The long way

by Mary Imlay Taylor

"Good-by, John!"

He did not answer her, but turned away, ashamed of the hard-wrung tears in his eyes. She stood watching him go, her lips quivering,—she had grieved the heart she loved best in the world. When he was gone, she made her way blindly into the house and crept up-stairs to her own room, and once there she fell on her knees beside the bed and buried her face on her outstretched arms.

It was indeed more than she could bear. Then she was ashamed of her rebellion. God Almighty would not give her more than she could bear; He knew her, He would not do it. Perhaps she could bear more than others, perhaps she had a greater power of endurance, as she had a greater power of love. Her soul, reeling in darkness, cried out for release. Then suddenly she remembered and understood. God was punishing her for her sin. Was not that the old Biblical idea? She had sworn to a falsehood before Him; to save her sister she had flung a challenge at God. She had vowed to love Belhaven when she could not; she had vowed to honor him when she despised him; she had vowed to obey him when she was determined to have nothing to do with him. She was perjured; she had called Eva a liar in her heart because Eva had maligned her, and now she was herself a living lie. That was it; God was punishing her! It was fair, it was just, it was what men would call a square deal; she had no right to beg off, she was a coward. She had done it on an impulse. She searched her own heart with merciless severity and she knew that she would never have done it but for the thought that Charter had left her for Mrs. Prynne. It stultified even her sacrifice; it made her the more frivolous and contemptible in her own eyes, and she was a coward, for she wanted to beg off. She wanted to tell John the truth; it was hard to let him suffer as she had suffered. If she could only have told him that she loved him and shared his pain, but she dared not. John was good but she dared not. He would not be resigned to such a fate; he would rebel against it, and if he rebelled, would she resist him? Would she stand out for her own cause, or would she yield to him? She was a strong woman, but she loved much; would she want to yield, would she resist?

It had always cost her an effort to contradict Charter; her impulse was always to give up, to be guided by him, and her happiness lay in pleasing him. Would she be strong enough not only to resist John but to resist her own heart? The enemy was within, the enemy of her resolutions, her own heart, was John's ally; it was pleading for him now. If she betrayed Eva, if she told John the truth, would he submit to this miserable marriage to save Eva and Belhaven from Astry? Not for a day, not for an hour! She knew John and she dared not tell him. Then the desolate loneliness of it came back to her and she cast herself, face downward, upon the floor and lay prone beside her bed, submerged in supreme weakness and misery. All her strength was gone, all her resistance, all her self-control; she lay there—broken and desperate—overwhelmed at last. There was nothing left in the world.

IX

When Charter left Rachel so abruptly, he did not return to the city but, turning his face toward the country, walked steadily away from the habitations of men. His mood was one that sought solitude as a spiritual necessity, for, at the very moment when the journey's end seemed to have been achieved and the lovely presence of Rachel—no longer a vision of his fevered fancy—was actually assured, his universe had crumbled about his ears.

The fact that no intimation of an engagement to Belhaven had ever reached him made the blow more astonishing; it seemed incredible that she could have been married without his knowledge, that an event of such vital importance to him could have occurred without a warning or even a premonition. He recalled his foolish expressions of feeling, his interrupted declaration, with a kind of shamed anger. He must have appeared like an idiot, coming back after his long silence to make love to a woman who had had time, in the interval, to get married to another man. Yet not even his first resentment against her for permitting him to go so far unwarned, was of long duration; his mind was too occupied with the astonishing fact of her marriage. The shock had been so great that his senses were benumbed, and he was able to go across country, picking a path through the woods, without an idea of where he was going.

The cool, green shade of the place, with the pungent scent of the pines and hemlocks, the delicate growth and glossy green leaves of the young gum trees, with here and there the tall frond of a hardy fern, gave him a feeling of familiarity without suggesting the painful necessity of reconciling himself to the change in all his most cherished remembrances. His mind staggered back from the consideration of his loss and he tried to recall the slow process of reasoning that had made him delay the letter to Rachel. The fact that he had not the pen of a ready writer did not furnish a sufficient excuse for delaying a matter so vital, and he remembered, in a bewildered way, his fruitless efforts to put his thoughts on paper. But intimately associated with these efforts was the sputter of Mauser bullets and the musical bugle of the trumpeter sounding the charge. He seemed to see the malarious mist rising from the rice paddies and the nipa huts of the Filipinos, while he recalled, with an even more vague recollection of the pains and the weariness, those hours that he had worked with the camp surgeon and sat beside the victims of cholera. He remembered, too, the face of the Filipino woman when he snatched her baby from the burning ruins of the village that the fleeing insurgents had fired, and he seemed to feel the clinging hands of the poor boy from Maryland when he had been mad with delirium and cried for his mother. The very fulness of those months in the tropics, the routine of marching and attacking the earthworks of the rebels, when those big straw hats had bobbed up and down until the awful charge with fixed bayonets drove them out of their trenches like ants out of a demolished hill in a flower-bed, returned to him.

It was incredible to think that, at the very moment when such vital things as this had occupied him, life on this side of the globe had continued to flow on in its usual conventional course, and that Belhaven had found opportunity to supplant him in Rachel's heart. At this thought an unreasoning rage against Belhaven made him walk faster and faster along the path; once or twice he had to stop to break his way through the brush or to tear aside the wild tangle of a vine, and it gave him almost a sensation of joy to tear and to break. He would have liked to crush Belhaven, to take him up bodily and fling him out of the way. He tried to recall his recollections of the man, but he had never liked him, and now, at the crucial moment, he could not summon up a vision of him, as Saul conjured the figure of Samuel out of the pit. Of one thing, however, he was reasonably sure, and that was that Belhaven did not belong to the class that he recognized as one that was made up of men of honor. With a very exalted conception of those qualifications that constitute "an officer and a gentleman," Charter had a peculiar scorn for the men who did not belong to that type, and nothing was more intolerable than the fact of Rachel's marriage to a creature that he would have been likely to call, had he been asked to qualify him, "that fellow Belhaven!" The fact that women rarely understand those qualities in men that are most obvious to their own sex did not alleviate Charter's anger and disgust. Rachel married to Belhaven was an object to move the gods to pity.

It was at this point in his confused misery that he recalled her anguish; after all, it might not have been altogether pity for him. He reddened at that thought, but, perhaps, she was already aware of her mistake, already plunged into the misery that now apparently was the common result of marriage and made divorce appear as a boon to those unfortunates who desire another opportunity, like the man in the nursery rhyme who jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes, only to jump into another bush and scratch them in again. Yet the thought that she was unhappy did not alleviate his misery or offer any solution of her extraordinary marriage, for her unhappiness must be independent of him since she had not considered him of sufficient importance to influence her decision. If she was disappointed in her choice it must be because she had suffered the common awakening after the event, rather than that she was grieved by any recollection of his affection, or regret that she had not awaited his return. The fact that her outbreak of grief was synchronous with his declaration was not significant in the light of previous events, for she must have seen that he loved her. With such marvelous obtuseness as this Charter failed to realize that his silence in the Philippines would have convinced almost any woman of his utter indifference, and that Rachel had had every right to argue that he wanted her to forget him.