one day, her tears and reproaches the next, and then her abrupt desertion. Her willingness to sacrifice Rachel, her falsehood about Rachel--he had only heard an expurgated edition of it from Eva herself--had been so many shocks to him; the whole thing was incredible. He found it necessary to take to pieces his conception of Eva and put it together again in a different combination, for, if he was her fellow sinner, he certainly was not her fellow sufferer; she had escaped. In some mysterious way she always evaded the consequences of her own acts; she slipped them off on to other people's shoulders, whitewashed them, and, at last, frankly disowned them. Belhaven, suffering the first shock of disillusionment, wondered if she ever really loved any one but herself? Since a week he had traveled past the first milestone on the road that Astry had traveled before him; since two days he was well on the second lap. How much more to the end? Sometimes it is a short, dusty, abrupt road and sometimes it is long and tortuous, and it broils in the sunshine of desert places, but it leads to one end. Having entered it, no one has ever turned back, no one will ever turn back. Surely, in Paradise there must be a place for the disillusioned, for the way blisters the feet.

Let no one suppose that because a man sins he cannot suffer. Belhaven knew better; he was feverish, the very air of the room suffocated him. Was it the heavy perfume of those foolish, white flowers? He stretched out his hand to pitch them out, but abruptly withdrew it as if something had stung him. Something had; he remembered appearances! Henceforth he was to spend three-fourths of the day remembering them; they hung about his neck like a millstone. He laughed bitterly, as he realized that Eva had sold him into slavery; she ought to have dipped his coat in the blood of a kid and handed him to Astry. She had done for him, disposed of him! Then he remembered Rachel and was overcome with shame, for, like a poltroon, he had hidden himself behind a woman and she was greater than he. It will be seen that Belhaven was rapidly approaching the third milestone--but then it is always a question of how many milestones there will be. The length of the way is only great enough to accomplish its purpose, but, sometimes, it has to be very great indeed; however, that is only in obstinate cases; violent ones run abruptly down the hill and cast themselves into the sea, like the Gadarene swine.

It does not matter so long as the end is accomplished, and it always is.

VII

Rachel had been married a week and a day when Dr. Macclesfield came to drink a cup of tea with her in her new home.

Dr. Macclesfield was a little, old man who might have been eighty and looked seventy. His face was seamed with wrinkles in curious criss-crosses, like the stitches in drawn-work, and he still shaved twice daily; he said that he did not care to grow a moustache, that his always caught up vermicelli. His small eyes twinkled with curiosity; nothing escaped him, but his sense of humor made him delightful. He had retired from practice but was still consulted in difficult cases; he was wealthy but his charities kept his income down to normal limits. His wife had been dead twenty years and he had no children, so he was perpetually interested in other people's affairs. People appealed to him keenly; he studied them, divided them into classes, found fault with them, and loved them. In his youth and middle age he had had an insatiable passion for work; he had labored at his profession as some men labor in a quarry. He had worn out a dozen young assistants and driven an orderly and methodical wife nearly out of her senses. She had lived and died complaining that the doctor never came home to meals on time, and never got through one without an interruption; she said that cold soups were perpetual and that it was useless to have pancakes. It was impossible for him to grasp what that had meant to her, and twenty years after her death he was still perplexed at the thought of her nervous despair when dinner had spoiled waiting for him. If she had explained, he would have thought it a trivial matter,--and so it was, if he was unmoved by chilled mutton. A terrible illness, brought on by the strain and constant exposure, had finally ended his active career. He had slowly and painfully recovered, to find his usefulness gone. His brain still answered the calls of the profession, but his body was no longer equal to the work of a Corliss engine, and he surrendered grimly, at seventy-five, describing himself as an old bluebottle-fly who could only creep on a window-pane on a sunshiny day.

He was fond of Rachel and she had taught him to drink tea. Yet he had deferred his visit until the last minute, for he did not relish the idea of seeing her as Belhaven's wife. Not that he especially objected to Belhaven. He regarded him as an undetermined quantity, who seemed to have an unfathomed depth, and who needed some moral plummet-line as well as a physical bracing up. When he thought of him, the old doctor shook his head and thrust out his underlip. "He's elusive," he said to himself. "In my young days I should have tried to experiment; now I would hesitate whether to give pepsin or calomel. I usually hate a man when I can't tell at a glance what sort of a pill he needs."

Rachel poured tea for him in the living-room. Belhaven's taste had been excellent but she had given those individual touches that made it homelike, and it began already, in a delicate way, to express her. The light from the high, south window touched the rumpled waves of her soft, brown hair and warmed the delicate pallor of her cheek. She wore a simple, white dress without a single ornament and there was only a handful of blue and yellow flags in a slender glass on the tea-table. Dr. Macclesfield drank his tea discontentedly. After all, the room suited her and she suited the room, if Belhaven could only obliterate himself!

"I remember this house very well," he remarked, carefully spearing another piece of lemon for his tea. "It was a tavern in the stage-coach days, before you were born, my dear. Old Will Jasmine used to keep it; he was enormously stout and very bald, which was a comfort, considering that he did all the fine cooking himself. He could dress green turtle as well as a _chef_. He used to keep a keg of beer on tap in that corner where you've got your bookcase, a dry kind of a substitute, too! That high window, with the Colonial fan over the top, was over the counter. I wonder how much Paul Van Citters cut out of his aunt's income for all those improvements? I heard that the old lady had to wear the same bonnet for three years, on account of those Corinthian capitals out on the front portico, and they ought to have been Doric!"

Rachel laughed. "Paul had been reading Ruskin, and he was mad about the subtle influences of architecture; I'm afraid he forgot the architecture of his aunt's bonnets."

"He couldn't; I've seen 'em."

"I wish he'd put in a few closets--not in his aunt's bonnets but in this house; it's as barren of closets as Paul's brain. I always feel that there are no little intricate places there, no little cells of poetic fancy. Paul is just stodgy and commonplace but Pamela loves him."

Dr. Macclesfield stirred his tea industriously. "Rachel," he said, "why did you let Eva's maid go to Addie Billop?"

Rachel drew a quick breath. "That's Mrs. Billop's affair; she knew that Zélie had been dismissed."

"Humph! I didn't, until yesterday. I was in New York for the day and met Sidney, wandering down Fifth Avenue with his mouth open, catching flies as usual. He mentioned the fact that Zélie was a treasure. I wonder if he's forgotten the pantry," the doctor added, chuckling softly.

"Only the wicked remember. Doctor, let me give you another cup of tea."

"No, my child," he waved her away. "Tea makes me gossip; two cups mean the undoing of my neighbors; a third would make me tell you about my grandmother and my first trousers. By the way, Rachel, John Charter landed in San Francisco yesterday, Pamela Van Citters told me; he'll have to report to the War Department here at once, so we'll see him."

Rachel busied herself with her tea-caddy, and as she deftly measured out another spoonful of tea, her hand was quite steady and slenderly graceful. The doctor watched her.

"He's coming back to marry Mrs. Prynne, I believe," she remarked quietly.

"Nonsense! That's all a lie of Addie Billop's. She picked up some nonsense, and Lottie Prynne never denies a matrimonial rumor; she's always in hopes that one will adhere long enough to develop a genuine case. John Charter isn't engaged to any one; Pamela told me she knew that for a fact."

Rachel said nothing.

"Charter's a fine fellow," the old man went on; "he's done splendid service out there, and they say he's to be promoted. Lottie Prynne--good Lord! I reckon all the ground Addie Billop had for that was the soldier's button on the top of Lottie's hatpin, and she got that from old Sedley. He told me so himself, said he'd be damned if he didn't wish she'd swallow it; he was too old to be ripping buttons off his uniform for pretty widows."

Rachel tried to laugh, but she had a sensation of strangling and bent over to arrange the blue and yellow flags. "I believe Paul has taken their house on Dupont Circle for another year," she said, in a low voice.

"I reckon he got it cheaper on a long lease. It would have been better taste to have taken this off his aunt's hands, but Pamela said she couldn't bear his architectural harangues and there was no sun parlor for the baby. By the way, the baby has cut its last double tooth; it's an occasion for public rejoicing; we've all lived on that baby's teeth and wrestled with them. Why--Rachel, my child!"

Rachel had suddenly covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

The old man set his teacup on the table and regarded her thoughtfully. For a moment she gave way and wept passionately, unrestrainedly; the barriers had broken down and she had lost control of herself. But it was not so much a spiritual surrender as a physical necessity; she had reached the limit of her endurance and she had to give up. For two weeks she had been building a battlement of stones for her own defense; she had been imagining how bravely she could meet her barren future behind her tower, but now--at a touch--it had crumbled into ruins. There had been terrible moments already, when it had seemed more than she could bear, but she had finally achieved a state that approached the normal; she had been trying to interest herself in the house, the garden, the life that she must lead, and she had been composed and even cheerful. But now the whole combination of circumstances had changed, and what had seemed endurable was no longer possible; she must break away from it, tear herself free or perish. Then, with that curious, superficial consciousness that makes us aware of extraneous things even at such moments as this, she became conscious of Dr. Macclesfield's cup on the table, set down hastily with the spoon in it. Her recognition of this was only mechanical but, in some way, it recalled her to herself; she must not confess her misery, since to confess it meant to involve Eva. She struggled with herself and began to come back; she came back a long way and heard Belhaven's voice at the door.

She dried her tears and looked up. Dr. Macclesfield had put on his spectacles and was writing a prescription, with his underlip thrust out. He handed it to her as Belhaven came across the hall.

"A hundred years ago that was good for nerves," said the old man; "you've got nerves, Rachel. Take that at bedtime and keep out of the house; open air and sunshine, that's the idea."

Rachel's hand closed over the slip of paper mechanically, but she was grateful. After all, tact was better than medicine; she had that moment to recover before the two men shook hands and she had to take up her rôle again. For the first time Rachel experienced a feeling with which she was soon to be deeply acquainted, that would recur again and again, and become at last a burden to her. She felt for the first time like a wild creature of the woods and the hills caught in a trap, a cruel and effectual trap, not one that maimed and gave a chance of a slow death, but an enduring, live-trap from which there was no escape and where she was not likely to be left to die. She would be fed and tended and kept alive, as if her life preserved some great privilege or happiness to the trapper, but she would never be allowed to escape; the bars of her cage were closed forever. Her heart began to beat tremendously against her breast; she was afraid, afraid of herself. Why had this awful thing come to her? What had she done? Was it that she had not loved deep enough, served enough, hoped enough, sacrificed enough? Had she been afraid to trust her own heart?

At first it had been a shock to her whenever Belhaven entered a room where she was, but to-day his coming was a relief; it gave her that moment to recover her self-control. He was standing by her little tea-table, talking to Dr. Macclesfield, and the light shining full on his face revealed the haggard lines and the extreme pallor. He, too, had been traveling along the road, but his manner was easy and even graceful; the tact that he showed in not observing her distress, while it was essentially a part of his breeding as a man of the world, was still wonderfully reassuring and had the value of a guarantee that he would, as he had said, always make it as easy for her as he could. But with that comforting reassurance came the swift, overwhelming thought that nothing could make it easy now, that this new turn of affairs, Charter's return, had made it more than she could bear.

"Well, if I were you, I'd rather stay here all winter than take a house in the city," Dr. Macclesfield was saying; "as long as you've got a motor, the distance doesn't count."

"Not for me, but--my wife--"

Rachel did not hear the end of Belhaven's halting sentence as she slipped out of the room and went up-stairs.

VIII

It was true that John Charter was coming home from the Philippine Islands.

Out there in the Island of Luzon there was consequently much mourning in the regiment, for John Charter had borne the heat and burden of the day, and it remained to be seen whether he would receive his reward. That Charter greatly differed, at first sight, from other men of his class and his profession cannot be said; that he did differ greatly in soul is true. He was a tall, muscular, well-built, young American, a soldier by instinct, a West Pointer by training, and a first lieutenant in a regiment of regulars by promotion, but John wore his khaki with distinction. He had a clean hand and a clean soul, he was superbly honest, and he was so simple that it seemed that the eternal boy would never die in him. A certain habit of reserve had kept him unknown and not greatly liked until the cholera came. In seasons of stress and cases of cholera, men learn things. The regiment learned John. It was hot and men fell sick like flies; a steam rose from the rice paddies; the water was poison; and the soldiers cursed God and died,--that is, a good many of them.

It was a time when the officers were on leave, but John came back at the first call. He had been trying to write to Rachel Leven a long delayed letter,--a letter that he found hard to write, there was so much to be said in it, and it would have changed the course of so many lives. On a little thing hangs, sometimes, the fate of a lifetime, but John never wrote that letter, for the cholera broke out in Company B and he took off his coat and went to work. He could do anything better than write a letter.

The men were very sick and the regiment surgeon had chills and fever; he worked between shakes and swore fearfully, but John and the chaplain helped him without profanity. The first week three died and ten more sickened; the second week the chaplain died and John helped the surgeon alone, for the colonel was in bed with cholera. John seldom slept, and when he did, he slept in his clothes. The camp was a pest-house. It is true that we come into this world alone and that we must go out of it alone, but at the last a man likes to hear a kind word, to see a friend's face. The dying saw John; he wrote their last letters for them, took charge of their little bequests, made their wills, sat with the sick and the delirious; and one poor boy from Maryland raved and clung to him for twenty-four hours. Then he fell asleep and began to mend. He thought John had saved his life, and he was probably right, for the surgeon had had a chill the day of the crisis and was not able to lift a finger.