Books: The Heart of Rachael

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She admired Mrs. Breckenridge deeply; more than that, the younger
woman's friendship and patronage were valuable assets to Miss
Vanderwall. But the social circle of Belvedere Hills was a small
circle, and Elinor had spent every one of her thirty-five summers,
or a part of every one, in just this limited group. There was
little malice in her pleasure at getting this glimpse behind the
scenes in Rachael's life; she would repeat her friend's
confidence, later, with the calm of a person doing the accepted
and expected thing, with the complacence of one who proves her
right to other revelations from her listeners in turn. It was by
such proof judiciously displayed that Elinor held her place in the
front ranks of her own select little group of gossips and
intimates. She wished the Breckenridges no harm, but if there were
dark elements in their lives, Elinor enjoyed being the person to
witness them. Thoughtfully adding a bloom to her cheeks with her
friend's exquisite powder, Miss Vanderwall reflected sagely that,
when one came to think of it, it must really be rather rotten to
be married to Clarence Breckenridge.

Rachael presently came back, with the signs of her recent emotion
entirely effaced, and her wonderful skin glowing faintly from a
bath. Superbly independent of cosmetics, independent even of her
mirror, she massed the thick short lengths of dark hair on the top
of her head, thrust a jewelled pin through the coil, and began to
hook herself into a lacy black evening gown that was loose and
comfortable. Before this was finished her stepdaughter rapped on
the door, and being invited, came in with the full self-
consciousness of seventeen.

"All hooked up straight?" asked Rachael. "That gown looks rather
well."

"Do you good women realize what time it is?" Miss Breckenridge
asked, by way of reply.

"Has she got it a shade too short?" speculated Rachael, thoughtful
eyes on the girl's dress.

"Well--I was wondering!" Carol said eagerly, flinging down her
wrap, to turn and twist before a door that was a solid panel of
mirror. "What do you think--we'll dance."

"Oh, not a bit," Rachael presently decided. "They're all up to the
knees this year, anyway. Car come round?"

"Long ago," said Billy, and Elinor, reaching for her own wrap,
declared herself ready. "I wish you were going, Rachael," the girl
added as she turned to follow their guest from the room.

"Come back here a moment, Bill," Mrs. Breckenridge said casually,
seating herself at the dressing-table without a glance at her
stepdaughter. For a moment Miss Breckenridge stood irresolute in
the doorway, then she reluctantly came in.

"You're just seventeen, Billy," said the older woman
indifferently. "When you're eighteen, next March, I suppose you
may do as you please. But until then--either see a little less of
Joe Pickering, or else come right out in the open about it, and
tell your father you want to see him here. This silly business of
telephoning and writing and meeting him, here, there, and
everywhere, has got to stop."

Billy stared steadily at her stepmother, her breath coming quick
and high, her cheeks red.

"Who said I met him--places?" she said, in a seventeen-year-old-
girl's idea of a tragic tone. Mrs. Breckenridge's answer to this
was a shrug, a smile, and a motherly request not to be a fool.

There was silence for a moment. Then Billy said recklessly:

"I like him. And you can't make me deny it!"

"Like him if you want to," said Mrs. Breckenridge, "although what
you can see in a man twice your age--with his particular history--
However, it's your affair. But you'll have to tell your father."

Billy shut her lips mutinously, her cheeks still scarlet.

"I don't see why!" she burst forth proudly, at last.

To this Mrs. Breckenridge offered no argument. Carefully filing a
polished fingertip she said quietly:

"I didn't suppose you would."

"And I think that if you tell him YOU interfere in a matter that
doesn't in the LEAST concern you," Billy pursued hotly,
uncomfortably eager to strike an answering spark, and reduce the
conversation to a state where mutual concessions might be in
order. "You have no BUSINESS to!"

Her stepmother was silent. She put on a ring, regarded it
thoughtfully on her spread fingers, and took it off again.

"In the first place," Billy said sullenly, "you'll tell him a lot
of things that aren't so!"

Silence. Outside the motor horn sounded impatiently. Billy
suddenly came close to her stepmother, her dark, mobile little
face quite transformed by anger.

"You can tell him what you please," she said in a cold fury, "but
I'll know WHY you did it--it's because you're jealous, and you
want everyone in the world to be in love with YOU! You hate me
because my father loves me, and you would do anything in the world
to make trouble between us! I've known it ever since I was a
little girl, even if I never have said it before! I--" She choked,
and tears of youthful rage came into her eyes.

"Don't be preposterous, Bill. You've said it before, every time
you've been angry, in the last five years," the older woman said
coolly. "This only means that you will feel that you have to wake
me up, when you come in to-night, to say that you are sorry."

"I will not!" said the girl at white heat.

"Well, I hope you won't," Rachael Breckenridge said amiably, "for
if there is one thing I loathe more than another, it is being
waked up for theatricals in the middle of the night. Good-bye. Be
sure to thank Mrs. Bowditch for chaperoning you."

"Are you going to speak to Clancy?" the girl demanded imperiously.

"Run along, Billy," Rachael said, with a faint show of impatience.
"Nobody could speak to your father about anything to-night, as you
ought to know."

For a moment Billy stood still, breathing hard and with tightly
closed lips, her angry eyes on her step-mother. Then her breast
rose on a childish, dry sob, she dropped her eyes, and moved a
shining slipper-toe upon the rug with the immortal motion of
embarrassed youth.

"You--you used to like Joe, Rachael," she said, after a moment, in
a low tone.

"I don't dislike him now," Rachael said composedly.

"He's awfully kind--and--and good, and Lucy never understood him,
or tried to understand him!" said Billy in a burst. The other
woman smiled.

"If Joe Pickering told you any sentimental nonsense like that,
kindly don't retail it to me," she said amusedly.

In a second Billy was roused to utter fury. Her cheeks blazed, her
breath came short and deep. "I hate you!" she said passionately,
and ran from the room.

Mrs. Breckenridge sat still for a few moments, but there was no
emotion but utter weariness visible in her face. After a while she
said, "Oh, Lord!" in a tone compounded of amusement and disgust,
and rising, she took a new book from the table, and went slowly
downstairs.

In the lower hall Alfred met her, his fat young face duly
mysterious and important in expression.

"Mr. Breckenridge got a telephone message from Doctor Jordan, Mrs.
Breckenridge; the doctor's been called into town to a patient, so
he can't see Mr. Breckenridge to-night."

"Oh! Well, he'll probably be here in the morning," Rachael said
carelessly.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Breckenridge, but Mr. Breckenridge seemed to be a
good deal worried about himself, and he had me call Doctor
Gregory," the man pursued respectfully.

"Doctor GREGORY!" echoed his mistress, with a laugh like a wail.
"Alfred, what were you THINKING of! Why didn't you call me?"

"He wouldn't have me call you," Alfred said unhappily. "He spoke
to the doctor himself. We got the housekeeper first, and she said
Doctor Gregory was dressing. 'Tell him it's a matter of life and
death,' says Mr. Breckenridge. Then we got him. 'I'm dining out,'
he says, 'but I'll be there this evening.'"

"Oh, dear, dear, dear!" Mrs. Breckenridge said half to herself in
serio-comic desperation. "Gregory--called in for a--for a--for
this! If I could get hold of him! He didn't say where he was
dining?"

"No, Mrs. Breckenridge," the man answered, with a great air of
efficiency.

"Well, Alfred, I wish sometimes you knew a little more--or a
little less!" Rachael said dispassionately. "Light a fire in the
library, will you? I'll have my dinner there. Tell Ellie to send
me up something broiled--nothing messy--and some strong coffee."

CHAPTER II

The coffee was strong. Mrs. Breckenridge found it soothing to
rasped nerves and tired body, and after the dinner things had been
cleared away she sat on beside the library fire, under the soft
arc of light from the library lamp, sipping the stimulating fluid,
and staring at the snapping and flashing logs.

A sense of merely physical well-being crept through her body, and
for a little time even her active brain was quieter; she forgot
the man now heavily sleeping upstairs, the pretty little tyrant
who had rushed off to dinner at the Chases', and the many
perplexing elements in her own immediate problem. She saw only the
quiet changes in the fire as yellow flame turned to blue--sank,
rose, and sank again.

The house was still. Kitchenward, to be sure, there was a great
deal of cheerful laughter and chatter, as Ellie, sitting heavily
ensconced in the largest rocker, embroidered a centrepiece for her
sister's birthday, Annie read fortunes in the teacups, Alfred
imitated the supercilious manner of a lady who had called that
afternoon upon Mrs. Breckenridge, and Helda, a milk-blond Dane
with pink-rimmed eyes, laughed with infantile indiscrimination at
everything, blushing an agonized scarlet whenever Alfred's
admiring eye met her own.

But the kitchen was not within hearing distance of the quiet room
where Rachael sat alone, and as the soft spring night wore on no
sound came to disturb her revery. It was not the first solitary
evening she had had of late, for Clarence had been more than
usually reckless, and was developing in his wife, although she did
not realize it herself, a habit of introspection quite foreign to
her real nature.

She had never been a thoughtful woman, her days for many years had
run brilliantly on the surface of life, she knew not whence the
current was flowing, nor why, nor where it led her; she did not
naturally analyze, nor dispute events. Only a few years ago she
would have said that to an extraordinary degree fortune had been
kind to her. She had been born with an adventurous spirit, she had
played her game well and boldly, and, according to all the
standards of her type, she had won. But sitting before this quiet
fire, perhaps it occurred to her to wonder how it happened that
there were no more hazards, no more cards left to play. She was
caught in a net of circumstances too tight for her unravelling.
Truly it might be cut, but when she stood in the loose wreckage of
it--how should she use her freedom? If it was a cage, at least it
was a comfortable cage; at least it was better than the howling
darkness of the unfamiliar desert beyond.

And yet she raged, and her hurt spirit flung itself again and
again at the bars. Young and beautiful and clever, how had life
tricked her into this deadlock, where had been the fault, and
whose?

For some undefined reason Rachael rarely thought of the past. She
did not care to bring its certainties, its panorama of blinded
eyes and closed doors before her mental vision. But to-night she
found herself walking again in those old avenues; her thoughts
went back to the memories of her girlhood.

Girlhood? Her eyes smiled, but with the smile a little twinge of
bitterness drew down her mouth. What a discontented, eager,
restless girlhood it had been, after all. A girlhood eternally
analyzing, comparing, resenting, envying. How she had secretly
despised the other girls, typical of their class, the laughing,
flirting, dress-possessed girls of a small California town. How
she had despised her aunts, all comfortably married and
prosperous, her aunts' husbands, her stodgy, noisy cousins! And,
for that matter, there had never been much reverence in her regard
for her mother, although Rachael loved that complaining little
woman in her cool way.

But for her father, the tall, clever, unhappy girl had a genuine
admiration. She did not love him, no one who knew Gerald Fairfax
well could possibly have sustained a deep affection for him, but
she believed him to be almost as remarkably educated and naturally
gifted as he believed himself to be. Her uncles were simply
country merchants, her mother's fat, cheerful father dealt in
furniture, and, incidentally, coffins, but her father was an
Englishman, and naturally held himself above the ordinary folk of
Los Lobos.

Nobody knew much about him, when he first made his appearance in
Los Lobos, this silky-haired, round-faced, supercilious stranger,
in his smart, shabby Norfolk coat, which was perhaps one reason
why every girl in the village was at once willing to marry him, no
questions asked. His speech was almost a different tongue from
theirs; he was thirty-five, he had dogs and a man-servant, instead
of the usual equipment of mother, sisters, and "hired girl," and
he seemed eternally bored and ungracious. This was enough for the
Los Lobos girls, and for most of their mothers, too.

The newcomer bought a small ranch, three miles out of town, and
lounged about it in a highly edifying condition of elegant
idleness. He rode a good horse, drank a great deal, and strode out
of the post-office once a week scattering monogrammed envelopes
carelessly behind him. He had not been long in town before people
began to say that his elder brother was a lord; a duke, Mrs. Chess
Baxter, the postmistress said, because to her question regarding
the rumor he had answered carelessly: "Something of that sort."

Thirty years ago there were a great many detached Englishmen in
California, fourth and fifth sons, remittance men, family
scapegraces who had been banished to the farthest frontier by
relatives who regarded California as beyond the reach of gossip,
and almost beyond the reach of letters. Checks, small but regular,
arrived quarterly for these gentry, who had only to drink, sleep,
play cards, and demoralize the girls of the country. Here and
there among them, to be sure, were pink-skinned boys as fresh and
sweet as the apple-blossoms under which they rode their horses,
but for the most part the emigrants were dissipated, disenchanted,
clinging loyally to the traditions of the older country that had
discarded them, and scorning the fragrant and inexhaustible
richness of the new land that had made them welcome. They were, as
a class, silent, only voluble on the subject of the despised
country of their adoption, and absolutely non-committal as to
their own histories. But far from questioning their credentials,
the women and girls everywhere accepted them eagerly, caught
something of an English accent and something of an English
arrogance.

So Clara Mumford, a rose of a girl, cream-skinned, blue-eyed, and
innocent with the terrible innocence of the village girlhood that
feels itself so wise--Clara, who knew, because her two older
sisters were married, where babies come from, and knew, because of
Alta Porter's experience, that girls--nice girls, who went with
one through the high school--can yield to temptation and be
ruined--Clara only felt, in shyly announcing her engagement to
Gerald Fairfax, that Fate had been too kind.

That this glittering stranger twice her age--why, he was even a
little bald--a man who had travelled, who knew people of title,
knew books, and manners, and languages--that he should marry an
undertaker's daughter in Los Lobos! It was unbelievable. Clara's
only misgiving during her short engagement was that he would
disappear like a dream. She agreed with everything he said; even
carrying her new allegiance to the point of laughing a little at
her own people: the layer cakes her mother made for the Sunday
noonday dinner; the red-handed, freckled swain who called on her
younger sister in the crisp, moonlighted winter evenings; and the
fact that her father shaved in the kitchen.

A few weeks slipped by, and Clara duly confided her youth and her
innocence and her roses to her English husband, a little ashamed
of the wedding presents her friends sent her, even a little
doubtful of her parents' handsome gift of a bird's-eye maple
bedroom set and a parlor set in upholstered cherry.

On her side she accepted everything unquestionably: the shabby
little ranch house that smelled of wood smoke, and tobacco smoke,
and dogs; the easy scorn of her old friends on her husband's part
that so soon alienated her from them; the drink that she quickly
learned to regard with uneasiness and distrust. It was not that
Jerry ever got really intoxicated, but he got ugly, excitable,
irritable, even though quite in control of his actions and his
senses.

Clara was a good cook, although not as expert as her fond mother's
little substitutions and innocent manipulations during their
engagement had led Gerald to believe. But she loved to please him,
and when flushed and triumphant she put down some especially
tempting dish before him, and felt his arm about her, tears of
actual joy would stand in her bright eyes. They had some happy
days, some happy hours, in the first newness of being together.

Gerald's man, Thomas, was an early cause of annoyance to Clara.
She would not have objected to cooking for a farm "hand"; that was
a matter of course with all good farmers' wives. But Thomas was
more British, in all that makes the British objectionable, than
his master, and Thomas was quite decidedly addicted to drink. He
never thought of wiping a dish, or bringing Clara in a bucket of
water from the well. He ate what she set out upon the kitchen
table for him, three times a day, chatting pleasantly enough of
the farm, the horses, chickens, and vegetable garden, if Clara was
in an amiable mood, but if, busy at the sink, or clearing the
dining-room table, she was inwardly fuming with resentment at his
very existence, Thomas could be silent, too, and would presently
saunter away, stuffing his pipe, without even the common courtesy
of piling his dishes together for her washing. Thomas held long
conversations with his master as they idled about the place; Clara
would hear their laughter. The manservant slept in a small shed
detached from the main house, and there were times when he did not
appear in the morning. At such times Gerald with a pot of strong
coffee likewise disappeared into the cabin.

"Pore old rotter!" the husband would say generously. "He's a
decentish sort, don't you know? I meanter say, poor old Thomas did
me an awfully good turn once--and that!"

Clara inferred from various hints that Gerald had once been in the
English army, and had met Thomas, and befriended him, or been
befriended by him, at that period of his existence. But, greatly
to the little bride's disappointment, Gerald never spoke of his
old home or his connections there. Clara had to draw what comfort
she could from his intimation that all his relatives were
unbelievably eminent and distinguished, the least of them superior
in brain and achievement to any American who ever drew the breath
of life.

And presently she forgot Thomas, forgot the petty annoyance of
cooking and summer heat and dogs and physical discomfort, in the
overwhelming prayer that the coming child, about whose advent
Gerald, at first annoyed, had later been so generously good-
natured, might prove a boy. Gerald, living uncomplainingly in this
dreadful little country town, enduring Western conditions with
such dignity, and loving his little wife despite her undertaker
father, would be seriously disgusted, she knew, if she gave him a
daughter.

"A--a girl?" Clara stammered, her wet eyes on the doctor's face,
her panting little figure lost in the big outline of her mother's
spare-room bed. She managed a brave smile, but there was a bitter
lump in her throat.

A girl!

And she had been so brave, so sweet with Jerry, who had not
enjoyed the three or four days of waiting at her mother's house;
so strong in her agonies, as became the healthy, normal little
country girl she was! Fate owed her a son, she had done her share,
she had not flinched. And now--a girl! Fresh tears of
disappointment came to take the place of tears of pain in her
eyes. She remembered that Jerry had said, a few days before,
"It'll be a boy, of course--all the old women about seem to have
settled that--and I believe I'll cable Cousin Harold."

"Ma says it'll be a boy," Clara had submitted hopefully, longing
to hear more of "Cousin Harold," to whom Gerald alluded at long
intervals.

"Of course it will--good old girl!" Jerry had agreed. And that was
only Thursday night, and this was in the late dawn of cold, wintry
Saturday morning.

Her mother bent over her and kissed her wet forehead. Mrs.
Mumford's big kind face was radiant; she had already four small
grandsons; this was the first grand-daughter. More than that, the
nurse was not here yet; she had been supreme through the ordeal;
she had managed one more birth extremely well, and she rejoiced in
the making of a nation.

"Such a nice baby, darling!" she whispered, "with her dear little
head all covered with black hair! Neta's dressing her."

"Where's Gerald?" the young mother asked weakly.

"Right here! I'll let him in for a moment!" There was a
satisfaction in Mrs. Mumford's voice; everything was proceeding
absolutely by schedule. "And just as anxious to see you as you are
to see him!" she added happily. These occasions were always the
same, and always far more enjoyable to this practised parent than
any pageant, any opera, any social distinction could have been. To
comfortably, soothingly lead the trembling novice through the long
experience, to whisk about the house capably and briskly busy with
the familiar paraphernalia, to cry in sympathy with another's
tears, to stand white-lipped, impotent, anguished through a few
dreadful moments, and then to laugh, and rejoice, and reassure,
before the happy hours of resting, and feeding, and cuddling
began--this was the greatest satisfaction in her life.

Clara, afraid in this first moment to face his disappointment,
felt in another the most delicious reassurance and comfort she had
known in months. Jerry, taking the chair by the bedside, was so
dear about it! The long night had much impressed the new-made
father. They had had coffee at about two o'clock--Clara remembered
wondering how they could sit enjoying it, instead of dashing the
hideous cups to the floor, and rushing out of the horrible
enclosure of walls and curtains--and as he bent over her she knew
he had had something stronger since--but he was so dear!

"Well, we've had a night of it, eh?" he said kindly. "Funny how
much one takes the little beggars for grawnted until it's one's
own that kicks up the row? You've not seen her--she's a nice
little beggar. You might get some sleep, I should think. I'm going
to hang around until some sort of a family jamboree is over, at
one o'clock--your mother insists that we have dinner--and then
I'll go out to the rawnch. But I'll be in in the morning!"

"Girl!" said Clara, apologetically, whimsically, deprecatingly,
her weak fingers clinging tightly to his.

"Ah, well, one carn't help that!" he answered philosophically.
"We'll have a row of jolly little chaps yet!"

But there was never another child. Clara, having cast her fortunes
in with her lord, was faithful to him through every breath she
drew. But before Rachael's first crying, feverish little summer
was over there had been some definite changes at the ranch. Thomas
was gone, and Clara, pale and exhausted with the heat, engaged
Ella, a young woman servant of her mother's selecting, to bake and
wash and carry in stove-wood. Clara managed them all, Gerald, the
baby, and the maid. Perhaps at first she was just a little
astonished to find her husband as easily managed as Ella and far
more easily managed than Rachael. Gerald Fairfax was surprised,
too, lazily conceding his altered little wife her new and
energetic way with a mental reservation that when she was strong
and well again and the child less a care, things would be as they
were. But Clara, once in power, never weakened for a moment again.
Rachael grew up, a solitary and unfriendly, yet a tactful and
diplomatic, little person on the ranch. She early developed a
great admiration for her father, and a consequent regard for
herself as superior to her associates. She ruled her mother
absolutely from her fourth year, and remained her grandmother's
great favorite among a constantly increasing flock of
grandchildren. Some innate pride and scorn and dignity in the
child won her her own way through school and school days; her
young cousins were bewildered themselves by the respect and fealty
they yielded her despite the contempt in which they held her
affectations.

Clara had never been a religious woman and, married to an utter
unbeliever, she had little enough to give a child of her own. But
Clara's mother was a church woman, and her father a deeply
religious man. It was his mother, "old lady Mumford"--Rachael's
great-grandmother--who taught the child her catechism whenever she
could get hold of that restless and lawless little girl.

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