II

When Richard Hughes, the last of his family, left his mother's old home

to John and Rachel Marquis, no one had wondered. Rachel was a sort of

cousin and John, too, a distant connection by somebody's marriage. And

they lived in the town and nothing was more natural than that he should

give them a home there, and whatever else he had to leave.

What no one knew but Rachel was that Richard Hughes had wished to marry

her, and that she had refused him and chosen John Marquis instead.

Richard Hughes, fifteen years her senior, quiet and inexpressive, shut

in with books and remote from life, was far less to her mind than John

Marquis, who was of her own generation, with whom she went to parties

and talked the light talk of youth, and had a thousand things in common,

as she thought. John was bright and jolly, and played tennis and danced

with her and took her out in a canoe, and was sweet-tempered and loved

to laugh, and between times talked seriously about the business he was

starting and the money he expected to make. John belonged to the whole

format of her life at that time, and it was perfectly natural to choose

to marry him, with the expectation that life would go on as she and John

had both known it and liked it in other homes, comfortable, sensible,

ambitious of practical things, real, as their kind would call it. It

seemed an impossible thing for her not to marry John.

In the first years of their marriage she was proud of coming quickly to

understand John's business. She was proud of her management and her

well-timed economies, proud that John could talk affairs over with her

with satisfaction, that she was beginning to take the place her mother

and other successful women had taken in practical life. But after two or

three years had passed, the space taken by practical things in her life

began to shrink; her familiarity with them detracted from their interest

and allowed her to dispose of them more readily. She began to feel a

restlessness which called for new interests.

At the same time John's affairs were not prospering. Difficulties he

could not manage hampered him. All Rachel's advice and economies were of

little help among the inevitable conditions of the time. She was

becoming tired of the continual effort to acquire, and impatient of the

atmosphere of practical things. But she made a show of readiness when he

suggested that they give up the cheerful modern home they had fitted

about themselves, with the conventions of comfort and the furnishings

and decorations to which they had been adapted.

It was just at this time that Richard Hughes left them his home and the

little money he owned. Nothing could have been more opportune for them.

Whatever other feelings John may have had were absorbed in sheer relief

at the assistance the bequest brought him. The money, with that from the

sale of their own house, tided him over his difficulties and even helped

to develop his business further. Rachel concealed her reluctance at

moving into the out-of-date old house with its antiquated furnishings,

and made a show of welcoming their fortune as a good partner should.

She could hardly tell when her consciousness of the house began to have

its influence upon her. From the first, John, absorbed in business, left

all practical things to her, feeling that the house was more hers than

his anyway. She, in a mood of vague compunction and desire to

compensate for she hardly knew what, made it a point of honor to dispose

of all their own furniture, chosen with such satisfaction and

complacency, and settled among the dull tones and quiet spaces of the

old house.

'Gay old place, isn't it?' said John, walking through the house after

they were established.

Rachel assented with a cheerful smile.

'Oh, well,' he went on, settling down with his trade-journals, which

looked sadly out of place in the dim library, 'we can stand it for a

while. Some time we can have what we want again.'

It was months before he recurred to the subject directly. Then, one

Sunday, he looked about him as he sat stretched in an old easy-chair,

and said abruptly, 'We are getting pretty well settled down here. I

didn't think the old place would be so comfortable.'

'It is more than comfortable,' said Rachel quietly.

'I wonder why Richard ever left it to us. Have you ever figured it out?'

'Oh, he had no nearer relatives that he knew.' Rachel tried to speak in

a matter-of-fact way, but instead she hesitated and flushed a little.

John looked at her closely. 'Do you know any other reason?' he asked

curiously.

Rachel hesitated again. Mere reticence on past affairs was one thing;

positively keeping a secret from her husband was another. 'Richard

wanted to marry me once,' she said. 'But I don't think that had anything

to do with it,' she added hastily.

'When was that?'

'Oh--before I was engaged to you,' said Rachel, and smiled at him.

John said nothing more, but sat tapping his knee with his folded

newspaper, as was his habit when in thought. Presently he rose and

strolled away.

Rachel could not help resenting his silence, which left her in

discomfort. When so much had been said he should have said more, if only

to put her at her ease. For days afterwards she expected him to return

to the subject, and when he did not do so, she continued to resent the

implication he seemed to be making.

At this time the house itself had already begun to have its effect upon

her. Rachel could hardly tell when she stopped looking wistfully at the

sectional bookcases and mission furniture of her acquaintances. But soon

after she moved into it, the house had ceased to be to her merely a

house. With her conventionally modern notions of beauty in furnishings,

she had first been surprised to find how at rest and how satisfied she

was in this house, which had met in a generous way the needs and tastes

of another generation, but met few of those to which she had been

trained. She had not known that it was in her to find a charm in such a

house. But from the time when she first became aware of a positive

quality in the place, she became more and more awake to its existence;

she wondered at it, but it held her attention constantly more firmly.

At last she found that behind the entity of the house lay that which had

made it--the personality of the generations gone and especially of its

last owner. The quality of the whole place, with its solidity of walls

and generosity of room, along with its plain sincerity in every detail,

seemed to indicate praiseworthiness, not only in the first builder, but

in all later possessors. It became a meritorious thing to have and to

keep a house like this. She remembered something of the sacrifices that

Richard Hughes had made to retain it, and warmed with pride of him at

the recollection.

The whole place reflected him and the people who had made him. Gradually

Rachel grew in pride of the house and of her heritage. As she lived

there month by month she found herself enveloped in its atmosphere and

growing toward its proportions. At first she entered the library with

timidity and an uncomfortable strangeness. Even one who had only very

superficial intellectual tastes must have felt a sort of awe before its

accumulation of books and their accompaniments. When Rachel and John had

first begun to make a home, they had placed the making of a library

among their ambitions, for it, and had taken pleasure in adding a few

gayly bound novels each year to the small united collection with which

they had begun. They had enjoyed seeing their few shelves grow, and

knowing that they had so many of the popular books of which their

friends talked. When they came to the Hughes home, Rachel had crowded

their parti-colored collection into the shelves of the library there,

weeding out others to make room for their own.

But on a later day, as she reentered the room, she felt a shock at the

incongruity presented and, to John's puzzlement, gathered their own

books into a corner by themselves where a curtain safely hid them. Their

garish triviality had no place among these mellowed, long-tried volumes.

John, however, had looked the old volumes over and pronounced them a dry

lot--give him something fresher.

But Rachel perceived that there had been something in the choosing of

these books which she had never really known. To her, books had been an

accessory, an incidental thing, hypothetically an enrichment of life,

but not an essential. She had thought of intellectual exercise as an

intermittent thing, to be taken up or laid down as suited the mood of

the time. But here was a people who chose books not merely as a

desirable possession, an ornamental furnishing, but as an unquestioned

necessity.

Gradually, as she continued to handle and to know their books, she

evoked for herself the earlier presences of the house, most of all

Richard Hughes. In the long hours which she now spent alone about the

house, she found herself living more constantly in a companionship with

those minds. They were not only an atmosphere, but sometimes almost a

positive presence. It entertained her to go over the books one by one,

sometimes, deciding who had chosen this one and that one, and for what

reason, and picturing the occasion of its coming to his hand. As her

knowledge of the library grew, she took more and more pleasure in this,

tracing the taste of one owner or another in the recurrence of a subject

or in successive accretions. She, as she learned, glowed over her

collection of first editions of modern works, since they had been

chosen, not as first editions, but, in their own time, as works for

which an appreciative hand was eagerly waiting.

And since Richard Hughes was the only one of her predecessors in the

library whom she had known, she found herself embodying all the others

in him. She knew him now better than she had ever known him. She could

detect his additions to the treasures of the house, and, as her own

knowledge increased, could trace his using of the resources which had

been handed down to him. She began to take pleasure in following what

she thought had been his path in taste and knowledge, gradually matching

her mind to his own.

Her pride in the room went through successive stages. In her first days

of satisfaction in mere proprietorship of so respectable and worthy a

possession, she took pleasure in unostentatious exhibition of it. She

liked to take guests there, in a natural sort of way, and to be found

sitting there, by unexpected callers. She liked the eminently admirable

background of the rows of books, for social episodes. But as her

knowledge of the library grew, that stage passed. As she went from

familiarity to intimacy, she began to desire that it should be an

exclusive intimacy. She no longer took callers to the room, and when

familiar acquaintances found their way there, she was uneasy at their

handling of the books and impatient of their discussion of them. She now

seldom spontaneously took strangers there. In time she had come to group

John with all the others. The only companionship that she desired in the

library was an imagined one.

John's attitude had more and more set her apart in this companionship.

His dislike for the house had grown steadily more obvious as the months

and years passed. It showed itself in a lack of home-pride, in open

contempt for the old-fashioned elements of the place, in reluctance to

make even necessary expenditure upon it.

But Rachel herself had hardly guessed the strength of his feeling until

one day when she discovered among Richard Hughes's papers what seemed to

be a memorandum for a codicil to his will, which would make a gift of a

thousand dollars to the little public library of the town.

She took the note directly to John. 'I think we ought to do this,' she

said.

John looked at the paper and laid it down. 'I don't see that we are

obliged to,' he answered shortly.

'It is what he intended to do--and we got the money,' she said, with too

patient a manner, as if explaining the moral point to him. 'We should

give it in his name.'

'It is enough to have to live in Richard Hughes's house. I don't care to

set up a memorial for him besides.'

'But John,' she urged herself to argue, 'is it honest?'

'There is more than one kind of honesty,' said John shortly, in a tone

which checked further answer. 'I can't afford it,' he added after a

moment, as the final word.

She left him in an anger which it seemed to her she would feel all her

life. But gradually it became less an active feeling than a part of all

her unformulated opinion of him. He had not followed her a single step

in the development which had resulted from her awakening to the spirit

of the house. In time he came to ignore the library altogether as part

of the house, and by degrees fitted up an incongruous little

lounging-place upstairs. Rachel came to regard his whole attitude toward

the place and the man who had owned it as belonging to his mental and

aesthetic plane; his jealous ingratitude seemed not a separate feeling,

but only an element in his character.

Richard Hughes, she now understood very well, had known her very little,

and had loved only her prettiness and light girlishness, charms which

were different from anything in his own life. The recollection of that

episode did not flatter her now, or even afford her any special

gratification. But she loved to live side by side with the embodiment

she had re-created for herself, and was proud to feel her spirit

matching its spirit. She sometimes felt, with her growing imagination,

that she was living in the house, not with John, but with these

presences of the past--most of all with Richard Hughes.

But in the mean time the matter of the bequest assumed for her

constantly greater proportions. After some time had passed she ventured

to mention it again. He answered as before, 'I can't afford it!' She

knew that he could afford it. About the same time he bought a strip of

ground lying beside them and began his garden. Rachel suggested that he

take a piece of their own grounds, but he bluntly rejected the proposal.

A growing taciturnity marked his manner, and often a willful crudeness

of phrase and speech, which annoyed her almost to the point of reproof.

So far as was possible, however, she kept the recognition of all this

far in the background of her thought and forebore any conscious

criticism of him, even to herself. But her warmest feeling for him was

tinged with pity.

Yesterday he had been taken. This accident, sudden as a lightning-flash

and more unforeseen, had ended the relation between them--though not the

puzzle. Rachel had never been one to revise her opinion of a man because

he was dead. Her tears had fallen now, but she had no compunctious

self-deception, and her long-framed feelings were only complicated, not

really altered. She saw as clearly as ever the incongruity of her

husband's presence in this room where Richard Hughes had had his life,

and where she now had her own.