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 æsthetic 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.