The Red Acorn Part 5

She took a chair near by, put away the arm he would have placed about her waist, drew from her pocket a dainty handkerchief bordered with black, and opened it deliberately. It shed a delicate odor of violets.

Harry waited anxiously for her to speak.

"This mourning which I wear," she began gently, "I put on when I received the news of your downfall."

"My downfall?" broke in Harry hotly. "Great heavens, you don't say that you, too, have been carried away by this wretched village slander?"

"I put it on," she continued, unmindful of the interruption, "because I suffered a loss which was greater than any merely physical death could have occasioned."

"I don't understand you."

"My faith in you as a man superior to your fellows died then. This was a much more cruel blow than your bodily death would have been."

"'Fore gad, you take a pleasant view of my decease--a much cooler one, I must confess, than I am able to take of that interesting event in my history."

Her great eyes blazed, and she seemed about to reply hotly, but she restrained herself and went on with measured calmness:

"The reason I selected you from among all other men, and loved you, and joyfully accepted as my lot in life to be your devoted wife and helpmate, was that I believed you superior in all manly things to other men. Without such a belief I could love no man."

She paused for an instant, and Harry managed to stammer:

"But what have I done to deserve being thrown over in this unexpected way?"

"You have not done anything. That is the trouble. You have failed to do that which was rightfully expected of you. You have allowed others, who had no better opportunities, to surpa.s.s you in doing your manly duty.

Whatever else my husband may not be he must not fail in this."

"Rachel, you are hard and cruel."

"No, I am only kind to you and to myself. I know myself too well to make a mistake in this respect. I have seen too many women who have been compelled to defend, apologize, or blush for their husband's acts, and have felt too keenly the abject misery of their lives to take the least chance of adding myself to their sorrowful number. If I were married to you I could endure to be beaten by you and perhaps love you still, but the moment I was compelled to confess your inferiority to some other woman's husband I should hate you, and in the end drag both of us down to miserable graves."

"But let me explain this."

"It would be a waste of time," she answered coldly. "It is sufficient for me to know that you are convicted by general opinion of having failed where a number of commonplace fellows succeeded. You, yourself, admit the justice of this verdict by tame submission to it, making no effort to retrieve your reputation. I can not understand how this could be so if you had any of the qualities that I fondly imagined you possessed in a high degree. But this interview is being protracted to a painful extent. Let us say good night and part."

"Forever?" he stammered.

"Yes."

She held out her hand for farewell. Harry caught it and would have carried it to his lips, but she drew it away.

"No; all that must be ended now," she said, with the first touch of gentleness that had shaded her sad, serious eyes.

"Will you give me no hope?" said Harry, pleadingly.

"When you can make people forget the past--if ever--" she said, "then I will change this dress and you can come back to me."

She bowed and entered the house.

Chapter V. The Lint-sc.r.a.ping and Bandage-making Union.

At length I have acted my severest part: I feel the woman breaking in upon me, And melt about my heart: My tears will flow.

-- Addison.

Rachel Bond's will had carried her triumphantly through a terrible ordeal--how terrible no one could guess, unless he followed her to her room after the interview and saw her alone with her agony. She did not weep. Tears did not lie near the surface with her. The lachrymal glands had none of that ready sensitiveness which gives many superficial women the credit of deep feeling. But when she did weep it was not an April shower, but a midsummer tempest.

Now it was as if her intense grief were a powerful cautery which seared and sealed every duct of the fountain of tears and left her eyes hot and dry as her heart was ashes.

With pallid face and lips set until the blood was forced from them, and they made a thin purplish line in the pale flesh, she walked the floor back and forth, ever back and forth, until a half-stumble, as she was turning in a dreary round, revealed to her that she was almost dropping from exhaustion.

She had thought her love for Harry had received its death-blow when her pride in him had been so rudely shattered. But this meeting, in which she played the part set for herself with a brave perfection that she had hardly deemed possible, had resurrected every dear memory, and her pa.s.sion sprung into life again to mock and jeer at her efforts to throttle it out of existence. With him toppling from the pedestal on which her husband must stand, she had told herself that there was naught left but to roll a great stone against the sepulcher in which her love must henceforth lie buried, hopeless of the coming of any bright angle to unseal the gloomy vault. Yet, despite the entire approval given this by her judgment, her woman's heart cried bitterly for a return of the joys out of which the beauty had fled forever.

Hours pa.s.sed in this wrestle with pain. How many she did not know, but when she came forth it was with the composure of one who had fought the fight and won the victory, but at a cost that forbade exultation.

There was one ordeal that thus far she had not been called upon to endure. From the day on which she had donned her sable robes to that of Harry's return no one had ventured to speak his name in her presence.

Even her father and mother, after the first burst of indignation, had kept silence in pity for her suffering, and there was that in her bearing that forbade others touching upon a subject in her hearing that elsewhere was discussed with the hungry avidity of village gossips masticating a fresh scandal.

But she could not be always spared thus. She had not been so careful of the feelings of less favored women and girls, inferior to her in brightness, as to gain any claim for clement treatment now, when the displacement of a portion of her armor of superiority gave those who envied or disliked her an unprotected spot upon which to launch their irritating little darts.

All the sewing, dorcas and mite societies of the several churches in Sardis had been merged into one consolidated Lint-Sc.r.a.ping and Bandage-Making Union, in whose enlarged confines the waves of gossip flowed with as much more force and volume as other waves gain when the floods unite a number of small pools into one great lake.

In other days a sensational ripple starting, say in the Episcopalian "Dorcas," was stilled into calmness ere it pa.s.sed the calm and stately church boundaries. It would not do to let its existence be even suspected by the keen eyes of the freely-censorious Presbyterian dames, or the sharp-witted, agile-tongued Methodist ladies.

And, much as these latter were disposed to talk over the weaknesses and foibles of their absent sisters in the confidential environments of the Mite Society or the Sewing Circle, they were as reluctant to expose these to the invidious criticisms of the women of the other churches as if the discussed ones had been their sisters in fact, and not simply through sectarian affiliation. Church pride, if nothing else, contributed to the bridling of their tongues, and checking the free circulation of gossip.

"Them stuck-up Presbyterian and Episcopalian women think little enough on us now, the land knows," Mrs. Deborah Pancake explained to a newly-received sister, whom she was instructing in elementary duties.

"There's no use giving 'em more reason for looking down upon us. We may talk over each other's short-comings among ourselves, private like, because the Bible tells us to admonish and watch over each other. But it don't say that we're to give outsiders any chance to speak ill of our sisters-in-Christ."

And Mrs. Euphrosyne Pursifer remarked to the latest agreeable accession to the parish of St. Marks, with that graceful indirection that gave her the reputation in Sardis of being a feminine Talleyrand:

"Undoubtedly the ladies in these outside denominations are very worthy women, dear, but a certain circ.u.mspection seems advisable in conversing with them on subjects that we may speak of rather freely among ourselves."

The rising fervor of the war spirit melted away most of these barriers to a free interchange of gossip. With the first thrill of pleasure at finding that patriotism had drawn together those whom the churches had long held aloof came to all the gushing impulse to cement the newly-formed relationship by confiding to each other secrets heretofore jealously guarded. Nor should be forgotten the "narrative stimulus"

every one feels on gaining new listeners to old stories.

It was so graciously condescending in Mrs. Euphrosyne Pursifer to communicate to Mrs. Elizabeth Baker some few particulars in which her aristocratic a.s.sociates of St. Marks had grieved her by not rising to her standard of womanly dignity and Christian duty, that Mrs. Baker in turn was only too happy to reciprocate with a similar confidence in regard to her intimate friends of Wesley Chapel.

It was this sudden lapsing of all restraint that made the waves of gossip surge like sweeping billows.

And the flotsam that appeared most frequently of late on their crests, and that was tossed most relentlessly hither and thither, was Rachel Bond's and Harry Glen's conduct and relations to each other.