When Charter left Rachel so abruptly, he did not return to the city
but, turning his face toward the country, walked steadily away from
the habitations of men. His mood was one that sought solitude as a
spiritual necessity, for, at the very moment when the journey's end
seemed to have been achieved and the lovely presence of Rachel--no
longer a vision of his fevered fancy--was actually assured, his
universe had crumbled about his ears.
The fact that no intimation of an engagement to Belhaven had ever
reached him made the blow more astonishing; it seemed incredible that
she could have been married without his knowledge, that an event of
such vital importance to him could have occurred without a warning or
even a premonition. He recalled his foolish expressions of feeling,
his interrupted declaration, with a kind of shamed anger. He must have
appeared like an idiot, coming back after his long silence to make love
to a woman who had had time, in the interval, to get married to another
man. Yet not even his first resentment against her for permitting him
to go so far unwarned, was of long duration; his mind was too occupied
with the astonishing fact of her marriage. The shock had been so great
that his senses were benumbed, and he was able to go across country,
picking a path through the woods, without an idea of where he was going.
The cool, green shade of the place, with the pungent scent of the pines
and hemlocks, the delicate growth and glossy green leaves of the young
gum trees, with here and there the tall frond of a hardy fern, gave
him a feeling of familiarity without suggesting the painful necessity
of reconciling himself to the change in all his most cherished
remembrances. His mind staggered back from the consideration of his
loss and he tried to recall the slow process of reasoning that had
made him delay the letter to Rachel. The fact that he had not the pen
of a ready writer did not furnish a sufficient excuse for delaying a
matter so vital, and he remembered, in a bewildered way, his fruitless
efforts to put his thoughts on paper. But intimately associated with
these efforts was the sputter of Mauser bullets and the musical bugle
of the trumpeter sounding the charge. He seemed to see the malarious
mist rising from the rice paddies and the _nipa_ huts of the Filipinos,
while he recalled, with an even more vague recollection of the pains
and the weariness, those hours that he had worked with the camp surgeon
and sat beside the victims of cholera. He remembered, too, the face
of the Filipino woman when he snatched her baby from the burning ruins
of the village that the fleeing insurgents had fired, and he seemed
to feel the clinging hands of the poor boy from Maryland when he had
been mad with delirium and cried for his mother. The very fulness of
those months in the tropics, the routine of marching and attacking the
earthworks of the rebels, when those big straw hats had bobbed up and
down until the awful charge with fixed bayonets drove them out of their
trenches like ants out of a demolished hill in a flower-bed, returned
to him.
It was incredible to think that, at the very moment when such vital
things as this had occupied him, life on this side of the globe had
continued to flow on in its usual conventional course, and that
Belhaven had found opportunity to supplant him in Rachel's heart. At
this thought an unreasoning rage against Belhaven made him walk faster
and faster along the path; once or twice he had to stop to break his
way through the brush or to tear aside the wild tangle of a vine, and
it gave him almost a sensation of joy to tear and to break. He would
have liked to crush Belhaven, to take him up bodily and fling him out
of the way. He tried to recall his recollections of the man, but he had
never liked him, and now, at the crucial moment, he could not summon
up a vision of him, as Saul conjured the figure of Samuel out of the
pit. Of one thing, however, he was reasonably sure, and that was that
Belhaven did not belong to the class that he recognized as one that
was made up of men of honor. With a very exalted conception of those
qualifications that constitute "an officer and a gentleman," Charter
had a peculiar scorn for the men who did not belong to that type, and
nothing was more intolerable than the fact of Rachel's marriage to a
creature that he would have been likely to call, had he been asked
to qualify him, "that fellow Belhaven!" The fact that women rarely
understand those qualities in men that are most obvious to their own
sex did not alleviate Charter's anger and disgust. Rachel married to
Belhaven was an object to move the gods to pity.
It was at this point in his confused misery that he recalled her
anguish; after all, it might not have been altogether pity for him.
He reddened at that thought, but, perhaps, she was already aware of
her mistake, already plunged into the misery that now apparently was
the common result of marriage and made divorce appear as a boon to
those unfortunates who desire another opportunity, like the man in the
nursery rhyme who jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his
eyes, only to jump into another bush and scratch them in again. Yet the
thought that she was unhappy did not alleviate his misery or offer
any solution of her extraordinary marriage, for her unhappiness must
be independent of him since she had not considered him of sufficient
importance to influence her decision. If she was disappointed in her
choice it must be because she had suffered the common awakening after
the event, rather than that she was grieved by any recollection of his
affection, or regret that she had not awaited his return. The fact
that her outbreak of grief was synchronous with his declaration was
not significant in the light of previous events, for she must have
seen that he loved her. With such marvelous obtuseness as this Charter
failed to realize that his silence in the Philippines would have
convinced almost any woman of his utter indifference, and that Rachel
had had every right to argue that he wanted her to forget him.
Instead he reviewed the whole course of their acquaintance and failed
to find any spot where he had not given evidence of her importance in
his life, and he could not imagine why it was necessary to put into
formal words a fact so vital and so obvious. He had lost her; that was
all there was to be said, and he must take his medicine like a man, and
the best thing to do was to get out of it and forget it.
These reflections had brought him to the edge of a stream and, as he
recovered his mental poise, he was surprised to find that it was a
part of Rock Creek and that he had, therefore, wandered many miles
out of his way. He stood still for a moment, allowing his eyes to
follow the lovely rivulet with a crowding recollection of its beauties
that had first appealed to his childish eyes, then to his boyish
fancy, and now gave him almost a sensation of comfort. It happened
to be one of those charming spots where the creek, so often tranquil
and limpid, was hurrying over stones and sending up little clouds of
spray as the miniature waves dashed through the narrow gorge between
the rocks, where the graceful boughs of a weeping birch drooped far
down over it and dropped their leaves into the stream. The gentle
murmur of the swift flowing current, the soft rustle of the abundant
foliage overhead, and the sweet, shrill cry of a catbird, were the only
sounds he heard. There was something uplifting in the solitude, in the
natural beauty of the scene, and, for the first time since the shock of
Rachel's announcement, Charter recalled himself to a more normal mood.
This was still with him, clothing familiar objects with the grim
outlines of reality, when an hour later he rode into the city on the
trolley and made his way at last to the Van Citters' house on Dupont
Circle, where he had been invited to make his home during his stay in
Washington. It was now late afternoon, or rather early evening; the
familiar drawing-room was cool and dim and he found Pamela yawning
over the latest novel.
She greeted him with a fusilade of reproaches; where had he been,
what had he been doing? They had been expecting him for hours; Paul
had gone out a second time to inquire at the War Department; a dozen
people had been to see him and gone away disappointed. Charter found it
difficult to answer the questions, and even more difficult to keep his
_sang-froid_ under his cousin's searching gaze, for Pamela had detected
his heightened color and gave him swift, birdlike glances that were
plainly suspicious.
"You must remember that I had a number of things to see to," he
parried, "besides, I went to the White House."
"Don't tell me that took all day--unless you unearthed a Filipino
conspiracy."
"Come, Pamela, give me a cup of tea; I know I've been ungrateful not to
report sooner, for it's awfully good of you and Paul to ask me here,
but I'll try to make the most of your hospitality the few days that I'm
likely to be in the city."
She gazed at him over the teacup, the sugar tongs suspended in mid-air.
"You don't mean to say that you're ordered off again?"
He shook his head, smiling faintly at her amazed attitude. "No, but you
mustn't expect me to spend my time loafing around Washington; you know
I was never intended for a carpet-knight."
"I wonder if you know that there was a report that you were engaged to
Mrs. Prynne?"
His blank amazement amply repaid her for this random shot. "What
nonsense! She must have been immensely annoyed."
Pamela smiled. "She wasn't. You haven't an idea, I suppose, that you're
something of a lion--with your Philippine record and the medal they
talk of giving you for bravery."
"Oh, rot!"
"How eloquent! It got all about, the report, I mean. Eva Astry asked
about it the day Rachel's engagement to Belhaven was announced."
"I didn't know until to-day that--that Miss Leven was married." Charter
flattered himself that his tone was casual and he busied himself with
Pamela's sugar-bowl.
She eyed him shrewdly. "It was almost as sudden as a stroke of
apoplexy," she remarked, sipping her tea.
"What?"
"Rachel's marriage; what else did you suppose?"
"I don't see why it should have been sudden. I seem to remember that
Mrs. Astry's was--"
"A sort of nine days' wonder? Yes, but Rachel's was more amazing in a
different way."
He considered several dominoes of sugar and selected a small half. "In
what way?" he risked, aware that his cousin was more than a match for
him in the conversational arena.
"Her engagement was announced on Monday and she was married on
Thursday."
"That doesn't show that the engagement had only existed since Monday."
"But it does show just that. Up to Monday Belhaven had been making
violent love to Eva Astry; everybody knew it."
Charter's face flushed darkly. "I hope you don't repeat any such
malicious gossip as that, Pamela!"
"It isn't gossip; ask Paul. We were out there for a week-end; so was
Massena, the Italian Chargé d'Affaires, and he was perfectly amazed.
Belhaven was simply devoted to Eva, and then to our surprise Astry
announced his engagement to Rachel."
"All this only goes to show that he needed a thrashing."
"Belhaven isn't the sort to get it. You know he's rather charming, but
I'm quite sure that Rachel never cared for him."
"I can see no other reason for her accepting him."
"Nor I, yet I've heard things--" Pamela stopped; after all Charter was
the last one to hear all this gossip; he would loathe it.