Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories Part 47

'When was that?'

'Oh--before I was engaged to you,' said Rachel, and smiled at him.

John said nothing more, but sat tapping his knee with his folded newspaper, as was his habit when in thought. Presently he rose and strolled away.

Rachel could not help resenting his silence, which left her in discomfort. When so much had been said he should have said more, if only to put her at her ease. For days afterwards she expected him to return to the subject, and when he did not do so, she continued to resent the implication he seemed to be making.

At this time the house itself had already begun to have its effect upon her. Rachel could hardly tell when she stopped looking wistfully at the sectional bookcases and mission furniture of her acquaintances. But soon after she moved into it, the house had ceased to be to her merely a house. With her conventionally modern notions of beauty in furnishings, she had first been surprised to find how at rest and how satisfied she was in this house, which had met in a generous way the needs and tastes of another generation, but met few of those to which she had been trained. She had not known that it was in her to find a charm in such a house. But from the time when she first became aware of a positive quality in the place, she became more and more awake to its existence; she wondered at it, but it held her attention constantly more firmly.

At last she found that behind the ent.i.ty of the house lay that which had made it--the personality of the generations gone and especially of its last owner. The quality of the whole place, with its solidity of walls and generosity of room, along with its plain sincerity in every detail, seemed to indicate praiseworthiness, not only in the first builder, but in all later possessors. It became a meritorious thing to have and to keep a house like this. She remembered something of the sacrifices that Richard Hughes had made to retain it, and warmed with pride of him at the recollection.

The whole place reflected him and the people who had made him. Gradually Rachel grew in pride of the house and of her heritage. As she lived there month by month she found herself enveloped in its atmosphere and growing toward its proportions. At first she entered the library with timidity and an uncomfortable strangeness. Even one who had only very superficial intellectual tastes must have felt a sort of awe before its acc.u.mulation of books and their accompaniments. When Rachel and John had first begun to make a home, they had placed the making of a library among their ambitions, for it, and had taken pleasure in adding a few gayly bound novels each year to the small united collection with which they had begun. They had enjoyed seeing their few shelves grow, and knowing that they had so many of the popular books of which their friends talked. When they came to the Hughes home, Rachel had crowded their parti-colored collection into the shelves of the library there, weeding out others to make room for their own.

But on a later day, as she reentered the room, she felt a shock at the incongruity presented and, to John's puzzlement, gathered their own books into a corner by themselves where a curtain safely hid them. Their garish triviality had no place among these mellowed, long-tried volumes.

John, however, had looked the old volumes over and p.r.o.nounced them a dry lot--give him something fresher.

But Rachel perceived that there had been something in the choosing of these books which she had never really known. To her, books had been an accessory, an incidental thing, hypothetically an enrichment of life, but not an essential. She had thought of intellectual exercise as an intermittent thing, to be taken up or laid down as suited the mood of the time. But here was a people who chose books not merely as a desirable possession, an ornamental furnishing, but as an unquestioned necessity.

Gradually, as she continued to handle and to know their books, she evoked for herself the earlier presences of the house, most of all Richard Hughes. In the long hours which she now spent alone about the house, she found herself living more constantly in a companionship with those minds. They were not only an atmosphere, but sometimes almost a positive presence. It entertained her to go over the books one by one, sometimes, deciding who had chosen this one and that one, and for what reason, and picturing the occasion of its coming to his hand. As her knowledge of the library grew, she took more and more pleasure in this, tracing the taste of one owner or another in the recurrence of a subject or in successive accretions. She, as she learned, glowed over her collection of first editions of modern works, since they had been chosen, not as first editions, but, in their own time, as works for which an appreciative hand was eagerly waiting.

And since Richard Hughes was the only one of her predecessors in the library whom she had known, she found herself embodying all the others in him. She knew him now better than she had ever known him. She could detect his additions to the treasures of the house, and, as her own knowledge increased, could trace his using of the resources which had been handed down to him. She began to take pleasure in following what she thought had been his path in taste and knowledge, gradually matching her mind to his own.

Her pride in the room went through successive stages. In her first days of satisfaction in mere proprietorship of so respectable and worthy a possession, she took pleasure in unostentatious exhibition of it. She liked to take guests there, in a natural sort of way, and to be found sitting there, by unexpected callers. She liked the eminently admirable background of the rows of books, for social episodes. But as her knowledge of the library grew, that stage pa.s.sed. As she went from familiarity to intimacy, she began to desire that it should be an exclusive intimacy. She no longer took callers to the room, and when familiar acquaintances found their way there, she was uneasy at their handling of the books and impatient of their discussion of them. She now seldom spontaneously took strangers there. In time she had come to group John with all the others. The only companionship that she desired in the library was an imagined one.

John's att.i.tude had more and more set her apart in this companionship.

His dislike for the house had grown steadily more obvious as the months and years pa.s.sed. It showed itself in a lack of home-pride, in open contempt for the old-fashioned elements of the place, in reluctance to make even necessary expenditure upon it.

But Rachel herself had hardly guessed the strength of his feeling until one day when she discovered among Richard Hughes's papers what seemed to be a memorandum for a codicil to his will, which would make a gift of a thousand dollars to the little public library of the town.

She took the note directly to John. 'I think we ought to do this,' she said.

John looked at the paper and laid it down. 'I don't see that we are obliged to,' he answered shortly.

'It is what he intended to do--and we got the money,' she said, with too patient a manner, as if explaining the moral point to him. 'We should give it in his name.'

'It is enough to have to live in Richard Hughes's house. I don't care to set up a memorial for him besides.'

'But John,' she urged herself to argue, 'is it honest?'

'There is more than one kind of honesty,' said John shortly, in a tone which checked further answer. 'I can't afford it,' he added after a moment, as the final word.

She left him in an anger which it seemed to her she would feel all her life. But gradually it became less an active feeling than a part of all her unformulated opinion of him. He had not followed her a single step in the development which had resulted from her awakening to the spirit of the house. In time he came to ignore the library altogether as part of the house, and by degrees fitted up an incongruous little lounging-place upstairs. Rachel came to regard his whole att.i.tude toward the place and the man who had owned it as belonging to his mental and aesthetic plane; his jealous ingrat.i.tude seemed not a separate feeling, but only an element in his character.

Richard Hughes, she now understood very well, had known her very little, and had loved only her prettiness and light girlishness, charms which were different from anything in his own life. The recollection of that episode did not flatter her now, or even afford her any special gratification. But she loved to live side by side with the embodiment she had re-created for herself, and was proud to feel her spirit matching its spirit. She sometimes felt, with her growing imagination, that she was living in the house, not with John, but with these presences of the past--most of all with Richard Hughes.

But in the mean time the matter of the bequest a.s.sumed for her constantly greater proportions. After some time had pa.s.sed she ventured to mention it again. He answered as before, 'I can't afford it!' She knew that he could afford it. About the same time he bought a strip of ground lying beside them and began his garden. Rachel suggested that he take a piece of their own grounds, but he bluntly rejected the proposal.

A growing taciturnity marked his manner, and often a willful crudeness of phrase and speech, which annoyed her almost to the point of reproof.

So far as was possible, however, she kept the recognition of all this far in the background of her thought and forebore any conscious criticism of him, even to herself. But her warmest feeling for him was tinged with pity.

Yesterday he had been taken. This accident, sudden as a lightning-flash and more unforeseen, had ended the relation between them--though not the puzzle. Rachel had never been one to revise her opinion of a man because he was dead. Her tears had fallen now, but she had no compunctious self-deception, and her long-framed feelings were only complicated, not really altered. She saw as clearly as ever the incongruity of her husband's presence in this room where Richard Hughes had had his life, and where she now had her own.

III

All waited for the coming of John's brother, David Marquis. David was an elder brother, retired from business on some pretext or other, now loitering his way profitably and pleasantly through the later half of his life. It had been his custom to visit them frequently, spending weeks at a time idling about the house, quiet, keen of look, ready to talk with interest on any general topic, but incommunicative of opinion on any personal matter. Rachel had always felt, as she saw his observant eye first upon John and then upon her, that he saw the difference between them and sympathized with her. For this reason, although she had never criticized John to him, she had sometimes spoken freely of herself and of her own tastes and wishes; and he had listened, quietly as ever, but responsively.

She had a sort of feeling now that she would find her poise through him when he came. A sympathetic eye would help her to adjust the degree of her grief to the limits of her previous feeling.

It was eight o'clock when he arrived. The pretext of dinner in the house was over, and even the neighborly and professional attentions of the day were withdrawn. Rachel descended from her room in the quiet house at the sound of his entrance, and met gratefully the brotherly kindliness of his manner. They sat a few minutes in the hall, in question and answer of his journey and of the accident and all the circ.u.mstantial things which cl.u.s.ter about death itself. Rachel answered freely and fully, discovering a relief in breaking the instinctive repression of the day, and finding the sort of rest she had hoped for from his presence. David listened to her quietly, as he had always done, with his ready eye upon her.

At last he rose, turning away from her with a comprehensive look about him.

'Where is he?' he asked abruptly.

'In the library,' said Rachel, with a movement to lead the way for him.

'In there?' exclaimed David, with the emphasis of surprise. Then he closed his lips again and followed her, without meeting her questioning look.

But inside the door he paused again. Rachel had, constrained by long habit, looked first at the room, as she entered, and then at the casket, as a separate thing. The room had so long served to give her poise that she felt a sort of appeal to it even now. David's eyes rested first on the casket and then swept the room in a disapproving look.

'Why is he here?' he asked, with a curtness in his easy voice which Rachel had never heard from him before.

'Why--' she began hesitatingly, and then added vaguely, 'It seemed best.'

'Best for him?' responded David with the same curtness.

Then he turned and dropped his head slowly over the figure in the coffin, and Rachel slipped away. David's manner seemed to put her entirely outside of the occasion.

Later he joined her where she waited in the dim parlor. The still chilliness of the room was stiffening and depressing, but she had not made a fire because its open cheerfulness would not have seemed appropriate. David walked up and down the long room a few minutes in a silence which Rachel, not knowing his mood, did not break.

Then he said, as abruptly as before, 'Can you have him moved in the morning?'

'Moved?--Where?'

Rachel had not supposed that her brother-in-law would have the same feeling of incongruity that she had.

'Anywhere but there. Here--I don't know--there is no place in the house that seems to belong to him. The hall might do--at least he went through there every day,' he finished with an irony none too subtle.

He began to walk up and down the length of the room, alternately facing her with a challenging air, and turning abruptly away again when he had neared her seat. But Rachel, absorbed still in her mood, was unappreciative of his manner.

'John never fitted into the house very well, anywhere,' she said, with reserved regret.

'Fitted into it!' exclaimed David, as he turned toward her at the end of the room. 'My--Did the house ever fit into him? It is the business of a house to suit the people that live in it,' he flung over his shoulder as he wheeled away again.

Rachel was silent, puzzled at this surprising change of manner in David, and not knowing how much of his emotion was merely the impatience of grief.

'Is there a corner of the house where it is appropriate for him to lie now, except that little cubby-hole of his upstairs?' demanded David, continuing, but as one who knows that an answer is impossible.