She went to church the next morning with her husband. It was one of the
conventions after a bereavement. She sat with her heavy veil down. There
was a gleam of comfort for her in the sermon after all. The Rector saw
her and delicately avoided any subject that might recall her recent
grief. A personal man, that day he sought to be strictly impersonal. He
must not preach of death or sorrow. He preached instead of sin, as a
safe abstraction.
What could this small quivering young woman in black know of sin? He
spoke about it to his wife on his way over.
“There is nothing gained in probing a raw wound,” he said. “There is
comfort in the service itself. I am fond of her and I don’t want to
sadden her. If you think I am treading on dangerous ground, let me
know.” She often let him know such things. They had a signal system with
a handkerchief.
So he preached from the text, “The wages of sin is death.”
He was a tall man with the eyes of a dreamer and some beliefs that he
did not voice in the pulpit.
“Sin!” he said. “Men and women, there is no absolute standard for sin.
The virtue of the untempted is nothing. He who sins and repents among
you is greater than he who has never sinned, having never had desire.”
His wife was watching the congregation. Before long she got out her
handkerchief.
His arm slipped through hers, her husband talked to her on the way home.
She needed air; they must take a roundabout way. He showed her crocuses
in fence corners, shrubbery bursting into dull red and green again, beds
of early tulips lifting their spiked heads through the soil. The village
streets were full of sedate couples walking home in the spring sunshine.
How friendly they were, how kind! What would they be if they knew? Did
she dare? Did she dare not to?
Their walk prolonged itself. Behind her veil she was gathering up
courage to ask him a question.
“The sermon!” she said at last. “Do you—do you really believe what he
said?”
He had to think a moment. Church to him was a matter of weekly habit, a
quiet hour in which his soul fed on things spiritual and took in, as one
may say, a week’s supply ahead. With the final “Amen” of the
benediction, he closed and locked that part of his mind and laid it
away.
“The text, oh, yes, ‘The wages of sin.’ Well, I don’t know about that. I
never get past the fact that it’s a plural subject and a singular verb.
I was trying to parse it all the time he was preaching.”
“He said,” she reminded him, “that the virtue of the untempted
wasn’t—didn’t amount to much; it was only those who had been—been
tempted that knew anything about it.”
He looked down at her, smiling.
“What is it! Has one of the maids been taking things?”
“No, not that. I was just—just thinking.”
“Oh, as to that,—well, if you really want my opinion about it—sin is
sin wherever you find it. You cannot get away with it, either in this
world or the next. He’s handling dangerous doctrine. Even to comfort the
sinner, one need not compromise with crime.”
“But if one is tempted—”
“We are all tempted,” he said. “The only difference between the good
ones and the bad ones is that the bad ones yield and the good ones do
not.”
She had known it all along. He was like her father—only younger, more
uncompromising. The older man had mellowed with the years. For her
husband the world was divided into the sheep and the goats, the good and
the bad.
Afterwards she could recall very little of that terrible Sabbath.
In the afternoon the children frolicked with their father. With his
usual kindly thought, he kept them from her. Late in the afternoon she
had rather a shock. He came into the room where she was lying on a couch
and held a key before her.
“To father’s study,” he said.
It was still father’s study.
“I have been in there. You are not going to touch that mess of papers
again. That’s a man’s job. I am going to start it to-night.”
Her heart seemed to stop.
“But—there are so many,” she gasped, “and I have always—”
“That’s exactly it. You have always looked after them, and I never
realised until now what a lot there was to do. I’ll sort them out
roughly, and to-morrow I will send one of the girls from the office to
help put them in order.”
“But the key—”
“I’ll take care of the key,” he said, smiling, and thrust it into his
pocket.
That night when he was safely asleep she got the key and slipped into
the little study. Everything was as she had left it. The box of medals
and papers, the stack of cancelled checks, and over on the desk, under a
weight where she had placed them, the Joan Bailey checks.
Perhaps he had seen them and wondered. What if he asked her about them?
What could she say?
Still building, you see, the secret house, still propping its falling
walls.
Fortune favoured her next day. Her husband telephoned at ten o’clock
that he would not be able to get home to dinner until late.
“Take things easy to-day, Bess,” he said. He dropped his voice. He was
calling from the office. “I couldn’t stand it to have you ill.” His
voice was a caress. “If you want me to go to pieces, just get sick.”
He meant it. She knew that he meant it. That morning it only added to
her agony of mind. But it gave her a full day. She must know that this
thing was real. Lying awake the night before, she had come to doubt it.
It was just possible that Joan Bailey had been exacting from her father
a sort of hush money all these years. That had been done, she knew.
“Blackmail,” they called it, and yet—
What she remembered of the Joan of years ago, was of a kindly,
broad-faced woman who had closed her baby’s fingers around one of hers
and watched in vain for the mother gleam in her eyes.
Anyhow she must know.
The children were at school. Mam’selle was darning stockings on a sunny
corner of the terrace. She had no railroad schedules and must trust to
luck. She dressed quickly in the still unfamiliar black and walked to
the station.
Here and there a kindly neighbour spoke to her in the chastened dropped
voice that one adopts toward the recently bereaved.
“So good,” they said; “so fine a man and so brave a soldier—and all
your life wrapped up in you!”
She could have screamed. That was it exactly. If only he had not been so
tender, if only he had made her face the thing at the time, if only when
Will had gone to him and said he loved her, he had insisted that she
tell the truth! But he had saved her then, as always, and now—
She had a very definite plan. Of one thing she was quite confident. Her
father had not intended that she should find out this thing. She
believed that through his lawyer he had made provision for the other
child, and it was to the lawyer that she went first.
He saw her at once. She approached the subject bravely. It had come to
the point with her when all the world might know, if only she could keep
it from one man.
“I want you to be quite frank with me,” she said. “I am going to say
something that is not particularly pleasant for me or for you, but I
have to say it, and I want you to promise, first, to be quite honest.”
The lawyer was elderly, suave, rather judicial.
“My dear child,” he said, “lawyers have to be honest, or dishonest
people would not come to them.”
She bent forward.
“Exactly what do you know of Joan Bailey?”
She had hit it right away. She had known her father very well, and men
are tolerably certain quantities. Given a situation and a man, one can
tell what the man will do. With a woman it is different; the woman
herself does not know what she will do.
The lawyer put his finger-tips together.
“Ah!” he said, “Joan Bailey! Do you mind telling me why you ask?”
“My father left her money, I think—an annuity.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“No, but I have reason to believe that he did.”
“And your reason?”
She held out two small, black-gloved hands to him.
“Please!” she cried. “I cannot fence. I only know that I must find out.
I do not care about the money. It is not that at all. It is something
else that I must know.”
The lawyer hesitated, then:
“The woman, Joan Bailey, was left a small annuity. It amounts, I
believe, to three hundred dollars a year.”
“Do you know why it was left to her?”
For just a moment his eyes dropped. Then he glanced up at her with
something of pity, much of comprehension.
“Yes,” he admitted, “I know.”
Even then she must be sure. There must not be another mistake. She
forced her dry lips to speak.
“The child is living?”
“The child is living—a fine boy. I never approved—”
She rose. In another moment she felt that she would scream.
“Thank you,” she said. “If you will give me the address—”
He was not so sure about that. In his kindly way he urged against it.
“Let the dead past bury its dead,” he said with a hand on her shoulder.
“The child is well enough.”
“I am living a lie. I have been living a lie for ten years, but then I
thought that it affected no one but myself. Now that I know that—now
that I know that—there is some one else, it is different—I—”
The old man shook his head after her as she went out. He thought she was
making a mistake. He did not understand, of course. Once a mother,
always a mother, no doubt would have been his explanation. He did not
believe in native honesty in women; in fact, he did not believe there
was such a thing as honesty. Elderly lawyers lose their faith and
substitute for it tolerance.
She got the address from him finally. It was not the Long Island village
that she remembered. It was in New Jersey, an hour’s ride, perhaps.
A sort of exaltation of sacrifice was on her now. She was quite clear,
no longer dazed and uncertain—to see the child, to comprehend him, that
he was hers, that whether she would or not she could no longer plan her
life without him—this she kept before her all the way. She could only
look forward. She dared not look back to the white house with the
crocuses, to Emily and little Jane, to the thousand homely trifles that
up to now had made up her day, almost her life. She did not think. She
was like a runner striving for the tape, eyes only for the goal ahead,
all effort, all tenseness. An instant of softening would be fatal.
And so after a long time she reached the house. It was a very small
house of clapboards with a porch. A poor little house, but not
untidy—quite thrifty, indeed, with its white curtains in the window and
its geranium box, rather spindling from the long winter.
She walked past it before she summoned courage to come back. There was
no door-bell. She rapped. Perhaps she had a moment of relief when there
was no reply from within. There was no one there. Surely she had done
her part. She had tried—
A second rap brought a response, a small voice from well beyond the
door. She knew immediately that it was the child’s voice. She had no
thrill, certainly; only a sickness, a sort of dizziness that made her
steady herself by the door-post.
“Come in,” said the small voice; “just open the door. It’s not locked.”
Somehow or other she pushed the door open and stepped inside. The early
spring sunshine had been very warm, but the little house was cool. That
was the first thing she noticed—coolness and order and a sort of prim
austerity.
Then she saw the boy. He was propped up on a sofa-bed in the back of the
room.
“Miss Joan isn’t here,” he said politely; “she’ll be here at five
o’clock.”
She could make out around him the various impedimenta of a child’s
convalescence. Pictures cut out and pinned to the wall over the
sofa-bed, papers covered with childish drawings, and on a chair, neatly
covered with cold water, four pared potatoes with the knife beside them.
Evidently the small hands had been labouring as well as playing.
She stood in the centre of the room looking down. Nothing quite
appropriate came to her to say. But the boy was at ease.
“You will have to excuse me,” he said. “I have a broken leg. It’s almost
better. In about a week I am going to get a pair of crutches.”
Still she could think of nothing to say. The child was almost exactly
like his father. It was a further complication. The same brown eyes,
heavily lashed, the same droop to the corners of his mouth, the same
rather wistful smile.
“Crutches,” said the small voice, “with rubber tips on ’em. Miss Joan is
afraid I’ll slip and fall again.”
She sat down. She was never theatrical, and the whole episode had an air
of unreality. When she did speak at last, her voice was very well
controlled; she even managed to smile.
“I will not wait for Miss Joan,” she said, “but I will sit down and talk
to you, if I may.”
The boy was delighted. Naïvely he showed her his drawings, marvellous
ships with flags as large as themselves in bow and stern, accompanied by
sharks, also as large as the vessels, the whole sailing a sea
ferociously disturbed. He showed her the potatoes and how thin the
peelings were.
He was pathetically glad of a visitor.
With an experienced eye, she noted that although he was a little pale
from confinement, his eyes were clear and healthy. He looked well cared
for and well nourished, abundantly cheerful.
The little house itself was comforting. This was no hovel, but a home in
which love and order abided. So far, so good. But, after all, that was
not her problem.
Perhaps a half hour passed during this one-sided conversation. She was
not thinking at all—she was remembering. Back, as she sat there, came
every forgotten detail of the other spring. Back came the boy with his
dark eyes and wistful mouth. Back out of the limbo of things wilfully
forgotten came that twenty-four hours of flight and terror and delight.
“Surely it had not been so wrong,” she said to herself, when the result
had been so beautiful.
“_Sin is sin wherever you find it. You cannot get away with it, either
in this world or in the next._”
“I wonder,” said the boy, “if you would look at the clock in the
kitchen. At half-past three school is out, and somebody generally comes
and sits with me.”
She got up a little blindly and went to the kitchen door. She felt that
the boy’s eyes followed her. That probably he knew the significance of
her dark clothing and veil, that he would even—had he dared—have
offered his mite of comfort.
“Almost three-thirty,” she said; “if you are sure some one will come to
sit with you, I think I must go.”
He smiled.
“Some one!” he said. “Why, yesterday there were eleven, and when Miss
Joan came home, she had to scrub the floor.”
She did not kiss the boy good-bye. It would have been an audacity,
almost an impertinence. She stood beside him, looking down.
“Miss Joan will be sorry she missed you.”
“Do you always call her Miss Joan?”
“Why, yes; that’s her name.”
“You don’t call her Aunt Joan or—or mother?”
“But she’s not my aunt or my mother either. I just live with her. But we
are great friends. Miss Joan says I am all she has, and she’s mostly all
I have got.”
Dangerous ground this!
She had a frantic impulse to drop on her knees beside the sofa-bed and
to catch the small cheerful figure to her. The diversion came at the
right moment—a clatter of feet outside, a slamming open of the door, an
influx of small boys, not too tidy, and bearing curious small boy
offerings.
She moved back and let the mob surround him. She had the pain of seeing
herself forgotten as she herself had forgot. She worked her way very
quietly to the door and out to the street.
And now at last she found that she could think. There was something
concrete about which to reason, a fact to be faced, not a fear as
before. Some of her father’s gallant blood made her throw back her
shoulders and sit straight. She had risen to meet her hour, as women
always do rise to meet the great crises of life.
The responsibility was not hers alone. This one thing—the child—she
shared in common with the boy of years ago. The responsibility was his,
too. She had not thought of reproach, of course. It was simply that they
two must face this thing together, must talk it over, think it out,
decide what was best.
Had it not been that the secret involved him also, probably in her
exalted mood, she would have taken the whole thing to her husband that
night. But in all the years that she had been building the secret house
she had forgotten that she had a partner in this ownership. It was not
hers alone. Now she remembered.
In the city between trains she had time to telephone to him. She found
him without the slightest difficulty. For years their paths, never
crossing, had closely paralleled. A hand out in this, her darkness, and
she could touch him.
She called his apartment at first and was given his club.
There was a slight constraint in his manner when she gave him her name.
The constraint was not immediate; it seemed to take him a moment to
place her. For, of course, what had been a tragedy for her had been but
an episode for him.
“Oh, of course!” he said, after a moment. “How stupid of me! How are
you, Bess?”
“Very well,” she said quickly. “I wish I might see you and talk to you.”
“Yes?”
“Something has happened,” she said hastily, “something I think you ought
to know. I’m—I’m rather upset about it.”
There was instant sympathy in his tone.
“Oh, yes, I know. Your father has just died, hasn’t he? I am very
sorry.”
“It isn’t that; it’s something entirely different. Could you—could you
come to see me?”
He hesitated just the fraction of a second. Then:
“I could come out to-night, if it is very important.”
She caught the slightest possible change in his inflection. It was as if
he emphasized the fact that to-night he knew her husband would be there.
In the darkness of the telephone booth she flushed.
“It is something that concerns only you and me. I am sorry, but I would
like to have you come when Will is not at home.”
There was a real silence, very short, very illuminating.
“Where are you living?”
“In the old house.”
“I see.” Then another pause. “I am very busy just now. Probably you know
that I am to be married—but if to-morrow afternoon will do, I can
arrange to come.”
“Shall I send the carriage for you?”
“No; I’ll take the short cut across the fields.”
How familiar that was, how many times he had telephoned to her and said
that he would take the short cut across the fields!
* * * * *
Once again the children, once again the quiet dinner with her husband
smiling at her through the candles, once again evening with the two of
them pacing the terrace under the stars while he smoked. Once again the
thousand and one soft sounds of early spring: the distant roaring of a
little creek swelled with rain, the belated twitter of a bird working
late to build its home, the raising of windows in the night nursery
after Mam’selle put out the lights.
From a hand on her elbow as they moved her husband slipped his arm
around her. Once, at the far end of terrace, where the shadows were
deepest, he stopped—and drew her close.
“You look very young to-night,” he told her, “quite saintly in your
black dress. I am almost afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me! Because I wear a black gown!”
“No. Because your virtues shine in your face. I am very common clay, I
am afraid, only—you keep it hidden from me!”
“Oh, no.”
“I love you with all my heart, dearest.” He bent over her. “I am afraid
I don’t say it often enough, but I always think it. You are my saint—my
star! And you are more than that—you are the mother of my two little
girls.”
It was a rare outburst for him. Two days ago, so absolutely had she
dismissed the past, two days ago she would have deprecated and adored
the little speech. Now it left her terrified and ashamed. To tell him!
To see the light die out of his eyes, never to come back! To have no
more hours together like this one, with his arm about her and perfect
trust between them.
A light wind had sprung up, with a threat of rain. Upstairs Mam’selle,
always watchful, was bowing the shutters in the night nursery. A vision
of the room came to her. Two white beds, two small white chairs, one
beside each bed, covered with an orderly array of fresh garments for the
morning; small shoes, neatly rolled white stockings, fluffy little
petticoats.
And then—a sofa-bed in the back of a tidy little room in a clapboard
house, childish drawings pinned to the walls, four potatoes pared thin!