Books: The Heart of Rachael

K >> Kathleen Norris >> The Heart of Rachael

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29

Rachael had great fear and respect for her great-grandmother, and
everything that was fine and good in the child instinctively
responded to the atmosphere of her little home. It was an
unpretentious home, even for Los Lobos: only a whitewashed
California cabin with a dooryard full of wall flowers and
geraniums, and pungent marigolds, and marguerites that were
budding, blossoming, and gone to rusty decay on one and the same
bush. The narrow paths were outlined with white stone ale-bottles,
turned upside down and driven into the soft ground, and under the
rustling tent of a lilac bush there were three or four clay pots
filled with dry earth. There was a railed porch on the east side
of the house, with vines climbing on strings about it, and here
the old woman, clean with the wonderful, cool-fingered cleanness
of frail yet energetic seventy-five, would sit reading in the
afternoon shade that fell from the great shoulders of the blue
mountains.

Inside were three rooms; there was no bathroom, no light but the
kerosene lamps the old hands tended daily, no warmth but the small
kitchen stove. All the furniture was old and shabby and cheap, and
the antimacassars and pictures and teacups old Mrs. Mumford prized
so dearly were of no value except for association's sake.
Rachael's great-grandmother lived upon tea and toast and fruit
sauce; sometimes she picked a dish of peas in her own garden and
sometimes made herself a rice pudding, but if her children brought
her in a chicken or a bowl of soup she always gave it away to some
poorer neighbor who was ill, or who was "nursing that great
strapping baby."

She read the Bible to Rachael and exhorted the half-believing,
half-ashamed child to lay its lessons to heart.

"Your life will be full of change and of pleasure, there will be
many temptations and much responsibility," said the sweet, stern,
thin old voice. "Arm yourself against the wickedness of the
world!"

Rachael, pulling the old collie's silky ears, thought nothing of
the wickedness of the world but much of possible change and
pleasure. She hoped her aged relative was right; certainly one
would suppose Granny to be right in anything she said.

The time would have swiftly come when the child's changing heart
would have found no room for this association, but before Rachael
was twelve Granny was gone, the little house, with its few poor
treasures shut inside it, was closed and empty. And only a year or
two later a far more important change came into the girl's life.
She had always disliked Los Lobos, had schemed and brooded and
fretted incessantly through her childhood. It was with astonished
delight that she heard that her parents, who had never, in a
financial sense, drawn a free breath since their marriage, who had
worried and contrived, who had tried indifference and bravado and
strictest economy by turns, had sold their ranch for almost two
thousand dollars more than its accumulated mortgages, and were
going to England.

It was a glorious adventure for Rachael, even though she was too
shrewd not to suspect the extreme hazard of the move. She talked
in Los Lobos of her father's "people," hinted that "the family,
you know, thinks we'd better be there," but she knew in her heart
that a few months might find them all beggars.

Her father bought her a loose, big, soft blue coat in San
Francisco, and a dashing little soft hat for the steamer. Rachael
never forgot these garments throughout her entire life. It
mattered not how countrified the gown under the coat, how plain
the shoes on her slender feet. Their beauty, their becomingness,
their comfort, actually colored her days. For twenty dollars she
was transformed; she knew herself to be pretty and picturesque.
"That charming little girl with the dark braids, going to
England," she heard some man on the steamer say. The ranch, the
chickens, weeds, and preserving, the dusty roads and shabby stores
of Los Lobos were gone; she was no longer a gawky child; she was a
young lady in a loose, soft, rough blue coat, with a black quill
in her soft blue hat.

England received her wandering son coolly, but Rachael never knew
it. Her radiant dream--or was it an awakening?--went on. Her
mother, a neat, faded, querulous little woman, whose one great
service was in sparing her husband any of the jars of life, was
keyed to frantic anxiety lest Jerry be unappreciated, now that he
had come back. Clara met the few men to whom her husband
introduced her in London with feverish eagerness; afraid--after
fifteen years--to say one word that might suggest her own concern
in Jerry's future, quivering to cross-examine him, when they were
alone, as to what had been said, and implied, and suggested.

Nothing definite followed. They lived for a month or two at a
delightful roomy boarding-house in London, where the modest meals
Clara ordered appeared as if by magic, and where Miss Fairfax
never sullied her pretty hands with dishwashing. Then they went to
visit "Aunt Elsie" in a suburban villa for several weeks, a visit
Rachael never thought of afterward without a memory of stuffy,
neat, warm rooms, and a gushing of canaries' voices. Then they
went down to Sussex, in the delicious fullness of spring, to live
with several other persons in a dark country house, where "Cousin
Harold" died, and there was much odorous crepe and a funeral.
Cousin Harold evidently left something to Gerald. Rachael knew
money was not an immediate problem. Hot weather came, and they
went to the seaside with an efficient relative called Ethel, and
Ethel's five children. Later, back in London, Gerald said, in his
daughter's hearing, that he had made "rather a good thing of that
little game of Bobbie's. Enough to tide us over--what? Especially
if the Dickies ask us down for a bit," he had added. The Dickies
did ask them down for a bit. They went other places. Gerald made a
little money on the races, made "a good thing" of this, and
"turned a bit over on that." Weeks made months and months years,
and still they drifted cheerfully about, Gerald happier than he
had ever been in exile, Clara fearful, admiring, ill at ease,
Rachael in a girl's paradise.

She grew beautiful, with a fine and distinguished beauty definite
in its appeal; before she was seven-teen she had her little
reputation for it; she moved easily into a circle higher than even
her father had ever known. She was witty, young, lovely, and in
this happier atmosphere her natural gayety and generosity might
well develop. She went about continually, and every year the
circle of her friends was widened by more distinguished names.

At seventeen Mrs. Gouveneur Pomeroy of New York brought the young
beauty back with her own daughter, Persis, for a winter in the
great American city, and when Persis died Rachael indeed became
almost as dear to the stricken parents. When she went back to
London they gave her not only gifts but money, and for two years
she returned to them for long visits. So America had a chance to
admire the ravishing Miss Fairfax, too, and Rachael had many
conquests and one or two serious affairs. The girls had their
first dances at the Belvedere Club; Rachael met them all, who were
later to be her neighbors: the Morans and Parmalees, the
Vanderwalls and the Torrences, and the Chases. She met Clarence
Breckenridge and his wife, and the exquisitely dressed little girl
who was Billy to-day.

And through all her adventures she looked calmly, confidently, and
with conscious enjoyment for a husband. She flirted a little, and
danced and swam and drove and played golf and tennis a great deal,
but she never lost sight for an instant of the serious business of
life. Money she must have--it was almost as essential to her as
air--and money she could only secure through a marriage.

The young Englishman who was her first choice, in her twentieth
year, had every qualification in the world. When he died, two or
three months before the wedding-day, Rachael's mother was fond of
saying in an aside to close friends that the girl's heart was
broken. Rachael, lovely in her black, went down to stay with
Stephen's mother, and for several weeks was that elderly lady's
greatest comfort in life. Silent and serious, her manner the
perfection of quiet grief, only Rachael herself knew how little
the memory of Stephen interfered with her long reveries as she
took his collies about in the soft autumn fogs. Only Rachael knew
how the sight of Trecastle Hall, the horses, the servants, and the
park filled her heart with despair. She might have been Lady
Trecastle! All this might so easily have been her own!

She had loved Stephen, of course, she told herself; loving, with
Rachael, simply meant a willingness to accept and to give. But
love was of course a luxury; she was after the necessities of
life. Well, she had played and lost, but she could play again. So
she went to the Pomeroys' for the winter, and in the spring was
brought back to London by her father's sudden death.

Gerald Fairfax's life insurance gave his widow a far more secured
income than he had ever given his wife. It was microscopic, to be
sure, but Clara Fairfax was a practised economist. The ladies
settled in Paris, and Rachael was seriously considering a French
marriage when, by the merest chance, in the street one day, a
small homesick girl clutched at her thin black skirt, and sent her
an imploring smile. Rachael, looking graciously down from under
the shade of her frilly black parasol, recognized the little
Breckenridge girl, obviously afflicted with a cold and
lonesomeness and strangeness. Enslaving the French nurse with
three perfectly pronounced sentences, Rachael went home with the
clinging Carol, put her to bed, cheered her empty little interior
with soup, soothed her off to sleep, and was ready to meet her
crazed and terrified father with a long lecture on the care of
young children, when, after an unavoidable afternoon of business,
he came back to his hotel.

The rest followed. Rachael liked Clarence, finding it agreeable
that he knew how to dress, how to order a dinner, tip servants,
and take care of a woman in a crowd. His family was one of the
oldest in America, and he was rich. She was sorry that Billy's
mother was living, but then one couldn't have everything, and,
after all, she was married again, which seemed to mitigate the
annoyance. Rachael said to herself that this was a wiser marriage
than the proposed one with poor Stephen: Stephen had been a wild,
romantic boy, full of fresh passion and dazed with exultant
dreams; Clarence was a man, longing less for moonshine and roses
and the presence of his beloved one than for a gracious,
distinguished woman who would take her place before the world as
mistress of his home and guardian of his child.

She had sometimes doubted her power to make Stephen happy--
Stephen, who talked with all a boy's heavenly shyness of long days
tramping the woods and long nights over the fire, of little sons
and daughters romping in the Trecastle gardens; but she entered
into her marriage with Clarence Breckenridge with entire self-
confidence. She had been struggling more or less definitely all
her life toward just such a position as this; it was a
comparatively easy matter to fill it, now that she had got it.

Carol she considered a decided asset. The child adored her, and
her services to Carol were so much good added to the beauty,
charm, and wisdom that she brought into the bargain. That Clarence
could ask more in the way of beauty, wisdom, and charm was not
conceivable; Rachael knew her own value too well to have any
doubts on that score.

And had her husband been a strong man, her dignified and ripened
loveliness must inevitably have won him. She stood ready to be
won. She held to her bond in all generosity. What heart and soul
and body could do for him was his to claim. She did not love him,
but she did not need love's glamour to show her what her exact
value to him might be; what was her natural return for all her
marriage gave her.

But quick-witted and cold-blooded as she was, she could not see
that Clarence was actually a little afraid of her. He had been too
rich all his life to count his money as an argument in his favor,
and although he was not clever he knew Rachael did not love him,
and hardly supposed that she ever could.

He felt with paternal blindness that she had married him partly
for the child's sake, and returned to the companionship of his
daughter with a real sense of relief.

Rachael, in turn, was puzzled. Carol was undeniably a pretty
child, with all a spoiled child's confident charm, but in all
good-natured generosity Rachael could not see in her the subtle
and irresistible fascinations that her father so eagerly
exploited. Surely no girl of ten, however gifted, could be
reasonably supposed to eclipse completely the woman Rachael knew
herself to be; surely no parental infatuation could extend itself
to the point of a remarriage with the bettering of a small child's
position alone the object.

Philosophy came promptly to the aid of the new-made wife. Billy
was a child, and Clarence a greater child. The situation was
annoying, was belittling to her own pride, but she would meet it
with dignity nevertheless. After all, the visible benefits of the
marriage were still hers: the new car, the new furs, the new and
wonderful sense of financial ease, of social certainty.

She schooled herself to listen with an indulgent smile to her
husband's fond rhapsodies about his daughter. She agreed amiably
that Billy would be a great beauty, a heart-breaker, that "the
little monkey had all the other women crazy with jealousy now, by
Jove!" She selected the little gowns and hats in which the radiant
Billy went off for long days alone with "Daddy," and she presently
graciously consented to share the little girl's luxurious room
because Billy sometimes awakened nervously at night. Rachael had
been accustomed to difficulties in dealing with the persons
nearest her; she met them resolutely. Sometimes a baffling sense
of failure smote the surface of her life, like a cold wind that
turns to white metal the smooth waters of a lake, but she held her
head proudly above it, and even Clarence and his daughter never
guessed what she endured. What did it matter? Rachael asked
herself wearily. She had not asked for love. She had resolutely
exchanged what she had to give for what she had determined to get;
Clarence had made no blind protestations, had expected no golden
romance. He admired her; she knew he thought it was splendid of
her to manage the engagement and marriage with so little fuss;
perhaps his jaded pulses fluttered a little when Rachael,
exquisite in her bridal newness, stooped at the railway station to
give the drooping Billy a good-bye kiss, and promise that in three
days they would be back to rescue her from the hated governess;
but paramount above all other emotions, she suspected, was the
tremendous satisfaction of having gained just the right woman to
straighten out his tangled domestic affairs, just the mother, as
the years went by, to do the correct thing for Billy.

Of some of these things the woman who sat idly before the library
fire was thinking, as the quiet evening wore on, and the purring
of the flames and the ticking of the little mantel clock accented
rather than disturbed the stillness. She was unhappy with a cold,
dry wretchedness that was deeper than any pang of passion or of
hate. The people she met, the books she read, the gowns she
planned so carefully, and the social events that were her life,
all--all--were dust and ashes. Clarence was less a disappointment
and a shame to her than an annoyance; he neglected her, he
humiliated her, true, but this meant infinitely less than that he
bored her so mercilessly. Billy, with her youthful complacencies
and arts, bored her; the sympathy of a few close friends bored her
as much as the admiration and envy of the many who were not close.
Cards, golf, dinners, and dances bored her. Rachael thought
tonight of a woman she had known closely, a beautiful woman, too,
and a rich and gifted woman, who, not many months ago, had quietly
ended it all, had been found by horrified maids in her gray-and-
silver boudoir lovelier than ever, in fixed and peaceful beauty,
with the soft folds of her lacy gown spreading like the petals of
a great flower about her and the little gleam of an empty bottle
in her still, ringed hand...

A voice broke the library stillness. Rachael roused herself.

"What is it, Helda?" she asked. "Doctor Gregory? Ask him to come
in. And ask Alfred--is Alfred still downstairs?--ask him to go up
and see if Mr. Breckenridge is awake.

"This is very decent of you, Greg," she said, a moment later, as
the doctor came into the room. "It doesn't seem right to interfere
with your dinner for the same old stupid thing!"

"Great pleasure to do anything for you, Rachael," the newcomer
said promptly and smilingly with the almost perfunctory courtesy
that was a part of Warren Gregory's stock in trade. "You don't
call on me often! I wish you did!"

She said to herself, as they both sat down before the fire, that
it was probably true. Doctor Gregory was notoriously glad of an
opportunity to serve his friends. He had not at all regretted the
necessity of leaving his dinner partner at the salad for a
professional call. He was quite ready to enjoy the Breckenridge
sitting-room, the fire, the lamplight, the company of a beautiful
woman. Rachael and he knew each other well, almost intimately;
they had been friends for many years. She had often been his guest
at the opera, had often chaperoned his dinner-parties at the club,
for Warren Gregory's only woman relative was his old mother, who
was neither of an age nor a type to take any part in his social
life.

He was forty, handsome, dignified, with touches of gray in his
close-clipped hair, but no other sign of years in his face or his
big, well-built figure. He had clever, fine eyes behind black-
rimmed glasses, a surgeon's clever hands, a pleasant voice. He
lived with his mother in a fine old house on Washington Square, in
New York City, and worked as tirelessly as if he were a penniless
be ginner at his profession instead of a rich man, a rich woman's
heir, and already recognized as a genius in his own line.

All women liked him, and he liked them all. He sent them books,
marked essays in magazines for their individual consideration,
took them to concerts, remembered their birthdays. But his only
close friends were men, the men with whom he played tennis and
golf, or with whom he was associated in his work.

With all his cleverness and all his charm, Warren Gregory was not
a romantic figure in the eyes of most women. He had inherited from
his old Irish mother a certain mildness, and a lenience, where
they were concerned. He neither judged them nor idolized them.
They belonged only to his leisure hours. His real life was in his
club, in his books, and in the hospital world where there were
children's tiny bones to set. He was conscious, as a man born in a
different circle always is conscious, that he had, by a series of
pleasant chances, been pushed straight into the inner heart of the
social group whose doors are so resolutely closed to many men and
women, and he liked it. His grand father had had blood but no
money, his mother money but no social claim. He inherited, with
the O'Connell millions, the Gregory name, and for perhaps ten
years he had enjoyed an unchallenged popularity. He had inherited
also, without knowing it, a definitely different standard from
that held by all the men and women about him. In his simple,
unobtrusive way he held aloof from much that they said and did.
Greg, said the woman, was a regular Puritan about gossip, about
drinking, about gambling.

They never suspected the truth: that he was shy. Sure of his touch
as a surgeon, pleasantly definite about books and pictures,
spontaneous and daring in the tennis court or on the links, under
his friendly manner with women was the embarrassment of a young
boy.

Before his tenth year his rigidly conscientious mother had
instilled into the wondering little-boy mind certain mysterious
yet positive moral laws. Purity and self-control were in the air
he breathed while at her side, and although a few years later
school and college had claimed him, the effect of those early
lessons was definite upon his character. Diffidence and a sort of
fear had protected him, far more effectually than any other means
might have done, from the common vices of his age, and in those
days a certain good-natured scorn from all his associates made him
feel even more than his natural shyness, and marked him rather
apart from other young men.

Keenly aware of this, it had been a tremendous surprise to the
young physician, returning from post-graduate work in Germany a
few years later, to find that what had once been considered a sort
of laughable weakness in him was called strength of character now;
that what had been a clumsy boy's inarticulateness was more
charitably construed into the silence of a clever man who will not
waste his words; and that mothers whose sons he had once envied
for their worldly wisdom were turning to him for advice as to the
extrication of these same sons from all sorts of difficulties.

Being no fool, he accepted the changed attitude with great
readiness, devoting himself to his work and his mother, and
pleasantly conscious that he was a success. He let women alone,
except where music and art, golf and the club theatricals were the
topic of interest, and, consequently, had come to his fortieth
year with some little awe and diffidence still left for them in
his secret heart. Rachael had told him, not long ago, that she
believed he took no interest in women older than fourteen and
younger than fifty, and there was some truth in the charge. But he
was conscious to-night of taking a distinct interest in her as he
sat down beside her fire.

He had never seen her so beautiful, he thought. She had dressed so
hastily, so carelessly, that an utter simplicity enhanced the
natural charm. Her dark hair was simply massed, her gown was
devoid of ornament, her hands bare, except for her wedding-ring.
On her earnest, exquisite face the occasion had stamped a certain
soberness, she was neither hostess nor guest to-night; just a
heartsick wife under the shadow of anger and shame.

"Well, what is it to-night?" Warren Gregory asked kindly.

"Oh, the same old thing, Greg. The Berry Stokes' dinner, you
know!"

"Shame!" the doctor said warmly, touched by her obvious
depression. "I'll go up. I can give him some pills. But you know,
he can't keep this up forever, Rachael. He's killing himself!"

In her sensitive mood the mildly reproachful tone was too much.
Rachael's breast rose, her eyes brightened angrily.

"Perhaps you'll tell me what more I can do, Greg!"

He looked at her in surprise; the shell of Mrs. Breckenridge's
cool reserve was not often pierced.

"My dear girl--" he stammered. "Why, Rachael--!"

For battling with a moment of emotion she had flung her beautiful
head back against the brilliant cretonne of the chair, her eyes
closed, her hands grasping the chair-arms. A tear slipped from
under her lids.

"I didn't for one second mean--" he began again uncomfortably.

Suddenly she straightened herself in her chair, and opened her
eyes widely. He saw her lovely breast, under its filmy black
chiffon, rise stormily. Her voice was rich with protest.

"No, you didn't mean anything, Greg, nobody means anything! Nobody
is anything but sorry for me: you, Billy, Elinor, the woman who
expected us at dinner to-night, the servants at the club!" she
said hotly. "Nobody blames me, and yet every one wonders how it
happens! Nobody thinks it anything but a little amusing, a little
shocking. I am to write the notes, and make the excuses, and be
shamed--and shamed--shamed--"

Her voice broke. She rose to her feet, and rested an elbow on the
mantel, and stared moodily at the fire. There was a silence.

"Rachael, I'm sorry!" Gregory said presently, impulsively.

Instantly her April smile rewarded him.

"I know you are, Greg!" she answered gratefully. "And I know," she
added, in a low tone, "that you are one of the persons who will
understand--when I end it all!"

"End it all!" he echoed sharply.

"Not suicide," she reassured him smilingly. She flung herself back
in her chair again, holding her white hand, with its ring, between
her face and the fire. "No," she said thoughtfully, "I mean
divorce."

There eyes met; both were pale, serious.

"Divorce!" he echoed, after a pause. "I never thought of it--for
you!"

"I haven't thought of it myself, much," Rachael admitted, with a
troubled smile.

As a matter of fact she had thought of it, since the early days of
her marriage, but never as an actual possibility. She had
preferred bondage and social position to freedom and the
uncomfortable status of the divorced woman. She realized now that
she might think of it in a slightly different way. She had been a
penniless nobody seven years ago; she was a personage now. The
mere fact that he was a Breckenridge would win some sympathy for
Clarence, but she would have her faction, too.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29