The Heart of Rachael
Page 73The blue tides rose and fell at Clark's Hills, the summer sun shone
healingly down upon Rachael's sick heart and soul. Day after day she
took her bare-headed, sandalled boys to the white beach, and lay in the
warm sands, with the tonic Atlantic breezes blowing over her. Space and
warmth and silence were all about; the incoming breakers moved steadily
in, and shrank back in a tumble of foam and blue water; gulls dipped
and wheeled in the spray. As far as her dreaming eyes could reach, up
the beach and down, there was the same bath of warm color, blue sea
melting into blue sky, white sand mingling with yellow dunes, until all
colors, in the distance, swam in a haze of dull gold.
Now and then, when even the shore was hot, the boys elected to spend
their afternoon by the bay on the other side of the village. Here there
was much small traffic in dingies and dories and lobster-pots; the
slower tides rocked the little craft at the moorings, and sent bright
swinging light against the weather-worn planks under the pier. Rachael
smiled when she saw Derry's little dark head confidently resting
against the flowing, milky beard of old Cap'n Jessup, or heard the
bronzed lean younger men shout to her older son, as to an equal, "Pitch
us that painter, will ye, Jim!"
She spoke infrequently but quietly of Warren to Alice. The older woman
discovered, with a pang of dismay, that Rachael's attitude was fixed
beyond appeal. There was such a thing as divorce, established and
approved; she, Rachael, had availed herself of its advantages; now it
was Warren's turn.
Rachael would live for her sons. They must of course be her own. She
would take them away to some other atmosphere: "England, I think," she
told Alice. "That's my mother country, you know, and children lead a
sane, balanced life there."
"I will be everything to them until they are--say, ten and twelve," she
added on another day, "and then they will begin to turn toward their
father. Of course I can't blame him to them, Alice. And some day they
will come to believe that it is all their mother's fault--that's the
way with children! And so I'll pay again."
"Dearest girl, you're morbid!" Alice said, not knowing whether to laugh
or cry.
"No, I mean it, I truly mean that! It is disillusioning for young boys
to learn that their father and mother were not self-controlled, normal
persons, able to bear the little pricks of life, but that our history
has been public gossip for years, that two separate divorces are in
their immediate history!"
"Rachael, don't talk so recklessly!"
Rachael smiled sadly.
"Well, perhaps I can be a good mother to them, even if they don't
idealize me!" she mused.
"I have come to this conclusion," she told
Alice one day, about a fortnight later, "while civilization is as it
is, divorce is wrong. No matter what the circumstances are, no matter
where the right and wrong lie, divorce is wrong."
"I suppose there are cases of drink or infidelity--" Alice submitted
mildly.
"Then it's the drink, or the infidelity that should be changed!"
Rachael answered inflexibly. "It's the one vow we take with God as
witness; and no blessing ever follows a broken vow!"
"I think myself that there are not many marriages that couldn't be
successes!" Alice said thoughtfully.
"Separation, if you like!" Rachael conceded with something of her old
bright energy. "Change and absence, for weeks and months, but not
divorce. Paula Verlaine should never have divorced Clarence; she made a
worse match, if that was possible, and involved three other small lives
in the general discomfort. And I never should have married Clarence,
because I didn't love him. I didn't want children then; I never felt
that the arrangement was permanent; but having married him, I should
have stayed by him. I know the mood in which Clarence took his own
life; he never loved me as he did Bill, but he wouldn't have done it if
I had been there!"
"I cannot consider Clarence Breckenridge a loss to society," Alice said.
"I might have made Clarence a man who would have been a loss to
society," Rachael mused. "He was proud; loved to be praised. And he
loved children; one or two babies in the nursery would have put Billy
in second place. But he bored me, and I simply wouldn't go on being
bored. So that if I had had a little more courage, or a little more
prudence in the first place, Billy, Clarence, perhaps Charlotte and
Charlie, Greg, Deny, Jim, Joe Pickering, and Billy might all have been
happier, to say nothing of the general example to society."
"I hear that Billy is unhappy enough now," Alice said, pleased at
Rachael's unusual vivacity. "Isabella Haviland told my Mary that Cousin
Billy was talking about divorce."
"From Joe?--is that so?" Rachael looked up interestedly. "I hadn't
heard it, and somehow I don't believe it! They have a curious affinity
through all their adventures. Poor little Bill, it hasn't been much of
a life!"
"They say she is going on the stage," Alice pursued, "which seems a
pity, especially for the child's sake. He's an attractive boy; we saw
him with her at Atlantic City last winter--one of those wonderfully
dressed, patient, pathetic children, always with the grown-ups! The
little chap must have a rather queer life of it drifting about from
hotel to hotel. They're hard up, and I believe most of the shops and
hotels have actually black-listed them. He would seem to be the sort of
man who cannot hold on to anything, and, of course, there's the
drinking! She's not the girl to save him. She drinks rather recklessly
herself; it's a part of her pose."
"I wonder if she would let the youngster come down here and scramble
about with my boys?" Rachael said unexpectedly. She had not seriously
thought of it; the suggestion came idly. But instantly it took definite
hold. "I wonder if she would?" she added with more animation than she
had shown for some time. "I would love to have him, and of course the
boys would go wild with joy! I would be so glad to do poor old Billy a
good turn. She and I were always friends, and had some queer times
together. And more than that"--Rachael's eyes darkened--"I believe that
if I had had the right influence over her she never would have married
Joe. I regarded the whole thing too lightly; I could have tried, in a
different way, to prevent it, at least. I am certainly going to write
Clarence, too," Rachael added in a low tone, and as if half to herself,
"and for many long years I have felt that I would be glad to do
something for him! To have his grandson here--doesn't it seem odd?-and
perhaps to lend Billy a hand; it seems almost like an answer to prayer!
He can sleep on the porch, between the boys, and if he has some old
clothes, and a bathing suit--"
"MY DEAR BILLY," she wrote that night, "I have heard one or two hints
of late that you have a good many things in your life just now that
make for worry, and am writing to know if my boys and I may borrow your
small son for a few weeks or a month, so that one small complication of
a summer in the city will be spared you. We are down here on Long
Island on a strip of high land that runs between the beautiful bay and
the very ocean, and when Jim and Derry are not in the one they are apt
to be in the other. It will be a great joy to them to have a guest, and
a delight to me to take good care of your boy. I think he will enjoy
it, and it will certainly do him good.
"I often think of you with great affection, and hope that life is
treating you kindly. Sometimes I fancy that my old influence might have
been better for you than it was, but life is mistakes, after all, and
paying for them, and doing better next time.
"Always affectionately yours, RACHAEL."
Three days elapsed after this letter was dispatched, and Rachael had
time to wonder with a little chill if she had been too cordial to
Billy, and if Billy were laughing her cool little laugh at her one-time
step-mother's hospitality and moralizing.
But as a matter of fact, the invitation could not have been more
happily timed for young Mrs. Pickering. Billy, without any further
notice to Magsie, had been to see Magsie's manager, coolly betraying
her friend's marriage plans, pledging the angry and bewildered Bowman
to secrecy, and applying for the position on her own account in the
course of one brief visit.
Bowman would not commit himself to engaging Billy, but he was
infinitely obliged to her for the news of Magsie, and told her so
frankly.
It was when she returned home from this call, and hot and weary, was
trying to break an absolute promise to the boy, involving the Zoo and
ice-cream, that Rachael's letter arrived.
Billy read it through, sat thinking hard, and presently read it again.
The softest expression her rather hard young face ever knew came over
it as she sat there. This was terribly decent of Rachael, thought
Billy. She must be the busiest and happiest woman in the world, and yet
her heart had gone out to little Breck. The last line, however, meant
more than all the rest, just now, to Billy Pickering. She was
impressionable, and not given to finding out the truths of life for
herself. Rachael's opinions she had always respected. And now Rachael
admitted that life was all mistakes, and added that heartening line
about paying for them, and doing better.
"'Cause I am so hot--and I never had any lunch--and you said you
would!" fretted the little boy, flinging himself against her, and
sending a wave of heat through her clothing as he did so.
"Listen, Breck," she said suddenly, catching him lightly in her arm,
and smiling down at him, "would you like to go down and stay with the
Gregory boys?"
"I don't know 'em," said Breck doubtfully.
"Down on the ocean shore," Billy went on, "where you could go in
bathing every day, and roll in the surf, and picnic, and sleep out of
doors!"
"Did they ask me?" he demanded excitedly.
"Their mother did, and she says that you can stay as long as you're a
good boy, down there where it's nice and cool, digging in the sand, and
going bare foot--"
"I'll be the best boy you ever saw!" Breck sputtered eagerly. "I'll
work for her, and I'll make the other kids work for her--she'll tell
you she never saw such a good boy! And I'll write you letters--"
"You won't have to work, old man!" Billy felt strangely stirred as she
kissed him. She watched him as he rushed away to break the news of his
departure to the stolid Swedish girl in the kitchen and the colored boy
at the elevator. He jerked his little bureau open, and began to
scramble among his clothes; he selected a toy for Jim and a toy for
Derry, and his mother noticed that they were his dearest toys. She took
him downtown and bought him a bathing suit, and sandals, and new
pajamas, and his breathless delight, as he assured sympathetic clerks
that he was going down to the shore, made her realize what a lonely,
uncomfortable little fellow he had been all these months. He could
hardly eat his supper that night, and had to be punished before he
would even attempt to go to sleep, and the next morning he waked his
mother at six, and fairly danced with impatience and anxiety as the
last preparations were made.
Billy took him down to Clark's Hills herself. She had not notified
Rachael, or answered her in any way, never questioning that Rachael
would know her invitation to be accepted. But from the big terminal
station she did send a wire, and Rachael and the boys met her after the
hot trip.
"Billy, it was good of you to come," Rachael said, kissing her quite
naturally as they met.
"I never thought of doing anything else," Billy said, breathing the
fresh salt air with obvious pleasure. "I had no idea that it was such a
trip. But he was an angel--look at them now, aren't they cute together?"
Rachael's boys had taken eager possession of their guest; the three
were fast making friends as they trotted along together toward the old
motor car that Rachael ran herself.
"It's a joy to them," their mother said. "Get in here next to me, Bill;
I'm not going even to look at you until I get you home. Did you ever
see the water look so delicious? We'll all go down for a dip pretty
soon. I live so simply here that I'm entirely out of the way of
entertaining a guest, but now that you're here, you must stay and have
a little rest yourself!"
"Oh, thank you, but--" Billy began in perfunctory regret. Her tone
changed: "I should love to!" she said honestly.
Rachael laughed. "So funny to hear your old voice, Bill, and your old
expressions."
"I? Oh, but I've gray hair! Getting old fast, Billum."
"And how's Greg?" Billy did not understand the sudden shadow that fell
across Rachael's face, but she saw it, and wondered.
"Very well, my dear."
"Does he get down here often? It's a hard trip."
"He always comes in his car. They make it in--I don't know--something
like two hours and ten minutes, I think. This is my house, with all its
hydrangeas in full bloom. Yes, isn't it nice? And here's Mary for
Breckenridge's bag."
Rachael had got out of the car, and now she gave Billy's boy her hand,
and stood ready to help him down.
"Well, Breck," said she, "do you think you are going to like my house,
and my little boys? Will you give Aunt Rachael a kiss?"
Billy said nothing as the child embraced his new-found relative
heartily, nor when Rachael took her upstairs to show her the third
hammock between the other two, and herself invested the visitor in blue
overalls and a wide hat. But late that evening, after a silence, she
said suddenly:
"You're more charming than ever, Rachael; you're one of the sweetest
women I ever saw!"
"Thank you!" Rachael said with a little note of real pleasure under her
laugh.
"You've grown so gentle, and good," said Billy a little awkwardly.
"Perhaps it's just because you're so sweet to Breck, and because you
have such a nice way with children, but I--I am ever and ever so
grateful to you! I've often thought of you, all this time, and of the
old days, and been glad that so much happiness of every sort has come
to you. At first I felt dreadfully--at that time, you know--"
She stopped and faltered, but Rachael looked at her kindly. They were
sitting on the wide porch, under the velvet-black arch of the starry
sky, and watching the occasional twinkle of lights on the dark surface
of the bay.
"You may say anything you like to me, Billy," Rachael said.
"Well, it was only--you know how I loved him--" Billy said quickly.
"I've so often thought that perhaps you were the only person who knew
what it all meant to me. I only thought he would be angry for a while.
I thought then that Joe would surely win him. And afterward, I thought
I would go crazy, thinking of him sitting there in the club. I had
failed him, you know! I've never talked about it. I guess I'm all tired
out from the trip down."
It was clumsily expressed; the words came as if every one were wrung
from the jealous silence of the long years, but presently Billy was
beside Rachael's chair, kneeling on the floor, and their arms were
about each other.
"I killed him!" sobbed Billy. "He spoke of me the last of all. He said
to Berry Stokes that he--he loved me. And he had a little old picture
of me--you remember the one in the daisy frame?--over his heart. Oh,
Daddy, Daddy!--always so good to me!"
"No, Bill, you mustn't say that you killed him," Rachael said, turning
pale. "If you were to blame, I was, too, and your grandmother, and all
of us who made him what he was. I didn't love him when I married him,
and he was the sort of man who has to be loved; he knew he wasn't big,
and admirable, and strong, but many a man like Clancy has been made so,
been made worth while, by having a woman believe in him. I never
believed in him for one second, and he knew it. I despised him, and
where he sputtered and stammered and raged, I was cool and quiet, and
smiling at him. It isn't right for human beings to feel that way, I see
it now. I see now that love--love is the lubricant everywhere in the
world, Bill. One needn't be a fool and be stepped upon; one has rights;
but if loving enough goes into everything, why, it's bound to come out
right."
"Oh, I do believe it!" said Billy fervently, kneeling on the floor at
Rachael's feet, her wet, earnest eyes on Rachael's face, her arms
crossed on the older woman's knees.
"I believe," Rachael said, "that in those seven years I might have won
your father to something better if I had cared. He wasn't a hard man,
just desperately weak. I've thought of it so often, of late, Bill.
There might have been children. Clancy had a funny little pathetic
fondness for babies. And he was a loving sort of person---"
"Ah, wasn't he?" Billy's eyes brimmed again. "Always that to me. But
not to you, Rachael, and little cat that I was--I knew it. But you see
I had no particular reverence for marriage, either. How should I? Why,
my own mother and my half-sisters--hideous girls, they are, too--were
pointed out to me in Rome a year ago. I didn't know them! I could have
made your life much easier, Rachael. I wish I had. I was thinking that
this afternoon when Breck was letting you carry him out into deep
water, clinging to you so cunningly. He is a cute little kid, isn't he?
And he'll love you to death! He's a great kisser."
"He's a great darling," smiled Rachael, "and all small boys I adore.
He'll begin to put on weight in no time. And--I was thinking, Bill--he
would have reconciled Clancy to you and Joe, perhaps; one can't tell!
If I had not left him, Clarence might have been living to-day, that I
know. He only--did what he did in one of those desperate lonely times
he used to dread so."
"Ah, but he was terrible to you, Rachael!" Billy said generously. "You
deserved happiness if anyone ever did!" Again she did not understand
Rachael's sharp sigh, nor the little silence that followed it. Their
talk ran on quite naturally to other topics: they discussed all the men
and women of that old world they both had known, the changes, the
newcomers, and the empty places. Mrs. Barker Emory had been much taken
up by Mary Moulton, and was a recognized leader at Belvedere Bay now;
Straker Thomas was in a sanitarium; old Lady Torrence was dead; Marian
Cowles had snatched George Pomeroy away from one of the Vanderwall
girls at the last second; Thomas Prince was paralyzed; Agnes Chase had
married a Denver man whom nobody knew; the Parker Hoyts had a delicate
little baby at last; Vivian Sartoris had left her husband, nobody knew
why. Billy was quite her old self as she retailed these items and many
more for Rachael's benefit.
But Rachael saw that the years had made a sad change in her before the
three days' visit was over. Poor little, impudent, audacious Billy was
gone forever--Billy, who had always been so exquisite in dress, so
self-conscious in her yachting gear, her riding-clothes, her smart
little tennis costumes! She was but a shadow of her old self now. The
smart hats, the silk stockings, the severely trim frocks were still
hers, but the old delicious youth, her roses, her limpid gaze, the
velvety curve of throat and cheek, these were gone. Billy had been
spirited, now she was noisy. She had been amusingly precocious, now she
was assuming an innocence, a naivete, that were no longer hers, had
never been natural to her at any time. She had always been coolly
indifferent to the lives of other men and women. Now she was embittered
as to her own destiny, and full of ugly and eager gossip concerning
everyone she knew. She chanced upon the name of Magsie Clay, little
dreaming how straight the blow went to Rachael's heart, but had
excellent reasons of her own for not expressing the belief that Magsie
would soon leave the stage, and so gave no hint of Magsie's rich and
mysterious lover. She did tell Rachael that she herself meant to go on
the stage, but imparted no details as to her hopes for doing so.
"Just how much money is left, Billy?" Rachael presently felt herself
justified in asking.
"Oh, well"--Billy had always hated statistics--"we sold the Belvedere
Bay place last year, you know, but it was a perfect wreck, and the
Moultons said they had to put seventeen thousand dollars into repairs,
but I don't believe it, and that money, and some other things, were put
into the bank. Joe was just making a scene about it--we have to draw
now and then--we sank I don't know what into those awful ponies, and we
still have that place--it's a lovely house, but it doesn't rent. It's
too far away. The kid adores it of course, but it's too far away, it
gives me the creeps. It's just going to wreck, too. Joe says sometimes
that he's going to raise chickens there. I see him!" Billy scowled, but
as Rachael did not speak, she presently came back to the topic. "But
just how much of my money is left, I don't know. There are two houses
in East One Hundredth--way over by the river. Daddy took them for some
sort of debt."
Rachael remembered them perfectly. But she could not revert to the days
when she was Clarence's wife without a pang, and so let the allusion go.
"Why he took them I don't know," Billy resumed, "ten flats, and all
empty. They say it would cost us ten thousand dollars to get them into
shape. They're mortgaged, anyway."
"But Billy, wouldn't that bring you in a fair income, in itself, if it
was once filled?"
"My dear, perhaps it would. But do you think you could get Joe
Pickering to do it? As long as the money in the bank lasts--I forget
what it is, several thousand, more than twenty, I think--we'll go along
as we are. Joe has a half-interest in a patent, anyway, some sort of
curtain-pole; it's always going to make us a fortune!"
"But, Billy, if you and the boy took a little place somewhere, and you
had one good maid--up there on the pony farm, for instance--surely it
would be saner, surely it would be wiser, than trying to think of the
stage now with him on your hands!"
"Except that I would simply die!" Billy said. "I love the city, and the
excitement of not knowing what will turn up. And if Joe would behave
himself, and if I should make a hit, why, we'll be all right."
A queer, hectic, unsatisfying life it must be, Rachael thought, saying
good-bye to her guest a day or two later. Dressing, rouging, lacing,
pinning on her outrageously expensive hats, jerking on her extravagant
white gloves, drinking, rushing, screaming with laughter, screaming
with anger, Billy was one of that large class of women that the big
city breeds, and that cannot live elsewhere than in the big city. She
would ride in a thousand taxicabs, worrying as she watched the metre;
she would drink a thousand glasses of champagne, wondering anxiously if
Joe were to pay for it; she would gossip of a dozen successful
actresses without the self-control to work for one-tenth of their
success, and she would move through all the life of the theatres and
hotels without ever having her place among them, and her share of their
little glory. And almost as reckless in action as she was in speech,
she would cling to the brink of the conventions, never quite a good
woman, never quite anything else, a fond and loyal if a foolish and
selfish mother, some day noisily informing her admirers that she
actually had a boy in college, and enjoying their flattering disbelief.
And so would disappear the last of the handsome fortune that poor
Clarence's father had bequeathed to him, and Clarence's grandson must
fight his way with no better start than his grandfather had had
financially, and with an infinitely less useful brain and less reliable
pair of hands. Billy might be widowed or freed in some less
unexceptionable way, and then Billy would marry again, and it would be
a queer marriage; Rachael could read her fate in her character.
She wondered, walking slowly the short mile that lay between her house
and the station, when Billy was gone, just how a discerning eye might
read her own fate in her own character. Just what did the confused
mixture of good motives and bad motives, erratic unselfishnesses and
even more erratic weaknesses that was Rachael, deserve of Fate? She had
bought some knowledge, but it had been dearly bought; she had bought
some goodness, but at what a cost of pain!
"I don't believe that Warren ever did one-tenth the silly things we
suspected him of!" Alice exclaimed one day. "I believe he was just an
utter fool, and Magsie took advantage of it!"
Rachael did not answer, but there was no brightening of her sombre
look. Her eyes, grave and sad, held for Alice no hope that she had
come, as George and Alice had come, to a softer view of Warren's
offence.
"I see him always as he was that last horrible morning," she said to
Alice. "And I pray that I will never look upon his face again!" And
when presently Alice hinted that George was receiving an occasional
letter from Warren, Rachael turned pale.
"Don't quote it to me, Alice," she said gently; "don't ask me to hear
it. It's all over. I haven't a heart any more, just a void and a pain.
You only hurt me--I can't ever be different. You and George love me, I
know that. Don't drive me away. Don't ever feel that it will be
different from what it is now. I--I wish him no ill, God knows, but--I
can't. It wouldn't be happiness for me or for him. Please, PLEASE--!"
Alice, in tears, could only give her her way.