The Heart of Rachael Part 24

"You asked about Margaret Clay," the doctor remembered presently.

"She was the same old sixpence, only growing up now; she owns to nineteen--isn't she more than that? She always did romance and yarn so much about herself that you can't believe anything."

"She's about twenty-one, perhaps no more than twenty," Rachael said, after some thought. "Did they say anything about Parker and Leila?"

"No, but the old lady can't do much harm there. She'll not last another six months. She may leave Margaret a slice, but it won't be much of a slice, for Parker could fight if it was. Leila's pretty safe. We'll have to go to that wedding, by the way!"

"Oh, Greg, the fun of going places together!" She was her happiest self again. His mother and Alice Valentine and everything else but their great joy was forgotten as they lingered over their luncheon and planned for their wedding day.

If they could only have been alone together, always, thought the new-made wife, when two perfect weeks on the powerful motor boat were over, and all the society editors were busily announcing that Doctor and Mrs. James Warren Gregory were furnishing their luxurious apartment in the Rotterdam, where they would spend the winter. They were so happy together; there was never enough time to talk and to be silent, never enough of their little luncheons all by themselves, their theatre trips, their afternoon drives through the sweet, clear early winter sunshine on the Park.

Always in the later years Rachael could feel the joy of these days again when she caught the scent of fresh violets. Never a day pa.s.sed that Warren did not send her or bring her a fragrant boxful. They quivered on the breast of her gown, and on her dressing-table they made her bedroom sweet. Now and then when she and Warren were to be alone she braided her dark hair and wound it about her head, tucking a few violets against the rich plaits, conscious that the cla.s.sic simplicity of the arrangement enhanced her beauty, and was pleased in his pleasure.

It suited her whim to carry out the little affectation in her soaps and toilet waters; he could not pick up her handkerchief or hold her wrap for her without freeing the delicate faint odor of her favorite flower. When they met downtown for dinner there was always the little ceremony of finding the florist, and all the operas this winter were mingled for Rachael with the most exquisite fragrance in the world.

These days were perfect. It was only when the outside world entered their paradise that anything less than perfect happiness entered, too. Rachael's old friends--Judy Moran, Elinor, and the Villalongas--said, and said with truth, that she had changed. She had not tried to change, but it was hard for her to get the old point of view now, to laugh at the old jokes, to listen to the old gossip. She had been cold and wretched only a year before, but she had had the confident self-sufficiency of a gypsy who walks bareheaded and irresponsible through a world whose treasure will never come her way. Now Rachael, tremulous and afraid, was the guardian of the great treasure, she knew now what love meant, and she could no longer face even the thought of a life without love.

Tirelessly, and with increasing satisfaction, she studied her husband's character, finding, like all new wives, that almost all her preconceived ideas of him had been wrong. Like all the world, she had always fancied Greg something of an autocrat, positive almost to stubbornness in his views.

Now it was amusing to discover that he was really a rather mild person, except where his work was concerned, rarely taking the initiative in either praising or blaming anybody or anything, deeply influenced by the views of other persons, and content to be rather a listener and onlooker than an active partic.i.p.ant in what did not immediately concern him. Rachael found this, for some subtle reasons of her own, highly pleasing. It made her less afraid of her husband's criticism, and spared her many of those tremors common to the first months of married life. Also, it gave her an occasional chance to influence him, even to protect him from his own indifference to this issue or that.

She laughed at him, accusing him of being an impostor. Why, everyone thought Dr. Warren Gregory, with his big scowl and his firm-set jaw, was an absolute Tartar, she exulted, when as a matter of fact he was only a little boy afraid of his wife! He hated, she learned, to be uncertain as to just the degree of dressing expected of him on different occasions, he hated to enter hotels by the wrong doors, to hear her dispraise an opera generally approved, or find good in a book branded by the critics as worthless. With all his pride in her beauty, he could not bear to have her conspicuous; if her laughter or her unusual voice attracted any attention in a public place, she could see that it made him uncomfortable. These things Rachael might have considered flaws in another man. In Warren they were only deliciously amusing, and his reliance upon her, where she had expected only absolute self-possession from him, seemed to make him more her own.

Rachael, daughter of wandering adventurers, had a thousand times more a.s.surance than he. In her secret heart she had no regard for any social law; society was a tool to be used, not a weight under which one struggled helplessly. She dictated where he followed precedent; she laughed where he was filled with apprehension.

Seriously, she set her wits and her love to the task of accustoming him to joy, and day by day he flung off the old, half- defined reluctances that still bound him, and entered more fully into the delights of the care-free, radiant hours that lay before them.

His wife saw the change in him, and rejoiced. But what she did not see, as the months went on, was the no less marked change in herself. As Warren's nature expanded, and as he began to reach quite naturally for the various pleasures all about him, Rachael's soul experienced an alteration almost directly opposed.

She became thoughtful, almost reserved, she began to show a certain respect for convention--not for the social conventions at which she had always laughed, and still laughed, but for the fundamental laws of truth, simplicity, and cleanness, upon which the ideal of civilization, at least, is based. She noticed that she was beginning to like "good" persons, even homely, dowdy, good persons, like Alice and George Valentine. She lost her old appet.i.te for scandal, for ugly stories, for reckless speech.

Warren, freed once and for all from his old prejudice, found nothing troublesome now in the thought that she had been another man's wife; it was a common situation, it was generally approved.

As in other things, he had had stupidly conventional ideas about it once--that was all. But Rachael winced at the sound of the word "divorce," not because of her own divorce, but at the thought that some other man and woman had promised in their first love what later they could not fulfil, and hated each other now where they had loved each other once, at the thought that perhaps--perhaps one of them loved the other still!

"Divorce is--monstrous," she said soberly to her husband in one of their hours of perfect confidence.

"How can we say it, of all persons, my darling? Don't be hidebound!"

"No," she smiled reluctantly, "I suppose we can't. But--but I never feel like a divorced woman, Warren, I feel like a different woman, but not as if that term fitted me. It sounds so--coa.r.s.e.

Don't you think it does?"

"No, I never thought of it quite that way. Everyone makes mistakes," he answered cheerfully.

"Don't you care--that it's true of me?" she asked.

"Are you trying to make me jealous, you gypsy!" he laughed. But there was no answering laughter in her face.

"Yes, perhaps I am," she admitted, as if she were a little surprised that it was so. And in her next slowly worded sentence she discovered for herself another truth. "I mind it, Warren!" she said. "I wish, with all my heart, that it wasn't so!"

"That isn't very consistent, sweet. Your life made you what you were, the one woman in the world I could ever have loved. Why quarrel with the process?"

"I wish you cared!" she said wistfully.

"Cared?"

"Yes--suffered over it--objected. Then I could keep proving to you that I never in my life loved anyone, man, woman, or child, until now!"

"But I believe that, my darling!"

She smiled at his wide, innocent look, a mother's amused yet hopeless smile, and as they rose from their late luncheon he put his arm about her and tipped her beautiful face up toward his own.

"Don't you realize, my darling, that just as you are, you are perfect to me--not nearly perfect, or ninety-nine per cent.

perfect, but pressed down and running over, a thousand per cent., a million per cent.?" he asked.

Her dark beauty glowed; she was more lovely than ever in her exquisite content.

"Oh, Warren, if you'd only say that to me over and over!" she begged.

"Dear Heaven, hear the woman! What else DO I do?"

"Oh, I don't mean now. I mean always, all through our lives. It's ALL I want to hear!"

"Do you realize that you are an absolute--little--tyrant?" he asked, laughing. Radiantly she laughed back.

"I only realize one thing in these days," she answered; "I only live for one thing!"

It was true. The world for her now was all in her husband, his smile was her light, and she lived almost perpetually in the sunshine. When they were parted--and they were never long parted-- the memory of this glance or that tone, this eager phrase or that sudden laugh, was enough to keep her happy. When they met again, whether she came to meet him in his own hallway, or rose, lovely in her furs, and walked toward him in some restaurant or hotel, joy lent her a new and almost fearful beauty. To dress for him, to make him laugh, to hold his interest, this was all that interested her, and for the world outside of their own house she cared not at all. They had their own vocabulary, their own phrases for moments of mirth or tenderness; among her gowns he had his favorites.

among the many expressions of his sensitive face there were some that it was her whimsical pleasure always to commend. Their conversation, as is the way with lovers, was all of themselves, and all of praise.

Long before they were ready for the world it began to make its demands. Rachael loved her own home--they had chosen a large duplex apartment on Riverside Drive--loved the memorable little meals they had before the fire, the lazy, enchanting hours of reading or of music in the big studio that united the two large floors, the scent of her husband's cigar, the rustle of her own gown, the snow slipping and lisping against the window, and it was with great reluctance that she surrendered even one evening. But there was hospitable Vera Villalonga and her dreadful New Year's dance, and there were the Bowditch dinner and the Hoyt dinner and the Parmalee's dance for Katrina. Unwillingly the beautiful Mrs.

Gregory yielded to the swift current, and presently they were caught in the rush of the season, and could not have withdrawn themselves except for serious cause.

Rachael smiled a little wryly one morning over Mrs. George Valentine's cordially worded invitation to an informal dinner, but she accepted it as a matter of course, and wore her most beautiful gown. She deliberately set out to capture her hostess' friendship, and simple, sweet Mrs. Valentine could not long resist her guest's beauty and charm--such a young, fresh creature as she was, not a bit one's idea of an adventuress, so genuinely interested in the children, so obviously devoted to Warren.

Rachael, on her side, contemplated the Valentines with deep interest. She found them a rather puzzling study, unlike any married couple that she had ever chanced to know. Alice was one of those good, homely, unfashionable women who seem utterly devoid of the instinct for dressing properly. Her ma.s.ses of dull brown hair she wore strained from her high forehead and wound round her head in a fashion hopelessly obsolete. Her evening gown, of handsome gray silk, was ruined by those little fussy touches of lace and ruffling that brand a garment instantly as "homemade."

George was one of the plainest of men, shy, awkward, insignificant looking, with a long-featured, pleasant face, and red hair. Warren had told his wife at various times that George was "a prince," and physically, at least, Rachael found him disappointing, especially beside her own handsome husband. She knew he was clever, with a large practice besides his work as head surgeon at one of the big hospitals, but Warren had added to this the information that George was a poor business man, and ill qualified to protect his own interests.

Yet, in his own home--a handsome and yet shabby brownstone house in the West Fifties--he appeared to better advantage. There was a brightness in his plain face when he looked at his wife, and an adoring response in her glance that after twelve years of married life seemed admirable to Rachael. "Alice" was a word continually on his lips; what Alice said and thought and did was evidently perfection. Before the Gregorys had been ten minutes in the house on their first visit he had gone downstairs to inspect the furnace, wound and set a stopped clock, answered the telephone twice, and fondly carried upstairs a refractory four-year-old girl, who came boldly down in her nightgown, with reproaches and requests. On his return from this trip he brought down the one- year-old baby, another girl, delicious in the placid hour between supper and bed, and he and his wife and Warren Gregory exchanged admiring glances as the beautiful Mrs. Gregory took the child delightedly in her arms, contrasting her own dark and glowing loveliness with the tiny Katharine's gold and roses.

It was a quiet evening, but Rachael liked it. She liked their simple, affectionate talk, their reminiscences, the serenity of the large, plainly furnished rooms, the glowing of coal fires in the old-fashioned steel-barred grates. She liked Alice Valentine's placidity, the sureness of herself that marked this woman as more highly civilized than so many of the other women Rachael knew.

There was none of Judy's and Gertrude's and Vera's excitability and restlessness here. Alice was concerned neither with her own appearance nor her own wants; she was free to comment with amus.e.m.e.nt or wonder or admiration upon larger affairs. Rachael wondered, as beautiful women have wondered since time began, what held this man so tightly to this mild, plain woman, and by what special gift of the G.o.ds Alice Valentine might know herself secure beyond all question in a world of beauty and charm and youth.

"Well, what d'you think of her, Alice?" Doctor Gregory had asked proudly when his wife was on his arm and leave-taking was in order.

"Think you're lucky, Greg," Mrs. Valentine answered earnestly.

"You've got a dear, good, lovely wife!"

"And you are going to let me come and make friends with the boy and the girls some afternoon?" Rachael asked.