Part 7

It was incredible to think that, at the very moment when such vital things as this had occupied him, life on this side of the globe had continued to flow on in its usual conventional course, and that Belhaven had found opportunity to supplant him in Rachel's heart. At this thought an unreasoning rage against Belhaven made him walk faster and faster along the path; once or twice he had to stop to break his way through the brush or to tear aside the wild tangle of a vine, and it gave him almost a sensation of joy to tear and to break. He would have liked to crush Belhaven, to take him up bodily and fling him out of the way. He tried to recall his recollections of the man, but he had never liked him, and now, at the crucial moment, he could not summon up a vision of him, as Saul conjured the figure of Samuel out of the pit. Of one thing, however, he was reasonably sure, and that was that Belhaven did not belong to the class that he recognized as one that was made up of men of honor. With a very exalted conception of those qualifications that constitute "an officer and a gentleman," Charter had a peculiar scorn for the men who did not belong to that type, and nothing was more intolerable than the fact of Rachel's marriage to a creature that he would have been likely to call, had he been asked to qualify him, "that fellow Belhaven!" The fact that women rarely understand those qualities in men that are most obvious to their own sex did not alleviate Charter's anger and disgust. Rachel married to Belhaven was an object to move the gods to pity.

It was at this point in his confused misery that he recalled her anguish; after all, it might not have been altogether pity for him. He reddened at that thought, but, perhaps, she was already aware of her mistake, already plunged into the misery that now apparently was the common result of marriage and made divorce appear as a boon to those unfortunates who desire another opportunity, like the man in the nursery rhyme who jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes, only to jump into another bush and scratch them in again. Yet the thought that she was unhappy did not alleviate his misery or offer any solution of her extraordinary marriage, for her unhappiness must be independent of him since she had not considered him of sufficient importance to influence her decision. If she was disappointed in her choice it must be because she had suffered the common awakening after the event, rather than that she was grieved by any recollection of his affection, or regret that she had not awaited his return. The fact that her outbreak of grief was synchronous with his declaration was not significant in the light of previous events, for she must have seen that he loved her. With such marvelous obtuseness as this Charter failed to realize that his silence in the Philippines would have convinced almost any woman of his utter indifference, and that Rachel had had every right to argue that he wanted her to forget him.

Instead he reviewed the whole course of their acquaintance and failed to find any spot where he had not given evidence of her importance in his life, and he could not imagine why it was necessary to put into formal words a fact so vital and so obvious. He had lost her; that was all there was to be said, and he must take his medicine like a man, and the best thing to do was to get out of it and forget it.

These reflections had brought him to the edge of a stream and, as he recovered his mental poise, he was surprised to find that it was a part of Rock Creek and that he had, therefore, wandered many miles out of his way. He stood still for a moment, allowing his eyes to follow the lovely rivulet with a crowding recollection of its beauties that had first appealed to his childish eyes, then to his boyish fancy, and now gave him almost a sensation of comfort. It happened to be one of those charming spots where the creek, so often tranquil and limpid, was hurrying over stones and sending up little clouds of spray as the miniature waves dashed through the narrow gorge between the rocks, where the graceful boughs of a weeping birch drooped far down over it and dropped their leaves into the stream. The gentle murmur of the swift flowing current, the soft rustle of the abundant foliage overhead, and the sweet, shrill cry of a catbird, were the only sounds he heard. There was something uplifting in the solitude, in the natural beauty of the scene, and, for the first time since the shock of Rachel's announcement, Charter recalled himself to a more normal mood.

This was still with him, clothing familiar objects with the grim outlines of reality, when an hour later he rode into the city on the trolley and made his way at last to the Van Citters' house on Dupont Circle, where he had been invited to make his home during his stay in Washington. It was now late afternoon, or rather early evening; the familiar drawing-room was cool and dim and he found Pamela yawning over the latest novel.

She greeted him with a fusilade of reproaches; where had he been, what had he been doing? They had been expecting him for hours; Paul had gone out a second time to inquire at the War Department; a dozen people had been to see him and gone away disappointed. Charter found it difficult to answer the questions, and even more difficult to keep his _sang-froid_ under his cousin's searching gaze, for Pamela had detected his heightened color and gave him swift, birdlike glances that were plainly suspicious.

"You must remember that I had a number of things to see to," he parried, "besides, I went to the White House."

"Don't tell me that took all day--unless you unearthed a Filipino conspiracy."

"Come, Pamela, give me a cup of tea; I know I've been ungrateful not to report sooner, for it's awfully good of you and Paul to ask me here, but I'll try to make the most of your hospitality the few days that I'm likely to be in the city."

She gazed at him over the teacup, the sugar tongs suspended in mid-air. "You don't mean to say that you're ordered off again?"

He shook his head, smiling faintly at her amazed attitude. "No, but you mustn't expect me to spend my time loafing around Washington; you know I was never intended for a carpet-knight."

"I wonder if you know that there was a report that you were engaged to Mrs. Prynne?"

His blank amazement amply repaid her for this random shot. "What nonsense! She must have been immensely annoyed."

Pamela smiled. "She wasn't. You haven't an idea, I suppose, that you're something of a lion--with your Philippine record and the medal they talk of giving you for bravery."

"Oh, rot!"

"How eloquent! It got all about, the report, I mean. Eva Astry asked about it the day Rachel's engagement to Belhaven was announced."

"I didn't know until to-day that--that Miss Leven was married." Charter flattered himself that his tone was casual and he busied himself with Pamela's sugar-bowl.

She eyed him shrewdly. "It was almost as sudden as a stroke of apoplexy," she remarked, sipping her tea.

"What?"

"Rachel's marriage; what else did you suppose?"

"I don't see why it should have been sudden. I seem to remember that Mrs. Astry's was--"

"A sort of nine days' wonder? Yes, but Rachel's was more amazing in a different way."

He considered several dominoes of sugar and selected a small half. "In what way?" he risked, aware that his cousin was more than a match for him in the conversational arena.

"Her engagement was announced on Monday and she was married on Thursday."

"That doesn't show that the engagement had only existed since Monday."

"But it does show just that. Up to Monday Belhaven had been making violent love to Eva Astry; everybody knew it."

Charter's face flushed darkly. "I hope you don't repeat any such malicious gossip as that, Pamela!"

"It isn't gossip; ask Paul. We were out there for a week-end; so was Massena, the Italian Chargé d'Affaires, and he was perfectly amazed. Belhaven was simply devoted to Eva, and then to our surprise Astry announced his engagement to Rachel."

"All this only goes to show that he needed a thrashing."

"Belhaven isn't the sort to get it. You know he's rather charming, but I'm quite sure that Rachel never cared for him."

"I can see no other reason for her accepting him."

"Nor I, yet I've heard things--" Pamela stopped; after all Charter was the last one to hear all this gossip; he would loathe it.

But he pressed the point. "What things?"

"Well, for one thing, they say Astry made the match to get him out of Eva's way."

"I should say it was putting him in it; it would have been easier to horsewhip him and be done with it."

Pamela sighed. "Your methods are so cryptic. I don't understand the thing anyway, but--" she weighed her words--"I know Rachel's wretched."

He rose and walked up and down the room; she was giving form and shape to the impression that had been growing in his own slower mind as he recalled Rachel's evident distress.

Pamela made matters worse, for looking up at his tall figure as it approached her and seeing the trouble in his face, she gave way to her feelings.

"Oh, John, I wish you'd been here!"

He halted, amazed. "Why?"

"Because--because I always thought Rachel liked you, and you might have prevented it somehow! I felt that she was--well, just sacrificed for Eva."

"I can't imagine why she should have been," he said hoarsely. "Good God, Pamela, don't make it any worse!"

Pamela, who had been using a plummet-line to sound the depths, was filled with awe at her discovery.

"I don't believe she ever cared a rap for Belhaven!" she climaxed.

"I don't see that that makes it any better."

"It doesn't make it any worse, and--"

"Perhaps not." Charter's face was very white. "Pamela, suppose we talk of something else!"

X

The slow weeks that had dragged by had not been happy ones for Eva Astry. Her first feeling of relief that it was done, the ordeal of Rachel's marriage and the risk that Astry would discover the motive that had prompted it, was over, and she had long ago begun to feel that she had purchased her immunity at too heavy a price. The cost of it, indeed, was chiefly revealed to her by Belhaven's attitude. The cruelty of his position began to appear to her in various aspects and she saw that her betrayal of him had cost her the chief place in his regard. She began to be vaguely aware that she had given him the right to hate her, that the sort of love she had inspired was not of a fiber to resist such an attack, that it was not even equal to the demands of common self-sacrifice. Unconsciously, too, she began to compare his attitude at the time of Astry's discovery with that of Rachel. Her sister had sacrificed herself to save her from the shadow of dishonor, while her lover had not even had the manhood to face her husband. No light in which she could view it made the situation seem less ugly, and at no time did Belhaven figure as a hero. Yet her affection for him had been strong enough to torture her with jealousy when she saw him stand up to be married to her sister. Although she knew that Rachel probably despised him, her own nature--soft and pleasure-loving--was not one to readily yield an admirer to another woman. It had been that reluctance to part with one that had made her recall Belhaven after her marriage with Astry. She could have married him in the first place but she had greatly preferred the Astry millions. It had seemed to her that all the accessories and comforts of wealth were necessary to her, that her beauty, always of a rare and lovely type, demanded the setting that Astry offered her.

She had always affected a mode of living and a class of society which had drained every purse in the family to keep her afloat, even as a young girl, and she had always intended to achieve a dazzling marriage. Astry, while failing to offer her a title and a place in Europe which she had coveted, did present the next thing to it,--the possession of a great fortune and the power to purchase the place in society which she had failed to attain through her mere beauty and charm. If she could not be a princess in a small European State, like one of her cousins, she could be the wife of an American millionaire, and she did not hesitate long over her decision. Belhaven, whose fortune was much smaller and who had squandered a large part of his income, was no match for Astry, and Eva's marriage to the latter had been celebrated with all the pomp that the Leven family, reinforced by the maternal relatives, the Sterrits, had been able to achieve. The paying for it, indeed, had driven poor Aunt Drusilla Leven into the retirement of an obscure Italian town where, as she frankly wrote her friends, washing was fabulously cheap. Profiting by this financial sacrifice, Eva had made the great match of the season and had never bestowed a thought upon poor Aunt Drusilla in her exile, except to be thankful that she did not have to invite that "old frump" to her dinners. But, after the first few months, even the society of a frump would have been more desirable than the continued criticism of a watchful, jealous, and uncongenial husband.

After his first discovery that Eva was not, as he had supposed, a beautiful and delicate replica of Rachel, Astry had been frankly disappointed. They had very little in common and he could not remain long unaware that, if Eva did not love money for its own sake, she cared greatly for the luxuries and privileges that money could obtain for her. Finding himself, therefore, an object of indifference to his young and beautiful wife, he met her with a like coldness and reserve, so that Eva was soon, like a naughty child, shut out of the inner circle of her husband's confidence. It was at this point, when they were both to blame, that she began to encourage Belhaven's renewed devotion. The result had been that Astry, no longer trusting her, had taken alarm, and there had been many quarrels, at first petty and then so serious that they led up to the moment when she had feared for Belhaven's life. Then had come the climax and her falsehood about her sister, Rachel's sacrifice to protect her, and the marriage.

Now that it was over and she was left to view the matter from every standpoint, in the cold light of common sense, she was filled with horror at the tangle she had made; and the continued necessity of acting it all out, of keeping up the tissue of falsehood that she had woven, was wearing her out. Her beauty, of that delicate and ephemeral type that is dependent on color and light, was visibly diminished. Mrs. Van Citters, happening in upon her at the unfortunate hour of noon, when all the defects are most fiercely revealed, thought that she looked absolutely pinched and white, and that only her peculiarly lovely hair and eyes saved her from being what Aunt Drusilla Leven would have called "real peaked."

Pamela, who had been carefully instructed by her husband to attend strictly to her own business, found it difficult to refrain from remarking upon Eva's looks, but she began the conversation with the determination to be very guarded and to only skim the surface.

"Are you really going to stay all summer?" she inquired casually, as she folded her parasol and tossed it with her gloves on a convenient chair in the breakfast-room, where Eva had just been taking coffee and toast. "Paul and I get off to-morrow. Mother took the baby last week; it's abominable in the city now."

"Well, you see we're not in the city," Eva drawled, "and Johnstone's been interested in the tariff. Besides, I suppose we'll go to Florida this winter and--" she shrugged her shoulders--"what's the use?"

Pamela stretched out an absent-minded hand and, picking up a strawberry from the cut-glass dish on the table, dangled it by its green stem. "I suppose you like to be here on Rachel's account; she isn't going away, is she?"

"I'm sure I don't know; I suggested the pyramids of Egypt."

Pamela clung to the surface. "There are such horrible cockroaches on those Nile boats," she observed.

"I can't imagine why people here have made such a fuss about Rachel's marriage," said Eva fretfully. "One would think a bomb had exploded; they seem to catalogue it with murder and sudden death."

Pamela looked vacant. "Do they? You know I've been simply taken up with trying to keep John Charter with us; Paul and I offered all sorts of inducements but he wouldn't stay."

"Good gracious, hadn't you Mrs. Prynne? I thought they were engaged."

"Nonsense! Imagine John marrying a paper doll! I don't know who started that report unless it was Mrs. Billop."

"She's equal to anything, but I can't see her object unless she thought Mrs. Prynne had designs on Sidney."

"Poor Lottie! I think even she'd draw the line there! I was perfectly amazed when Paul told me about that supposed engagement, the day that Rachel's was announced, but I fancy that was really what put it into Mrs. Billop's head."

"I don't see why."

"Why of course you know John was in love with Rachel?"

Eva, who had been only languidly attentive, turned quickly. "What?"

Pamela reddened. "Didn't you know it? Didn't Rachel ever tell you about it?"

"Not a word."

Her visitor felt deliciously guilty; she had not intended to transgress her husband's injunctions, but, as long as she had inadvertently let the cat out of the bag, there was a wicked satisfaction in seeing Eva's amazed incredulity.

"Well, of course I knew it," she said sweetly, nibbling her strawberry, "it was perfectly easy to see; John's so thoroughly masculine that he can't hide it; you know men are just like ostriches; they bury their heads in the sand and think they're completely hidden."

"If it was so obvious, it seems rather strange, doesn't it, that I never heard anything about it?"

"Well, I suppose of course Rachel didn't reciprocate and so you didn't notice."

Eva deliberated; she began to suspect that Pamela was watching her. "No, Rachel didn't reciprocate," she risked at last; "that's certain, isn't it?"

"Yes, if we take it for granted that we always marry the people we care for."

Eva blushed,--a blush that spread painfully from brow to chin and throat,--her eyelids quivered and drooped from Pamela's gaze, she clasped her hands tightly under the table.

"Don't you think Rachel's too superbly honest to do anything else?" she asked.

"I think Rachel's perfectly lovely and the dearest girl in the world, but she looks--oh, Eva, can't you see how wretched she looks?"

"No, I haven't seen it, and she can't be; I won't let her be!" Eva's face quivered.

"There, now I've made you unhappy!" lamented Pamela, sincerely distressed and contrite. "I shouldn't have said it, but Rachel does look so pale, so worn, and you know I do love her."

"You can't love her as I do; she's the dearest thing in the world! She isn't unhappy: I won't believe it; and this is all nonsense about Charter. You dreamed it, Pamela!"

"Oh, I only said that he was in love with her!"

"You implied the rest of it!"

"I'm such a romantic idiot; Paul says so."

"I hope people aren't talking about it."

"Oh, no, no!"

Eva sank back in her chair and pressed her hands over her eyes for an instant. "Why in the world did you want to frighten me so, Pamela?"

"But I didn't. I only went on talking about Rachel when I should have held my tongue; I didn't mean to worry you, but she does look wretchedly unwell and--"

"Who does?" said Astry, who had entered as she spoke.

Pamela, in some discomfiture, cast an appealing glance at Eva, but Eva offered no explanations and she was compelled to rise to the emergency alone.

"We were talking of Rachel; I think she's feeling the heat," she said feebly, as Astry shook hands with her.

"Nonsense, it's been quite cool out here and Rachel's never complained of the weather. Belhaven just told me that she'd refused to go to Newport."

Pamela looked about for her parasol and gloves; she knew that John Charter had gone to Newport to visit an aunt.

"I think it's perfectly abominable myself,--I mean the weather," she said desperately; "we're going to-morrow."

Astry moved easily over to the mantelpiece and began to arrange one of his Chinese gods. "There'll be an exodus now," he remarked, "since Congress adjourned yesterday. Massachusetts Avenue is boarded up already; only the unfashionable will dare to stay in the face of those shutters. I expect Eva to go to Lenox."

"I'm not going anywhere," she replied quickly; "this is my summer off. Don't go, Pamela; stay and we'll go over to see Rachel."

But Pamela felt guilty; if she had only skimmed the surface, she had certainly skimmed it very thoroughly. "I can't stay; think of the things I've got to do before half-past seven to-morrow morning."

"Nothing half as important as staying to see your friends," said Astry.

But Pamela would not be diverted from her flight, though she stood on the terrace a moment while she raised her pink parasol and whirled it slowly around before balancing it over her head.

"If I had a view like this I'd stay too!" she declared.

Eva, standing in the door, looked out over the magnificent prospect with languid eyes.

"Oh, you'd get tired of it! I sometimes want to paint the dome sky-blue--as the monkey did his tail."

Disregarding Eva's irreverence, Pamela waved again from the lower terrace, and then they watched her go down the long road until the fluttering pink parasol diminished to the size of a new blown peony.

Astry, who had escorted her to the gate, came back slowly and his wife noticed for the first time that his expression was unusually grave. In the broad sunshine she saw the crow's-feet about his eyes and the streak of gray in his hair; he was not handsome, but distinguished, and he had that indefinable air that is inalienable from a man of his birth and breeding. As he approached, he took a letter out of his pocket and Eva's fascinated eyes, following his movements, discovered that the envelope was small and odiously blue. Her hand tightened its hold on the white pilaster beside the door and she stood quite still, though a thrill of panic shot through her with an almost irresistible impulse of flight. He came up and proffered the letter gravely.

"I think this is yours."

She took it mechanically, coloring again almost as painfully as she had under Pamela's observation.

"Craggs brought it up with my mail this morning, I hope by mistake, but there have been others like it and it seemed worth while to tell you."

"I don't see why you keep that man!"

"My dear Eva, the excellent Craggs is invaluable; he knows how to press my trousers and hold his tongue."

"He creeps about the house like a spy."

Astry turned quickly. "I hope you don't think I employ servants to watch my wife."

She bit her lip, sudden tears in her eyes.

Her husband's face changed sharply. "At least I deserve fair treatment; I'm incapable of sinking to such a depth as that."

"You know I dislike the man."

"That's neither here nor there; the question's more vital. Did you suppose because of what I said to you that night, the night of Rachel's engagement," his voice halted an instant and then went on, "that I had set Craggs to watch you?"

Eva leaned heavily against the door with the little blue note crushed in her hand. "There was nothing else for me to think," she said in a low voice.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Astry, "is that what you think of your husband?"

He turned away and was half-way across the terrace when a new thought arrested him and he came back.

"I spoke of that note just now to warn you. As I said, several have been put with my mail, though plainly addressed to you. I have reason to think that the servants do it purposely. I can assure you that I have no wish to see them."