Had Mrs. Caldwell seen Peter pacing the floor of his little hotel room that night, she would have been less certain that he did not love Sheila. She had said to him, "There's nothing so tragic as the truth—when it comes too late!" And it was this tragedy with which Peter grappled now.
He had not known that he loved Sheila until Mrs. Caldwell told him that he should have married her; but those words had been for him a revelation; an illumination of the last ten years and more. Suddenly he saw, as if a searchlight had been flung upon them, the innermost, secret depths of his own heart—saw them filled with the image of another man's wife. So swiftly, so entirely without warning had self-knowledge dawned upon him that the cry had been wrung from him, "Why do you tell me this now—when it is too late?" But after the one betraying exclamation, he had put all his strength into the attempt to conceal his discovery. Mrs. Caldwell had spoken of the honor of her generation as of a thing that had not survived, in its purity, to a later one. Yet Peter's sense of honor was too scrupulous to permit him the confession to anyone that he loved another's wife. To the single end of concealment he had set himself through the rest of that interview. He had gone through it as through some nerve-racking nightmare, struggling for self-control as one struggles for safety in dreams of horrid peril.
He must not admit that he loved Sheila! He must not admit that he loved her! That was what he had told himself over and over, fighting all the while for the mastery of his face, his voice, lest they proclaim what his lips did not utter.
Yet in spite of the struggle, in spite of the sense of awful calamity, of absolute wreckage, that had descended upon him, he had been keenly, piteously conscious of every word that Mrs. Caldwell had said; and he had realized fully the impossibility and the irony of the task she had imposed upon him.
Having failed to marry Sheila himself, he must now undertake to keep her in love with the man who had married her! This was all which was required of him; this wasall! His devotion to Mrs. Caldwell had not faltered; but now, facing his tragedy alone and in the freedom to suffer, he felt a great bitterness toward his old friend for her request. It seemed to him incredibly stupid that she should think for an instant that he, an unmarried man, could assume the post of guardian over a wife's love for her husband. It implied, in the first place, an intimacy which Sheila was far too fine-grained to permit; for however confidential she might become on the subject of her work, she would never be confidential with him in regard to Ted. Whatever he might perceive, she would never give him the opportunity to say to her, "I think that your affection for your husband is waning. Let us put fresh fuel on the fire."
It implied, too, that request of Mrs. Caldwell's, a sharing of Sheila's life which Shadyville would never tolerate; which his own awakened heart could not tolerate. He could not be much with Sheila henceforth. For once, Shadyville's narrow restrictions would be right.
So, he told himself, Mrs. Caldwell had been stupid. And—unconsciously, of course—she had been cruel.
And yet—she was leaving Sheila, leaving her to an essentially alien companion. What wonder that, in her passionate solicitude, she had reached out to the one person whose understanding sympathy she could count upon? What wonder that, however unpractically, she had made an appeal to one whose heart she had divined better than she knew? What wonder, even, that he had made her a sort of promise? "There is nothing I would not do for you or Sheila!" he had said to her; and that was true. There was nothing he would not do for them—if he could. Only—Ted himself must keep what was his own! He had been man enough to win Sheila; now he must keep her!
Ted had been man enough to win her; and he, Peter, had not been! That was what he realized now—with measureless self-scorn.Hehad not even been man enough to know that he loved her; much less man enough to make her his. And now, because he could not make her his, his life was charred to ashes—but his soul was an anguished, unquenchable flame. He had long thought that he knew the worst of himself; his discreditable indolence; his reluctance for effort and conquest; his insufficient courage to follow his emotions into poverty; and that negligible fineness of his which had held him back from advantages that he could not repay with genuine emotion. He had known all that of himself, calling it his worst, and feeling a certain pride in it, too, as in a failure that was of more delicate fiber than the successes of others. But he had never really known the worst of himself until now. For the worst of him was that he had not recognized the true love of his life when it came to him. Those early fancies of his for girls whom he deemed too poor to marry—what had they been but fancies indeed? He had despised himself once or twice for not committing himself, but what was the offense of failing a mere fancy compared to the offense of not recognizing the one true love when it was in his life? He would have had courage enough to follow it to the world's end, in sharpest poverty and hardship, but he had so sheltered himself from any mischance in love that he had not known love when it came. Blind fool that he was, he had not known it when it came!
Even now he could not tell just when it had come. Looking back along the years, it seemed to him to have been there always, for every memory of Sheila, since her little girlhood, took him by the throat.
He saw her as he—and Ted!—had seen her one April day when she was but twelve years old; a slender, black-haired, dreaming-eyed child, lying upon the pale, spring grass and looking up into the flowering cherry-tree branches above her head; a child who was herself an embodied poem, so akin she was to all of April's magic, to the spring's lovely miracles. He saw her, too, in his class-room, eager, earnest, exquisitely responsive to every perception, every thought of his own; a little girl while he was already a man, and yet his comrade, his comrade in every phase of life had he but discerned and willed it! He saw her as a young girl, with her pure eyes and her generous mouth and her sweet, slender throat; a being still untouched by life, but beautifully ready, touchingly desirous for life's shaping hands. And he saw her as she had been yesterday, walking by his side, the woman at last—yet strangely immature, incomplete. He had thought her immature and incomplete because she had not developed her gift. Now there came to him another thought—bred of all those flashing pictures of her in which she seemed so much his own—the thought that she was incomplete because she had not really loved.
It was impossible that she should really love Ted; Ted who could give neither comprehension nor response to the greater part of her nature. It was impossible! He had felt that at the time of her marriage; he remembered now how resentfully! He had felt it when Mrs. Caldwell had shown him—only too convincingly—how that marriage had occurred. He had cried out to Mrs. Caldwell that Sheila must have loved Ted, but he had realized, then, that she had not. And he realized it now. It had been love's hour with her, but it had not been love. It had not been love because he himself, who could have given her such a love as she needed, who could have compelled such a love from her, had failed her. Back and forth he paced in his little room; a creature caged, not by mere walls, but by an irreparable mistake; a creature agonized and helpless. For it was too late for this vision of utter truth now. His life was spoiled—and hers!
Yes, he had spoiled her life! For a little while, he forgot his own disaster in contemplating hers. He had said that he was not the right man for her; but with all his soul and all his brain and all his blood, he knew that he was the right man for her. Throughout her whole life she had turned to him with that simple trust which is bred of love, or at least of potential love, alone. She had said to him once—long ago—with an innocent and tender wonder, "There is nothing I cannot tell you, Peter—nothing!" And that had been true—until Ted had lured her into bondage. While she had been free, there had not been a door in her heart or her spirit that would not have opened at his touch. She had been his—his for the taking! And he had not taken her.
He had left her to Ted; to Ted for whom so many doors of her nature must be closed forever. He had left her to that most terrible loneliness of all—loneliness in a shared life. The thoughts that she could not speak to Ted—how they must beat about in the prison of her mind; how they must cry for release, for answer! He seemed to feel them against his own temples, those unuttered thoughts that were Sheila's very self; he seemed to feel their ache, their hunger. Nothing would be born of those thoughts now; that gift of expression which had been a part of Sheila's soul would go barren to the grave. This was one of the wrongs he had done her—but it was not the worst.
For the worst that had befallen her through him, he told himself, was not that her gift had missed expression, but that she herself had missed the blinding glory of true love.
She was immature, she was undeveloped, because he had not made her his. And he wanted to make her his. Oh, my God, he wanted to make her his! His life was charred to ashes, but his soul was the quivering, torturing flame of his passion. It would not be quenched; it would not, in the least, be stilled; it drove him about the shabby little room as if it were literally a flame from which he must try to escape—though he knew he could not.
He had broken his heart over the disaster to Sheila's life, but as the night advanced and his passion flared the fiercer in hours securely dark and secret, self rose up within him and shrieked and cursed over his own disaster.
He wanted her! He was forty-six years old; not too old to love, but far, far too old to love calmly. The desires of half a lifetime were in him, desires that had lain low and fed upon his years until, in their accumulated strength, they were terrible—wild beasts that tore him, fires that burned him to the bone. And they were strangely compounded of instincts evil and lawless—when felt for another man's wife—and longings wholly innocent and sweet.
For the first time he longed for a home. He looked about his tiny, dingy room with a feeling of desolation, seeing in his mind so different a place—a home with her. He longed for simple, innocent things—her face across the table from him at his meals; her little possessions scattered about with his; the sound of her step in the rooms around him. And he longed to reach out in the night and touch her; he longed to reach out in the night and take her into his arms. He wanted—and now soul and flesh merged in one flame—he wanted her to bear him a child.
Back and forth he paced, his nails digging into his palms, his teeth cutting his lips, driven by the flame that could never be extinguished, never be satisfied. And all the while, he pictured her in his arms; he pictured her with his child at her breast.
Then, suddenly—and quite as plainly as if he were in the room—he sawTed'schild, and he staggered toward a chair and fell, sobbing, into it.
How long those horrible sobs shook him he did not know. He felt himself baffled, beaten, inconceivably tortured. He watched the gray morning steal into the room as one who has kept a death vigil beside his best-loved watches it. A new day had come, but there was no hope in it for him. There was no hope for him—though his days should be ever so many.
He fell asleep at last, sitting there in his uncomfortable chair, with the cold light of the dawn creeping over his haggard face, and he dreamed that Ted came into the room and said, "Sheila needs you. She needs you to keep alive her love for me." And in the dream, he answered, as he had really answered Mrs. Caldwell the day before, "There is nothing I would not do for her." So vivid was all this that when he opened his eyes and found Ted actually in the room, he was not in the least surprised.
"You left your door unlocked," Ted explained apologetically, "and I came on in. Mrs. Caldwell died in the night—and Sheila's gone to pieces. She's been asking for you. Would you mind going to her for a bit?"
"There's nothing I would not do for her!" replied Peter, in the words of his dream. And for an instant he thought he still dreamed.
"That's awfully good of you. You look done up, Burnett. But if you're equal to it, I'll be grateful to you."
As he gazed at Peter, whose face was gray still, though the morning light was now golden, Ted added to himself, "Poor chap! He's growing old." To him it would have been incredible that Peter's scars had been won in youth's own great battle—the battle with love. A certain complacency stole warmly through him then, ruddy and robust as he knew himself to be, a complacency that led him to lay a kindly, solicitous hand on the older man's shoulder; and so intent he was upon his self-satisfied kindliness that he did not see Peter wince at the touch.
"You do look done up, Burnett. Maybe I ought not to ask you——"
But Peter cut him short. "I'd do anything for Sheila," he repeated.
After all, this was left to him, Peter reflected; it was left to him to do things for Sheila. And perhaps he would find nothing she needed of him impossible. The love that had been so dark with the dark and secret hours could have its white vision, too.
Peter had felt that he could not be much with Sheila henceforth; that neither his own heart nor conventional Shadyville's standards would permit it. But Sheila herself ordained otherwise, and under the circumstances of her bereavement, Peter could but obey her.
Never had Sheila been so lonely as in the weeks immediately following Mrs. Caldwell's death. Whatever reserves of speech had existed between the two in these latter years, there had been no reserve of feeling, of comprehension. Close friends they had always been; and if Sheila was alone in a shared life, so far as her marriage was concerned, she had had a satisfying refuge in her grandmother's sympathetic companionship. Now, with that companionship lost to her, she began to feel, as she had never done before, the limitations of her marriage. Her nervous restlessness increased and sharpened to a positive hunger which Ted's affection and compassion were powerless to alleviate. In her loss and sorrow he could do nothing for her, earnestly as he tried. It was as if he could not reach her, and she realized it with amazement. If he had not compelled from her the greatest passion of which she was capable, he had certainly won love of a kind from her, love warm and sincere, and their life together had bound her to him with such ties of loyalty and habit and common experience, with such dear memories of young tenderness and joy, that she had never doubted the completeness of their union. That he could not reach her now, that he could bring no peace to her in her trouble, seemed to her unexplainable—until she recalled the fact that he and Mrs. Caldwell, though fond of each other, had not been really near each other in spirit. Theirs had been a pleasant, light affection, an amiable, surface relation, bred of the accident of their connection rather than of any genuine attraction between them. Remembering this, Sheila assured herself of its being the reason that Ted could not comfort her for Mrs. Caldwell's death. There was so much in her grandmother that he had never seen, so much of which he could not speak at all.
Peter, on the other hand, had been almost as dear to her grandmother as she herself had been—almost as dear and quite as near. He had a thousand sweet and intimate memories of Mrs. Caldwell, and he suffered, in the loss of her, a grief akin to Sheila's own. So to Peter she turned. With the perfect unconsciousness of self that a child might have shown, she made her demands upon him, upon his pity, upon his time; and if he did not come often to see her, she sent for him.
She was really strangely unworldly, and in this renewed comradeship with her old friend, she saw nothing for anyone to criticize. Neither did she recognize in it any danger for Peter or herself. Peter had always been there in her life, an accepted and unexciting fact. She did not allow for change in him or herself in the ten years of her marriage, years during which they had met hut seldom and casually. She had simply resumed the way of her girlhood, her childhood, with him, never considering that it might now be surcharged with peril for them; never for an instant fearing that she might some day find herself unable to do without him. She needed him; he was at hand; and she demanded fulfillment of her need. He brought her the consolation that Ted could not bring her; he gave her aching heart peace. Repeatedly he displayed a disposition to efface himself, after the first days of her mourning were over, but she would not have it so. In her innocence she still insisted on his frequent presence, and was sometimes puzzled and hurt that he evinced so little gladness in being with her. That he had the look of one harassed almost beyond endurance, she did finally perceive, but she understood it not at all, and at last dismissed it from her mind as something outside her province. Men had worries, worries about money and trivial things like that, she reflected. Peter was probably bothered about something of the sort, something that did not greatly matter after all. A real trouble he would have brought to her; of that she was sure.
So the winter passed in a close companionship between them, and it was to Peter's honor that she knew neither her own heart nor his at the end of it.
Ted it was, and not Peter, who made the situation impossible of continuance. Ted it was who plucked from it, at least for Sheila, its concealing innocence. He had been cordial to Peter; at first he had even been grateful to him, seeing Sheila comforted by him. But after a time he grew tired of Peter's face at his dinner table two or three times a week; he wearied of finding Peter in his little sitting-room whenever he came home particularly early; he sickened, with a sudden and profound distaste, of having Peter drawn into all the intimate concerns and happenings of his own and Sheila's life. Not for a moment did he suspect Sheila of any sentimental inclinations toward Peter, for he fully appreciated and trusted her fidelity. But he thought her behavior foolish and imprudent, and in spite of his trust in her, hewasjealous of this friendship which so absorbed and satisfied her. Why should she require a man's friendship at all? Why should she require anyone but himself and Eric? And having once questioned thus, his patience speedily gave way, and a climax ensued.
"Sheila," he said to her one day, a day when he had come home to discover Peter reading Maeterlinck to her, "Sheila, why on earth do you have Burnett here so much?"
"Because he's my friend—my dear old friend," answered Sheila, her eyes clear with the surprise of a clean conscience.
"Wouldn't a woman friend do as well?" Ted was trying to hold himself in check, but something in his words or his tone made Sheila stare, and he repeated, with a touch of asperity, "Wouldn't a woman friend do as well?"
"The only woman friend I have whom I really care for is Charlotte—and she won't be here until April."
"Then you'd better wait for her. You'd better wait for her—and see less of Burnett."
"What do you mean?" she asked. And now her puzzled eyes grew steel-cold with intuitive resentment.
"I mean that you'll get yourself talked about if you go on as you're doing at present. A married woman can't be so much with a man not her husbandwithoutbeing talked about."
"That is absurd!" she retorted, and her voice was as cold as her eyes; it put miles between them. "Peter has always been my friend. He's been like one of my family to me all my life. He's more than ever like a relative to me now that all my own people are dead. It's absurd to suggest that our friendship could be so misinterpreted. It'slowto think of such a thing!"
"Low or not, it'swiseto think of such things. You'll get yourself talked about if I let you. But I'm your natural protector, and Iwon'tlet you. I forbid you to have Burnett here as you've been doing.I forbid you!"
"I am to tell him that?" she inquired scornfully.
"You're to tell him nothing. He'll soon stop coming if he's not asked. The fact is, I don't believe he's wanted to come so often. You're the one to blame, Sheila. You've invited him—you've sent for him when he hasn't come of his own accord." And then, as they faced each other in their unaccustomed hostility, Ted added, with a final flare of wrath, "You've run after him—that's what you've done!"
As if he had struck her, Sheila's face went livid, then scarlet. She opened her lips to answer, but no sound came. So, for an instant, they looked at each other, silent, motionless, transfixed by this horror that had risen between them, this horror of anger—almost of hate. Then Ted took a step toward her; already he was contrite: "I didn't mean that. I lost my temper and went too far. Forgive me, Sheila!"
But she did not say that she forgave him. She only said: "Never speak to me of this again—never in all our lives!" And then she turned from him and walked out of the room, leaving him to feel himself far more at fault than he had ever believed her to be.
But though her pride, her insulted innocence, had carried her unbroken through the interview, she was in reality cruelly humiliated. That final sentence of Ted's anger—"You've run after him—that's what you've done!"—rang in her ears for days afterward, shaming her as only the very proud can be shamed. It was not true of her, she told herself; it was not true—but it was hideous that it could have been said of her nevertheless. That Peter had never thought it of her, she was confident. It was impossible that Peter should misunderstand her in anything. But she dreaded seeing him with the accusation in her mind. She could not meet him now without an acute and painful self-consciousness. Her happy friendship with him was changed, was forever spoiled. At last she wrote to him, telling him not to come to see her for awhile—not to come until she should bid him. After she had sent the note, however, she suffered more than before, feeling that she had brought constraint between them, that she had suggested to Peter, by her request that he stay away from her, the same unworthy thoughts about them that Ted had flung at her. Far, far worse than meeting him was the growing certainty that she had made him self-conscious about their friendship, too; that she had shown it to him as possible of degrading misconstruction. For he would read from her note, carefully though she had refrained from reasons or explanations, just what had happened. Peter would never comfortably miss a thing like that; sensitive and subtle to a degree, he could never be spared by mere omissions, by lack of plain and definite statement.
It was unbearable that such a situation should have come about. Not for a moment did she forgive Ted for creating it. But she lived on with him in cool outward harmony, realizing that in marriage one may have to endure hurt and disappointment, and being much too high-bred a woman to take her revenge in petty breaches of courtesy.
That she was disappointed in Ted, as well as hurt by him, she now admitted to herself for the first time. It is curious how some final and serious issue between two people living together will cast a light on all the past; will disclose anew, and more flagrantly, lapses and shortcomings and injuries that had once seemed trifles and been ignored or condoned or forgotten. Thus Sheila now looked backward along the years of her marriage and saw how Ted had failed her in understanding, in generosity, in any selfless consideration and love. Small instances of his selfishness recurred to her and promptly became as signposts directing her to greater ones. His care for his creature comfort, his innocent vanities, his rather smug pleasure in his success—things which she had smiled over with a tender lenience—served now to remind her that he had never taken any account of her preferences, of her independent possibilities, of her talent; that he had not, at any time, made the least effort to comprehend or share her interests. He had used her in his own work, and he had dismissed hers with a wave of his hand, as he might have pushed away a child's toy. Whatever he had discerned of her mental quality and power, he had regarded only in its relation to himself; if she had been wonderful for him, she had been wonderful as his helpmate, not as the individual. He had wanted her to be wife and mother only, and he had accomplished that. With anything else in her nature, in her life, he had had neither tolerance nor patience nor sympathy.
Of course she went too far in her arraignment of him. She forgot, in her sudden bitterness, the warmth and kindness of his heart, the staunchness and integrity of his character, his desire and attempt to shield her from all things harsh and hard—even though he shielded her in his own particular way!—and the very real sincerity of his love for her. She forgot that, by his own standards, his own conception of a husband's duty, he had honestly and steadfastly done his best for her. She saw her whole life fed to his selfishness as to an insatiable monster; and most terrible of all, she knew that she saw too late. Their marriage was made. As a husband Ted was formed and could not be changed. If, in the beginning, she had had a clearer conception of his nature; if she had had a stronger sense of her own rights as an individual and the courage to assert those rights, everything would have been different. She would never have been subdued to mere wifehood and motherhood if that had been. She would never—she saw it now!—she would never have made that compact of renunciation with God!
It was to the matter of that compact she came at last—inevitably. And she said to herself, over and over now, that she would never have made it if she had known herself and Ted better in the beginning. She would never have made it because she would not have seen her work as a guilty thing.
Nor had her work been a guilty thing! No woman watched her child every moment; at least no woman did so who could have the relief of a nurse. She might as readily have been paying an afternoon call or playing bridge when Eric was exposed to scarlet fever. It was just an accident that she had been writing then instead of doing any one of a dozen other things of which Ted would have approved. Yes, it was an accident that she had been writing then, she repeated to herself. But back of that accident had been her morbid conscience and Ted's narrow-mindedness; and together they had translated it into a crime. Thus she had been driven into the compact with God for Eric's life—the compact that had ruined her own life. Her morbid conscience and Ted's selfish narrow-mindedness had wrought together for the frustration of her gift, of her happiness. And it was upon Ted that she put far the greater share of the blame.
Oddly enough, though she saw her husband so plainly now; though she censured his faults so unsparingly and regretted so passionately her own mistakes with him—mistakes of weakness, of cowardly submission, she told herself—she did not, even now, take the final step of considering what might have been if she had not married him; of what might have been if she had married some one altogether more congenial and unselfish.
It was Charlotte who thought of that for her.
It was toward the end of April that Charlotte arrived in Shadyville. She had never lived in Shadyville since her first flight from it to boarding-school. After school had come New York and Paris, where she had studied singing; and for the last five years she had been on the concert stage, filling engagements all over the continent—much to the distress of her family who, though inordinately proud of her, could not understand why any woman with plenty of money at her disposal should work. Charlotte had always decided things for herself, however, and once convinced that her happiness lay in the active pursuit of her art, no one could dissuade her from it. Certainly no penniless woman could have worked harder or with more zest than she. Musician to her finger-tips, and with a remarkably beautiful, silver-clear soprano voice, she had also the modern woman's desire to earn her living; to justify her existence by doing something well. An independent and a busy life was necessary to her, and it was impossible to see her without realizing that she had chosen wisely for herself.
To Shadyville she had always seemed a brilliant figure; now, as a successful professional singer, she was a dazzling one. Even Sheila was a little awed by her, although the two had kept up their childhood's friendship during all these years of separation and of such diverse interests. Every now and then Charlotte descended on Shadyville for a brief visit to her parents, and then she invariably took up with Sheila their dropped threads and wove a new flower into the pattern of their affection. On this occasion she came to Sheila with more than her usual warmth, divining what a grief Mrs. Caldwell's death must have been to her, and she watched her friend, as the days passed, with an increasing solicitude.
To all appearances everything was well with the Kent household. Sheila and Ted seemed to be on the best of terms; Eric had grown into a fine, healthy, handsome little lad, particularly fond of his proud mother; prosperity, as Shadyville measured it, fairly shone from the charming and well-ordered little house. Certainly all appeared to be well with Sheila, yet Charlotte was not satisfied about her. Six months had passed since Mrs. Caldwell's death, and though Charlotte allowed for the sincerity and depth of Sheila's mourning, she rejected a sorrow already somewhat softened by time as sufficient cause for the change she found in Sheila. There was something else, something of an altogether different nature, that was responsible for the hunger of Sheila's eyes, the restlessness of her manner. Charlotte remembered, with a rush of indignation, Sheila's unfulfilled ambitions, her wasted gift. That was the trouble; of course that baffled gift of Sheila's was the trouble. And something must be done about it. She was with Sheila when she came to this conclusion, and immediately she acted on it, impulsive, decisive creature that she was.
"What of your writing, Sheila dear? I can't recall your speaking of it to me for a long, long while."
"Oh—that'sover!" replied Sheila, with unhappy emphasis.
"But why?"
It was a warm May afternoon and they were sitting on Sheila's veranda. Out on the lawn Eric and another boy of his own age frolicked about like a couple of animated puppies. Sheila pointed to them:
"You remember what Mrs. North said—that a woman couldn't be both mother and artist?"
"I told you that wasn't true!"
"It has been true for me, Charlotte."
"It needn't be now. While Eric was a baby, it may have been true for you, but there's no reason in the world why it should be now."
"Well, itistrue for me now—it will be true for me always. And yet——"
And then, because disillusion and bitterness were strong upon Sheila, Charlotte got the whole story out of her, from the first revelation of Ted's attitude toward a married woman's art to the final climax of Eric's illness, her self-blame and her renunciation of her work. Even while she told it, she knew that she would reproach herself afterward for disloyalty to Ted, but the sheer relief of confiding it to a sympathetic listener was too much for her scruples.
"I never heard of anything so outrageous in my life!" exclaimed Charlotte, when the story was ended. "It's barbarous—barbarous!"
Not a word of her final clear vision of her husband, her belated disappointment in him, had Sheila uttered. For that at least she had been too loyal. But already she repented having betrayed his views in regard to the married woman-artist. So well she knew what Charlotte must think of them, indeed, that she now felt impelled to a defense:
"Of course it hasn't been Ted's fault—you mustn't feel that he's to blame."
"Mustn't I?" asked Charlotte drily. And then, "My dear girl, hehasbeen to blame—absolutely, unforgivably to blame. It makes me wild to think of his narrow-minded, pig-headed selfishness. And that you should have given in to it—! Oh, Sheila, Sheila, where is your independence, your sense of your rights as an individual, a human being? Are you a cave woman—that you should be just your husband's docile chattel?" And Charlotte sprang from her chair and began to pace the veranda, urged by the fierce energy of her anger.
"I said it had been Ted's fault—this spoiling of your life," she went on presently, "but it's been your fault, too, Sheila. It's been your fault for giving in to him."
"But," pleaded Sheila, "I didn't give in toTed. I gave in to circumstances. Seeing that Eric was ill—that he might die—because I'd neglected him in order to write was what conquered me. That was what drove me to the vow to renounce my work—if Eric was spared."
Charlotte came and stood before her then: "Sheila, you know as well as I do that you'd never have made that vow if the sense of Ted's disapproval, his condemnation, hadn't been working on you. You know that it was merely an accident that you were writing when Eric was exposed to scarlet fever. You know that if youhadn'tbeen writing, you would have been reading or sleeping or paying calls, and that if you'd been doing any of those things, you wouldn't have thought yourself guilty because you'd taken an hour off from the hardest job a woman has—the mother-job—even though Eric did suffer by it. You know you'd have recognized that there are just so many cruel mischances in life, and that Eric's illness was one of them. You know that it wasTed, back of circumstances, that influenced you to make your vow of renunciation!"
It was what Sheila had so recently told herself, and she could not refute it now. Looking into her downcast, acquiescent face, Charlotte continued: "As for the vow—that's nonsense! It's mere morbid, hysterical nonsense. God never exacted it of you. He's never held you to it, you may be sure. If He's wanted anything of you, He's wanted you to use the talent He's given you. If you've been at all at fault, it's for wasting your talent. Youhavewasted it—you've wasted it to please Ted. You've wasted it because you've allowed yourself to be intimidated and bullied by Ted. That's the whole trouble!"
"Oh, Charlotte—," began Sheila.
"I've spoken the truth," insisted Charlotte firmly. "You can't deny a word I've said." And then, flinging out her hands with a gesture of despair, "The worst of it is that it's too late to help matters now. You'll go on in the same way—letting Ted bully you—to the end of your days. There's never been any chance for you with him. Your chance was with Peter Burnett. It's Peter you should have married!"
"You must not say that," objected Sheila quickly—and a little unsteadily. "You must not say that, Charlotte. It's ridiculous. And it's dreadful, too. Ted and I love each other—wedolove each other!"
But Charlotte was no longer inclined for argument. She answered Sheila's protest with a smile—no more. Suddenly she seemed to be through with the subject of Sheila's life, and perching upon the railing of the veranda, she looked off into green distances with a gaze singularly vague and pensive for her. Sheila watched her admiringly, noting her erect slenderness, her spirited, keenly intelligent face, the clear blue of her eyes, the warm gold of her hair in the sunshine.
"It's you Peter should marry," said Sheila lightly, when the silence between them had lengthened uncomfortably. "You'd be just the wife for him, Charlotte!"
Charlotte turned toward her, and there was no mistaking her earnestness and her sincerity. "I'd marry him to-morrow!" she cried.
"Oh, Charlotte, I neverdreamed—my dear!——"
"Don't be sorry for me," Charlotte interrupted warningly. "Don't be sorry for me. I may marry him yet!"
And a moment later, she was swinging down the street, as serene and independent as if she had never known—much less, confessed—the pain of unrequited love.
As Sheila looked after her, she noticed again the gold of her hair, the beautiful, free carriage of her shoulders—and now she felt no pleasure in them. Rather was she conscious of a sharp little pang of envy, and with it, sounded the echo of Charlotte's last words—"I may marry him yet!" Charlotte was a splendid, gallant creature; shemightmarry Peter. And then Sheila, feeling that envious pang again and still more sharply, demanded of herself in swift terror: "Am I jealous?—am I jealous of Charlotte because Peter may come to love her?"
Oh, it couldn't be that!—it couldn't! It was impossible that she should be jealous about any man but her husband. For she and Ted loved each other—theydidlove each other, whatever had been their mistakes with each other.
She called Eric to her, and he left his playmate on the lawn and came, smiling. She caught him to her, with a sort of frightened passion:
"Kiss mother, darling!"
He looked back over his shoulder at the boy who was waiting for him. "With him there?" he inquired reluctantly, already shy of caresses before his own sex.
But Sheila, usually the most considerate and tactful of mothers, amazed him now by ignoring his hint. Still with that terrified passion, she kissed him not once, but many times—her son and Ted's! Her son and Ted's! Then, leaving him standing there in his astonished embarrassment, she went into the house and up to her own room, there to sit and stare before her at things unseen, but all too visible to her.
So Ted had been right after all; right in objecting to her being so much with Peter. Ithadbeen unwise; moreover, it had been wrong, all that companionship of the past winter. For it had brought her to this; it had brought her so to depend upon Peter that she could not be happy unless he was often with her; it had brought her so to care for him that she could not think of him in relation to another woman without jealousy. It had brought her to this—and she was a wife and mother!
She had been ashamed when Ted had told her that she would get herself talked about in connection with Peter, and still more ashamed when he had accused her of "running after" Peter. But that had been an endurable shame, for at the heart of it had been self-respect, the indestructible pride of perfect innocence. But the shame that surged over her now was the agonizing shame of guilt, the shame of utter self-scorn, self-loathing. She—a wife, a mother!—cared for a man not her husband; cared for him in a way that made it torment to her to think of his marrying another woman. Hideous and unbelievable though it was, she cared for him so much. She had cared for him even while she was declaring to Charlotte—and later, to herself—that she loved her husband. She cared for Peter—even now, facing the truth and admitting it, she would not use the word, love—she cared for Peter, and she was Ted's wife, the mother of Ted's son. Not even the touch of that little son had been powerful to blind her. She cared!—shecared!
For a moment her face went down into her hands, and the hopeless grief of unfortunate love mastered her, tore her throat with its sobs, burned her eyes with its bitter tears. But presently her head was up again, and with shaking fingers she was bathing her eyes, concealing as best she could the ravages of that instant's surrender. She had no rights in this thing; she had not even the right to suffer. Ted or Eric might come in at any moment, and they must not see that she had wept; she was theirs.
She had no right to suffer. There could be only one right course in this; to fight, to crush out of herself what she was not free to feel, to put between herself and Peter some barrier that could not be destroyed. There was Ted, there was Eric—they should have been barriers enough. But they had not been barriers enough, and there must be another. There must be something—some one—more, to keep her safe, to hold her heart, her thoughts, from this forbidden haven. There must be something—some one—else—. And then her mind leaped to Charlotte. Charlotte loved Peter; she had practically admitted that. Well, she should marry him—as she'd said that she might do. Though it broke her own heart, Charlotte should marry Peter. She herself would arrange it.
She did not pause to consider that Peter might not want to marry Charlotte, that he might not be happy in doing so. She did not pause, yet, to question—she did not dare to question, indeed—whether Peter turned her own love. She was intent upon but one end: to protect herself from what she felt for him, from what she would continue to feel for him as long as he was free.
With this haste and need and fear upon her, she wrote to him, asking him to come to her the next afternoon. It would be their first meeting since Ted's ban upon their friendship, and she realized, with fresh humiliation, that in spite of everything, she was glad of this chance to be with Peter. She realized that she could scarcely wait until the morrow should bring him to her. Because she was thus glad, she almost decided not to send her note after all, and then—lest she would not!—she hurried out and mailed it herself.
Somehow she got through dinner and the evening. She heard Eric's lessons and tucked him away for the night with a bedtime story and the kisses that, when no one was looking on, he was eager enough to receive. She listened to Ted's anecdotes of the day and responded with a mechanical vivacity. Then, at last, she was hidden by the night, freed by the night—though she lay by Ted's side.
She had no right to suffer, but she did suffer now. As Peter had done months before, she suffered through the darkness. But with her there was no yielding to dear visions of a forbidden love, as there had been with him; there was no picturing of life as it might have been with him; no thrilling to the imaginary caresses and delights of a passion which, in her married self, was wholly unworthy. Rather was the night a long battle with the love that it so shamed her to find within herself. Thus, in this distress of her soul, she was at least spared the physical torture which Peter had endured. Not for an instant was her love for Peter translated, in her mind, into physical terms; she neither imagined nor desired its touch; in her guilt there was a strange innocence—an innocence characteristic of her. She would go through life unaware of the grosser aspects of things; under any circumstances, however equivocal, she would be curiously pure. In one thing only did she fall now to the level of less idealistic beings; in spite of her struggle to the contrary, she wondered, at last, if Peter loved her. She dared and stooped, in the privacy of the night, to wonder that.
When Peter came to her the next afternoon, he found her haggard, but very quiet, very calm. Beneath her calmness, however, he divined the stir of troubled depths, and he carefully kept to the surface; ignored his long banishment; took up one impersonal topic after another for her entertainment; and was altogether so much the safe, unromantic, delightful old friend of the family that, but for the hammering of her pulses, he would have persuaded Sheila that the distress of the past night was a mere, ugly dream. But because she could not look at him without a catch of her breath; because she could not speak to him without first pausing to steady her voice; because all her tranquility was but desperate and painful effort, she knew the night was no dream, but even more of a reality than she had thought.
"Peter," she said at last, with attempted lightness, "Peter, I'm going to meddle with your destiny."
"What do you mean?" he asked, smiling at her.
That smile of his almost cost her her self-control, so dear it was to her. But she went on bravely enough: "I'm going to secure you a wife."
He threw up his hands in dismay. "Don't try," he pleaded. "You could never find a wife to suit me!"
"But Ihavefound one who's sure to suit you."
"You've actually selected her?—you have her waiting for me?"
She nodded, trying to smile back at him now with a deceiving gayety.
"May I know who the fair lady is?"
"Of course. She's—Charlotte! She is just the woman for you, Peter."
"Never," he said promptly. "She is charming and clever and handsome and kind,but—she's not the woman for me."
"Peter"—and Sheila dropped her pretense of playfulness—"Peter, she's all that you need. She'd make a great man of you."
"At this late date?" he inquired a little ruefully. "She'd make a great man of me at forty-six?"
"Yes, she would. Charlotte's very—strong. She could accomplish anything she wished. She'd do much for a man—with a man—if she loved him."
"I have no reason to believe that she loves me," said Peter.
"Perhaps I shouldn't tell you, butIhave reason to believe that—she loves you."
He leaned forward and searchingly studied her face: "I'm sure you are mistaken. But—granting that Charlotte may love me—is it for her sake that you want me to marry her?"
"For hers—and for yours. I want to see you in a home of your own, Peter—with a wife to love you, with children. I want—I want you to be happy!"
"I would not be happy if I married Charlotte."
"Why, Peter?"
"Because I do not love her."
"You would come to love her."
"No, Sheila—I am not free to do that."
"Do you—do you love some one else?" And her voice shook now in spite of her attempt to keep it firm.
"Yes," he answered quietly, "I love some one else."
"Some one you can—marry?" She could not look at him, but question him she must.
"No—not some one I can marry."
The room was very still for a moment; but she seemed to hear the sorrow of his voice echoing and re-echoing through it.
"You will get over that in time," she whispered.
"I will never get over it," he answered.
And now she looked at him. She had wondered if he loved her; looking into his sad eyes, she knew. A sob swelled her throat and broke from her lips. And then they sprang up and faced each other.
So they stood, gazing at each other. And though they neither spoke nor touched each other, the heart of each was clear to the other—more clear, indeed, than speech or touch could have made them. So they stood, looking into each other's eyes, and unbearable pain and unbelievable ecstasy were mingled in those few, silent moments. Then the ecstasy died; the pain became cruelly intense. And more than pain shone dark in Sheila's eyes; fear crouched there, and Peter saw it. She loved him—and she was afraid of him. More intolerably than anything else, that hurt him—that she should have to be afraid of him.
"Peter," she said—and her voice trembled so that he could scarcely understand her words, "Peter, I want you to marry Charlotte for—for my sake." And her fear stared at him out of her eyes, stared at him and implored him.
She was asking him to put Charlotte between them. He realized that now. She was telling him that Ted and Eric were not enough to keep them apart.
"I will do it—or something which will answer as well," he assured her gently. "You may trust me for that, Sheila."
And then, still without touching her, without even looking at her again, he was gone. He was gone and everything was ended for them—for them who had not known even the beginnings.