"I'm sorry for you," she said sweetly; "you did wrong, you've injured my sister, deeply pained her,—poor, foolish child! But let no one say that you haven't suffered, that you're not punished. To have to marry me was hard indeed. We must make the best of it, fellow sufferer; let us forego reproaches!"
Belhaven pressed her cold fingers in silence and she went out; he saw her cross the hall and slowly ascend the staircase. She walked like one who dragged a weight; all the elasticity of her graceful figure seemed gone, and he realized at last that she had made a terrible sacrifice. Before this revelation, Belhaven's mind stopped short; he had been devoutly occupied in contemplating his own misery until, like the frog that looked at the cow, he had tried to distend his own importance to match its endless inflations. He had regarded himself from every standpoint but Rachel's; he was now suddenly to behold himself from hers. To her he apparently had no compensations, he was the climax of her misery, the last straw. Then he remembered her sympathy for him. It was quite genuine; she pitied him because he was married to her. Belhaven smiled bitterly to himself. She was a fine woman, an unusual woman, but she clearly meant it; he wondered how many women ever considered it a punishment to be married to them? Certainly not Eva.
Then he recalled how quickly Eva decided to sacrifice him to escape disgrace, how suddenly she had awakened to public opinion. Her vows and caresses one day, her tears and reproaches the next, and then her abrupt desertion. Her willingness to sacrifice Rachel, her falsehood about Rachel—he had only heard an expurgated edition of it from Eva herself—had been so many shocks to him; the whole thing was incredible. He found it necessary to take to pieces his conception of Eva and put it together again in a different combination, for, if he was her fellow sinner, he certainly was not her fellow sufferer; she had escaped. In some mysterious way she always evaded the consequences of her own acts; she slipped them off on to other people's shoulders, whitewashed them, and, at last, frankly disowned them. Belhaven, suffering the first shock of disillusionment, wondered if she ever really loved any one but herself? Since a week he had traveled past the first milestone on the road that Astry had traveled before him; since two days he was well on the second lap. How much more to the end? Sometimes it is a short, dusty, abrupt road and sometimes it is long and tortuous, and it broils in the sunshine of desert places, but it leads to one end. Having entered it, no one has ever turned back, no one will ever turn back. Surely, in Paradise there must be a place for the disillusioned, for the way blisters the feet.
Let no one suppose that because a man sins he cannot suffer. Belhaven knew better; he was feverish, the very air of the room suffocated him. Was it the heavy perfume of those foolish, white flowers? He stretched out his hand to pitch them out, but abruptly withdrew it as if something had stung him. Something had; he remembered appearances! Henceforth he was to spend three-fourths of the day remembering them; they hung about his neck like a millstone. He laughed bitterly, as he realized that Eva had sold him into slavery; she ought to have dipped his coat in the blood of a kid and handed him to Astry. She had done for him, disposed of him! Then he remembered Rachel and was overcome with shame, for, like a poltroon, he had hidden himself behind a woman and she was greater than he. It will be seen that Belhaven was rapidly approaching the third milestone—but then it is always a question of how many milestones there will be. The length of the way is only great enough to accomplish its purpose, but, sometimes, it has to be very great indeed; however, that is only in obstinate cases; violent ones run abruptly down the hill and cast themselves into the sea, like the Gadarene swine.
It does not matter so long as the end is accomplished, and it always is.
VII
Rachel had been married a week and a day when Dr. Macclesfield came to drink a cup of tea with her in her new home.
Dr. Macclesfield was a little, old man who might have been eighty and looked seventy. His face was seamed with wrinkles in curious criss-crosses, like the stitches in drawn-work, and he still shaved twice daily; he said that he did not care to grow a moustache, that his always caught up vermicelli. His small eyes twinkled with curiosity; nothing escaped him, but his sense of humor made him delightful. He had retired from practice but was still consulted in difficult cases; he was wealthy but his charities kept his income down to normal limits. His wife had been dead twenty years and he had no children, so he was perpetually interested in other people's affairs. People appealed to him keenly; he studied them, divided them into classes, found fault with them, and loved them. In his youth and middle age he had had an insatiable passion for work; he had labored at his profession as some men labor in a quarry. He had worn out a dozen young assistants and driven an orderly and methodical wife nearly out of her senses. She had lived and died complaining that the doctor never came home to meals on time, and never got through one without an interruption; she said that cold soups were perpetual and that it was useless to have pancakes. It was impossible for him to grasp what that had meant to her, and twenty years after her death he was still perplexed at the thought of her nervous despair when dinner had spoiled waiting for him. If she had explained, he would have thought it a trivial matter,—and so it was, if he was unmoved by chilled mutton. A terrible illness, brought on by the strain and constant exposure, had finally ended his active career. He had slowly and painfully recovered, to find his usefulness gone. His brain still answered the calls of the profession, but his body was no longer equal to the work of a Corliss engine, and he surrendered grimly, at seventy-five, describing himself as an old bluebottle-fly who could only creep on a window-pane on a sunshiny day.
He was fond of Rachel and she had taught him to drink tea. Yet he had deferred his visit until the last minute, for he did not relish the idea of seeing her as Belhaven's wife. Not that he especially objected to Belhaven. He regarded him as an undetermined quantity, who seemed to have an unfathomed depth, and who needed some moral plummet-line as well as a physical bracing up. When he thought of him, the old doctor shook his head and thrust out his underlip. "He's elusive," he said to himself. "In my young days I should have tried to experiment; now I would hesitate whether to give pepsin or calomel. I usually hate a man when I can't tell at a glance what sort of a pill he needs."
Rachel poured tea for him in the living-room. Belhaven's taste had been excellent but she had given those individual touches that made it homelike, and it began already, in a delicate way, to express her. The light from the high, south window touched the rumpled waves of her soft, brown hair and warmed the delicate pallor of her cheek. She wore a simple, white dress without a single ornament and there was only a handful of blue and yellow flags in a slender glass on the tea-table. Dr. Macclesfield drank his tea discontentedly. After all, the room suited her and she suited the room, if Belhaven could only obliterate himself!