Part 9

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.

The common soldiers and the Filipinos were fervent in their desire to have John back but he did not get there. In fact he found himself suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, appreciated. The War Department was not disposed to let him hide his light under a bushel. For some unheard of reason they began to realize his value. He did not get his orders to the Philippine Islands, but he got a medal from Congress for his distinguished courage at Caloocan, a matter that seemed to have been just remembered. If he had been willing, young Captain Charter would have been quite a hero; as it was, he had to spend most of his time, while visiting his aunt at Newport, dodging social lion-tamers, and he began to dread the sight of a motor filled with ladies in fashionable attire making its way to the front door. If he had the habit of command he had not the attendant love of publicity, and he hated to move continually before the public eye, garbed, as it were, in the pomp and panoply of war. He went on obscure fishing trips with old seafaring characters; he went tramping in the woods and fields; but he could not escape the incense of popular admiration as a hero, nor the disturbing ripple of Pamela's letters. For Pamela kept him informed; from her he heard that Eva had broken down in the heat of August and the Astrys had consequently taken a flying trip to Europe. About Rachel his fair correspondent was more discreet, but she let drop a hint now and then, and he knew when, at the approach of fall, the Belhavens went away together for a brief visit in Boston, Aunt Drusilla Leven having returned from her exile to her little house in Cambridge, where she was likely, so Pamela wrote, to have to live on salt cod and kippered herring until the first of January, when her dividends would have at last arrived. "You know," Pamela added, "that college towns are fearfully expensive and even top round is out of sight up there!"

The knowledge that the Belhavens were probably still absent was a more material comfort to Charter when, in December, he got the dreaded order to report in Washington for staff duty at the White House. At the same time Paul Van Citters wrote to invite him to spend Christmas with them, and casually mentioned that the Belhavens had been away since Thanksgiving, though the Astrys were home again. Pamela had carefully instructed her husband in this portion of his letter and it had the desired effect. John was lonely, he dreaded Christmas, and he had no objections to going to the Van Citterses, as long as he had to be in Washington by the first of the year. Paul talked of going south for a shooting trip; John did not care a pin about it, but he did not want to shoot himself and sometimes he felt dangerously like it. For there are strenuous moments when even the most rational human being lets go of the normal facts of life and feels those destructive forces at work within himself, tearing away his resolutions, letting slip the material bonds that make existence possible, turning back the wheels of life, loosening the noose that holds the body and the will together. John was tired of the struggle; he had put Rachel out of his life, but, as yet, he had not replaced her. To escape the bonds of such a passion it is a vital necessity, they say, to supplant it, and John's great simplicity of soul had not yet reached this easy solution. To him it would not have been easy, chiefly because there were so few like Rachel, so few had her sweetness and her subtle charm.

The day that he arrived in Washington he was received only by Mr. Van Citters' mother, as it happened that Paul had been called to Baltimore to see a sick friend and Pamela was out at a formal luncheon at the White House. These engagements were sufficiently pressing to excuse their temporary failure to welcome their cousin, and, after lunching with his elderly hostess, Charter found time to go out for a stroll before Pamela was likely to return. He had intended to avoid the neighborhood of the Belhaven house, but they were absent, so he found it easy to excuse himself for turning his steps in that direction. The road outside of the city was more inviting, the tempter argued insidiously, and he was less likely to meet chance acquaintances; besides, it was unnecessary to go within a bow-shot of the dangerous neighborhood.

It was a crisp December day; there was snow behind the hedgerows and here and there he saw a snowbird or a woodpecker. The growing familiarity of the scene afforded him a curious kind of comfort. He was only vaguely aware of those mysterious forces that were continually turning him in one direction, and he thought that he had conquered himself, that he could risk even the sights and sounds that recalled most vividly that supreme moment when his universe had toppled over like a house of cards. Moreover, the city had grown beyond his recollection during his absence in the Philippines, and a new block of houses had so entirely altered the appearance of the neighborhood, and he had been so occupied with his own thoughts, that he was surprised to find himself at a turn of the road where he must pass the lower driveway between the entrance to Astry's estate and the old Belhaven place. But, after a moment's hesitation, he went on and, glancing down at the low rambling house, saw the smoke ascending from the chimneys and a large, gray motor standing in the stable-yard. Then he suddenly remembered that Paul's statement that they had been away since Thanksgiving did not contain a guarantee that they would remain away until spring. Sharply aware of the shock that he had received, John called himself a fool to have risked meeting Rachel so soon again. Yet the thought of it gave him a pleasure nearly as poignant as pain. She arose before his mind's eye with the clearness of a perfect revelation; he seemed to see at once the graceful erectness of her slight figure, the delicate face, the charming eyes, the mouth that had both tenderness and strength.

John averted his eyes from the house, for that made Belhaven certain; it clothed the situation in flesh and drove it to his heart. But the long grove of cedars, their pungent odor, the sweep of the frozen field, the bare poles of the wood through which he caught here and there the glorious leap and flash of the sun on the snowy slopes beyond, these things reminded him of Rachel. They made the thought of her so vivid, so persuasive, that it seemed natural to see her in the flesh as he turned the last lap of the Astry meadows. She was alone; she had been to the house and was going home by a short cut through the woods. She wore no hat and the wind had ruffled her brown hair until it curled in little vagrant tendrils about her temples. A long, gray coat covered her to her feet and she had thrust her hands into the pockets, boy fashion, and was walking fast. A swift change passed over her face as she caught sight of him, a change that deepened the soft color in her cheeks and darkened her eyes.

John met her gravely, almost bluntly. "I didn't know until a moment ago that you were here!"

"Or you wouldn't have come?"

"Or I wouldn't have come."

"Can't we let it all go, John?" she asked, a little, pitiful quiver about her lips. "I hate to lose your friendship; it--has always been dear to me."

He stood still, looking down at the frosted grass. "I thought it was dear to me until I lost you!"

"It's cruel that there can be no middle course; must it be love or hate?"

"It must always be love, I think--I've tried to kill it, Rachel."

"It will die after a while a natural death. We can't talk about it; John, haven't I done enough to kill it? I've married some one else."

"As if I didn't know it!"

"I'm trying to help you kill it!"

"You can't," bitterly, "every word you say makes it more alive. I've no right to stand here and look at you; I ought to remember the Mosaic law about my neighbor's wife. I've always despised men who made love to married women, and now I'm one of them; how you must hate me, Rachel!"

She breathed hard as if in physical pain. "Don't, John; let us forget it--thrust it out of sight. Don't you see that it's wrong for me to listen? If you care so much I must mean something to you; have I deserved this at your hands?"

"Rachel!"

"You've forced me to say that; can't you see how it seems to me? I'm married to Belhaven and you think I ought to hear this. If I were married to you, John, would you want me to hear it from him?"

She had driven it home.

"Forgive me," he said hoarsely.

She saw the drawn look about his mouth and eyes and his pain deepened hers. "I don't want you to be less than yourself," she said gently.

"I'll try to get my lesson by rote," he said bitterly, "I shan't be a brute again."

She stooped down and, picking up a fallen acorn, turned it over in her hands as if she had discovered some new interest or virtue in it; she was trying to hide her face from him, for if he saw it he could surely read it. "I was going home by the woodpath," she said. "I've been to see Eva, but she's out somewhere, perhaps on her way to my house; I must go on."

"May I go with you? Or--"

"Of course you may come; we're going to be friends, aren't we?" Then, as they turned into the path: "I've heard all about your work in the Philippines; it was like you to say nothing of it. I was so glad of the promotion, too."

"I suppose it's all right," he said drearily. "I haven't thought much about it. I've been in Newport for five months, being invited to meet widows and orphans. Then I got orders to report here and Van Citters asked me down for Christmas. They told me that you and the Astrys were away for a while."

"Eva had to go in August: she broke down; but they came back in October. Johnstone has just imported a new Chinese god."

"I see that he hasn't reformed; I mean Johnstone, not the god. Has he gone in for any more new fads?"

They were forcing themselves to talk commonplaces.

"Occult science and Shintoism, I believe," she replied, still trifling with her acorn. "He has some new toy from the West Indies, but I don't know much about it; he calls it the red sphere."

"I wish I could have brought him a few odds and ends from the Philippines. I didn't--I remembered the story of Jim Fealey coming home with six church candlesticks and a mahogany sideboard as the spoils of war."

She did not answer him for a moment, she could not; and then she tried to divert his glance. "Look, isn't that view pretty? I love that bit--and see, there's a glimpse of the Astry gateposts."

They stopped midway in the woods and looked southward. There was a clearing, and in it a few gray rocks loomed out of the snow, while the hemlocks, still mantled in snow, parted to show the long curve of the meadows beyond and the stately gateway in the dark line of hedge. As they looked, a man and a woman crossed the path below them without looking up; she was weeping passionately and clinging to her companion's arm.

Rachel turned slowly away and walked on, and John dared not look at her, for they had both recognized the two below them in the wood. It was Belhaven with Eva.

Rachel walked ahead, turning her acorn over and over in her hand and looking at it curiously, unconscious that she did it. John walked behind her, blind with rage, the old primeval instinct to kill tearing at his heart. This was the man she had married, the man she had preferred to him!

They came to the edge of the woods; before them was the old, tavernlike house, with Paul's expensive roof and Colonial porch, that had cost his aunt three years of bonnets. Rachel paused an instant.