Rachel's hand closed over the slip of paper mechanically, but she was grateful. After all, tact was better than medicine; she had that moment to recover before the two men shook hands and she had to take up her rôle again. For the first time Rachel experienced a feeling with which she was soon to be deeply acquainted, that would recur again and again, and become at last a burden to her. She felt for the first time like a wild creature of the woods and the hills caught in a trap, a cruel and effectual trap, not one that maimed and gave a chance of a slow death, but an enduring, live-trap from which there was no escape and where she was not likely to be left to die. She would be fed and tended and kept alive, as if her life preserved some great privilege or happiness to the trapper, but she would never be allowed to escape; the bars of her cage were closed forever. Her heart began to beat tremendously against her breast; she was afraid, afraid of herself. Why had this awful thing come to her? What had she done? Was it that she had not loved deep enough, served enough, hoped enough, sacrificed enough? Had she been afraid to trust her own heart?
At first it had been a shock to her whenever Belhaven entered a room where she was, but to-day his coming was a relief; it gave her that moment to recover her self-control. He was standing by her little tea-table, talking to Dr. Macclesfield, and the light shining full on his face revealed the haggard lines and the extreme pallor. He, too, had been traveling along the road, but his manner was easy and even graceful; the tact that he showed in not observing her distress, while it was essentially a part of his breeding as a man of the world, was still wonderfully reassuring and had the value of a guarantee that he would, as he had said, always make it as easy for her as he could. But with that comforting reassurance came the swift, overwhelming thought that nothing could make it easy now, that this new turn of affairs, Charter's return, had made it more than she could bear.
"Well, if I were you, I'd rather stay here all winter than take a house in the city," Dr. Macclesfield was saying; "as long as you've got a motor, the distance doesn't count."
"Not for me, but—my wife—"
Rachel did not hear the end of Belhaven's halting sentence as she slipped out of the room and went up-stairs.
VIII
It was true that John Charter was coming home from the Philippine Islands.
Out there in the Island of Luzon there was consequently much mourning in the regiment, for John Charter had borne the heat and burden of the day, and it remained to be seen whether he would receive his reward. That Charter greatly differed, at first sight, from other men of his class and his profession cannot be said; that he did differ greatly in soul is true. He was a tall, muscular, well-built, young American, a soldier by instinct, a West Pointer by training, and a first lieutenant in a regiment of regulars by promotion, but John wore his khaki with distinction. He had a clean hand and a clean soul, he was superbly honest, and he was so simple that it seemed that the eternal boy would never die in him. A certain habit of reserve had kept him unknown and not greatly liked until the cholera came. In seasons of stress and cases of cholera, men learn things. The regiment learned John. It was hot and men fell sick like flies; a steam rose from the rice paddies; the water was poison; and the soldiers cursed God and died,—that is, a good many of them.
It was a time when the officers were on leave, but John came back at the first call. He had been trying to write to Rachel Leven a long delayed letter,—a letter that he found hard to write, there was so much to be said in it, and it would have changed the course of so many lives. On a little thing hangs, sometimes, the fate of a lifetime, but John never wrote that letter, for the cholera broke out in Company B and he took off his coat and went to work. He could do anything better than write a letter.
The men were very sick and the regiment surgeon had chills and fever; he worked between shakes and swore fearfully, but John and the chaplain helped him without profanity. The first week three died and ten more sickened; the second week the chaplain died and John helped the surgeon alone, for the colonel was in bed with cholera. John seldom slept, and when he did, he slept in his clothes. The camp was a pest-house. It is true that we come into this world alone and that we must go out of it alone, but at the last a man likes to hear a kind word, to see a friend's face. The dying saw John; he wrote their last letters for them, took charge of their little bequests, made their wills, sat with the sick and the delirious; and one poor boy from Maryland raved and clung to him for twenty-four hours. Then he fell asleep and began to mend. He thought John had saved his life, and he was probably right, for the surgeon had had a chill the day of the crisis and was not able to lift a finger.