Book 2 - Chapter 6

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_ BOOK II CHAPTER VI

Only Miss Margaret Clay perused the papers on the following morning with an avidity to equal that of Mrs. Warren Gregory. Magsie read hungrily for praise, Rachael was as eager to discover blame. The actress, lying in her soft bed, wrapped in embroidered silk, and sleepily conscious that she was wakening to fame and fortune, gave, it is probable, only an occasional fleeting thought to her benefactor's wife, but Rachael, crisp and trim over her breakfast, thought of nothing but Magsie while she read.

Praise--and praise--and praise. But there was blame, too; there was even sharply contemptuous criticism. On the whole, Rachael had almost as much satisfaction from her morning's reading as Magsie did. The three most influential papers did not comment upon Miss Clay's acting at all. In two more, little Miss Elsie Eaton and Bryan Masters shared the honors. The Sun remarked frankly that Miss Clay's amateurish acting, her baby lisp, her utter unacquaintance with whatever made for dramatic art, would undoubtedly insure the play a long run. Rachael knew that Warren would see all these papers, but she cut out all the pleasanter reviews and put them on his dresser.

"Did you see these?" she asked him at six o'clock.

"I glanced at some of them. You've not got The Sun here?"

"No--that was a mean one," Rachael said sweetly. "I thought it might distress you, as it probably did Magsie."

"I saw it," he said, evidently with no thought of her feeling in the matter. "Lord, no one minds what The Sun thinks!"

"She's really scored a success," said Rachael reluctantly. Warren did not answer.

For the next three evenings he did not come home to dinner, nor until late at night. Rachael bore it with dignity, but her heart was sick within her. She must simply play the waiting game, as many a better woman had before her, but she would punish Warren Gregory for this some day!

She dressed herself charmingly every evening, and dined alone, with a book. Sometimes the old butler saw her look off from the page, and saw her breast rise on a quick, rebellious breath; and old Mary could have told of the hours her mistress spent in the nursery, sitting silent in the darkness by the sleeping boys, but both these old servants were loyalty's self, and even Rachael never suspected their realization of the situation and their resentment. To Vera, to Elinor, even to Alice Valentine, she said never a word. She had discussed Clarence Breckenridge easily enough seven years before, but she could not criticise Warren Gregory to anyone.

On the fourth evening, when they were to dine with friends, Warren reached home in time to dress, and duly accompanied his wife to the affair. He complained of a headache after dinner, and they went home at about half-past ten. Rachael felt his constraint in the car, and for very shame could not make it hard for him when he suggested that he should go downtown again, to look in at the club.

"But is this right, is it fair?" she asked herself sombrely while she was slowly disrobing. "Could I treat him so? Of course I could not! Why, I have never even looked at a man since our very wedding day--never wanted to. And I will be reasonable now. I will be reasonable, but he tries me hard--he makes it hard!"

She put her face in her hands and began to cry. Warren was deluded and under a temporary spell, but still her dear and good and handsome husband, her dearest companion and confidant. And she missed him.

Oh, to have him back again, in the old way, so infinitely dear and interested, so quick with laughter, so vigorous with comment, so unsparing where he blamed! To have him come and kiss the white parting of her hair once more as she sat waiting for him at the breakfast table, turn to her in the car with his quick "Happy?" once more, hold her tight once more against his warm heart!

How unlike him it was, how contemptible it was, this playing with the glorious thing that had been their love! For the first time in her life Rachael could have played the virago, could have raged and stamped, could have made him absolutely afraid to misuse her so. He did not deserve such consideration, he should not be treated so gently.

While she sat alone, in the long evenings, she tried to follow him in her thoughts. He was somewhere in the big, warm, dark theatre, watching the little pool of brightness in which Magsie moved, listening to the crisp, raw freshness of Magsie's voice. Night after night he must sit there, drinking in her beauty and charm, torturing himself with the thought of her inaccessibility.

It seemed strange to Rachael that this world-old tragedy should come into her life with all the stinging novelty of a calamity. People and press talked about a murder, about an earthquake, about a fire. Yet what was death or ruin or flames beside the horror of knowing love to be outgrown, of living beside this empty mask and shell of a man whose mind and soul were in bondage elsewhere? Rachael came to know love as a power, and herself a victim of that power abused.

Slowly resentment began to find room in her heart. It was all so childish, so futile, so unnecessary! A prominent surgeon, the husband of a devoted wife, the father of two splendid sons, thus flinging pride and sanity to the wind, thus being caught in the lightly flung net of an ordinary, pretty little actress, the daughter of a domestic servant and a soldier in the ranks! And what was to be the outcome? Rachael mused sombrely. Was Warren to tire simply of his folly, Magsie to carelessly fill his place in the ranks of her admirers, Rachael to gracefully forgive and forget?

It was an unpalatable role, yet she saw no other open to her. What was to be gained by coldness, by anger, by controversy? Was a man capable of Warren's curious infatuation to be merely scolded and punished like a boy? She was helpless and she knew it. Until he actually transgressed against their love, she could make no move. Even when he did, or if he did, her only recourse was the hated one of a public scandal: accusations, recriminations.

She began to understand his nature as she had not understood it in all these years. Bits of his mother's brief comment upon him came back to her; uncomprehensible when she first heard them, they were curiously illuminating now. He had been a naturally good boy, awkward, silent, conscientious; turning toward integrity as normally as many of his companions turned toward vice. Despite his natural shyness, his diffidence of manner, he had been strong himself and had scorned weakness in anyone; upright, he needed little guiding. The praise of servants and of his mother's friends had been quite frankly his; even his severe mother and father had been able to find little fault in the boy. But they had early learned that when a minor correction was demanded by their first- born's character, it was almost impossible to effect it. His standard of behavior was high, fortunately, for it was also unalterable. There was no hope of their grafting upon his conscience any new roots. James knew right from wrong with infallible instinct; he was not often wrong, but when he was, no outside criticism affected him. As a baby, he would defend his rare misdeeds, as a boy, he was never thrashed, because there was always some good reason for what he did. He had been misinformed, he certainly understood the other fellows to say this; he certainly never heard the teacher forbid that; handsome, reasonable, self-respecting, he won approval on all sides, and because of this mysterious predisposition toward what was right and just, came safely to the years when he was his own master and could live unchallenged by the high moral standard he set himself.

Some of this Rachael began to perceive. It was a key to his conduct now. He respected Magsie, he admired her; there was no reason why he should not indulge his admiration. No unspoken criticism from his wife could affect him, because he had seen the whole situation clearly and had decided what was seemly and safe in the matter. Criticism only brought a resentful, dull red color to Warren Gregory's face, and confirmed him more stubbornly in the course he was pursuing. He could even enjoy a certain martyr-like satisfaction under undeserved censure, all censure being equally incomprehensible and undeserved. Rachael had once seen in this quality a certain godlike supremacy, a bigness, and splendidness of vision that rose above the ordinary standards of ordinary men; now it filled her with uneasiness.

"Well," she thought, with a certain desperate philosophy, "in a certain number of months or years this will all be over, and I must simply endure it until that time comes. Life is full of trouble, anyway!"

Life was full of trouble; she saw it on all sides. But what trivial matters they were, after all, that troubled Elinor and Vera and Judy Moran! Vera was eternally rushing into fresh, furious hospitalities, welcoming hordes of men and women she scarcely knew into her house; chattering, laughing, drinking; flattering the debutantes, screaming at the telephone, standing patient hours under the dressmaker's hands; never rested, never satisfied, never stopping to think. Judy Moran's trouble was that she was too fat; nothing else really penetrated the shell of her indolent good nature. Kenneth might be politely dropped from the family firm, her husband might die and be laid away, her brother- in-law commence an ugly suit for the reclamation of certain jewels and silver tableware, but all these things meant far less to Mrs. Moran than the unflattering truths her bedroom scales told her every morning. She had reached the age of fifty without ever acquiring sufficient self-control to rid herself of the surplus forty pounds, yet she never buttered a muffin at breakfast time, or crushed a French pastry with her fork at noon, without an inward protest. She spent large sums of money for corsets and gowns that would disguise her immense weight rather than deny herself one cup of creamed-and-sugared tea or one box of chocolates. And she suffered whenever a casual photograph, or an unexpected glimpse of herself in a mirror, brought to her notice afresh the dreadful two hundred and twenty pounds.

And Elinor had her absurd and unnecessary troubles, rich man's wife as she was now, and firmly established in the social group upon whose outskirts she had lingered so long. The single state of her four sisters was a constant annoyance to her, especially as Peter was not fond of the girls, and liked to allude to them as "spinsters" and "old maids," and to ask more entertaining and younger women to the house. Elinor had never wanted a child, but in the third or fourth year of her marriage she had begun to perceive that it might be wise to give her worldly old husband an heir, much better that, at any cost, than to encourage his fondness for Barbara Oliphant's boy, his namesake nephew, who was an officious, self-satisfied little lad of twelve. But Nature refused to cooperate in Elinor's maternal plans and Peter Junior did not make his appearance at the big house on the Avenue. Elinor grew yearly noisier, more reckless, more shallow; she rushed about excitedly from place to place, sometimes with Peter, sometimes with one of her sisters; not happy in either case, but much given to quarrelsome questioning of life. It was not that she could not get what she wanted so much as that she did not know her own mind and heart. Whatever was momentarily tiresome or distasteful must be pushed out of her path, and as almost every friend and every human experience came sooner or later into this category, Elinor found herself stranded in the very centre of life.

Alice had her troubles, too, but when her thoughts came to Alice, Rachael found a certain envy in her heart. Ah, those were the troubles she could have welcomed; she could have cried with sheer joy at the thought that her life might some day slip into the same groove as Alice's life. Rachael loved the atmosphere of the big, shabby house now; it was the only place to which she really cared to go. There was in Alice Valentine's character something simple, direct, and high-principled that communicated itself to everybody and everything in her household. A small girl in her nursery might show symptoms of diphtheria, a broken tile on the roof might deluge the bedroom ceilings, an old cook leave suddenly, or a heavy rain fall upon a Sunday predestined for picknicking, but Alice Valentine, plain, slow of speech, and slow of thought, went her serene way, nursing, consoling, repairing, readjusting.

She had her cares about George, but they were not like Rachael's cares for Warren. Alice knew him to be none too strong, easily tired, often discouraged. His professional successes were many, but there were times when the collapse of a tiny child in a free hospital could blot from George's simple, big, tender heart the memory of a dozen achievements. The wife, deep in the claims of her four growing children, sometimes longed to put her arms about him, to run away with him to some quiet land of sunshine and palms, some lazy curve of white beach where he could rest and sleep, and drift back to his old splendid energy and strength. She longed to cook for him the old dishes he had loved in the early days of their marriage, to read to him, to let the world forget them while they forgot the world.

Instead, a hundred claims kept them here in the current of affairs. Mary was a tall, sweet, gracious girl of sixteen now, like her father, a pretty edition of his red hair and long- featured clever face. Mary must go on with her music, must be put through the lessoning and grooming of a gentlewoman, and take her place in the dancing class that would be the Junior Cotillion in a year or two. Alice Valentine was not a worldly woman, but she knew it would be sheer cruelty to let her daughter grow up a stranger in her own world, different in speech and dress and manner from all the other girls and boys. So Mary went to little dances at the Royces' and the Bowditches', and walked home from her riding lesson with little Billy Parmalee or Frank Whittaker, or with Florence Haviland and Bobby Oliphant. And Alice watched her gowns, and her hair, and her pretty young teeth only a little less carefully than she listened to her confidences, questioned her about persons and things, and looked for inaccuracies in her speech.

George Junior was a care, too, in these days at the non-committal, unenthusiastic age of fourteen, when all the vices in the world, finger on lip, form a bright escort for waking or sleeping hours, and the tenderest and most tactful of maternal questions slips from the shell of boyish silence and gruffness unanswered. Full of apprehension and eagerness, Alice watched her only son; she could not give him every hour of her busy days; she would have given him every instant if she could. He was a good boy, but he was human. Dressed for dinner and the theatre, his mother would look into the children's sitting-room to find Mary reading, George reading, Martha, very conscious of being there on sufferance, also reading virtuously and attentively.

"Good-night, my darlings! You're going to bed promptly at nine, aren't you, Mary--and Gogo, too? You know we were all late last night," Alice would say, coming in.

"I am!" Mary would give her mother her sunny smile. "Leslie Perry is going to be here to-morrow night, anyway, and we're going to Thomas Prince's skating party in the afternoon, aren't we, Mother?"

"Thomas Prince, the big boob!" Gogo might comment without bitterness.

"He's not a big boob, either, is he, Mother?" Mary was swift in defence. "He's not nearly such a boob as Tubby Butler or Sam Moulton!"

"Gosh, that's right--knock Tubby!" Gogo would mumble.

"Oh, my darling boy, and my darling girl!" Alice, full of affection and distress, would look from one to the other. Gogo, standing near his mother, usually had a request.

"They're all over at Sam's to-night. Gosh! they're going to have fun!"

"Father said 'NOT again this week,'" Mary might chant.

"Mary!" Alice's reproachful look would silence her daughter; she would put an arm about her son.

"What is it to-night, dear?"

"Oh, nothing much!" Gogo would fling up his dark head impatiently.

"Just Tubby and Sam?"

"I guess so," gruffly.

"But Daddy feels--" Alice would stop short in perplexity. Why shouldn't he go? She had known Mrs. Moulton from the days when they both were brides, the Moultons' house was near, and it was dull for Gogo here, under the sitting-room lamp. If he had only been as contented as Mary, who, with a good time to remember from yesterday, and another to look forward to to-morrow, was perfectly happy to-night. But boys were different. Sam was a trustworthy little fellow, but Alice did not so much like Tubby Butler. And George did not like to have Gogo away from the house at night. She would smile into the boy's gloomy eyes.

"Couldn't you just read to-night, my son, or perhaps Mary would play rum with you? Wouldn't that be better, and a long night's sleep, than going over to Sam's EVERY night?"

But she would leave a disappointed and sullen boy behind her; his disgusted face would haunt her throughout the entire evening.

Martha was not so much a problem, and little Katharine was still baby enough to be a joy to the whole house. But between the children's meals, their shoes and hats and lessons, Alice was a busy woman, and she realized that her responsibilities must increase rather than lessen in the next few years. When Mary was married, and Gogo finishing college, and Martha ready to be entertained and chaperoned by her big sister, then she and George might take Kittiwake and run away; but not now.

Rachael formed the habit of calling at the Valentine house through the wet winds of March and April, coming in upon Alice at all hours, sometimes with the boys, sometimes alone. Alice, in her quiet way, was ready to open her heart completely to her brilliant friend. Rachael spoke of all topics except one to Alice. They discussed houses and maids, the children, books and plays and plans for the summer, birth and death, the approaching responsibility of the vote, philosophies and religions, saints and sages. And the day came when Rachael spoke of Warren and of Margaret Clay.

It was a quiet, wet spring afternoon, a day when the coming of green leaves could be actually felt in the softened air. The two women were upstairs in Alice's white and blue sitting-room enjoying a wood fire. Jim and Derry were in the playroom with Kittiwake; the house was silent, so silent that they could hear the drumming of rain on the leads, and the lazy purr of the fire.

Alice was first incredulous, and then stunned at the story.

Rachael told all she knew, the change in her husband, the opening night of "The Bad Little Lady," her lonely dinners and evenings, and Magsie's complacent attitude of possession.

"Well," said Alice, who had been an absorbed and astounded listener, when she finished, "I confess I don't understand it! If Warren Gregory is making a fool of himself over Margaret Clay, no one is going to be as much ashamed as he is when he is over it. I think with you," Alice added, much in earnest, "that as far as any actual infidelity goes, neither one would be CAPABLE of it! Magsie's a selfish little featherhead, but she has her own advantage too close at heart, and Warren, no matter what preposterous theory he has to explain his interest in Magsie, isn't going to actually do anything that would put him in the wrong!" She paused, but Rachael did not speak, and something in her aspect, as she sat steadily watching the fire, smote Alice to the heart. "I have never been so shocked and so disappointed in my life!" Alice went on, "I can't YET believe it! The only thing you can do is keep quiet and dignified, and wait for the whole thing to wear itself out. This explains the change between George and Warren. I knew George suspected something from the way he tried to shut me up when I saw Warren the other night at the theatre."

"Now that I've talked about it," Rachael smiled, "I believe I feel better!" And presently she dried her eyes, and even laughed at herself a little as she and Alice fell to talking of other things. When Rachael, a boy in each hand, said good-bye, and went out into the pale, late afternoon sunshine that followed the rain, Alice accompanied her to the door, and stood for a moment with her at the top of the street steps.

"You're so lovely, Rachael," said her friend affectionately. "It doesn't seem right to have anything ever trouble anyone so pretty!"

Rachael only smiled doubtfully in answer, but Derry and Jim talked all the way home, their mother listening in silence. She found their conversation infinitely more amusing when uninfluenced by her. Both were naturally observant, Jim logical and reasonable, Derry always misled by his fancy and his dreams. When Tim was a lion, he was a lion who lived in the Gregory nursery, sat in the chairs that belonged to the Gregory children, and preyed upon their toys, as toys. But Derry was a beast of another calibre. The polished nursery floor was the still water of jungle pools, and the cribs were trees which a hideous and ferocious beast, radically differing in every way from little Gerald Gregory, climbed at will. Jim was a lion who liked to be interrupted by grown-ups, who was laughing at his make-believe all the time, but Derry was so frightfully in earnest as to often terrify himself, and almost always impress his brother, with his roarings and ravaging.

To-day their conversation ran along pleasantly; they were companionable little brothers, and only unmanageable when separated.

"All the men walking home will get their feet horrid an' wet," said Jim, "and then the ladies will scold 'em!"

"This would be a great, big ocean for a fairy," Derry commented, flicking a wide puddle with a well-protected little foot. "Jim," he added in an anxious undertone, "could a fairy drown?"

"Not if he had his swimming belt on," Jim said hardily.

"All the fairies have to take little white rose leaves, and make themselves swimming belts," Derry said dreamily, "'r else their mothers won't let them go swimming, will they, Mother?"

They did not wait for her answer, and Rachael was free to return to her own thoughts. But the interruption roused her, and she watched the little pair with pleasure as they trotted before her on the drying sidewalks. Derry was blond and Jim dark, yet they looked alike, both with Rachael's dark, expressive eyes, and with their father's handsome mouth and sudden, appealing smile. But Rachael fancied that her oldest son was most like his father in type, and found it hard to be as stern with Jim as she was with the impulsive reckless, eager Derry, whose faults were more apt to be her own.

To-night she went with them to the nursery, where their little table was already set for supper and their small white beds already neatly turned down.

"Mother's going to give us our baths!" shouted Jim. Both boys looked at her eagerly; Rachael smiled doubtfully.

"Mother's afraid that she will have to dress, to meet Daddy downtown," she began regretfully, when old Mary interposed respectfully:

"Excuse me, Mrs. Gregory. But Dennison took a message from Doctor this afternoon. I happen to know it because Louise asked me if I didn't think she had better order dinner for you. Doctor has been called to Albany on a case, and was to let you know when to expect him."

"Goody--goody--good-good!" shouted Jim, and Derry joined in with a triumphant shriek, and clasped his arms tightly about his mother's knees. Rachael had turned a little pale, but she kissed both boys, and only left them long enough to change her gown to something loose and comfortable.

Then she came back to the nursery, and there were baths, and games, and suppers, and then stories and prayers before the fire, Mary and Rachael laughing over the fluffy heads, revelling in the beauty of the little bodies.

When they were in bed she went down to a solitary dinner, and, as she ate it, her thoughts went back to other solitary dinners years ago. Utter discouragement and something like a great, all- enveloping fear possessed her. She was afraid of life. She had dented her armor, broken her steel, she had been flung back and worsted in the fight.

What was the secret, then, Rachael asked the fire, if youth and beauty and high hopes and great love failed like so many straws? Why was Alice contented, and she, Rachael, torn by a thousand conflicting hopes and fears? Why was it, that with all her cleverness, and all her beauty, the woman who had been Rachael Fairfax, and Rachael Breckenridge, and Rachael Gregory, had never yet felt sure of joy, had never dared lay hands upon it boldly, and know it to be her own, had trembled, and apprehended, and distrusted where women of infinitely lesser gifts had been able to enter into the kingdom with such utter certainty and serenity?

Sitting through the long evening by the fire, in the drowsy silence of the big drawing-room, Rachael felt her eyes grow heavy. Who was unhappy, who was happy--what was all life about anyway--

Dennison and old Mary came in at eleven, and looked at her for a long five minutes. Their eyes said a great many things, although neither spoke aloud. The fire had burned low, the light of a shaded lamp fell softly on the sleeping woman's face. There was a little frown between the beautiful brows, and once she sighed lightly, like a child.

The man stepped softly back into the hall, and Mary touched her mistress.

"Mrs. Gregory, you've dropped off to sleep!"

Rachael roused, looked up, smiling bewilderedly. Her look seemed to search the shadows beyond the old woman's form. Slowly the new look of strain and sorrow came back into her eyes.

"Why, so I did!" she said, getting to her feet. "I think I'll go upstairs. Any message from Doctor Gregory?"

"No message, Mrs. Gregory."

"Thank you, Mary, good-night!" Rachael went slowly out through the dimly lighted arch of the hall doorway, and slowly upstairs. She deliberately passed the nursery door. Her heart was too full to risk a visit to the boys to-night. She lighted her room and sank dazedly into a chair.

"I dreamed that we were just married, and in the old studio," she said, half aloud. "I dreamed I had the old-feeling again, of being so sure, and so beloved! I thought Warren had come home early and had brought me violets!" _

Read next: Book 2: Chapter 7

Read previous: Book 2: Chapter 5

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