Why had she married Larry when she never loved him; felt him to be a stranger, simply because he had interpreted the words of a dying man for her?
In the light of realization the errors of life become our most deadly accusers. We dare not make others pay for the folly that we should never have perpetrated. Mary-Clare, the woman, had paid and paid, until now she faced bankruptcy; 36 she was prepared still to do her part as far as in her lay––but she must retrace her steps, be sure and then go on as best she could.
Always, in those old childish days, there had been the grim spectre of Larry’s mother. Her name was never mentioned but to the imaginative, sensitive Mary-Clare, she became, for that very reason, a clearly defined and potent influence. She was responsible for the doctor’s lonely life in King’s Forest; for Larry’s long absences from home; for the lines that grew between the old doctor’s eyes when he laid down the few simple laws of conduct that formed the iron code of life:
Never lie. Never break a promise. Never take advantage for selfish gain. Think things out with your woman brain, and never count the cost if you know it is right.
Larry’s mother, so the child believed, had not kept the code––therefore, Mary-Clare must the more strictly adhere to it and become what the other had not! And how desperately she had struggled to reach her ideal. In the conflict, only her sunny joyous nature had saved her from wreck. Naturally direct and loyal, much of what might have occurred was prevented. Passionate love and devout belief in the old doctor eliminated other dangers.
It was well and right to use your “woman brain,” but when in the end you always came to the conclusion that the doctor’s way was your way, life was simplified. If one could not fully understand, then all the more reason for relying upon a good guide, a tested friend; but above all other considerations, once the foundation was secure was this: she must make up to her adored doctor and Larry for what that unmentioned, mysterious woman had denied them.
It had all seemed so simple, when one did not know!
That was it. Breathing hard, Mary-Clare came back to the present. She could not know until she had lived, and being married did not stop life. And now, Mary-Clare could consider, as if apart from herself, from the girl who had married Larry because he had caught the dying request of the old doctor. She had wanted to do right at that last tragic moment. 37 She had done it with the false understanding of reality and found out the truth––by living. It had seemed to her, in her ignorance, the only way to relieve the suffering of the dying: to help Larry who was deprived of everything.
Mary-Clare must not desert, as the unmentioned woman had.
But life, living––how they had torn the blindness from her! How she had paid and paid until that awful awakening after the birth and death of her last child, three months before! She had tried then to make Larry understand before he went away, but she could not! Larry always ascribed her moods, as he called them, to her “just going to have a child,” or “getting over having one.”