CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH JOHN SMITH UNBURDENS HIS CONSCIENCE

Rachel's mouth was now perfectly formed to express her emotions, as it had not been in early youth. There had come a little added fulness in the curves of the upper lip, a little added sensitiveness in the line of the lower. With its well-defined corners, melting, when she smiled, into a pair of will-o'-the-wisp dimples, this mouth of hers was worthy to form the lure for many an exciting escapade on the part of her lovers. In her intelligent, sometimes perfervid, often gloomy face, it suggested a series of grace-notes introduced wilfully into a bit of serious music. It destroyed the general harmony of her face and increased its fascination. On the morning following the primitive race across the sands, the grace-notes dominated the more serious expression of her personality.

In the depths of her there was plenty of sadness, but the joy which is inseparable from any confession of love, even the love which battles against insurmountable barriers, glowed through her and informed every fibre of her with sparkling animation. She laughed frequently for no apparent cause.

The wide lawns about Gray Arches still glistened with dew and birds sang in the branches of the trees. The notes mingled with the plash of the waves on the distant beach, and with that infinite murmur of sounds that came out of the sunshine, out of the grass, out of the shimmering distances of that smiling country, checkered in light open fields and in dark variegated woods. All around, everywhere, was vivid palpitating life.

Rachel with a huge pair of shears that flashed in the sun, was snipping dead roses from a bush of the late-blooming variety. Brown and withered, they fell on the gravel path--mere ghosts of flowers; and, at every onslaught, all the green leaves of the bush shook and all its fresh blossoms trembled and poured forth an intoxicating perfume as if to thank her for the service. Beside her, seated on the grass, André was making the flowers they had gathered into a bouquet. He held in his brown hands nasturtiums, gladioli and dahlias. Occasionally, unable to resist an unusually perfect one, Rachel flung him still another rose.

"There," she said, "that's enough; if I cut any more, I shan't be able to carry them, and the hospital nurse may not let John Smith have them anyway."

A thorn had scratched her wrist, and she lifted the hand to her lips.

André regarded her with a vigorous gaze. "Do you know," he said at last, "you look like a rose yourself."

She threw him the shadow of a glance from between half-closed lids. In her morning dress of delicate pink muslin, beneath a shade hat with a flapping brim, she did look like a rose; and a wide collar, turned up over her throat to protect it from the sun, heightened the illusion. Against its colour her cheeks had taken a richer tinge and her eyes, between their curling lashes, were unusually deep and liquid. She was amazingly beautiful with a superadded beauty, with that fleeting and ethereal grace, which, independent of features or contours, touches any woman when she realizes that she is loved where she herself loves. Now, as if anxious to divert André's too curious gaze, she began speaking rapidly and almost at random. The air and the sunlight appeared to intoxicate her.

"Have you ever noticed, André," she cried, "the boastfulness of Nature when she has anything worth displaying? She is for all the world like a woman who takes particular pride in showing off her children, like that Mrs. Polestacker we both knew who was always calling attention to her Katie's teeth and curls. Take that rose bush," she continued, "it fairly swaggers with pride now that it is covered so finely with roses, but once the flowering season is over, and see how meekly it will obliterate itself; it will retire into the background like an old maid at a dance. For who notices the larkspur when its time is past, or the raspberry bush when it is no longer hung with its little crimson lamps? It is the energy that a growing, living thing puts forth that it would flaunt before us, saying, 'See here, _I_ produced these flowers--these berries!' and it is that energy which attracts us--the immense energy of being." And throwing back her head, her neck on the strain, her arms falling at her sides, with the shears in one hand, she gazed into the deep blue of the sky which, bending down over the earth, was like an inverted sea.

Unconsciously, as in the old days, she spoke her thoughts aloud to André. He did not reply; if truth were told, he was in the dark as to her meaning, but that only increased the enchantment.

André was Rachel's senior by six years, but owing to his mind in which the impressions were deep but few, he still looked a youth, almost a child. His beauty, agile, simple, unsettled, with admirable disposition of colouring, was that of a child. High on the cheek bones, under the eyes, the blood came and went with his emotions, and his arched lips under his tiny moustache stood a little open, which gave him an innocent expression. He was difficult to resist, just as a child is difficult to resist. Rachel's feeling for him was almost maternal; but for all that, her comprehension of him failed at one point.

When he had first received word of her marriage, André had cast himself on the ground, and the earth had seemed to respond with deep tremours to his grief. He had told himself that he would never see her again. As for her husband, he felt that it would be impossible for him to ever meet Simon Hart without yielding to the desire to fly straight at his throat. Yet, he had met him and experienced no emotion of the sort. Something told him that Rachel was not in love with her husband. Still there was that in her eyes which bewildered him. Now with his hands clasped behind his head and his back against a tree, he regarded her with a devotion, a tenderness, a desperation of which none but a pure and youthful soul is capable, and the old agony began to stir again in the depths of his breast.

Ceasing from her ecstatic contemplation of the sky, Rachel looked over at the gardener's cottage. As she did so, all her outlines went to deeper softness. André, sensitively, felt the thrill through her of some ineffable emotion.

"What are you thinking about, Rachel?" he demanded.

She started and the colour mounted.

"Thinking?"

"Yes; just now, when you turned and looked over yonder?"

"Oh! ... I was thinking of Mr. St. Ives's improvement of the organ. It's really extraordinary what he has accomplished, André; and by such simple means. You must see it. He's carrying on his work over there in the gardener's cottage. And I was comparing his invention and his natural pride in it, to the rose bush and its roses, I suppose."

"St. Ives?" André was sitting upright and rigid. "Is he--is he the one who came to Pemoquod that time?"

"Yes. My husband formed a company to represent his inventions. I always felt Mr. St. Ives had great promise," she went on as frankly as she could, "and I persuaded Simon to get up a company. Now he's glad he did."

André was wretched. "And he's here?

"Yes; for a few weeks. Mr. Hart was anxious that the work shouldn't be delayed, so he came here while the shop is being altered."

André said no more. And Rachel exerted herself to dispel his gloom. So contagious was the vitality of her mood that he apparently forgot the incident.

Presently, bidding him gather up the withered roses that littered the path, and taking into her own hands the bunch of fresh blossoms, she led the way to the house and André followed. His old dream, in all its simplicity, once more possessed his heart.

When Rachel arrived at the hospital, John Smith was expecting her. In a clean shirt with his grey hair neatly brushed and his gaunt frame arranged under a spotless sheet, he was eagerly awaiting her. The floor nurse warned her that the interview must be a brief one; the patient could not live more than a day or two.

John Smith's story was substantially what Rachel had surmised it would be, and as he told it with frequent interruptions when the cough racked him, she had difficulty in fixing her thoughts upon him. The vital moment of her own life called her, and try as she would, she could give but a divided attention.

"The fact is, I ain't done just the straight thing by you," he rambled on, "and I'm glad you're as well fixed as you are. It ain't quite the same as if I'd found you in want. However, I've suffered for putting this time off; I've been hectored in ways you wouldn't dream of. Needn't tell me the dead don't take their revenge if you pass over their wishes! I don't mean that they come back or anything of that sort," he interrupted himself, in response to a questioning glance, "but they stick in your mind somehow--you can't forgit how they looked when they told you to do such and such a thing, and you don't do it. But I'll say this much for myself, I meant as much as could be to give you that money when I reached America seventeen years ago, a month or two after your father's death; but I had a hard run of luck, and I used some of it, and then I used more, until it was about all gone. And it was only when I got this cough about three years and a half ago, that I began to think a good bit about Thomas Beckett. Funny too, so long after his death; but I'd see him when I was droppin' off to sleep, and he'd look at me so! But your father didn't do the straight thing either," he broke off with sudden resentment, "for he left your mother, as far as I could gather, to shift for herself.

"As I was saying, perhaps it was my low state of health, but he gave me no rest; seemed as if he was tryin' to say that you needed that money. And finally the thought come to me that perhaps I ought to give your mother at least part of what was owin' her; so I wrote to Old Harbour and you know the rest. You see," he concluded, "when I learned that your mother had been dead more'n twenty years, I was afraid to make myself known. I was fearful some relative or friend'd get after me on your part. So I sent seven hundred dollars along, it was all I'd saved, to that friend of yours whose name the postmaster gave me, and then I left. I went away from the town in Massachusetts where I'd been workin' and I found a job as foreman in a mill in another town. And I thought everything'd be all right then; but do you know, I still dreamed of your father, and the upshot was, that I went to a priest and made a clean breast of the story; and as he told me to do, I worked hard and paid it all up. Yes, I've paid it all up," he finished, "for the balance, the eight hundred dollars that was comin' to you, I deposited in your name in the bank at Old Harbour;" and fumbling in the pocket of his shirt, he handed her a sealed envelope. "There's the deposit slip, and the whole story written out ready to be mailed to you in case I didn't manage to see you," he explained.

His face had grown brighter, had regained a faint expression of health, as the load that had long oppressed his conscience was lifted.

Rachel left the invalid holding admiringly in his bony fingers her bunch of flowers. She reached the door of the ward; then, with a sudden eagerness, she retraced her steps.

"Was my Father a happy man?" she asked, "or did he seem to regret all along what he had done in leaving my Mother?" She waited his answer with bated breath.

But relief was manifest all over John Smith. Had he not triumphantly passed through the ordeal of his confession? At her question his eyes glistened; he laughed a weak, irresponsible laugh.

"No, I don't think he worried much about it till he come to die. It was far-away questions that touched your father more; he was always reading and sometimes he'd argue and git angry. But barring those times, he was pretty jolly as far as I can recollect. It was only when he seen the last port just ahead, that same as me, he seemed to think things over. But, I've done the right thing, and I'm going to git well," he proclaimed.

The same nurse she had seen on coming, met her in the corridor. Rachel directed her to have John Smith moved to a private room with special attendant; then she left the hospital.

For some reason she was relieved that her father had not regretted his course sooner, that he had remained, almost to the last, a true vagabond. As to her one-time hot defence of him on the score of his loyalty to her mother, the point had lost significance.

All that was mettlesome in her character was aroused. Having promised Emil to go to the marble works, she was going there, in the face of fancied influences from the past; in the face, too, of the vigorous warning of her own conscience. The coming interview was absolutely necessary that she might, once and for all, make clear to him her position. In this juggling with conscience most women are adept. Rachel played the game so well as to be almost self-deceived. However, as the moment of the meeting drew near, she grew faint and a tide of irrepressible joy mingled with and almost dominated her misery. When she quitted the hospital she was pale with determination, like a soldier before battle, but her eyes, overflowing with light, were the eyes of a woman in love. Her mind was too full of its own matter to allow her to care about anything else. Does not the surge of passion in one's own breast drown the echo of death and despair from another's heart?

She stopped at one of the large shops where delicacies were for sale, and ordered a basket of fruits and jellies sent to John Smith; then, hailing a cab, she drove to the marble works, which lay in the direction of the Bronx on the outskirts of the city.