The Heart of Rachael
Page 63Yet, even then, as Rachael Gregory admitted to herself months later,
there had been a cloud in the sky--a cloud so tiny and so vague that
for many days she had been able to banish it in the flooding sunshine
all about her whenever it crossed her vision.
But it was there, and after a while other tiny clouds came to bear it
company, and to make a formidable shadow that all her philosophy could
not drive away. Philosophy is not the bride's natural right; the
honeymoon is a time of unreason; a crumpled rose-leaf in those first
uncertain weeks may loom larger than all the far more serious storms of
the years to come.
Rachael, loving at last, was overwhelmed, intoxicated, carried beyond
all sanity by the passion that possessed her.
When Warren Gregory came to find her at Quaker Bridge on that
unforgettable morning after the storm, a chance allusion to Mrs.
Valentine, the charming unknown lady with the gray hair, had distracted
Rachael's thoughts from the point at issue. But later on, during the
long drive, she had remembered it again.
"But Greg, dear, did you tell me that you and Doctor Valentine drove
down yesterday in all that frightful storm?"
"No, no, of course not, my child; we came down late the night
before--why, yesterday we couldn't get as far as the gate! Mrs.
Valentine's brother was there, and we played thirty-two rubbers of
bridge! Sweet situation, you two miles away, and me held up after three
months of waiting!"
She said to herself, with a little pain at her heart, that she didn't
understand it. It was all right, of course, whatever Greg did was all
right, but she did not understand it. To be so near, to have that
hideous war of wind and water raging over the world, and not to come
somehow--to swim or row or ride to her, to bring her delicious
companionship and reassurance out of the storm! Why, had she known that
Greg was so near no elements that ever raged could have held her--
But of course, she was reminding herself presently, Greg had never been
to Quaker Bridge, he had no reason to suppose her in actual danger;
indeed, perhaps the danger had always been more imagined than real. If
his hosts had been merely bored by the weather, merely driven to cards,
how should he be alarmed?
"Did the Valentines know what a tide we were having in Quaker Bridge?"
she asked, after a while.
"Never dreamed it; didn't know we'd been cut off until it was all
over!" That was reassuring, at least. "And, you see, I couldn't say
much about our plans. Alice Valentine's all wool, of course, but she's
anything but a yard wide! She wouldn't have understood--not that it
matters, but it was easier not! She was sweet to you at the wedding,
and she'll ask us to dinner, and you two will get along splendidly. But
she's not as--big as George."
"You mean, she doesn't like the--divorce part of it?"
"Or words to that effect," the doctor answered comfortably. "Of course,
she'd never have said a word. But they are sort of simple and
old-fashioned. George understands--that's all I care about. Do you see?"
"I see," she answered slowly. But when he spoke again the sunshine came
back to her heart; he had planned this, he had planned that, he had
wired Elinor, the power boat was ready. She was a woman, after all, and
young, and the bright hours of shopping, of being admired and envied,
and, above all, of being so newly loved and protected, were opening
before her. What woman in the world had more than she, what woman
indeed, she asked herself, as he turned toward her his keen, smiling
look of solicitude and devotion, had one-tenth as much?
Later on, in that same day, there was another tiny shadow. Rachael,
however, had foreseen this moment, and met it bravely.
"How's your mother, Greg?" she asked suddenly.
"Fine," he answered, and with a swift smile for her he added, "and
furious!"
"No--is she really furious?" Rachael asked, paling.
"Now, my dearest heart," Warren Gregory said with an air of authority
that she found strangely thrilling and sweet, "from this moment on make
up your mind that what my good mother does and says is absolutely
unimportant to you and me! She has lived her life, she is old, and
sick, and unreasonable, and whatever we did wouldn't please her, and
whatever anyone does, doesn't satisfy her anyway! In forty years--in
less than that, as far as I'm concerned--you and I'll be just as bad.
My mother acted like a martyr on the steamer; she was about as gay with
her old friends in London as you or I'd be at a funeral; she had an air
of lofty endurance and forbearance all the way, and, as I said to
Margaret Clay in Paris, the only time I really thought she was enjoying
herself was when she had to be hustled into a hospital, and for a day
or two there we really thought she was going to have pneumonia!"
Rachael's delightful laugh rang out spontaneously from utter relief of
heart.
"Oh, Greg, you're delicious! Tell me about old Lady Frothingham, is she
difficult, too? And how's pretty Magsie Clay?"
"Now, if we're married to-morrow," the doctor Went on, too much
absorbed in his topic to be lightly distracted. "But do you hear me,
Ma'am? How does it sound?"
"It sounds delicious! Go on!"
"If we're married to-morrow, I say--it could be to-day just as well,
but I suppose you girls have to buy clothes, and have your hands
manicured, and so on--"
"You know we do, to say nothing of lying awake all night talking about
our beaux!"
"Well"--he conceded it somewhat reluctantly--"then, to-morrow, some
time before I go with Valentine to call for you, I'll go down to see my
mother. She'll kiss me, and sigh, and feel martyred. In a month or two
she'll call on me at the office. 'Why don't you and your wife come to
see me, James?' 'Would you like us to, Mother? We fancied you were
angry at us.' 'I am sorry, my son, of course, but I have never been
angry. Will you come to-morrow night?' And when we go, my dear, you'd
never dream that there was anything amiss, I assure you!"
"I'll make her love me!" said Rachael, smiling tenderly.
"Perhaps some day you'll have a very powerful argument," he said with a
significant glance that brought the quick blood to her face. "Mother
couldn't resist that!"
She did not answer. It was a part of this new freshness and purity of
aspect that she could not answer.
"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
"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 passed
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 classic 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 participant 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
assurance 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 appetite 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--coarse. 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.
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 masses 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 amusement 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 gods 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.
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.
"If you WILL," their mother said, and she and Rachael kissed each
other. Gregory chuckled, in high feather, all the way home.
"You're a wonder, Ladybird! I have NEVER seen you sweeter nor prettier
than you were to-night!"
Rachael leaned back in the car with a long, contented sigh.
"One can see that she was all ready to hate me, Greg; a woman who had
been married, and who snapped up her favorite bachelor--"
He laughed triumphantly. "She doesn't hate you now!"
"No, and I'll see to it that she never does. She's my sort of woman,
and the children are absolute loves! I like that sort of old-fashioned
prejudice--honestly I do--that honor-thy-father-and-thy-mother-and-keep
holy-the-sabbath-day sort of person. Don't you, Greg?"
"We--ll, I don't like narrowness, sweet."
"No." Rachael pondered in the dark. "Yet if you're not narrow you seem
to be--really the only word for it is--loose," she submitted. "Somehow
lately, a great many persons--the girls I know--do seem to be a little
bit that way."
"You don't find THEM judging you!" her husband said. Rachael answered
only by a rather faint negative; she would not elucidate further. This
was one of the things she could never tell Warren, a thing indeed that
she would hardly admit to her own soul.
But she said to herself that she knew now the worst evil of divorce.
She knew that it coarsened whomever it touched, that it irresistibly
degraded, that it lowered all the human standard of goodness and
endurance, and self-sacrifice. However justified, it was an evil;
however properly consummated, it soiled the little group it affected.
The disinclination of a good woman like Alice Valentine to enter into a
close friendship with a younger and richer and more beautiful woman
whose history was the history of Rachael Gregory was no mere prejudice.
It was the feeling of a restrained and disciplined nature for an
unchecked and ill-regulated one; it was the feeling of a woman who, at
any cost, had kept her solemn marriage vow toward a woman who had
broken her word.
Rachael was beginning to find it more comprehensible, even more
acceptable, than the attitude of her own old world. Fresh from the Eden
that was her life with Warren, she had turned back to the friends whose
viewpoint had been hers a few months ago.
Were they changed, or was she? Both were changed, she decided. She had
been a cold queen among them once, flattered by their praise and
laughter, reckless in speech, and almost as reckless in action. But now
her only kingdom was in Warren Gregory's heart. She had no largesse for
these outsiders; she could not answer them with her old quick wit now;
indeed she hardly heard them. And on their side, where once there had
been that certain deference due to the woman who, however wretched and
neglected, was still Clarence Breckenridge's wife, now she noticed,
with quick shame, a familiarity, a carelessness, that indicated plainly
exactly the fine claim to delicacy that she had forfeited. Her position
in every way was better now than it had been then. But in some subtle
personal sense she had lost caste. A story was ventured when she
chanced to be alone with Frank Whittaker and George Pomeroy that her
presence would have forbidden in the old days, and Allen Parmalee gave
her a sensation of absolute sickness by merrily introducing her to his
sister from Kentucky with the words: "Don't stare at her so hard, Bess!
Of course you remember her: she was Mrs. Breckenridge last year, but
now she's making a much better record as Mrs. Gregory!"
The women were even more frank; Clarence's name was often mentioned in
her presence; she was quite simply congratulated and envied.
"My dear," said Mrs. Cowles, at a women's luncheon, "you were
extraordinarily clever, of course, but don't forget that you were
extremely lucky, too. Clarence making no fuss, taking all the trouble
to provide the evidence, and Greg being only too anxious to step into
his shoes, made it easy for you!"
"I'm no prude," Rachael smiled, over a raging heart. "But I couldn't
see this coming, nobody did. All I could do was to break free before my
self-respect was absolutely gone!"
"Go tell that to the White Wings, darling," laughed Mrs. Villalonga,
lazily blowing smoke into rings and spirals.
"Seriously, Vera, I mean it!"
"Seriously, Rachael, do you mean to tell me that you hadn't the
SLIGHTEST idea--" Mrs. Villalonga roused herself, to smilingly study
the other woman's face as she asked the question. "Not a word--not a
HINT?"
"Ah, well--" Rachael's face was flaming. She would have put her hand in
the fire to be able to say "No." The others laughed cheerfully.
"Nobody misunderstands you, dear: you were in a rotten fix and you got
out of it nicely," said fat Mrs. Moran, and Mrs. Villalonga added
consolingly: "Why, my heavens, Rachael, I'd leave Booth to-morrow for
anyone half as handsome as Warren Gregory!"
In March the Gregorys sent out cards for their first really large
entertainment, a Mardi-Gras ball. Rachael and Warren spent many happy
hours planning it: the studio was to be cleared, two other big rooms
turned into one for the supper, music for dancing, musical numbers for
the entertainment; it would be perfect in every detail, one of the
notable affairs of the winter. Rachael hailed it as the end of the
season. They were to make a flying trip to the Bermudas in April, and
after that Rachael happily planned a month or two in the almost
deserted city before Warren would be free to get away to the mountains
or the boat. It was with a delightful sense of freedom that she
realized that her first winter in her new role was nearly over. Next
winter her divorce and remarriage would be an old story, there would be
other gossip more fascinating and more new, she would be taken quite
for granted. Again, she might more easily evade the social demand next
winter without exposing herself to the charge of being fickle or
changed. This year her brave and dignified facing of the world had been
a part of the price she paid for her new happiness. Now it was paid.
And for another reason, half-defined, Rachael was glad to see the
months go by. She had been Warren Gregory's wife for nearly six months
now, and the rapture of being together was still as great for them both
as it had been in the first radiant days of their marriage. For
herself, indeed, she knew that the joy was constantly deepening, and
even the wild hunger and passion of her heart could find no flaw in his
devotion. Her surrender to him was with a glorious and unashamed
completeness, the tones of her extraordinary voice deepened when she
spoke to him, and in her eyes all who looked might read the story of
insatiable and yet satisfied love.