Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories Part 48

He suddenly abandoned his walk and came over and sat down opposite her, in front of the empty fireplace. He sat silent a moment, his gray figure drooping in a big chair. Rachel, looking carefully at him for the first time, noted with a kind of surprise the mark of brokenness and relaxation upon him, of submission to tremendous grief. It had not occurred to her that John could be mourned in that way. After a moment he said quietly, 'This house has never been a home for John.'

'I was always hoping,' said Rachel, as if this subject were one which they had discussed before and agreed upon, 'that he would feel more at home here in time.'

'What would have been necessary to bring that about?' asked David quietly.

'Well,' said Rachel, with reluctance in criticism even greater than usual, 'he would have had to change in many ways.'

'In what ways?' persisted David.

Rachel hesitated again. The thing, when baldly said, seemed so much harsher than when it was merely held in thought.

'John's taste was different from that of the people who made the house,'

she said.

'Yes, I know. These pictures, and the old books in the library, and so on. Is that what you mean?'

'Well, the insides of the books, and other pictures which we don't have--and so on,' she finished indefinitely.

'Yes. You thought John was crude and rather coa.r.s.e in feeling.'

'Oh, no--not that indeed!'

'You wouldn't call it just that, of course. But the difference between you was the same, whether it put you up high or him down low. Isn't that so? You were sorry for yourself because John was not on your level?'

'Yes,' admitted Rachel, reluctantly voicing the word.

'Were you ever sorry enough for John because you were not on his level?--There are different kinds of lonesomeness,' he added after a pause. 'I never saw a worse case than John's.'

Rachel sat upright, looking at him in a sort of amazement, as much at himself as at the idea. She had never dreamed that behind his apparently sympathetic observation of her lay any condemnation of her att.i.tude.

He met her look with one as direct, and asked, in a way which made the question a sort of arraignment, 'Did it ever occur to you what a tragedy John's life was?'

Rachel merely shook her head slowly as she tried to connect, in an impersonal sort of way, the notion of tragedy with John--John the successful, the obstinate, the simple in desire, the objective. There had been no real disappointment in all his life. She looked back half-indignantly at David, rejecting the suggestion.

David rose and took a turn up and down the parlor again, pausing in the shadows at the farther end of the room. Then he came back to his seat and faced her determinedly.

'What _I_ had always hoped was that you would come to understand John without any outside interference. I came back over and over to see, but I always kept from b.u.t.ting in.' He paused again. 'I wouldn't say anything now, only your tone, your "Poor John" way, shows you are just the same as ever. I won't have him buried without your knowing something more about him--if I can show you,' he added more gently.

'Please tell me,' said Rachel quietly. Her mind was still half as much on David as on what he was going to say.

'There is nothing to tell that you should not have seen for yourself.

You were his wife and you lived with him. From the time you came to this house one side of John's life ended. In a way he had no home and no--wife. A man wants a companion.'

Rachel almost spoke, in startled contradiction. It was she who had been uncompanioned.

'You were proud, I know, of never finding fault with John. Don't you know that he would have been glad if you had openly found fault with him? As it was, it seemed as if you thought him hopeless. When he said things about the house or anything in it, he really wanted you to contradict him and argue with him, and give him a way to come to the same place where you were--don't you see?'

'Did he tell you?'

'No. But of course I used to sit round with him a good deal. And I had always been used to understanding him,' he added, with a drop in his voice. 'John had a lot of imagination,' he went on.

Rachel looked up in real surprise.

'I could see every year how the house was getting more on his nerves.

Sometimes when he was feeling it more than usual he would say little things that I understood. For him it was like living with some one who didn't want him round. But he might have liked it.'

'You don't understand,' said Rachel, as if p.r.i.c.ked into coming to her own defense. 'John didn't like the way the house came to us in the first place. You didn't know--'

'Yes, I did,' he responded as she hesitated, 'I found out.'

'And yet,' she went on, 'we used the house and the money--'

'You haven't known much about the business for several years, have you?

Of course you do know that the house has been in your name from the beginning, almost. But you don't know that the few thousands Richard Hughes left have been invested for you ever since two years after he died. It crippled John for a while after he took it out of the business.

But he always took good care of that money--it amounts to quite a little now.'

'John didn't like it because Richard--' Rachel hesitated again.

'You thought he was jealous. He did that after one day when you weeded out a lot of his books and put them away in some corner. And it was after he had those New York electric men here that evening and you seemed not to want to have them in the library, that he bought that corner of ground over there and made his garden. Don't you understand?'

Rachel dropped her face upon her hands, partly for relief from David's serious face, which forebore to rebuke her and yet of necessity did so, partly to close herself in with her own bewilderment. To reconstruct John's life meant to take a new view of her own also.

David leaned suddenly toward her. 'If John had been jealous, wouldn't he have had reason, Rachel? I know you weren't--untrue to him. But still--'

He felt the formulation of the thought with her.

'I haven't judged you harshly, Rachel,' he went on in a moment, 'but it is not right that a man's brother should know him better than his wife does. I had to make you know, even at the last.'

Then, as if he were compelled to say the final hard thing, he added, 'Wasn't there something you had already thought you should do when everything was in your hands?'

Rachel, startled and flushing, faced him again, in involuntary confession. 'I had always thought it would be right to carry out a plan of Richard Hughes's.'

'Yes, I know. I am sure that was only a momentary notion of his. He had a great habit of making notes of things. His will was made only a few days before he died, and that idea was probably earlier. I was an executor, you remember. But anyway, several years ago John made a large gift to the library of Richard's college, in Richard's name. He took no chances on being unfair. He should have told you,' he added, 'but John had a hard sort of pride to manage, and I suppose he never did.'

'No,' said Rachel, 'he never did.'

She rose, with a sudden dropping of her hands at her sides, as if relinquishing something they had held, and moved vaguely toward the door.

'Don't you think,' pursued David, 'that he might be brought in here--or somewhere?'

Rachel hesitated, her hand faltering on the door-frame. 'No,' she said at last, 'let him stay there now.' And she herself went out through the dim chill hall. She lingered a moment at the closed library door, and then went slowly on up to her own empty room.

OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT[8]

BY MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE