Part 9

After all, perhaps her distress was groundless, perhaps these two had found a way to reconcile themselves to their fate. She stood still, her lips compressed, thinking; with her old, soft self-pity, she thought her own position the hardest in the world, and that she had created the situation herself did not alleviate its misery. It was, perhaps, this very selfishness, this desire to find that no grief was as great as her own, that drove her on, for she only remained a moment in doubt; the next she was crossing the short stretch of lawn between the rhododendrons and the rear door. Sure now that Belhaven was out, she trailed leisurely across the intervening space and made her way to the front of the house.

As she had anticipated, she found Rachel in the front hall, but not even jealousy could detect any embarrassment or tenderness in her expression; instead, young Mrs. Belhaven looked deeply depressed. The sisters greeted each other with that constraint which was the natural result of their mutual knowledge. Rachel had been engaged in arranging some long-stemmed roses in a tall vase and she went on with her task, selecting them from a great cluster that lay on the table at her side. Eva picked up one or two and pressed them languidly against her face while she asked the usual desultory questions about the house and their mutual friends.

"Pamela went away this morning," she announced; "she came out yesterday to bid me good-by."

Rachel went on with the roses. "She needs a change: she's fallen off since last winter; Pamela's always in motion, like a merry-go-round."

"She thinks you look perfectly wretched."

"How complimentary! It seems we must have been taking stock of each other without any illusions on either side."

"You do look badly, Rachel, so white! You aren't ill, are you?"

"Do I look any whiter than you do? Come, Eva, we can't expect to look blooming; we've been through so much, you and I."

"I was in hopes I didn't show it; I can see that you do."

Rachel looked at her over the roses, a little vexed. "Well, you do show it."

"Do I?"

Eva went over to the mirror and gazed at her own reflection. The grace and loveliness of outline, the exquisite color of hair and eyes remained, but her face--now that she looked at it in the full light of the open door--was almost transparently pale. She sighed.

"I've gone off worse than Pamela!"

"With more cause, I'm sure," said Rachel bitterly.

"Oh, I've suffered!" Eva threw her two roses back on the table with the petulant gesture of a child, "no one knows how I've suffered!"

Rachel picked up the discarded roses and put them carefully into the vase. "Have you never thought of me, Eva?"

"That's one of the things that make it so bad, Rachel; I've thought of it often. I know it must be dreadful for you, it must be!"

"I don't think that quite expresses it."

Rachel spoke dispassionately, but as she turned and stood facing Eva, the ravages of pain were apparent in the dark shadows under the eyes, the delicately hollowed cheeks, the tightening of the sensitive lips. It had not diminished her beauty, which was less dependent on color than Eva's, and the subtle charm of her expression was deepened and accentuated; Eva felt it.

"Rachel, I'm certain that he--that he'll learn to love you better than he ever loved me; I know he hates me now!"

"Can't you let him go out of your life altogether?"

Eva shook her head slowly. "How can I? Think of all it meant to us, to you and me, Rachel! Besides, I've suffered."

Rachel looked at her with forbearance; she was unchanged after all, and she was in need of pity and help like a child.

"You'll have to bear it, Eva; I have to."

"Then--" Eva dragged the words out--"you are wretched?"

"Why do you want to dwell on it? What good does it do? We've got to bear it."

Eva caught Rachel by both arms, holding her and looking at her. "Rachel, tell me, were you in love with Charter?"

Rachel recoiled, tried to drag herself away. "Why do you want to know? What right have you to ask?"

Eva clung to her. "I must know, I must!"

But Rachel made no response; instead she eluded her sister's grasp and went to the open door. She stood there, looking out past the young hemlocks and the maples, across a field of wheat, where a flock of crows skimming low over it showed black against the golden grain. Suddenly she hid her face in her hands, and her whole slender figure, shaken with emotion, quivered from head to foot.

"You needn't tell me," said Eva's voice behind her, "I know!"

There was a long silence. The hot, August sunshine filtered through the foliage of the maples and flecked the gravel path with gold; there was a dusky haze about the horizon, while the sky overhead was vividly blue. A faint, hot wind ran over the yellow grain in long, quivering waves and the vivid atmosphere seemed to pulsate and throb with heat.

"Rachel, I can't bear it, it's too much--and I did it--I did it all!"

Poor Rachel turned and went back to the table and began mechanically to arrange and rearrange the roses. "It's no use to talk of it, Eva; it's over and done with now!"

"No, it isn't, it can't be! You've got to face it and so have I--" Her voice broke with self-pity, but her grief for Rachel was quite as sincere. She looked at her in anguish--"You must hate me!"

"Do you think hate made me do it?"

"No, you were an angel, but you're human; you must hate me now!"

"No, I don't hate you, but--sometimes--I've been very angry with you, Eva. God knows I wish you'd never done it!"

"You've every right to hate me," the penitent lamented. "I--I lied about you to save myself."

Rachel could endure no more; she covered her ears with her hands. "Oh, Eva, please go away, let me be; I can't stand it!"

Eva looked at her a moment in silence and then ran out of the house. She went home blindly, not feeling the heat, and following the shade of the woodpath by instinct. Before her went the anguished face of Rachel; she knew at last that she had ruined her sister's life, she had lost all, and gained nothing. She had set out gayly on the Way of the Transgressors; with bleeding feet she was coming slowly and painfully back from the Way.

Astry was alone in the library when his wife entered it an hour later and he rose and put down his book. Something in her face warned him that a climax had been reached. Eva flung her big white hat on the table and sank into a chair.

"Take me away, please, to-morrow," she said. "I can't stand it here a moment longer."

Astry turned to the window and deliberately lit his pipe, but his hand shook as he struck the match. Was this an appeal for help? Was she coming back to him to save her?

"We'll go to-morrow," he said, and his voice was almost kind. His old anger against her had died down to ashes, he no longer felt the rage and jealousy of passion; the small figure in the chair and the bent, golden head looked almost childish, and he no longer hardened his heart.

XII

Belhaven came back from town rather late in the afternoon. He had ridden out on the front seat of an open car, talking in a desultory way to the gripman, chiefly because it seemed to afford him a perverse pleasure to disregard the large sign overhead which forbade conversation with the motorman. He was in a mood to enjoy breaking all rules in a puny effort to feel independent. For, if the truth be told, he had felt for months as if Astry had caught him and chained him up, much as the infidel Turks used to chain their Christian captives to the oars when their galleys went into battle.

Not even a long day at the club had relaxed his mood and he was far from feeling as gay and debonair as he had appeared to Eva when she had observed him through the leaves of the rhododendrons. He was deeply vexed with himself, ashamed of the part he had played, disgusted that he had sacrificed so much for a feeling that had proved to be so ephemeral, that he had given up his own freedom and even his self-respect to shield a woman who could toss him aside, at the first alarm, as easily as she would have discarded a soiled glove.

These reflections had become, of late, so habitual that Belhaven found it difficult to control his passionate resentment; like Eva herself, he was engrossed with the spectacle of his own misery, but he longed, more keenly than she did, to visit it on some one else. It added nothing to the joy of the situation either to be well aware of Astry's scorn. It did not require a very delicate perception to understand his attitude, and the bare politeness with which he treated Belhaven made the latter long to strangle him. It amazed him even now, in his moments of blind fury, that he had ever been afraid to encounter Astry's anger, for it seemed to him that he hungered exceedingly for an opportunity to avenge the contemptuous scorn of the other man's manner. To use the metaphor that came uppermost in Belhaven's own mind, he longed "to have it out with him," and the very impossibility of any outbreak that would lead to exposure made it all the more maddening. He could not speak now without betraying Eva, and it seemed to be his lot in life to swallow the polished insults of Eva's husband.

The heat of the August afternoon did not tend to decrease the heat of his mood, and Belhaven, having left the tram at the corner of the avenue, walked slowly along in the dust of the highway, using his stick to knock off the heads of the wayside flowers with a vicious stroke that was at least a small vent for an irritation that had reached the limits of his endurance.

It was anything but a pleasure, therefore, to see Astry himself approaching, seated alone in his smart little trap, driving one of the finest of his thoroughbreds, while Belhaven was fairly in the way to be covered with the dust from his wheels. But, in spite of the feeling which he inspired, Astry was not inclined to dash the gravel of the roadside upon his enemy; instead he drew up as he came within earshot, and leaning over, with his whip-hand resting on the edge of the seat, he called out, in a tone that was unconsciously that of superiority and indifference, a perfectly casual greeting.

"I say, going straight home?"

The tone, as well as the look that accompanied this remark, affected Belhaven almost as agreeably as a sudden attack by obnoxious insects.

"Where did you suppose I was going?" he retorted, his face flushing darkly with anger.

But Astry took no notice of this reply.

"Tell Rachel that we sail day after to-morrow. I've wired for staterooms on the 'Marianna.' Some one failed at the last moment and we got them."

Belhaven was sufficiently startled to answer more rationally. "Rather sudden, isn't it? I thought you were going to Lenox."

Astry resumed his erect position and gathered up the reins. "Eva simply went to pieces this morning," he said, meeting the other man's look with a direct cold stare, "collapsed and begged me to take her away at once."

"She looked perfectly well when I saw her last," Belhaven exclaimed, in open surprise.

"Well, she isn't now; the doctor's just ordered a sea voyage. Tell Rachel I said so."

"Extremely sorry, I'm sure," Belhaven stammered slightly, digging his stick in the dirt.

But Astry merely nodded and drove on, his beautiful horse, already restive at the delay, sweeping down hill and away at a rate of speed that would have to be moderated at the city limits.

His brother-in-law, feeling figuratively, if not actually, deluged in the dust from his wheels, walked slowly on, past the wide, Georgian gateway and into the grove of cedars that led more directly to his own house. As he went, his reflections were scarcely more agreeable than they had been before this encounter, and he experienced a feeling of bitterness at the thought that Eva always managed to escape. She had escaped at his expense on a previous occasion, and now, when the situation was so hideously unpleasant, she had only to affect illness to induce a doctor to order her to Europe. The convenience of this arrangement was too much like stratagem to escape Belhaven's suspicions and it marked one more lap in the long road that he had entered. He had learned, to his cost, that an affection that can be so easily diverted from its lawful channel is, after all, of too thin and desultory a quality to be worth the trouble of capture. It was evident that Eva cared no more for him than she had cared for her husband, but that she did care very devotedly for herself, that she would never willingly permit a lovely hair of her head to be injured, or suffer a single pang that she could escape. And for this he had wrecked his life!

These thoughts, bitter enough in the first blaze of disillusionment, brought him to the edge of the garden. Looking across it, he was suddenly aware of Rachel, although she was quite unconscious of his approach. The quaint flower garden, with its long rows of old box and its gravel paths, lay on the east side of the house and, at this hour of the day, was pleasantly shadowed and fragrant with flowers. Rachel had planted many of the old-fashioned flower-beds herself with that feverish energy that we display when it is necessary to find some vent for our misery, some commonplace occupation that will hide the suffering that it cannot heal.

At this moment she was kneeling in the gravel path beside a bed of heliotrope, clipping away dead leaves and blossoms and rearranging, with the aid of a trowel, some of the smaller plants. She was bareheaded and the charming oval of her face was delicately framed by the dusky rumple of her soft hair, while her white sleeves were folded back above the elbow and she wielded her trowel with dexterous fingers. The simplicity of her attitude and the earnestness with which she delved after a vagrant plant, that had intruded itself into the sacred precincts of her heliotrope, were as refreshing as a bouquet of homely flowers in the gorgeously barren splendor of Eva's drawing-room. It was just this thought, this impression of the clear contrast between the two sisters, that arrested Belhaven at the edge of the garden, and he stood, unobserved, watching Rachel as she lifted her stray deftly out of the earth and, making another hole for it in a bed of friendly petunias, set it down and pressed the soil back around the roots with the tender care that makes the lover of Nature respect the life of the humblest seedlings of the garden. He noticed, too, as Eva had noticed, the delicate hollows in the cheeks, the shadows under the eyes, and the tight line of the lips, and he fancied that there was a greater need here for care and a change of scene than existed in Eva's case. But most of all the homely occupation, the apparent absorption in an uninteresting task, surprised him; he had been accustomed all his life to women of fashion, to the idle butterflies of a society that drifted from Washington to Newport or Lenox, the Hot Springs or Florida, when it did not immediately take flight to London, Paris or the Riviera. To see a young and beautiful woman kneeling on the ground to delve in a flower-bed was something so new that it interested him. After all, he reflected, Rachel had kept her word; she was unconventional and she was always doing something that he did not expect. It was at this point in his reflections that she looked up and suspended her labors long enough to make a remark so conventional that he almost smiled.

"You found it hot coming out, didn't you?"

"No, I came on the front of the tram; no one felt the weather but an old colored woman who was carrying a watermelon."

Rachel went on patting the earth down with her trowel. "The melon will repay her for that. I thought Harter was to go for you in the motor."

"He missed me then." Belhaven had come down between the box borders and stood now, with his hands in his pockets, observing her plants. "I say, where did you get all that heliotrope? I didn't know there were so many shades."

"Didn't you? I bought the plants; you know it was too late to start them from seeds when--I came--" the instant of hesitation was perceptible and he noticed the delicate color that softly suffused the cheek that she tried to turn away from him.

He made no immediate reply and the soft pat of her trowel went on. The green shadows were lengthening across the long lawns and there was no other sound but the hum of a bumblebee who kept trying to intrude into the heliotrope.

At last he spoke with an effort. "I just met Astry; he sent a message to you."

She suspended her trowel without looking up. "Yes?"

"They sail for Europe on Saturday."

Rachel stopped short in her work. "Going to Europe on Saturday? Why, I can't understand--Eva was here this morning."

"Astry says she's broken down and the doctor's ordered a trip to Europe."

"She said nothing about it; I--I thought her quite well."

"So did I," said Belhaven dryly, "but it seems that the doctor was called in."

Rachel rose, gathering up her trowel and shears. "I must go and 'phone to her; I can't understand."

Belhaven moved about among the flower-beds, examining them much as an explorer would look at a newly discovered specimen. "I think you need a change yourself," he said at last; "you've had as much of it as--the rest of us."

"Oh, I can't go!"

Something in her tone made him turn sharply.

"You mean you can't go anywhere with me; that I'm too horrible to take along?"

She flung him an eloquent look. "Need we talk of such things at all?"

He frowned. "To tell you the truth I hate to feel that I'm a--a sort of a crocodile to you."

In spite of herself Rachel laughed hysterically. "I often think I must be almost that to you!" she replied.

He hesitated; a strange feeling had taken possession of him, the old landmarks were being swept away, he no longer belonged to the false and trivial world that had once been his only idea of life. He was shipwrecked, but across the sea he seemed to catch glimpses of a lovelier, saner existence,--"he who loses his life shall find it." More than once lately he had remembered the words though he could not remember where he had seen them. But he had not the courage to say any of these things to his wife.

"I wish you'd let me take you away; you'd be as free of my society as you are here,--more so, for we wouldn't be so observed by our friends,--and I think the change would be a blessing to you."

Rachel blushed slightly again. "Thank you," she said quite gently, "but--I just can't--not now. Later I'd like to go to Boston. I think you belong to clubs there, don't you? And I could get a chance to go out to Cambridge; my aunt is coming back and--and I'd like to go there to her."

He faced her without coming a step nearer, but with a new and quite humble air. "I wish you'd feel that I really want to please you," he said.

She looked down at the trowel in her hands and saw the marks of the earth on her fingers. "Thank you," she said, almost shyly, and went away from him across the lawn, and he saw her, a moment later, disappear into the house.

"She's a good sport," he said to himself, in the language that was most familiar to him, "a downright good sport, and I've been a beastly cad."

XIII

All this while Charter had been away. He had left Washington almost immediately and was taking his leave out of the sphere of its influence; he even dreaded the possibility of a summons to report at the War Department. Not that he was afraid to meet the problem and grapple with it, but he was determined to conquer it, and Rachel's very presence, under the altered conditions, had been too distracting a pain. If he was ever to see his way through it, he must see it without her. She had removed herself from his life and he had lived so long near the thought of her that her absence seemed to take the magic part of life away, to leave him a bare skeleton of meaningless days.

At first it was indeed impossible to believe in their final separation; there seemed to exist some indestructible tie between them, spiritual and therefore immortal, born of their community of soul, their absolute sympathy, their old happy comradeship. He could not quite believe that Rachel did not belong to him, that, instead, she belonged to Belhaven, and it was the necessity of recognizing that which forced him to the overt act of flight. He must feel that he was mistaken, that no infrangible bond existed between their spirits, that he was free as Rachel had shown that she felt herself to be free. He could not have explained this feeling, his folly as he called it, to himself, but he tried to urge on the process of dissolution, to slip out of the shackles, and the fact that he knew intuitively that Rachel was unhappy had not made the process of forgetting easier. To stand outside of her life, put out of it by her own act, and to witness her misery was like pouring gall into his wound; even his magnificent courage blenched before it.

For a nature like his absence does very little; life regained its normal aspect, but individually he felt lopsided. Rachel's disappearance from her place in his plans and his hopes left them toppling over, only half complete, and he was continually groping about for a solution of his problem, a way to regain the old, equable poise. He even wanted to go back to the Philippines, a desire which made his brother officers smile sardonically. They thought that John had always been a fool, and now he had apparently become besottedly fond of living in a hole with the sole object of relieving the troubles of a few common soldiers and helping the Filipinos.