The long way

by Mary Imlay Taylor

Pamela, who had been using a plummet-line to sound the depths, was filled with awe at her discovery.

"I don't believe she ever cared a rap for Belhaven!" she climaxed.

"I don't see that that makes it any better."

"It doesn't make it any worse, and—"

"Perhaps not." Charter's face was very white. "Pamela, suppose we talk of something else!"

X

The slow weeks that had dragged by had not been happy ones for Eva Astry. Her first feeling of relief that it was done, the ordeal of Rachel's marriage and the risk that Astry would discover the motive that had prompted it, was over, and she had long ago begun to feel that she had purchased her immunity at too heavy a price. The cost of it, indeed, was chiefly revealed to her by Belhaven's attitude. The cruelty of his position began to appear to her in various aspects and she saw that her betrayal of him had cost her the chief place in his regard. She began to be vaguely aware that she had given him the right to hate her, that the sort of love she had inspired was not of a fiber to resist such an attack, that it was not even equal to the demands of common self-sacrifice. Unconsciously, too, she began to compare his attitude at the time of Astry's discovery with that of Rachel. Her sister had sacrificed herself to save her from the shadow of dishonor, while her lover had not even had the manhood to face her husband. No light in which she could view it made the situation seem less ugly, and at no time did Belhaven figure as a hero. Yet her affection for him had been strong enough to torture her with jealousy when she saw him stand up to be married to her sister. Although she knew that Rachel probably despised him, her own nature—soft and pleasure-loving—was not one to readily yield an admirer to another woman. It had been that reluctance to part with one that had made her recall Belhaven after her marriage with Astry. She could have married him in the first place but she had greatly preferred the Astry millions. It had seemed to her that all the accessories and comforts of wealth were necessary to her, that her beauty, always of a rare and lovely type, demanded the setting that Astry offered her.

She had always affected a mode of living and a class of society which had drained every purse in the family to keep her afloat, even as a young girl, and she had always intended to achieve a dazzling marriage. Astry, while failing to offer her a title and a place in Europe which she had coveted, did present the next thing to it,—the possession of a great fortune and the power to purchase the place in society which she had failed to attain through her mere beauty and charm. If she could not be a princess in a small European State, like one of her cousins, she could be the wife of an American millionaire, and she did not hesitate long over her decision. Belhaven, whose fortune was much smaller and who had squandered a large part of his income, was no match for Astry, and Eva's marriage to the latter had been celebrated with all the pomp that the Leven family, reinforced by the maternal relatives, the Sterrits, had been able to achieve. The paying for it, indeed, had driven poor Aunt Drusilla Leven into the retirement of an obscure Italian town where, as she frankly wrote her friends, washing was fabulously cheap. Profiting by this financial sacrifice, Eva had made the great match of the season and had never bestowed a thought upon poor Aunt Drusilla in her exile, except to be thankful that she did not have to invite that "old frump" to her dinners. But, after the first few months, even the society of a frump would have been more desirable than the continued criticism of a watchful, jealous, and uncongenial husband.

After his first discovery that Eva was not, as he had supposed, a beautiful and delicate replica of Rachel, Astry had been frankly disappointed. They had very little in common and he could not remain long unaware that, if Eva did not love money for its own sake, she cared greatly for the luxuries and privileges that money could obtain for her. Finding himself, therefore, an object of indifference to his young and beautiful wife, he met her with a like coldness and reserve, so that Eva was soon, like a naughty child, shut out of the inner circle of her husband's confidence. It was at this point, when they were both to blame, that she began to encourage Belhaven's renewed devotion. The result had been that Astry, no longer trusting her, had taken alarm, and there had been many quarrels, at first petty and then so serious that they led up to the moment when she had feared for Belhaven's life. Then had come the climax and her falsehood about her sister, Rachel's sacrifice to protect her, and the marriage.

Now that it was over and she was left to view the matter from every standpoint, in the cold light of common sense, she was filled with horror at the tangle she had made; and the continued necessity of acting it all out, of keeping up the tissue of falsehood that she had woven, was wearing her out. Her beauty, of that delicate and ephemeral type that is dependent on color and light, was visibly diminished. Mrs. Van Citters, happening in upon her at the unfortunate hour of noon, when all the defects are most fiercely revealed, thought that she looked absolutely pinched and white, and that only her peculiarly lovely hair and eyes saved her from being what Aunt Drusilla Leven would have called "real peaked."