Instantly she was free, and he was standing by the fire with folded arms, looking at her.
"You have missed love, and I have missed it," Warren Gregory said presently. "We"ll be patient, Rachael. I"ll wait; we"ll both wait- -"
"Greg!" she could only answer still in that stricken whisper, still pale. She stood just as he had left her.
A silence fell between them. The physician took out a cigarette from his gold case with trembling ringers.
"I"m a little giddy, Rachael," he said after a moment. "I--on my honor I don"t know what"s happened to me! You"re the most wonderful woman in the world--I"ve always thought that--but it never occurred to me--the possibility--"
He paused, confused, unable to find the right words.
"You"ve been facing this all alone," he continued presently. "Poor Rachael! You"ve been splendid--wonderfully brave! You have me beside you now; I"ll help you if I may. Some day we may find a way out! Well," he finished abruptly, "suppose I go up and see Clarence?"
For answer she rose, and without speaking again went ahead of him up the stairway and left him at the door of her husband"s room. He did not see her again that night.
Half an hour later he came down, dismissed his car, and walked home under the spring stars. In his veins, like a fire, still ran the excited, glorious consciousness of his madness. In his ears still echoed the wonderful golden voice; he could hear her very words, and he took certain phrases from his memory, and gloated over them as another man might have gloated over strings of pearls: "I"d like to be far away from cities and people, a fisherman"s wife on an ocean sh.o.r.e with a baby coming every year and just the delicious sea to watch!" "Greg--don"t frighten me!"
Exquisite, desirable, enchanting--every inch of her--her voice, her eyes, her slender hand with its gold circle. What a woman!
What a wife! What radiant youth and beauty and charm--and all trampled in the mire by Clarence Breckenridge, of all insensate brutes! How could laughter and courage and beauty survive it?
He was going to the club, a mile away from the Breckenridge house, but long before the visions born that evening were exhausted, he saw the familiar lights, and the awninged porches, and heard the faint echoes of the orchestra. They were dancing.
Warren Gregory turned away again, and plunged into the darkness of the roadside afresh. "My dear Don Quixote!" With what a look of motherly amus.e.m.e.nt and tenderness she had said it. What a woman!
He had never kissed her. He had never even thought of kissing Clarence Breckenridge"s wife.
He thought of his mother, tried to forget her with a philosophical shrug, and found that the slender, black-clad, quiet-voiced vision was not to be so easily dismissed. It was said of old Madam Gregory that she had never been heard to raise her voice in the course of her sixty honored years. Of the four sons she had borne, three were dead, and the husband she had loved so faithfully lay beside them. She was slightly crippled, her outings confined to a slow drive every day. She was solitary in a retinue of servants.
But that modulated voice and those cool, temperate eyes were still a power. His mother"s displeasure was a very real thing to Warren Gregory, and the thought of adding another sorrow to the weight on those thin shoulders was not an easy one for him to entertain.
It would be a sorrow. Mrs. Gregory was a rigid Catholic, her life"s one prayer nowadays was that her beloved son might become one, too. Her marriage at seventeen to a non-Catholic had been undertaken in the firm conviction that faith like hers must win the conversion of her beloved James, the best, the most honorable of men. When her oldest son was born, and given his father"s name, she saw, in her husband"s willingness to further plans for the baptism, definite cause for hope. Another son was born, there was another christening; it was the father"s own hand that gave the third baby lay-baptism only a few moments before the tiny life slipped back into the eternity from which it had so lately come.
A year or two later a fourth son was born. Presently the dignified Mrs. Gregory was taking a trio of small, sleek-headed boys to Sunday-school, watching every phase in the development of their awakening souls with terror and with hope. What fears she suffered in spirit during those years no one but herself knew. Outwardly, the hospitable, gracious life of the great house went on; the Gregorys were prominent in charities, they opened their mountain camp for the summer, they travelled abroad, they had an audience with the Pope. Time went on, and the twelve-year-old George was taken from them, breaking the father"s heart, said the watching world. But there was a strange calm in the mother"s eyes as they rested on the dead child"s serene face: Heaven had her free offering, now she must have her reward.
A few months later James Gregory became a convert to her religion.
Charles, the second son, had never wavered from his mother"s faith, and rejoiced with her in this great event. But the first- born, Warren, as all but his mother called him, to avoid confusion with his father, was a junior in college when these changes took place, and when he came home for the long vacation his mother knew what her cross must be for the years to come. He listened to her with the appalling silence of the nineteen-year-old male, he kissed her, he returned gruff, embarra.s.sed answers to her searching questions of his soul, and he escaped from her with visibly expanding lungs and averted eyes. She knew that she had lost him.
Men called him a good man, and she a.s.sented with dry lips and heavy eyelids. Charles died, leaving a young widow and an infant son, the father shortly followed, and Warren came home from his interne year, and was a good son to her in her dark hour. When they began to say of him that he would be great, she smiled sadly.
"My father was a doctor," she said once to an old friend, "and James inherits it!" But at a memory of her own father, erect and rosy among his girls and boys in the family pew, she burst into tears. "I would rather have him with his father, with George and Charles, and with my angel Francis, than have him the greatest man that ever lived!" she said.
But if she had not made him a good Catholic she had made him a good man, and it was a fair and honorable record that Warren Gregory could offer to the woman he loved. Love--it had come to him at last. His thoughts went back to Rachael. It seemed to him that he had always known how deeply, how recklessly he loved her.
He had a thrilling memory of her as Persis Pomeroy"s guest, years ago, an awkward, delightful seventeen-year-old, with her hair in two thick braids, looped up at the neck, and tied with a flaring black bow. He remembered watching her, hearing for the first time the delicious voice with its English accent: "Well, I should say it was indeed!"
"Well, I should say it was indeed!" Across more than ten years he recalled the careless, crisp little answer to some comment from Persis, his first precious memory of Rachael. The girls, he remembered, were supposedly too young for a certain dance that was imminent, they were opposing their youthful petulance--baffled roses and sunshine--to Mrs. Pomeroy"s big, placid negatives.
Gregory could still see the matron"s comfortably shaking head, see Persis attacking again and again like a frantic b.u.t.terfly, and see "the little English girl," perched on the porch rail, looking from mother to daughter smilingly, with her blue, serious eyes.
Why had he never thought of her again until Clarence Breckenridge brought her back with him, a bride, six years later? Or, rather, having thought of her, as he undoubtedly had, why had he not found the time to cross the water and go to see her? Nothing might have come of it, true. But she might have yielded to him as readily as to Clarence Breckenridge!
"I love her!" he said to himself, and it seemed wonderful, sad, and sweet, joyous and terrible to admit it. "I love her. But she doesn"t love me or anyone, poor Rachael! She"s forgotten me already!"
CHAPTER III
As a matter of fact, Rachael thought about him very often during the course of the next two or three days, and after he had left her that night she could think of nothing else. To the admiration of men she was cheerfully accustomed; perhaps it would be safe to say that not in the course of the past ten years had she ever found herself alone in a man"s company without evoking a more or less definite declaration of his admiration for her. But to- night"s affair was a little distinctive for several reasons.
Warren Gregory was a most exceptional man, for one thing; he was reputedly a coldblooded man, for another; and for a third, he had been extraordinarily in earnest. There had been no hesitation, he had committed himself wholeheartedly. She was conscious of a pleasurable thrill. However gracious, however gallant Warren was, there had been no social pretence in his att.i.tude to-night.
And for a few moments she let her imagination play pleasantly with the situation. It was at least a new thought, and life had run in a groove for a long, long time. Granted the preliminaries safely managed, it would be a great triumph for the woman whom Clarence Breckenridge had ignored to come back into this group as Warren Gregory"s wife.
Rachael got into bed, flinging two or three books down beside her pillow and lighting the shaded lamp that stood at the bedside. She found herself unable to read.
"Wouldn"t Florence and Gardner buzz!" she thought with a smile.
"And if they buzzed at the divorce, what WOULDN"T they say if I really did remarry? But the worst of it is"--and Rachael reaching for The Way of All Flesh sighed wearily--"the worst of it is that one never DOES carry out plans, or _I_ never do, any more. I used to feel equal to any situation, now I don"t--getting old, perhaps.
I wonder"--she stared dreamily at the soft shadows in the big room--"I wonder if things are as queer to most people as they are to me? I don"t get much joy out of life, as it is, and yet I don"t DARE cut loose and go away. No maid, no club, living at some cheap hotel--no, I couldn"t do that! I wish there was someone who could advise me--some disinterested person, someone who--well, who loved me, and who knew that I"ve always tried to be decent, always tried to play the game. All I want is to be reasonably well treated; to have a good time and be among pleasant people--"
Her thoughts wandered about among the various friends whose judgment might serve at this crisis to clear her own thoughts and simplify the road before her. Strangely enough, Warren Gregory"s own mother was the first of whom she thought; that pure and austere and uncompromising heart would certainly find the way.
Whether Rachael had the courage to follow it was another question.
She loved old Mrs. Gregory; they were good friends. But Rachael dismissed her with a little shudder, as from the spatter of icy water against her bared breast. The bishop? Rachael and Clarence duly kept a pew in one of the city"s fashionable churches; it was the Breckenridge family pew, rented by the family for a hundred years. But they never sat in it, although Rachael felt vaguely sometimes that for reasons undefined they should, and Clarence was apt in moments of sentiment to reproach his wife with the statement that his grandmother had been a faithful church woman, and his mother had always attended church on pleasant mornings in winter.
But the bishop called on Rachael once a year, and Rachael liked him, and mingled an air of pretty penitence for past negligences with a gracious promise of better conduct in future. His Grace was a fine, breezy, broadminded man, polished in manner, sympathetic, and tolerant. He had not risen to his present eminence by too harsh a rebuke of the sinner.
His handsome young a.s.sistant, Father Graves, as he liked to be called, was far more radical. But a great deal was forgiven this attractive boyish celibate by the women of the Episcopal parish.
They enjoyed his scoldings, gave him their confidences, and asked his advice, though they never followed it. His slender, black-clad figure, with the Roman collar, was admired by many bright eyes at receptions and church bazaars.
Still, Rachael could not somehow consider herself as seriously asking either of these two clergymen for advice. She could see the bishop, fitting finely groomed fingers together, pursing his lips for a judicial reply.
"My dear Mrs. Breckenridge, that Clarence is now pa.s.sing through a most unfortunate, most lamentable, period in his life is, alas, perfectly true. His mother--a lovely woman--was one of my wife"s dearest friends, one of my own. His first marriage was much against her wishes, poor dear lady, and--as my wife was saying the other day--had she lived to see him happily married again, and her grandchild in such good hands, it could not but have been a great joy to her. Yes. ... Now, you and I know Clarence--know his good points, and know his faults. That"s one of the sad things about us poor human beings, we get to know each other so well! And isn"t it equally true that we"re not patient enough with each other?--oh, yes, I know we try. But do we try HARD enough? Isn"t there generally some fault on both sides, quick words, angry, hasty actions, argument and blame, when we say things we don"t mean and that we are sure to regret, eh? We all get tired of the stupid round of daily duty, and of the people we are nearest to--that"s a sad thing, too. We"d all like a change, like to see if we couldn"t do something else better! And so comes the break, and the cloud on a fine old name, and all because we aren"t better soldiers--we don"t want to march in line! Bless me, don"t I know the feeling myself? Why, that good little wife of mine could tell you some tales of discouragement and disenchantment that would make you open your eyes! But she braces me up, she puts heart into me--and the first thing I know I"m marching again!"
And having comfortably shifted the entire trend of the conversation from his parishioner to himself and found nothing insurmountable in his own problem, the good bishop would chuckle mischievously at finding his eminent self quite human after all, and would suggest their going in to find Mrs. Bishop, and having a cup of tea. These women, always restless and dissatisfied, were a part of his work; he prided himself upon the swiftness and tact with which he disposed of them.
Rachael"s mouth twisted wryly at the thought of him. No, she could not bare her soul to the bishop.
Nor could she approach Father Graves with any real hope of a helping word. To seek him out in his study--that esthetically bare and yet beautiful room, with its tobacco-brown hangings and monastic furnishing in black oak--would be to invite mischief. To sit there, with her eloquent eyes fixed upon his, her haunting voice wrapping itself about his senses, would be a genuine cruelty toward a harmless, well-intentioned youth whose heroism in abjuring the world, the flesh, and the devil had not yet been great enough to combat his superb and dignified egotism. At best, he would be won by Rachael"s revelation of her soul to a long and frankly indiscreet talk of his own; at worst, he would construe her confidences in an entirely personal sense, and feel that she came not at all to the priest and all to the man.
Dismissing him from her councils, Rachael thought of Florence Haviland, the good and kind-hearted and capable matron who was Clarence"s sister and only near relative. She and Florence had always been good friends, had often discussed Clarence of late.
What sort of advice would Florence"s forty-five years be apt to give to Rachael"s twenty-eight? "Don"t be so absurd, Rachael, half the men in our set drink as much as Clarence does. Don"t jump from the frying-pan into the fire. Remember Elsie Rowland and Marian Cowles when you talk so lightly of divorce!"
That would be Florence"s probable att.i.tude. Still, it was a bracing att.i.tude, heartily positive, like everything Florence did and said. And Florence was above everything else a church member, a prominent Christian in her self-sacrificing wifehood and motherhood, her social and charitable and civic work. She might be unflattering, but she would be right. Rachael"s last conscious thought, as she went off to sleep, was that she would take the earliest possible moment to extract a verdict from Florence,
She went into her husband"s room at ten o"clock the next morning to find Billy radiantly presiding over a loaded breakfast tray, and the invalid, pale and pasty, and with no particular interest in food evinced by the twitching muscles of his face, nevertheless neatly brushed and shaved, propped up in pillows, and making a visible effort to appear convalescent.
"How are you this morning?" Rachael asked perfunctorily, with her quick glance moving from the books on the table to the wood fire burning lazily behind bra.s.s firedogs. Everything was in perfect order, Helda"s touch visible everywhere.
"Fine," Clarence answered, also perfunctorily. His coffee was untouched, and the cigarette in his long holder had gone out, but Billy was disposing of eggs, toast, bacon, and cream with youthful zest. Clarence"s hot, sick gaze rested almost with hostility upon his wife"s cool beauty; in a gray linen gown, with a transparent white ruffle turned back from her white throat, she looked as fresh as the fresh spring morning.
"Headache?" said the nicely modulated, indifferent voice.