CHAPTER XI
With tragic sincerity Sheila had entered into the compact for her son's life, and she kept it to the letter. She saw no reason why she should have a poorer sense of honor toward God than she had toward men and women; her child had been spared to her, and henceforth it was for her to fulfill her part, to keep her given word.
She had never understood, indeed, why people made—and broke—promises to God so lightly. She had found them ready enough to complain if they considered God unjust to them, but they never seemed to think that it mattered whether they were "square" with God or not. To them He was a sort of divine creditor who need not be paid. They even made it a proof of reverence—a comfortable proof!—to place Him far above the consideration they had to show their fellow men. This viewpoint was impossible to Sheila. Morbid, hysterical, as her offered price for Eric's life had been, she felt herself bound, and she paid punctiliously.
It was easy enough thus to pay as she watched her child growing strong and rosy again. His little life—Ah, what was it not worth? A dozen times a day the memory of that night when she had believed that he would die sent her shuddering to her knees with fresh prayers and promises. And always the recollection of that loss escaped roused in her a very passion of thanksgiving. She had her son!—that was her answer to all the dreams which, unrealized, sometimes stole back to tempt her with their wistful faces.
When Eric was well enough for her now and then to leave him—at first she could not leave him lest, with her sheltering hands removed, his life should flicker out—she gave burial to the little brain children that, for the child of her body, she had sacrificed. Every bit of verse, every little sketch, and the unfinished story which was, in her sight, most guilty, and most dear of all, she laid away; not with ribbon and lavender and rites of sentiment and tears, but sternly, barely, ruthlessly, as one puts away things discarded by the heart itself. She might have burned them less harshly, and that she did not was only because she conceived it a finer deed to keep them and resist them. So she put her honor to the uttermost test.
It was thus, and with her own hands, she poured her life into the mould Ted had desired for it; it was thus she thrust from her all that did not pertain to her husband and her child and her home. Yet between Ted and herself not a word about it passed. He never reproached her for what her writing had so nearly cost them; he never asked her to give it up; he never even inquired as to whether she were still pursuing it. He simply stood aloof from that element in her, with what queer mixture of disapproval and pride and magnanimity she could but guess.
They continued to be happy together, the happier as the months passed and Ted saw her more and more his and Eric's. In the beginning he had probably thought that, after the shock of Eric's peril receded, Sheila would try to write again; that fear must have lurked behind his non-committal silence; but time gave him his security about it. Sheila never told him of the compact of that anguished night, but gradually he became as sure that she had given up her talent forever as if he had heard her pledge. "Little wife!" he often called her, "Little mother!" And always it was as if he said to her, "What other name could be half so sweet?"
And she told herself that he was right. Never had there been a better husband. And to be loved by a man like that, a man clean and fine and kind; to be the mother of such a man's child, she was very certain was worth more to a woman than any other honors or fulfillments which life could bring her. She had known that always, even when she first discovered—so bitterly!—that Ted was not in sympathy with her gift and her ambitions; and she knew it more surely as time went on. There were moments when she wished ardently that the sympathy between them had been more absolute; when she thought that, happy as she was, she would have been happier if their tastes had gone hand-in-hand like their hearts. But there was never a time when she would have exchanged Ted for any other man, or when she felt it possible to have done without him. There are women who, married, feed their discontents with visions of what life could have been in freedom or with some other man than they have chosen. Sheila was not of this sort. Having crossed the threshold of marriage, she did not look behind her at the alluring—and elusive—road of might-have-been.
She hoped, now, for other children. With this utter surrender of herself to the woman's life, there came to her the longing for many children, for all her arms could hold. The sum of that creative force which, under different circumstances, would have flowed into her work, all its denied passion and vitality, was transmuted into the instinct of motherhood. Because of her creative gift, there was literally more life within her, more life to bestow, and so, the channel of artistic expression being closed to her, she yearned to spend it all upon maternity; to have, indeed, as many children as her arms could hold.
Had these desired children come to her, peace might have been hers finally and entirely. But the desire was not granted. Eric grew out of his babyhood to a fine, sturdy boyhood, and was still the only child. And now Sheila, a woman of thirty and ten years married, began to feel again, and more strongly than ever in her life, the urge of her gift, the unrest of dreams stifled, thwarted, but never destroyed.
She had made a compact with God, and she continued to keep it; but more and more hunger stared out of her eyes and a nervous restlessness betrayed itself in her manner. She was happy, but she was not satisfied. Something clamored in her unappeased.
If she had lived in a large city, there would at least have been food, if not activity, for that clamoring, aching thing within her. There would have been pictures and music and plays to lift her, at times, into the world of poetic beauty for which she longed. But Shadyville could offer nothing to one of her mental quality; as a girl she had found diversion in its social gaiety, but as a matron, the mother of a nine-year-old son, even the social life of the town was restricted for her to card-parties and the doubtful amusement of chaperonage.
For in Shadyville, the young married people early abdicated in favor of those still younger, those still seeking mates. Society was, in fact, merely a means of finding one's mate, so primitive had the little town remained; companionship between men and women, save as an opportunity for the eternal quest, was unknown. Wives and mothers sat placidly, or wearily, against the walls at dances, watching the game of man and maid, and slaked their thirst for entertainment, for stimulating comradeship, at the afternoon teas and bridge parties of their own sex. Now and then a reading club or a study class was organized, a naïve effort toward an understanding of things which Shadyville vaguely perceived to be of importance beyond its boundaries; and always the class or club died of insufficient nourishment. Within thirty miles of a large town, the life of Shadyville remained uncorrupted—and unimproved; a healthy, simple, joyous affair of the love-quest in youth; a healthy, simple, and usually contented, matter of home-making and child-rearing later. Sheila, having stepped over into the second stage with her marriage, was not supposed to feel any longings which her domestic existence could not satisfy; and feeling them, in defiance of Shadyville's standards and traditions, she could but suppress and starve them.
"Let me go down to the office every day and help you," she suggested to Ted finally, "I used to help you—before we were married."
But Ted, whose limited ambitions had realized themselves and whose work had now settled into a comfortable routine for which he was more than capable, evinced no enthusiasm for the project. She had helped him; he had never forgotten nor disparaged that. But he did not need or want her at the Star office now, and he did need and want her in his home.
"You have enough to do as it is—with Eric and the house," he said.
"But, Ted, I haven't enough to do," she insisted. "There's nothing for me really to do in the house. I overlook everything, but that doesn't occupy all my time. And with Eric at school—don't you see, my dear, that it's something to do I need? Don't you see how—how restless I am?"
"We ought to have more children!" he exclaimed wistfully.
"Yes," she agreed, "yes, we ought to have more children. But if they do not come—?" And she stared before her, her hands lying empty and listless in her lap. "If they do not come—?" she repeated presently. And now she turned her brooding eyes to his face and a purpose gathered and concentrated in them. "I wonder if you could understand—" she began.
But he cut into the sentence: "I must hurry back to the office. I take too much time for lunch. Don't get discontented, little girl. I'll take you down to Louisville for the horse show next week. We'll have a bully spree. That's what you need." And he went off whistling blithely, sure that he had solved the problem of Sheila's "moods"—as he always called any symptom of depression in her.
Sheila watched him go, smiling. "Of course he wouldn't have understood," she said to herself. "And how I would have bothered him if I'd tried to analyze myself for him—poor dear!" But the reflection, amused, yet wholly tender, did not end her unrest, her perplexity.
After a futile attempt to interest herself in duties about the house, she set out for a walk, hoping to capture something of the outdoor peace. It was October, always an exhilarating month in Kentucky, with its crisp air and its flaming banners of red and gold, and soon her blood was stirred and her heart lightened, and she was swinging along at a brisk pace. She had started in the direction of her grandmother's house, but suddenly she wheeled about and took to another street.
Never since Eric's illness had her grandmother spoken to her of her writing, and she had been glad of the silence. It seemed to her that if they talked at all, they who had been so close, so much would have to be said; she could not conceive of a reserve in anything which she undertook to discuss with Mrs. Caldwell at all. Ted's views on the duty of a wife and mother would therefore have to be told with the rest, and she did not want to tell them. Her grandmother would have little patience with them, she was sure. As a devoted husband, most of all as the father of Sheila's child, Ted seemed to have won a secure place in Mrs. Caldwell's affection at last, and Sheila, who had clearly seen Mrs. Caldwell's original reluctance to the marriage, had no intention of jeopardizing that place now. Understanding, sympathy, advice would have meant much to her, but she could not take them at Ted's expense.
So she walked on, away from her grandmother's house; onward until she left the town behind her and found herself upon the road leading to Louisville. Just ahead of her, she saw, then, a familiar figure trudging along in leisurely fashion, the figure of Peter Burnett.
"Peter!" she hailed joyously. And as he hastened back to her, her heart lifted buoyantly; her somber mood departed. She did not say to herself, "Here is understanding," but she felt it. A sudden warmth possessed her, and that other self of hers, so long banished—the Other-Sheila of dreams and visions—suddenly looked out of her eyes.
"A constitutional?" inquired Peter. And then, to her nod, "May I go with you?"
"Oh, yes, Peter, do! Let's have a good old-time talk! Let's play I'm young again!"
Peter grimaced: "You? You're still a child! But I—! It's a sensitive subject with me nowadays—that of youth."
"It needn't be," laughed Sheila. "You've discovered the fountain of eternal youth."
And indeed, Peter at forty-six had changed curiously little from the Peter of twenty-eight. Still slender and of an indolent grace, his aspect of youth had wonderfully persisted. And having passed his life far more in contemplation than in struggle, his face matched his figure with a freshness rare to middle years. He was, it must be admitted, a convincing argument in favor of laziness—except for the expression of his eyes; they had something of the look of Sheila's; their gaze seemed turned inward upon a tragedy of unfulfillment. And unfulfilled, in very truth, was all the promise of Peter's attainments; of his exceptional parts. He was still teaching rhetoric to little girls at the Shadyville Seminary, and, because he had not married, he was still leading cotillions. He read his Theocritus as of old; he called often upon Mrs. Caldwell; sometimes he had an accidental meeting with Sheila, such as this. So his years had passed; too smoothly to age him; too barrenly to content or enrich him in any sense. No one appeared to see his pathos, but pathos was there.
He fell into step with Sheila and they tramped onward together in the cool, bright air, talking with the happy fluency which they always had for each other. And though Sheila said nothing of her problem, her restlessness, she felt all the while the comfort of her companion's understanding sympathy—for anything that she might choose to tell him.
The road rose before them, a gradual, steady ascent; they reached its crest just as the sun grew low and vivid. A glow was upon the autumn fields on either hand; tranquility and silence seemed to be everywhere; tranquility and silence except for a weird crooning that now floated to them, a crooning indescribably mournful. And then they espied, crouching down at the roadside and almost at their elbows, a creature as weird and mournful as the sound.
"Crazy Lisbeth," whispered Sheila.
Lisbeth it was, Lisbeth grown old and more pitiful than ever; a ragged, unkempt being—yet strangely lifted above the sordidness of her rags and her beggar's life by her insanity. Long ago she had ceased to work at all, her poor brain having become incapable of any continuous effort, however simple. But she had resisted the obvious havens of asylum and almshouse, and contrived to live on in liberty by aid of the precarious charity of those who had once employed her. She made her home in any deserted hovel that she could seize upon, going from one to another in a sad progress of destitution. And whenever the days were fine, she still roamed the countryside, a desire upon her that would not let her rest, though her memory of her dead husband and child was now so vague and blurred that she no longer consciously sought them. To-day the desire that so tormented her was allayed. For she held something in her arms, something that she rocked gently as she crooned.
Sheila went a step nearer, but Lisbeth did not look up or appear aware of her presence. She was not aware of anything in the world but the treasure within her arms. Watching, Sheila's eyes filled with quick tears and her throat ached with a pity almost unbearable. For the thing in Lisbeth's arms was a battered doll, and the crooning was a lullaby.
Very softly Sheila turned to Peter. "Let us go back," she said. "She hasn't seen us—she mustn't see us. We must not wake her from her dream. It's a doll she's rocking, and she's dreaming—she's dreaming it's a child."
They started back without speaking, hushed and saddened by what they had seen of another's tragedy; and as they went, Sheila was thinking of the occasion in her childhood when she had pretended to be Lisbeth's little daughter. It had happened so long ago, but in all the years since then Lisbeth had been intent on the one dream, the one hope—that of motherhood. All definite remembrance of the child she had borne and lost was gone from her clouded brain, but the instinct and desire of motherhood had remained; it had been life to her. Her mind, flickering like a will-o'-the-wisp from one uncompleted thought to another, had been steadfast enough in that; her heart, detached from every human tie, had never faltered in its impulse of maternity. The tears filled Sheila's eyes again, filled and overflowed so that Peter gave an exclamation of concern and dismay.
"Poor Lisbeth!" she murmured. "Poor thing! And I who have my child am discontented. What is the matter with me?"
It was the question she had put to Ted long ago—after that other episode of Lisbeth—and he had been as bewildered as she. But there was no bewilderment in the glance that met hers now. Nevertheless, Peter did not answer her directly. But after awhile he said musingly:
"A bird's wings may be clipped, but its heart can't be changed. Always—always—it is mad to fly!"