Had Mrs. Caldwell seen Peter pacing the floor of his little hotel room
that night, she would have been less certain that he did not love
Sheila. She had said to him, "There's nothing so tragic as the
truth--when it comes too late!" And it was this tragedy with which
Peter grappled now.
He had not known that he loved Sheila until Mrs. Caldwell told him that
he should have married her; but those words had been for him a
revelation; an illumination of the last ten years and more. Suddenly
he saw, as if a searchlight had been flung upon them, the innermost,
secret depths of his own heart--saw them filled with the image of
another man's wife. So swiftly, so entirely without warning had
self-knowledge dawned upon him that the cry had been wrung from him,
"Why do you tell me this now--when it is too late?" But after the one
betraying exclamation, he had put all his strength into the attempt to
conceal his discovery. Mrs. Caldwell had spoken of the honor of her
generation as of a thing that had not survived, in its purity, to a
later one. Yet Peter's sense of honor was too scrupulous to permit him
the confession to anyone that he loved another's wife. To the single
end of concealment he had set himself through the rest of that
interview. He had gone through it as through some nerve-racking
nightmare, struggling for self-control as one struggles for safety in
dreams of horrid peril.
He must not admit that he loved Sheila! He must not admit that he
loved her! That was what he had told himself over and over, fighting
all the while for the mastery of his face, his voice, lest they
proclaim what his lips did not utter.
Yet in spite of the struggle, in spite of the sense of awful calamity,
of absolute wreckage, that had descended upon him, he had been keenly,
piteously conscious of every word that Mrs. Caldwell had said; and he
had realized fully the impossibility and the irony of the task she had
imposed upon him.
Having failed to marry Sheila himself, he must now undertake to keep
her in love with the man who had married her! This was all which was
required of him; this was _all_! His devotion to Mrs. Caldwell had not
faltered; but now, facing his tragedy alone and in the freedom to
suffer, he felt a great bitterness toward his old friend for her
request. It seemed to him incredibly stupid that she should think for
an instant that he, an unmarried man, could assume the post of guardian
over a wife's love for her husband. It implied, in the first place, an
intimacy which Sheila was far too fine-grained to permit; for however
confidential she might become on the subject of her work, she would
never be confidential with him in regard to Ted. Whatever he might
perceive, she would never give him the opportunity to say to her, "I
think that your affection for your husband is waning. Let us put fresh
fuel on the fire."
It implied, too, that request of Mrs. Caldwell's, a sharing of Sheila's
life which Shadyville would never tolerate; which his own awakened
heart could not tolerate. He could not be much with Sheila henceforth.
For once, Shadyville's narrow restrictions would be right.
So, he told himself, Mrs. Caldwell had been stupid.
And--unconsciously, of course--she had been cruel.
And yet--she was leaving Sheila, leaving her to an essentially alien
companion. What wonder that, in her passionate solicitude, she had
reached out to the one person whose understanding sympathy she could
count upon? What wonder that, however unpractically, she had made an
appeal to one whose heart she had divined better than she knew? What
wonder, even, that he had made her a sort of promise? "There is
nothing I would not do for you or Sheila!" he had said to her; and that
was true. There was nothing he would not do for them--if he could.
Only--Ted himself must keep what was his own! He had been man enough
to win Sheila; now he must keep her!
Ted had been man enough to win her; and he, Peter, had not been! That
was what he realized now--with measureless self-scorn. _He_ had not
even been man enough to know that he loved her; much less man enough to
make her his. And now, because he could not make her his, his life was
charred to ashes--but his soul was an anguished, unquenchable flame.
He had long thought that he knew the worst of himself; his
discreditable indolence; his reluctance for effort and conquest; his
insufficient courage to follow his emotions into poverty; and that
negligible fineness of his which had held him back from advantages that
he could not repay with genuine emotion. He had known all that of
himself, calling it his worst, and feeling a certain pride in it, too,
as in a failure that was of more delicate fiber than the successes of
others. But he had never really known the worst of himself until now.
For the worst of him was that he had not recognized the true love of
his life when it came to him. Those early fancies of his for girls
whom he deemed too poor to marry--what had they been but fancies
indeed? He had despised himself once or twice for not committing
himself, but what was the offense of failing a mere fancy compared to
the offense of not recognizing the one true love when it was in his
life? He would have had courage enough to follow it to the world's
end, in sharpest poverty and hardship, but he had so sheltered himself
from any mischance in love that he had not known love when it came.
Blind fool that he was, he had not known it when it came!
Even now he could not tell just when it had come. Looking back along
the years, it seemed to him to have been there always, for every memory
of Sheila, since her little girlhood, took him by the throat.
He saw her as he--and Ted!--had seen her one April day when she was but
twelve years old; a slender, black-haired, dreaming-eyed child, lying
upon the pale, spring grass and looking up into the flowering
cherry-tree branches above her head; a child who was herself an
embodied poem, so akin she was to all of April's magic, to the spring's
lovely miracles. He saw her, too, in his class-room, eager, earnest,
exquisitely responsive to every perception, every thought of his own; a
little girl while he was already a man, and yet his comrade, his
comrade in every phase of life had he but discerned and willed it! He
saw her as a young girl, with her pure eyes and her generous mouth and
her sweet, slender throat; a being still untouched by life, but
beautifully ready, touchingly desirous for life's shaping hands. And
he saw her as she had been yesterday, walking by his side, the woman at
last--yet strangely immature, incomplete. He had thought her immature
and incomplete because she had not developed her gift. Now there came
to him another thought--bred of all those flashing pictures of her in
which she seemed so much his own--the thought that she was incomplete
because she had not really loved.
It was impossible that she should really love Ted; Ted who could give
neither comprehension nor response to the greater part of her nature.
It was impossible! He had felt that at the time of her marriage; he
remembered now how resentfully! He had felt it when Mrs. Caldwell had
shown him--only too convincingly--how that marriage had occurred. He
had cried out to Mrs. Caldwell that Sheila must have loved Ted, but he
had realized, then, that she had not. And he realized it now. It had
been love's hour with her, but it had not been love. It had not been
love because he himself, who could have given her such a love as she
needed, who could have compelled such a love from her, had failed her.
Back and forth he paced in his little room; a creature caged, not by
mere walls, but by an irreparable mistake; a creature agonized and
helpless. For it was too late for this vision of utter truth now. His
life was spoiled--and hers!
Yes, he had spoiled her life! For a little while, he forgot his own
disaster in contemplating hers. He had said that he was not the right
man for her; but with all his soul and all his brain and all his blood,
he knew that he was the right man for her. Throughout her whole life
she had turned to him with that simple trust which is bred of love, or
at least of potential love, alone. She had said to him once--long
ago--with an innocent and tender wonder, "There is nothing I cannot
tell you, Peter--nothing!" And that had been true--until Ted had lured
her into bondage. While she had been free, there had not been a door
in her heart or her spirit that would not have opened at his touch.
She had been his--his for the taking! And he had not taken her.
He had left her to Ted; to Ted for whom so many doors of her nature
must be closed forever. He had left her to that most terrible
loneliness of all--loneliness in a shared life. The thoughts that she
could not speak to Ted--how they must beat about in the prison of her
mind; how they must cry for release, for answer! He seemed to feel
them against his own temples, those unuttered thoughts that were
Sheila's very self; he seemed to feel their ache, their hunger.
Nothing would be born of those thoughts now; that gift of expression
which had been a part of Sheila's soul would go barren to the grave.
This was one of the wrongs he had done her--but it was not the worst.
For the worst that had befallen her through him, he told himself, was
not that her gift had missed expression, but that she herself had
missed the blinding glory of true love.
She was immature, she was undeveloped, because he had not made her his.
And he wanted to make her his. Oh, my God, he wanted to make her his!
His life was charred to ashes, but his soul was the quivering,
torturing flame of his passion. It would not be quenched; it would
not, in the least, be stilled; it drove him about the shabby little
room as if it were literally a flame from which he must try to
escape--though he knew he could not.
He had broken his heart over the disaster to Sheila's life, but as the
night advanced and his passion flared the fiercer in hours securely
dark and secret, self rose up within him and shrieked and cursed over
his own disaster.
He wanted her! He was forty-six years old; not too old to love, but
far, far too old to love calmly. The desires of half a lifetime were
in him, desires that had lain low and fed upon his years until, in
their accumulated strength, they were terrible--wild beasts that tore
him, fires that burned him to the bone. And they were strangely
compounded of instincts evil and lawless--when felt for another man's
wife--and longings wholly innocent and sweet.
For the first time he longed for a home. He looked about his tiny,
dingy room with a feeling of desolation, seeing in his mind so
different a place--a home with her. He longed for simple, innocent
things--her face across the table from him at his meals; her little
possessions scattered about with his; the sound of her step in the
rooms around him. And he longed to reach out in the night and touch
her; he longed to reach out in the night and take her into his arms.
He wanted--and now soul and flesh merged in one flame--he wanted her to
bear him a child.
Back and forth he paced, his nails digging into his palms, his teeth
cutting his lips, driven by the flame that could never be extinguished,
never be satisfied. And all the while, he pictured her in his arms; he
pictured her with his child at her breast.
Then, suddenly--and quite as plainly as if he were in the room--he saw
_Ted's_ child, and he staggered toward a chair and fell, sobbing, into
it.
How long those horrible sobs shook him he did not know. He felt
himself baffled, beaten, inconceivably tortured. He watched the gray
morning steal into the room as one who has kept a death vigil beside
his best-loved watches it. A new day had come, but there was no hope
in it for him. There was no hope for him--though his days should be
ever so many.
He fell asleep at last, sitting there in his uncomfortable chair, with
the cold light of the dawn creeping over his haggard face, and he
dreamed that Ted came into the room and said, "Sheila needs you. She
needs you to keep alive her love for me." And in the dream, he
answered, as he had really answered Mrs. Caldwell the day before,
"There is nothing I would not do for her." So vivid was all this that
when he opened his eyes and found Ted actually in the room, he was not
in the least surprised.
"You left your door unlocked," Ted explained apologetically, "and I
came on in. Mrs. Caldwell died in the night--and Sheila's gone to
pieces. She's been asking for you. Would you mind going to her for a
bit?"
"There's nothing I would not do for her!" replied Peter, in the words
of his dream. And for an instant he thought he still dreamed.
"That's awfully good of you. You look done up, Burnett. But if you're
equal to it, I'll be grateful to you."
As he gazed at Peter, whose face was gray still, though the morning
light was now golden, Ted added to himself, "Poor chap! He's growing
old." To him it would have been incredible that Peter's scars had been
won in youth's own great battle--the battle with love. A certain
complacency stole warmly through him then, ruddy and robust as he knew
himself to be, a complacency that led him to lay a kindly, solicitous
hand on the older man's shoulder; and so intent he was upon his
self-satisfied kindliness that he did not see Peter wince at the touch.
"You do look done up, Burnett. Maybe I ought not to ask you----"
But Peter cut him short. "I'd do anything for Sheila," he repeated.
After all, this was left to him, Peter reflected; it was left to him to
do things for Sheila. And perhaps he would find nothing she needed of
him impossible. The love that had been so dark with the dark and
secret hours could have its white vision, too.