THE REMORSE OF WONDERING NANCY
She awoke to the sun, glad-hearted and made newly buoyant by one of
those soundless black sleeping-nights that come only to the town-tired
when they have first fled. She ran to the glass to know if the
restoration she felt might also be seen. With unbiassed calculation the
black-fringed lids drew apart and one hand pushed back of the temple,
and held there, a tangled skein of hair that had thrown the dusk of a
deep wood about her eyes. Then, as she looked, came the little dreaming
smile that unfitted critic eyes for their office; a smile that wakened
to a laugh as she looked--a little womanish chuckle of confident joy, as
one alone speaking aloud in an overflowing moment.
An hour later she was greeting Bernal where the sun washed through the
big room.
"Young life sings in me!" she said, and felt his lightening eyes upon
her lips as she smiled.
There were three days of it--days in which, however, she grew to fear
those eyes, lest they fall upon her in judgment. She now saw that his
eyes had changed most. They gave the face its look of absence, of
dreaming awkwardness. They had the depth of a hazy sky at times, then
cleared to a coldly lucid glance that would see nothing ever to fear,
within or without; that would hide no falseness nor yet be deceived by
any--a deadly half-shut, appraising coolness that would know false from
true, even though they mated amicably and distractingly in one mind.
The effect of this glance which she found upon herself from time to time
was to make Nancy suspect herself--to question her motives and try her
defenses. To her amazement she found these latter weak under Bernal's
gaze, and there grew in her a tender remorse for the injustice she had
done her husband. From little pricking suspicions on the first day she
came on the last to conviction. It seemed that being with Bernal had
opened her eyes to Allan's worth. She had narrowly, flippantly misjudged
a good man--good in all essentials. She was contrite for her unwifely
lack of abnegation. She began to see herself and Allan with Bernal's
eyes: she was less than she had thought--he was more. Bernal had proved
these things to her all unconsciously. Now her heart was flooded with
gratitude for his simple, ready, heartfelt praise of his brother--of his
unfailing good-temper, his loyalty, his gifts, his modesty so often
distressed by outspoken admiration of his personal graces. She listened
and applauded with a heart that renewed itself in all good resolves of
devotion. Even when Bernal talked of himself, he made her feel that she
had been unjust to Allan.
Little by little she drew many things from him--the story of his
journeyings and of his still more intricate mental wanderings. And it
thrilled her to think he had come back with a message--even though he
already doubted himself. Sometimes he would be jocular about it and
again hot with a passion to express himself.
"Nance," he said on another night, "when you have a real faith in God a
dead man is a miracle not less than a living--and a live man dying is
quite as wondrous as a dead man living. Do you know, I was staggered one
day by discovering that the earth didn't give way when I stepped on it?
The primitive man knowing little of physics doesn't know that a child's
hand could move the earth through space--but for a certain mysterious
resistance. That's God. I felt him all that day, at every step, pushing
the little globe back under me--counteracting me--resisting me--ever so
gently. Those are times when you feel you must tell it, Nance--when the
God-consciousness comes."
"Oh, Bernal, if you could--if you could come back to do what your
grandfather really wanted you to do--to preach something worth while!"
"I doubt the need for my message, Nance. I need for myself a God that
could no more spare a Hottentot than a Pope--but I doubt if the world
does. No one would listen to me--I'm only a dreamer. Once, when I was
small they gave me a candy cane for Christmas. It was a thing I had long
worshipped in shop-windows--actually worshipped as the primitive man
worshipped his idol. I can remember how sad I was when no one else
worshipped with me, or paid the least attention to my treasure. I
suspect I shall meet the same indifference now. And I hope I'll have the
same philosophy. I remember I brought myself to eat the cane, which I
suppose is the primary intention regarding them--and perhaps the fruits
of one's faith should be eaten quite as practically."
They had sent no word to Allan, agreeing it were better fun to surprise
him. When they took the train together on the third day, the wife not
less than the brother looked forward to a joyous reunion with him. And
now that Nancy had proved in her heart the perverse unwifeliness of her
old attitude and was eager to begin the symbolic rites of her atonement,
it came to her to wonder how Bernal would have judged her had she
persisted in that first wild impulse of rebellion. She wanted to see
from what degree of his reprobation she had saved herself. She would be
circuitous in her approach.
"You remember, Bernal, that night you went away--how you said there was
no moral law under the sky for you but your own?"
He smiled, and above the noise of the train his voice came to her as his
voice of old came above the noise of the years.
"Yes--Nance--that was right. No moral law but mine. I carried out my
threat to make them all find their authority in me."
"Then you still believe yours is the only authority?"
"Yes; it sounds licentious and horrible, doesn't it; but there are two
queer things about it--the first is that man quite naturally _wishes_ to
be decent, and the second is that, when he does come to rely wholly upon
the authority within himself, he finds it a stricter disciplinarian than
ever the decalogue was. One needs only ordinary good taste to keep the
ten commandments--the moral ones. A man may observe them all and still
be morally rotten! But it's no joke to live by one's own law, and yet
that's all anybody has to keep him right, if we only knew it,
Nance--barring a few human statutes against things like murder and
keeping one's barber-shop open on the Sabbath--the ruder offenses which
no gentleman ever wishes to commit.
"And must poor woman be ruled by her own God, too?"
"Why not?"
"Well, it's not so long ago that the fathers of the Church were debating
in council whether she had a soul or not, charging her with bringing
sin, sickness and death into the world."
"Exactly. St. John Damascene called her 'a daughter of falsehood and a
sentinel of hell'; St. Jerome came in with 'Woman is the gate of the
devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion'; St. Gregory, I
believe, considered her to have no comprehension of goodness; pious old
Tertullian complimented her with corrupting those whom Satan dare not
attack; and then there was St. Chrysostom--really he was much more
charitable than his fellow Saints--it always seemed to me he was not
only more humane but more human--more interested, you might say. You
know he said, 'Woman is a necessary evil, a domestic peril, a deadly
fascination, a painted ill.' It always seemed to me St. Chrysostom had a
past. But really, I think they all went too far. I don't know woman very
well, but I suspect she has to find her moral authority where man finds
his--within herself."
"You know what made me ask--a little woman in town came to see Allan not
long ago to know if she mightn't leave her husband--she had what seemed
to her sufficient reason."
"I imagine Allan said 'no.'"
"He did. Would you have advised her differently?"
"Bless you, no. I'd advise her to obey her priest. The fact that she
consulted him shows that she has no law of her own. St. Paul said this
wise and deep thing: 'I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that
there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him that esteemeth anything
unclean, to him it is unclean!'"
"Then it lay in her own view of it. If she had felt free to go, she
would have done right to go."
"Naturally."
"Yet Allan talked to her about the sanctity of the home."
"I doubt if the sanctity of the home is maintained by keeping unwilling
mates together, Nance. I can imagine nothing less sanctified than a home
of that sort--peopled by a couple held together against the desire of
either or both. The willing mates need no compulsion, and they're the
ones, it seems to me, that have given the home its reputation for
sanctity. I never thought much about divorce, but I can see that much at
once. Of course, Allan takes the Church's attitude, which survives from
a time when a woman was bought and owned; when the God of Moses classed
her with the ox and the ass as a thing one must not covet."
"You really think if a woman has made a failure of her marriage she has
a right to break it."
"That seems sound as a general law, Nance--better for her to make a
hundred failures, for that matter, than stay meekly in the first because
of any superstition. But, mind you, if she suspects that the Church may,
after all, have succeeded in tying up the infinite with red-tape and
sealing-wax--believes that God is a large, dark notary-public who has
recorded her marriage in a book--she will do better to stay. Doubtless
the conceit of it will console her--that the God who looks after the
planets has an eye on her, to see that she makes but one guess about so
uncertain a thing as a man."
"Then you would advise--"
"No, I wouldn't. The woman who has to be advised should never take
advice. I dare say divorce is quite as hazardous as marriage, though
possibly most people divorce with a somewhat riper discretion than they
marry with. But the point is that neither marriage nor divorce can be
considered a royal road to happiness, and a woman ought to get her
impetus in either case from her own inner consciousness. I should call
divorcing by advice quite as silly as marrying by it."
"But it comes at last to her own law in her own heart?"
"When she has awakened to it--when she honestly feels it. God's law for
woman is the same as for man--and he has but two laws for both that are
universal and unchanging: The first is, they are bound at all times to
desire happiness; the second is, that they can be happy only by being
wise--which is what we sometimes mean when we say 'good,' but of course
no one knows what wisdom is for all, nor what goodness is for all,
because we are not mechanical dolls of the same pattern. That's why I
reverence God--the scheme is so ingenious--so productive of variety in
goodness and wisdom. Probably an evil marriage is as hard to be quit of
as any vice. People persist long after the sanctity has gone--because
they lack moral courage. Hoover was quite that way with cigarettes. If
some one could only have made Jim believe that God had joined him to
cigarettes, and that he mustn't quit them or he'd shatter the
foundations of our domestic integrity--he'd have died in cheerful
smoke--very soon after a time when he says I saved his life. All he
wanted was some excuse to go on smoking. Most people are
so--slothful-souled. But remember, don't advise your friend in town. Her
asking advice is a sign that she shouldn't have it. She is not of the
coterie that Paul describes--if you don't mind Paul once more--'Happy is
he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth.'"
There had come to the woman a vast influx of dignity--a joyous increase
in the volume of that new feeling that called to her husband. She would
have gone back, but one of the reasons would have been because she
thought it "right"--because it was what the better world did! But
now--ah! now--she was going unhampered by that compulsion which galls
even the best. She was free to stay away, but of her own glad, loyal
will she was going back to the husband she had treated unjustly, judged
by too narrow a standard.
"Allan will be so astonished and delighted," she said, when the coupé
rolled out of the train-shed.
She remembered now with a sort of pride the fine, unflinching sternness
with which he had condemned divorce. In a man of principles so staunch
one might overlook many surface eccentricities.