The Heart of Rachael
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER VI
This letter, creased from constant reading, Rachael showed to George
Valentine a week later. The doctor, who had spent the week- end with his family
at Clark's Hills, was in his car and running past the gate of Home Dunes on his
way back to town when Rachael stopped him. She looked her composed and dignified
self in her striped blue linen and deep-brimmed hat, but the man's trained look
found the circles about her wonderful eyes, and he detected signs of utter
weariness in her voice.
"Read this, George," said she, resting against the door of his car, and
opening the letter before him. "This came from Billy — Mrs. Pickering, you know
— several days ago."
George read the document through twice, then raised questioning eyes to hers,
and made the mouth of a whistler.
"What do you think?" Rachael questioned in her turn.
"Lord! I don't know what to think," said George. "Do you suppose this can be
true?"
Rachael sighed wearily, staring down the road under the warming leaves of the
maples into a far vista of bare dunes in thinning September sunshine.
"It might be, I suppose. You can see that Billy believes it," she said.
"Sure, she believes it," George agreed. "At least, we can find out. But I
don't understand it!"
"Understand it?" she echoed in rich scorn. "Who understands anything of the
whole miserable business? Do I? Does Warren, do you suppose?"
"No, of course nobody does," George said hastily in distress. He regarded the
paper almost balefully. "This is the deuce of a thing!" he said. "If she didn't
care for him any more than that, what's all the fuss about? I don't believe the
threat about sending his letters, anyway!" he added hardily.
"Oh, that was true enough," Rachael said lifelessly. "They came."
George gave her an alarmed glance, but did not speak.
"A great package of them came," Rachael added dully. "I didn't open it. I had
a fire that morning, and I simply set it on the fire." Her voice sank, her eyes,
brooding and sombre, were far away. "But I watched it burning, George," she said
in a low, absent tone, "and I saw his handwriting — how well I know it —
Warren's writing, on dozens and dozens of letters — there must have been a
hundred! To think of it — to think of it!"
Her voice was like some living thing writhing in anguish. George could think
of nothing to say. He looked about helplessly, buttoned a glove button briskly,
folded the letter, and made some work of putting it away in an inside pocket.
"Well," Rachael said, straightening up suddenly, and with resolute courage
returning to her manner and voice, "you'll have, somebody look it up, will you,
George?"
"You may depend upon it-immediately," George said huskily. "It — of course
it will make an immense difference," he added, in his anxiety to be reassuring
saying exactly the wrong thing.
Rachael was pale.
"I don't know how anything can make a great difference now, George," she
answered slowly. "The thing remains — a fact. Of course this ends, in one way,
the sordid side, the fear of publicity, of notoriety. But that wasn't the phase
of it that ever counted with me. This will probably hurt Warren — "
"Oh, Rachael, dear old girl, don't talk that way!" George protested. "You
can't believe that Warren will feel anything but a — a most unbelievable
relief! We all know that. He's not the first man who let a pretty face drive him
crazy when he was working himself to death." George was studying her as he
spoke, with all his honest heart in his look, but Rachael merely shook her head
forlornly.
"Perhaps I don't understand men," she said with a mildness that George found
infinitely more disturbing than any fury would have been.
"Well, I'll look up records at the City Hall," he said after a pause. "That's
the first thing to do. And then I'll let you know. Boys well this morning?"
"Lovely," Rachael smiled. "My trio goes fishing to-day, packing its lunch
itself, and asking no feminine assistance. The lunch will be eaten by ten
o'clock, and the boys home at half-past ten, thinking it is almost sundown. They
only go as far as the cove, where the men are working, and we can see the tops
of their heads from the upstairs' porch, so Mary and I won't feel entirely
unprotected. I'm to lunch with Alice, so my day is nicely planned!"
The bright look did not deceive him, nor the reassuring tone. But George
Valentine's friendship was more easily displayed by deeds than words, and now,
with an affectionate pat for her hand, he touched his starter, and the car
leaped upon its way. Just four hours later he telephoned Alice that the wedding
license of Margaret Rose Clay and Richard Gardiner had indeed been issued a week
before, and that Magsie was not to be found at her apartment, which was to be
sublet at the janitor's discretion; that Bowman's secretary reported the absence
of Miss Clay from the city, and the uncertainty of her appearing in any of Mr.
Bowman's productions that winter, and that at the hospital a confident inquiry
for "Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner" had resulted in the discreet reply that "the
parties" had left for California. George, with what was for him a rare flash of
imagination, had casually inquired as to the name of the clergyman who had
performed the ceremony, being answered dispassionately that the person at the
other end of the telephone "didn't know."
"George, you are an absolute WONDER!" said Alice's proud voice, faintly
echoed from Clark's Hills. "Now, shall you cable — anybody- -you know who I
mean?"
"I have," answered the efficient George, "already."
"Oh, George! And what will he do?"
"Well, eventually, he'll come back."
"Do you THINK so? I don't!"
"Well, anyway, we'll see."
"And you're an angel," said Mrs. Valentine, finishing the conversation.
Ten days later Warren Gregory walked into George Valentine's office, and the
two men gripped hands without speaking. That Warren had left for America the day
George's cable reached him there was no need to say. That he was a man almost
sick with empty days and brooding nights there was no need to say. George was
shocked in the first instant of meeting, and found himself, as they talked
together, increasingly shocked at the other's aspect.
Warren was thin, his hair actually showed more gray, there were deep lines
about his mouth. But it was not only that; his eyes had a tired and haunted look
that George found sad to see, his voice had lost its old confident ring, and he
seemed weary and shaken. He asked for Alice and the children, and for Rachael
and the boys.
"Rachael's well," George said. "She looks — well, she shows what she's been
through; but she's very handsome. And the boys are fine. We had the whole crowd
down as far as Shark Light for a picnic last Sunday. Rachael has little Breck
Pickering down there now; he's a nice little chap, younger than our Katrina —
Jim's age. The youngster is in paradise, sure enough, and putting on weight at a
great rate."
"I didn't know he was there," Warren said slowly. "Like her — to take him
in. I wish I had been there — Sunday. I wish to the Lord that it was all a
horrible dream!"
He stopped and sat silent, looking gloomily at the floor, his whole figure,
George thought, indicating a broken and shamed spirit.
"Well, Magsie's settled, at least," said George after a silence.
"Yes. That wasn't what counted, though," Warren said, as Rachael had said.
"She is settled without my moving; there's no way in which I can ever make
Rachael feel that I would have moved." Again his voice sank into silence, but
presently he roused himself. "I've come back to work, George," he said with a
quiet decision of manner that George found new and admirable. "That's all I can
do now. If she ever forgives me — but she's not the kind that forgives. She's
not weak — Rachael. But anyway, I can work. I'll go to the old house, for the
present, and get things in order. And you drop a hint to Alice, when she talks
to Rachael, that I've not got anything to say. I'll not annoy her."
George's heart ached for him as Warren suddenly covered his face with his
hands. Warren had always been the adored younger brother to him, Warren's
wonderful fingers over the surgical table, a miracle that gave their owner the
right to claim whatever human weaknesses and failings he might, as a balance.
George had never thought him perfect, as so much of the world thought him; to
George, Warren had always been a little more than perfect, a machine of inspired
surgery, underbalanced in many ways that in this one supreme way he might be
more than human. George had to struggle for what he achieved; Warren achieved by
divine right. The women were in the right of it now, George conceded, they had
the argument. But of course they didn't understand — a thing like that had
nothing to do with Warren's wife; Rachael wasn't brought into the question at
all. And Lord! when all was said and done Warren was Warren, and professionally
the biggest figure in George's world.
"I don't suppose you feel like taking Hudson's work?" said George now. "He's
crazy to get away, and he was telling me yesterday that he didn't see himself
breaking out of it. Mrs. Hudson wants to go to her own people, in Montreal, and
I suppose Jack would be glad to go, too."
"Take it in a minute!" Warren said, his whole expression changing. "Of course
I'll take it. I'm going to spend this afternoon getting things into shape at the
house, and I think I'll drop round at the hospital about five. But I can start
right in to-morrow."
"It isn't too much?" George asked affectionately.
"Too much? It's the only thing that will save my reason, I think," Warren
answered, and after that George said no more.
The two men lunched together, and dined together, five times a week, with a
curious change from old times: it was Warren who listened, and George who did
the talking now. They talked of cases chiefly, for Warren was working day and
night, and thought of little else than his work; but once or twice, as September
waned, and October moved toward its close, there burst from him an occasional
inquiry as to his wife.
"Will she ever forgive me, George?" Warren asked one cool autumn dawning when
the two men were walking away from the hospital under the fading stars. Warren
had commenced an operation just before midnight, it was only concluded now, and
George, who had remained beside him for sheer admiration of his daring and his
skill, had suggested that they walk for a while, and shake off the atmosphere of
ether and of pain.
"It's a time like this I miss her," Warren said. "I took it all for granted,
then. But after such a night as this, when I would go home in those first years,
and creep into bed, she was never too sleepy to rouse and ask me how the case
went, she never failed to see that the house was quiet the next morning, and
she'd bring in my tray herself — Lord, a woman like that, waiting on me!"
George shook his head but did not speak. They walked an echoing block or two
in silence.
"George, I need my wife," Warren said then. "There isn't an hour of my life
that some phase of our life together doesn't come back to me and wring my heart.
I don't want anything else — our sons, our fireside, our interests together.
I've heard her voice ever since. And I'm changed, George, not in what I always
believed, because I know right from wrong, and always have, but I don't believe
in myself any more. I want my kids to be taught laws — not their own laws. I
want to go on my knees to my girl — "
His voice thickened suddenly, and they walked on with no attempt on either
side to end the silence for a long time. The city streets were wet from a rain,
but day was breaking in hopeful pearl and rose.
"I can say this," said George at last: "I believe that she needs you as much
as you do her. But Rachael's proud — "
"Ah, yes, she's that!" Warren said eagerly as he paused.
"And Warren, she has been dragged through the muck during the last few
years," George resumed in a mildly expostulatory tone.
"Oh, I know it!" Warren answered, stricken.
"She hates coarseness," pursued George, "she hates weakness. I believe that
if ever a divorce was justified in this world, hers was. But to have you come
back at her, to have Magsie Clay break in on her, and begin to yap breezily
about divorce, and how prevalent it is, and what a solution it is, why, of
course it was enough to break her heart!"
"Don't!" Warren said thickly, quickening his pace, as if to walk away from
his own insufferable thoughts.
For many days they did not speak of Rachael again; indeed George felt that
there was nothing further to say. He feared in his own heart that nothing would
ever bring about a change in her feeling, or rather, that the change that had
been taking place in her for so many weeks was one that would be lasting, that
Rachael was an altered woman.
Alice believed this, too, and Rachael believed it most of all. Indeed, over
Rachael's torn and shaken spirit there had fallen of late a peace and a sense of
security that she had never before known in her life. She tried not to think of
Warren any more, or at least to think of him as he had been in the happy days
when they had been all in all to each other. If other thoughts would creep in,
and her heart grow hot and bitter within her at the memory of her wrongs, she
resolutely fought for composure; no matter now what he had been or done, that
life was dead. She had her boys, the sunsets and sunrises, the mellowing beauty
of the year. She had her books, and above all her memories. And in these
memories she found much to blame in herself, but much to pity, too. A rudderless
little bark, she had been set adrift in so inviting, so welcoming a sea twenty
years ago! She had known that she was beautiful, and that she must marry — what
else? What more serious thought ever flitted through the brain of little Rachael
Fairfax than that it was a delicious adventure to face life in a rough blue coat
and feathered hat, and steer her wild little sails straight into the heart of
the great waters?
She would have broken Stephen's heart; but Stephen was dead. She had seized
upon Clarence with never a thought of what she was to give him, with never a
prayer as to her fitness to be his wife, nor his fitness to be the father of her
children. She had laughed at self-sacrifice, laughed at endurance, laughed at
married love — these things were only words to her. And when she had tugged
with all her might at the problem before her, and tried, with her pitiable,
untrained strength to force what she wished from Fate, then she had flung the
whole thing aside, and rushed on to new experiments — and to new failures.
Always on the surface, always thinking of the impression she made on the
watching men and women about her, what a life it had been! She had never known
who made Clarence's money, what his own father had been like, what the forces
were that had formed him, and had made him what he was. He did not please her,
that began and ended the story. He had presently flung himself into eternity
with as little heed as she had cast herself into her new life.
Ah, but there had been a difference there! She had loved there, and been
awakened by great love. Her child's crumpled, rosy foot had come to mean more to
her than all the world had meant before. The smile, or the frown, in her
husband's eyes had been her sunshine or her storm. Through love she had come to
know the brimming life of the world, the pathos, the comedy that is ready to
spill itself over every humble window-sill, the joy that some woman's heart
feels whenever the piping cry of the new-born sounds in a darkened room, the
sorrow held by every shabby white hearse that winds its way through a hot and
unnoticing street. She had clung to husband and sons with the tigerish tenacity
that is the rightful dower of wife and mother; she had thought the world well
lost in holding them.
And then the sordid, selfish past rose like an ugly mist before her, and she
found at her lips the bitter cup she had filled herself. She was not so safe
now, behind her barrier of love, but that the terrible machinery she had set in
motion might bring its grinding wheels to bear upon the lives she guarded. She
had flung her solemn promise aside, once; what defence could she make for a
second solemn promise now? The world, divorce mad, spun blindly on, and the echo
of her own complacent "one in twelve" came faintly, sickly back to her after the
happy years.
"Divorce has actually no place in our laws, it isn't either wrong or right,"
Rachael said one autumn day when they were walking slowly to the beach. Over
their heads the trees were turning scarlet; the days were still soft and warm,
but twilight fell earlier now, and in the air at morning and evening was the
intoxicating sharpness, the thin blue and clear steel color that mark the dying
summer. Alice's three younger children were in school, and the family came to
Clark's Hills only for the week- ends, but Rachael and her boys stayed on and
on, enjoying the rare warmth and beauty of the Indian Summer, and comfortable in
the old house that had weathered fifty autumns and would weather fifty more.
"In some states it is absolutely illegal," Rachael continued, "in others,
it's permissible. In some it is a real source of revenue. Now fancy treating any
other offence that way! Imagine states in which stealing was only a regrettable
incident, or where murder was tolerated! In South Carolina you cannot get a
divorce on any grounds! In Washington the courts can give it to you for any
cause they consider sufficient. There was a case: a man and his wife obtained a
divorce and both remarried. Now they find they are both bigamists, because it
was shown that the wife went West, with her husband's knowledge and consent, to
establish her residence there for the explicit purpose of getting a divorce. It
was well- established law that if a husband or wife seek the jurisdiction of
another state for the sole object of obtaining a divorce, without any real
intent of living there, making their home there, goes, in other words, just for
divorce purposes, then the decree having been fraudulently obtained will not be
recognized anywhere!"
"But thousands do it, Rachael."
"But thousands don't seem to realize — I never did before — that that is
illegal. You can't deliberately move to Reno or Seattle or San Francisco for
such a purpose. All marriages following a divorce procured under these
conditions are illegal. Besides this, the divorce laws as they exist in
Washington, California, or Nevada are not recognized by other states, and so
because a couple are separated upon the grounds of cruelty or incompatibility in
some Western state, they are still legally man and wife in New York or
Massachusetts. All sorts of hideous complications are going on: blackmail and
perjury!
"I wonder why divorce laws are so little understood?" Alice mused.
"Because divorce is an abnormal thing. You can't make it right, and of course
we are a long way from making it wrong. But that is what it is coming to, I
believe. Divorce will be against the law some day! No divorce on ANY GROUNDS! It
cannot be reconciled to law; it defies law. Right on the face of it, it is
breaking a contract. Are any other contracts to be broken with public approval?
We will see the return of the old, simple law, then we will wonder at ourselves!
I am not a woman who takes naturally to public work — I wish I were. But
perhaps some day I can strike the system a blow. It is women like me who
understand, and who will help to end it."
"It is only the worth-while women who do understand," said Alice. "You are
the marble worth cutting. Life is a series of phases; we are none of us the same
from year to year. You are not the same girl that you were when you married
Clarence Breckenridge — "
"What a different woman!" Rachael said under her breath.
"Well," said Alice then a little frightened, "why won't you think that
perhaps Warren might have changed, too; that whatever Warren has done, it was
done more like — like the little boy who has never had his fling, who gets
dizzy with his own freedom, and does something foolish without analyzing just
what he is doing?"
"But Warren, after all, isn't a child!" Rachael said sadly.
"But Warren is in some ways; that's just it," Alice said eagerly. "He has
always been singularly — well, unbalanced, in some ways. Don't you know there
was always a sort of simplicity, a sort of bright innocence about Warren? He
believed whatever anybody said until you laughed at him; he took every one of
his friends on his own valuation. It's only where his work is concerned that you
ever see Warren positive, and dictatorial, and keen — "
Rachael's eyes had filled with tears.
"But he isn't the man I loved, and married," she said slowly. "I thought he
was a sort of god — he could do no wrong for me!"
"Yes, but that isn't the way to feel toward anybody," persisted Alice. "No
man is a god, no man is perfect. You're not perfect yourself; I'm not. Can't you
just say to yourself that human beings are faulty — it may be your form of it
to get dignified and sulk, and Warren's to wander off dreamily into curious
paths — but that's life, Rachael, that's 'better or worse,' isn't it?"
"It isn't a question of my holding out for a mere theory, Alice," Rachael
said after a while; "I'm not saying that I'm all in the right, and that I will
never see Warren again until he admits it, and everyone admits it — that isn't
what I want. But it's just that I'm dead, so far as that old feeling is
concerned. It is as if a child saw his mother suddenly turn into a fiend, and do
some hideously cruel act; no amount of cool reason could ever convince that
child again that his mother was sweet and good."
"But as you get older," Alice smiled, "you differentiate between good and
good, and you see grades in evil, too. Everything isn't all good or all bad,
like the heroes and the villains of the old plays. If Warren had done a
'hideously cruel' thing deliberately, that would be one thing; what he has done
is quite another. The God who made us put sex into the world, Warren didn't; and
Warren only committed, in his — what is it? — forty-eighth year one of the
follies that most boys dispose of in their teens. Be generous, Rachael, and
forgive him. Give him another trial!"
"How CAN I forgive him?" Rachael said, badly shaken, and through tears. "No,
no, no, I couldn't! I never can."
They had reached the beach now, and could see the children, in their blue
field coats, following the curving reaches of the incoming waves. The fresh roar
of the breakers filled a silence, gulls piped their wistful little cry as they
circled high in the blue air. Old Captain Semple, in his rickety one-seated
buggy, drove up the beach, the water rising in the wheel-tracks. The children
gathered about him; it was one of their excitements to see the Captain wash his
carriage, and the old mare splash in the shallow water. Alice seated herself on
a great log, worn silver from the sea, and half buried in the white sand, but
Rachael remained standing, the sweet October wind whipping against her strong
and splendid figure, her beautiful eyes looking far out to sea.
"You two have no quarrel," the older woman added mildly. "You and Warren were
rarely companionable. I used to say to George that you were almost TOO
congenial, too sensitive to each other's moods. Warren knew that you idolized
him, Rachael, and consequently, when criticism came, when he felt that you of
all persons were misjudging him, why, he simply flung up his head like a horse,
and bolted!"
"Misjudging?" Rachael said quickly, half turning her head, and bringing her
eyes from the far horizon to rest upon Alice's face. The children had seen them
now, and were running toward them, and Alice did not attempt to answer. She
sighed, and shrugged her shoulders.
A dead horseshoe crab on the sands deflected the course of the racing
children, except Derry, who pursued his panting way, and as Rachael sat down on
the log, cast himself, radiant and breathless, into her arms. She caught the
child to her heart passionately. He had always been closer to her than even the
splendid first-born because of the giddy little head that was always getting him
into troubles, and the reckless little feet that never chose a sensible course.
Derry was always being rescued from deep water, always leaping blindly from high
places and saved by the narrowest possible chance, always getting his soft mop
of hair inextricably tangled in the steering-gear of Rachael's car, or his foot
hopelessly twisted in the innocent-looking bars of his own bed, always eating
mysterious berries, or tasting dangerous medicines, always ready to laugh deeply
and deliciously at his own crimes. Jim assumed a protective attitude toward him,
chuckling at his predicaments, advising him, and even gallantly assuming the
blame for his worst misdeeds. Rachael imagined them in boarding-school some day;
in college; Jim the student, dragged from his books and window-seat to go to the
rescue of the unfortunate but fascinating junior. Jim said he was going to write
books; Derry was going — her heart contracted whenever he said it — was going
to be a doctor, and Dad would show him what to do!
Ah, how proud Warren might have been of them, she thought, walking home
to-day, a sandy hand in each of hers, Derry hopping on one foot, twisting, and
leaping; Jim leaning affectionately against her, and holding forth as to the
proper method of washing wagons! What man would not have been proud of this
pair, enchanting in faded galatea now, soon to be introduced to linen
knickerbockers, busy with their first toiling capitals now, some day to be
growling Latin verbs. They would be interested in the Zoo this winter, and then
in skating, and then in football — Warren loved football. He had thrown it all
away!
Widowed in spirit, still Rachael was continually reminded that she was not
actually widowed, and in the hurt that came to her, even in these first months,
she found a chilling premonition of the years to come. Warm-hearted Vera
Villalonga wrote impulsively from the large establishment at Lakewood that she
had acquired for the early winter. She had heard that Rachael and Greg weren't
exactly hitting it off — hoped to the Lord it wasn't true — anyway, Rachael
had been perfectly horrible about seeing her old friends; couldn't she come at
once to Vera, lots of the old crowd were there, and spend a month? Mrs. Barker
Emery, meeting Rachael on one of the rare occasions when Rachael went into the
city, asked pleasantly for the boys, and pleasantly did not ask for Warren.
Belvedere Bay was gayer than ever this year, Mrs. Emory said; did Rachael know
that the Duchess of Exton was visiting Mary Moulton — such a dear! Georgiana
Vanderwall, visiting the Thomases at Easthampton, motored over one day to spend
a sympathetic half morning with Rachael, pressing that lady's unresponsive hand
with her own large, capable one, and murmuring that of course — one heard —
that the Bishop of course felt dreadfully — they only hoped — both such dear
sweet people —
Rachael felt as if she would like to take a bath after this well- meant
visitation. A day or two later she had a letter from Florence, who said that
"someone" had told her that the Gregorys might not be planning to keep their
wonderful cook this winter. If that was true, would Rachael be so awfully good
as to ask her to go see Mrs. Haviland?
"The pack," Rachael said to Alice, "is ready to run again!"