The long way

by Mary Imlay Taylor

His brother-in-law, feeling figuratively, if not actually, deluged in the dust from his wheels, walked slowly on, past the wide, Georgian gateway and into the grove of cedars that led more directly to his own house. As he went, his reflections were scarcely more agreeable than they had been before this encounter, and he experienced a feeling of bitterness at the thought that Eva always managed to escape. She had escaped at his expense on a previous occasion, and now, when the situation was so hideously unpleasant, she had only to affect illness to induce a doctor to order her to Europe. The convenience of this arrangement was too much like stratagem to escape Belhaven's suspicions and it marked one more lap in the long road that he had entered. He had learned, to his cost, that an affection that can be so easily diverted from its lawful channel is, after all, of too thin and desultory a quality to be worth the trouble of capture. It was evident that Eva cared no more for him than she had cared for her husband, but that she did care very devotedly for herself, that she would never willingly permit a lovely hair of her head to be injured, or suffer a single pang that she could escape. And for this he had wrecked his life!

These thoughts, bitter enough in the first blaze of disillusionment, brought him to the edge of the garden. Looking across it, he was suddenly aware of Rachel, although she was quite unconscious of his approach. The quaint flower garden, with its long rows of old box and its gravel paths, lay on the east side of the house and, at this hour of the day, was pleasantly shadowed and fragrant with flowers. Rachel had planted many of the old-fashioned flower-beds herself with that feverish energy that we display when it is necessary to find some vent for our misery, some commonplace occupation that will hide the suffering that it cannot heal.

At this moment she was kneeling in the gravel path beside a bed of heliotrope, clipping away dead leaves and blossoms and rearranging, with the aid of a trowel, some of the smaller plants. She was bareheaded and the charming oval of her face was delicately framed by the dusky rumple of her soft hair, while her white sleeves were folded back above the elbow and she wielded her trowel with dexterous fingers. The simplicity of her attitude and the earnestness with which she delved after a vagrant plant, that had intruded itself into the sacred precincts of her heliotrope, were as refreshing as a bouquet of homely flowers in the gorgeously barren splendor of Eva's drawing-room. It was just this thought, this impression of the clear contrast between the two sisters, that arrested Belhaven at the edge of the garden, and he stood, unobserved, watching Rachel as she lifted her stray deftly out of the earth and, making another hole for it in a bed of friendly petunias, set it down and pressed the soil back around the roots with the tender care that makes the lover of Nature respect the life of the humblest seedlings of the garden. He noticed, too, as Eva had noticed, the delicate hollows in the cheeks, the shadows under the eyes, and the tight line of the lips, and he fancied that there was a greater need here for care and a change of scene than existed in Eva's case. But most of all the homely occupation, the apparent absorption in an uninteresting task, surprised him; he had been accustomed all his life to women of fashion, to the idle butterflies of a society that drifted from Washington to Newport or Lenox, the Hot Springs or Florida, when it did not immediately take flight to London, Paris or the Riviera. To see a young and beautiful woman kneeling on the ground to delve in a flower-bed was something so new that it interested him. After all, he reflected, Rachel had kept her word; she was unconventional and she was always doing something that he did not expect. It was at this point in his reflections that she looked up and suspended her labors long enough to make a remark so conventional that he almost smiled.

"You found it hot coming out, didn't you?"

"No, I came on the front of the tram; no one felt the weather but an old colored woman who was carrying a watermelon."

Rachel went on patting the earth down with her trowel. "The melon will repay her for that. I thought Harter was to go for you in the motor."

"He missed me then." Belhaven had come down between the box borders and stood now, with his hands in his pockets, observing her plants. "I say, where did you get all that heliotrope? I didn't know there were so many shades."

"Didn't you? I bought the plants; you know it was too late to start them from seeds when—I came—" the instant of hesitation was perceptible and he noticed the delicate color that softly suffused the cheek that she tried to turn away from him.

He made no immediate reply and the soft pat of her trowel went on. The green shadows were lengthening across the long lawns and there was no other sound but the hum of a bumblebee who kept trying to intrude into the heliotrope.

At last he spoke with an effort. "I just met Astry; he sent a message to you."