“It’s gone,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the loss it must be to her, I’d
say frankly that I’m glad. You never knew it, but it had come between
us, somehow. Not the singing, but all that it brought with it.”
I was not much of a rider, and Jim was busy about the ranch during most
of the day. Peggy rode off alone rather often, and would come in toward
evening tired but very happy. After those rides I always thought there
was something rather wonderful in her attitude toward Jim, something
solicitous and tender and almost mysterious.
I had ventured out alone into the mountains one day, going further than
I knew, and finally losing my way. After considerable wandering my horse
found the trail again, and we headed toward home. It was mid-afternoon,
and the peaks overhead were brilliant with sunshine. And on a rock,
above, suddenly I saw Peggy.
She was standing there, immobile, looking down toward the ranch. She had
not seen me, and as I looked she threw her hands out and began to sing.
I had never heard her sing like that. It was all back, and more.
I sat on my horse and cried; cried for the sheer pathos of it. Just how
long it was since her voice had come back I did not know. I do not know
now, for she still carries out the program she set for herself. Jim has
never guessed. But what is important is that somehow, somewhere she had
reached the forks of the road, and had turned to Jim.
No, it isn’t an answer. It is plain surrender. I suppose whether it pays
or not depends on the Jims of the world. And it depends, too, on what a
woman really wants. I daresay it will always be love, unless we develop
a new type of women. Which God forbid.
V
THE SECRET HOUSE: The Wife
I
Her father was dead. In the fulness of years he had passed away. There
was no great grief; only a hush in the house and that sense of emptiness
that comes to even a crowded household after a death. The children had
been taken to school. In the nursery a canary sang in a sunny window.
She sat alone in the room that had been the dead man’s study for many
years. It was a small room in the back of the house on the second floor.
Out of it opened his bedroom. The bed, strangely square and white and
empty, stood where she could see it from the desk. All the morning she
had been busy with his papers, his letters to her mother during the war,
old receipts, newspaper cuttings, many photographs—the impedimenta of a
long and busy life. Over the desk hung his sword, and under it were
photographs on the wall, a picture of her as she looked at her first
communion, a younger picture of a very little girl in a plaid dress,
with velvet-topped shoes and straight hair cut into a bang, and just
before her, level-browed, one taken when she was seventeen, about the
time— She closed her eyes.
Receipts and cancelled checks went into the waste-basket; letters were
laid aside for more careful scrutiny. The war records went into a box
with half a dozen medals. They were to go to the Grand Army
headquarters. He had been a very great soldier, this old man who died.
Most of the cancelled checks she recognised. He had brought her back
into the big family home when her children began to come. Since then she
had helped him with his affairs—not that he knew much of business
himself. He had kept his books in a sort of crooked, comfortable fashion
that had been her husband’s despair. She ran over the cancelled checks
hastily before tearing them in half and consigning them to the
waste-basket. There were a few that were not familiar; one of quite
recent date puzzled her. _Pay to the order of Joan Bailey_, it said. The
date was only a month or two ago. That was rather curious; a month or
two ago he had been quite ill, and there had been a nurse. But the
nurse’s name was not Bailey.
She went over the checks now with some care. The accumulated
extravagances and necessities of thirty years were there. She found the
piano that was her wedding gift; little Emily’s silver mug. And every
now and then she came across a Joan Bailey check. When she had finished,
she sat staring at twenty of them, each for a substantial sum, each
endorsed across the back in the same neat feminine hand. Two a year for
ten years! She sat with the checks in her hands, looking out through the
window to the vista and garden and white road beyond.
The canary sang joyously. Beside the white bed in the next room was the
great upholstered chair in which her father had sat during the past
year. More than once he had sat there while she worked at his desk,
watching her with loving, faded old eyes.
“_Pay to Joan Bailey!_” That was what he had been thinking when he
looked at her through the doorway.
Her baby had lived then after all. They had told her it died. For ten
years, he who had been frankness and truth itself, had lived a lie, had
fought desperately for her happiness and—secured it.
Out of all the tumult of that terrible time, the name of Joan Bailey
came back, loomed large. For years she had not thought of her. She had
put her resolutely out of her intelligence, just as she had put away
that one year. The child was dead, and what had been, had been.
Ah! but the child was not dead! Round in a circle again to the child.
How she had hated it—this visible little squalling symbol, this
tangible sin! She had held it once—she remembered that. Sometimes still
in the night she wakened to a consciousness of that pitiful little
bundle which had been hers for only an hour. Such thoughts never came to
her in the day, so rigorously had she schooled her mind to
forgetfulness. But at night, with the barriers of caution and secrecy
weakened by sleep, sometimes she was back again in the little house on
Long Island, with Joan Bailey’s motherly face bending over her, and a
tiny thing beside her that stirred against her heart.
One builds up a house of secrecy day by day; each new day adds thickness
to its walls. And so she had built her house. Only to find now, after
ten years, these twenty doorways.
The gardener was bending over some early crocuses down on the lawn.
Lying out on the grass to the sun was a child’s frock put to bleach. The
frock was Emily’s, who was seven—the other child would be ten—taller
than Emily!
Her own composure surprised her. The thing was so new that as yet she
was able to view it almost with detachment. It was as if another woman’s
problem confronted her for solution, as though another woman with a
husband and children had confessed a living illegitimate child and had
asked her what to do.
The children were coming home from school. She could see the carriage on
the white road, filled with a squirming mass that overflowed onto the
steps, clung to the back, and stood between the old driver’s friendly
knees.
The horse ambled along. Here and there a youngster dropped off as
casually as a ripe apple from a tree, and scurried across a lawn to home
and luncheon. Childish laughter came to her through the open window. But
as the carriage neared the house, glee was succeeded by decorum.
Grandfather had just gone away.
Something of their new dignity seemed to invest the two little girls in
white as they drove in, short legs dangling, prim hair ribbons erect.
They saw her through the window and waved to her. She waved back
absently. These children belonged to the woman with the problem.
Of all life’s great questions, only death is met with a hush, and death
after all is not a question but its answer. The man who is to be hanged
must have his breakfast first. The tortures of the spirit are
inextricably confused with food, with money, with covering our bodies,
with putting them to rest at night—so shackled are our souls by the
flesh.
The gardener must have permission to put crocuses in a pot for the
table, the children must have luncheon. Perhaps it was just as well—it
gave her a little time. Very slowly she was comprehending this thing
that had come to her. After she had grasped it, she could begin to think
of what she must do.
Once in the house the children forgot their new-found dignity and called
to her jubilantly. The reaction from the hush of the last three days was
immensely cheerful. The house was full of sunlight, of open doors, of
spring flowers, of little darting breezes full of promise.
The little girls danced through the hall and up the staircase. Only, at
the door of the study, they moderated their shrill young voices. For
here they were again on the threshold of the great Unknown. Each child
as she kissed her mother threw a wide-eyed glance to the empty room
beyond, with the square white bed and the great chair.
“The teacher,” said Emily, in her older sister voice, “was very
considerate to Jane. Jane, tell mother what you did.”
“Throwed ink on the teacher,” said Jane gaily, “shook my pen and the ink
went on her. She was all spotty.”
“How very naughty!” said the mother. “How very, very naughty!”
She drew a long breath. These were hers, hers by law, by every right of
legitimacy. However she had failed before, here at least, she had done
her best—and her best had been very good.
“The teacher,” said Emily, “the teacher says that she thinks she can get
it out and you are not to worry, mother, but that to-morrow Jane is not
to be allowed to eat her orange at eleven o’clock.”
“I should think not,” she heard her own voice saying. “I shall have to
apologise for my naughty little daughter.”
She ate no luncheon, but she sat and spread bread and butter “and plenty
of jam, please, mother” for the little girls.
Her orderly house soothed her; it was as if the very decorum and
respectability of her surroundings had put this other thing far back,
almost out of her life. The quiet step of the maid serving the table,
the shaven green of the spring lawn, the dignified manœuvres of the
goldfish in an aquarium in a sunny window—all these helped to keep her
mental balance; she stored up, as it were, a reserve of saneness against
the time that she knew was coming.
There was something of desperation in the way she clung to the small
affairs of her household, something of fierce maternity in the way she
held the children to her. It was as if she said to the other woman:
“_These_ are my children—only _these_.”
But the evil hour could not be indefinitely postponed. At two o’clock
came a message from a kindly neighbour:
“Please let me have the kiddies for a little while. I know how terribly
tired you must be. I will take splendid care of them, and do lie down
and take a nap.”
Even then, she prolonged the parting. In her black dress with white
bands at the neck and wrists, she led the children down the drive to the
gate and watched them scurry across the road and out of sight. When at
last, she turned, she and the other woman, herself of ten years ago,
were together alone for the first time: this other self, which she
loathed, which had shamed her so.
“Your child,” said the other self.
She stood under the apple trees, which were still black but moist and
swelling with promise, and put her hand to her throat.
“Not mine,” she said, “oh, my God! not mine, living and without a
mother. I won’t face it; I can’t face it.” But after all, she was the
daughter of a soldier and she had something of her father’s soul.
Perhaps that afternoon she had some little conception of the burden the
old man had carried through the years—a burden not of his own making, a
weight of secrecy that must have almost crushed his upright spirit.
She went back to the study. The sun was in the west now and the room was
cool and shadowy. She closed the door and resolutely faced her
situation.
She was happily married to a man she both loved and respected. She had
two children born of that marriage. About her lay secure ramifications
of respectability, of domestic happiness and love. One of two things she
must do and she must make her choice and abide by it.
She had a little money from her father’s estate. She could see Joan
Bailey and continue her father’s secret arrangement, thus ignoring
everything but her financial responsibility for the child. Or she could
tell her husband.
She faced her dilemma squarely, for as yet it was only a dilemma. Only
later on was she to find that between a mother and her child is a bond
that no instinctive secrecy, no fear of shame, can entirely sever.
She went very far back. She went back to that early spring—years
before—and her first love affair. Here was no tale of seduction of a
young girl by an older man; merely the story of a boy and a girl, both
in their teens, caught in the throes of a first love. A tale of long
spring evenings when the motherless girl wandered unwatched among the
trees, when the boy with his ardent young soul on his lips met her night
after night. And even then it had not been wrong; they had always
intended to marry.
April it was by that time, April, fast flowering into May.
They ran away finally, because the elders had said that years must
elapse and at seventeen years are centuries—
But no one would marry them. They were so young—almost flagrantly
young. They were discovered after a day or so of fruitless interviews
with clergymen and brought back.
And for a time that had seemed to be all. They were to wait and in a few
years they might marry.
But it had not been all. There had been—the small red bundle that had
stirred against her heart.
Little by little the boy had slipped out of her life. She saw him now
and then, even yet. A chance meeting had long since ceased to have any
shock about it—and she had felt so secure.
The boy had never known about Joan Bailey or the other.
The old father had not blamed the boy much. The hardest part for her had
been that he blamed himself. She had heard him walking the floor of this
very room hour after hour, those first days. Hard days they were,
brooding hard days. He had looked very peaceful yesterday when they—
Her husband came home that night, swinging up the walk with an air of
almost boyish freedom. The restraint of the last few days had told on
him also. He had loved the old soldier—but when one is full of years
and yearns for rest, death is not a captivity, but a release.
The dogs barked around him. He kept a weather eye on the window,
suspecting ambuscade.
It was a twilight game with the children to ambush father from a window
and pelt him with rag dolls—so being young and having in his pocket
certain ammunition with which to return their fire, the ammunition being
bonbons, he walked warily and with extreme caution, keeping a weather
eye open for danger signals in the shape of hair ribbons over window
sills.
But after all, his caution went for nothing, because instead of rag
babies, it was crocuses, and they came from behind the hall door when he
entered.
He was a tall young man and he carried the children upstairs, one on
each shoulder, into his wife’s dressing room. The shades were drawn. She
had a fear of the daylight, late as it was. She felt that since he knew
her so well, he must see at once the veil that lay over her eyes.
He dropped the children in a laughing heap on the couch and came over to
her.
“You are looking tired, sweetheart,” he said, “and you promised to rest
to-day.”
“I have rested. There were some little things—”
“Look here, why not go away for a few days, just two or three. Mam’selle
can keep the girlies well enough. We will take the car and just go
quietly. We won’t even lay out a route. We’ll just wander about. What do
you think of it?”
She patted his arm, still avoiding his eyes.
“Give me a little time,” she begged. “There are so many things just now,
and I—somehow I don’t feel—” She broke down, her voice trembling.
“That’s natural, of course. In a day or so, I suppose the roads will be
better anyhow. But you must get away. This whole thing has been too much
for you.”
Still with his arm around her, they went downstairs to dinner. Between
the lights on the table she could look across to him. How strong he
looked—and how good! She knew his creed, an almost Puritanical
insistence on integrity in women; she knew his belief in her.
Above, Mam’selle was putting the children to bed. There were short
excursions in white nighties to the head of the stairs, last good-night
messages, soft little kisses blown down. Across the table her husband
smiled at her.
“After all,” he said softly, “he was very old, dear. You still have the
children, and—and me.”
She smiled back at him with veiled eyes.
“_Pay to Joan Bailey!_”