III

All waited for the coming of John's brother, David Marquis. David was an

elder brother, retired from business on some pretext or other, now

loitering his way profitably and pleasantly through the later half of

his life. It had been his custom to visit them frequently, spending

weeks at a time idling about the house, quiet, keen of look, ready to

talk with interest on any general topic, but incommunicative of opinion

on any personal matter. Rachel had always felt, as she saw his observant

eye first upon John and then upon her, that he saw the difference

between them and sympathized with her. For this reason, although she had

never criticized John to him, she had sometimes spoken freely of herself

and of her own tastes and wishes; and he had listened, quietly as ever,

but responsively.

She had a sort of feeling now that she would find her poise through him

when he came. A sympathetic eye would help her to adjust the degree of

her grief to the limits of her previous feeling.

It was eight o'clock when he arrived. The pretext of dinner in the house

was over, and even the neighborly and professional attentions of the day

were withdrawn. Rachel descended from her room in the quiet house at the

sound of his entrance, and met gratefully the brotherly kindliness of

his manner. They sat a few minutes in the hall, in question and answer

of his journey and of the accident and all the circumstantial things

which cluster about death itself. Rachel answered freely and fully,

discovering a relief in breaking the instinctive repression of the day,

and finding the sort of rest she had hoped for from his presence. David

listened to her quietly, as he had always done, with his ready eye upon

her.

At last he rose, turning away from her with a comprehensive look about

him.

'Where is he?' he asked abruptly.

'In the library,' said Rachel, with a movement to lead the way for him.

'In there?' exclaimed David, with the emphasis of surprise. Then he

closed his lips again and followed her, without meeting her questioning

look.

But inside the door he paused again. Rachel had, constrained by long

habit, looked first at the room, as she entered, and then at the casket,

as a separate thing. The room had so long served to give her poise that

she felt a sort of appeal to it even now. David's eyes rested first on

the casket and then swept the room in a disapproving look.

'Why is he here?' he asked, with a curtness in his easy voice which

Rachel had never heard from him before.

'Why--' she began hesitatingly, and then added vaguely, 'It seemed

best.'

'Best for him?' responded David with the same curtness.

Then he turned and dropped his head slowly over the figure in the

coffin, and Rachel slipped away. David's manner seemed to put her

entirely outside of the occasion.

Later he joined her where she waited in the dim parlor. The still

chilliness of the room was stiffening and depressing, but she had not

made a fire because its open cheerfulness would not have seemed

appropriate. David walked up and down the long room a few minutes in a

silence which Rachel, not knowing his mood, did not break.

Then he said, as abruptly as before, 'Can you have him moved in the

morning?'

'Moved?--Where?'

Rachel had not supposed that her brother-in-law would have the same

feeling of incongruity that she had.

'Anywhere but there. Here--I don't know--there is no place in the house

that seems to belong to him. The hall might do--at least he went through

there every day,' he finished with an irony none too subtle.

He began to walk up and down the length of the room, alternately facing

her with a challenging air, and turning abruptly away again when he had

neared her seat. But Rachel, absorbed still in her mood, was

unappreciative of his manner.

'John never fitted into the house very well, anywhere,' she said, with

reserved regret.

'Fitted into it!' exclaimed David, as he turned toward her at the end of

the room. 'My--Did the house ever fit into him? It is the business of a

house to suit the people that live in it,' he flung over his shoulder as

he wheeled away again.

Rachel was silent, puzzled at this surprising change of manner in David,

and not knowing how much of his emotion was merely the impatience of

grief.

'Is there a corner of the house where it is appropriate for him to lie

now, except that little cubby-hole of his upstairs?' demanded David,

continuing, but as one who knows that an answer is impossible.

He suddenly abandoned his walk and came over and sat down opposite her,

in front of the empty fireplace. He sat silent a moment, his gray figure

drooping in a big chair. Rachel, looking carefully at him for the first

time, noted with a kind of surprise the mark of brokenness and

relaxation upon him, of submission to tremendous grief. It had not

occurred to her that John could be mourned in that way. After a moment

he said quietly, 'This house has never been a home for John.'

'I was always hoping,' said Rachel, as if this subject were one which

they had discussed before and agreed upon, 'that he would feel more at

home here in time.'

'What would have been necessary to bring that about?' asked David

quietly.

'Well,' said Rachel, with reluctance in criticism even greater than

usual, 'he would have had to change in many ways.'

'In what ways?' persisted David.

Rachel hesitated again. The thing, when baldly said, seemed so much

harsher than when it was merely held in thought.

'John's taste was different from that of the people who made the house,'

she said.

'Yes, I know. These pictures, and the old books in the library, and so

on. Is that what you mean?'

'Well, the insides of the books, and other pictures which we don't

have--and so on,' she finished indefinitely.

'Yes. You thought John was crude and rather coarse in feeling.'

'Oh, no--not that indeed!'

'You wouldn't call it just that, of course. But the difference between

you was the same, whether it put you up high or him down low. Isn't that

so? You were sorry for yourself because John was not on your level?'

'Yes,' admitted Rachel, reluctantly voicing the word.

'Were you ever sorry enough for John because you were not on his

level?--There are different kinds of lonesomeness,' he added after a

pause. 'I never saw a worse case than John's.'

Rachel sat upright, looking at him in a sort of amazement, as much at

himself as at the idea. She had never dreamed that behind his apparently

sympathetic observation of her lay any condemnation of her attitude.

He met her look with one as direct, and asked, in a way which made the

question a sort of arraignment, 'Did it ever occur to you what a tragedy

John's life was?'

Rachel merely shook her head slowly as she tried to connect, in an

impersonal sort of way, the notion of tragedy with John--John the

successful, the obstinate, the simple in desire, the objective. There

had been no real disappointment in all his life. She looked back

half-indignantly at David, rejecting the suggestion.

David rose and took a turn up and down the parlor again, pausing in the

shadows at the farther end of the room. Then he came back to his seat

and faced her determinedly.

'What _I_ had always hoped was that you would come to understand John

without any outside interference. I came back over and over to see, but

I always kept from butting in.' He paused again. 'I wouldn't say

anything now, only your tone, your "Poor John" way, shows you are just

the same as ever. I won't have him buried without your knowing something

more about him--if I can show you,' he added more gently.

'Please tell me,' said Rachel quietly. Her mind was still half as much

on David as on what he was going to say.

'There is nothing to tell that you should not have seen for yourself.

You were his wife and you lived with him. From the time you came to this

house one side of John's life ended. In a way he had no home and

no--wife. A man wants a companion.'

Rachel almost spoke, in startled contradiction. It was she who had been

uncompanioned.

'You were proud, I know, of never finding fault with John. Don't you

know that he would have been glad if you had openly found fault with

him? As it was, it seemed as if you thought him hopeless. When he said

things about the house or anything in it, he really wanted you to

contradict him and argue with him, and give him a way to come to the

same place where you were--don't you see?'

'Did he tell you?'

'No. But of course I used to sit round with him a good deal. And I had

always been used to understanding him,' he added, with a drop in his

voice. 'John had a lot of imagination,' he went on.

Rachel looked up in real surprise.

'I could see every year how the house was getting more on his nerves.

Sometimes when he was feeling it more than usual he would say little

things that I understood. For him it was like living with some one who

didn't want him round. But he might have liked it.'

'You don't understand,' said Rachel, as if pricked into coming to her

own defense. 'John didn't like the way the house came to us in the first

place. You didn't know--'

'Yes, I did,' he responded as she hesitated, 'I found out.'

'And yet,' she went on, 'we used the house and the money--'

'You haven't known much about the business for several years, have you?

Of course you do know that the house has been in your name from the

beginning, almost. But you don't know that the few thousands Richard

Hughes left have been invested for you ever since two years after he

died. It crippled John for a while after he took it out of the business.

But he always took good care of that money--it amounts to quite a little

now.'

'John didn't like it because Richard--' Rachel hesitated again.

'You thought he was jealous. He did that after one day when you weeded

out a lot of his books and put them away in some corner. And it was

after he had those New York electric men here that evening and you

seemed not to want to have them in the library, that he bought that

corner of ground over there and made his garden. Don't you understand?'

Rachel dropped her face upon her hands, partly for relief from David's

serious face, which forebore to rebuke her and yet of necessity did so,

partly to close herself in with her own bewilderment. To reconstruct

John's life meant to take a new view of her own also.

David leaned suddenly toward her. 'If John had been jealous, wouldn't he

have had reason, Rachel? I know you weren't--untrue to him. But still--'

He felt the formulation of the thought with her.

'I haven't judged you harshly, Rachel,' he went on in a moment, 'but it

is not right that a man's brother should know him better than his wife

does. I had to make you know, even at the last.'

Then, as if he were compelled to say the final hard thing, he added,

'Wasn't there something you had already thought you should do when

everything was in your hands?'

Rachel, startled and flushing, faced him again, in involuntary

confession. 'I had always thought it would be right to carry out a plan

of Richard Hughes's.'

'Yes, I know. I am sure that was only a momentary notion of his. He had

a great habit of making notes of things. His will was made only a few

days before he died, and that idea was probably earlier. I was an

executor, you remember. But anyway, several years ago John made a large

gift to the library of Richard's college, in Richard's name. He took no

chances on being unfair. He should have told you,' he added, 'but John

had a hard sort of pride to manage, and I suppose he never did.'

'No,' said Rachel, 'he never did.'

She rose, with a sudden dropping of her hands at her sides, as if

relinquishing something they had held, and moved vaguely toward the

door.

'Don't you think,' pursued David, 'that he might be brought in here--or

somewhere?'

Rachel hesitated, her hand faltering on the door-frame. 'No,' she said

at last, 'let him stay there now.' And she herself went out through the

dim chill hall. She lingered a moment at the closed library door, and

then went slowly on up to her own empty room.