The Torch Bearer

by Reina Melcher Marquis

Even now he could not tell just when it had come. Looking back along the years, it seemed to him to have been there always, for every memory of Sheila, since her little girlhood, took him by the throat.

He saw her as he—and Ted!—had seen her one April day when she was but twelve years old; a slender, black-haired, dreaming-eyed child, lying upon the pale, spring grass and looking up into the flowering cherry-tree branches above her head; a child who was herself an embodied poem, so akin she was to all of April's magic, to the spring's lovely miracles. He saw her, too, in his class-room, eager, earnest, exquisitely responsive to every perception, every thought of his own; a little girl while he was already a man, and yet his comrade, his comrade in every phase of life had he but discerned and willed it! He saw her as a young girl, with her pure eyes and her generous mouth and her sweet, slender throat; a being still untouched by life, but beautifully ready, touchingly desirous for life's shaping hands. And he saw her as she had been yesterday, walking by his side, the woman at last—yet strangely immature, incomplete. He had thought her immature and incomplete because she had not developed her gift. Now there came to him another thought—bred of all those flashing pictures of her in which she seemed so much his own—the thought that she was incomplete because she had not really loved.

It was impossible that she should really love Ted; Ted who could give neither comprehension nor response to the greater part of her nature. It was impossible! He had felt that at the time of her marriage; he remembered now how resentfully! He had felt it when Mrs. Caldwell had shown him—only too convincingly—how that marriage had occurred. He had cried out to Mrs. Caldwell that Sheila must have loved Ted, but he had realized, then, that she had not. And he realized it now. It had been love's hour with her, but it had not been love. It had not been love because he himself, who could have given her such a love as she needed, who could have compelled such a love from her, had failed her. Back and forth he paced in his little room; a creature caged, not by mere walls, but by an irreparable mistake; a creature agonized and helpless. For it was too late for this vision of utter truth now. His life was spoiled—and hers!

Yes, he had spoiled her life! For a little while, he forgot his own disaster in contemplating hers. He had said that he was not the right man for her; but with all his soul and all his brain and all his blood, he knew that he was the right man for her. Throughout her whole life she had turned to him with that simple trust which is bred of love, or at least of potential love, alone. She had said to him once—long ago—with an innocent and tender wonder, "There is nothing I cannot tell you, Peter—nothing!" And that had been true—until Ted had lured her into bondage. While she had been free, there had not been a door in her heart or her spirit that would not have opened at his touch. She had been his—his for the taking! And he had not taken her.

He had left her to Ted; to Ted for whom so many doors of her nature must be closed forever. He had left her to that most terrible loneliness of all—loneliness in a shared life. The thoughts that she could not speak to Ted—how they must beat about in the prison of her mind; how they must cry for release, for answer! He seemed to feel them against his own temples, those unuttered thoughts that were Sheila's very self; he seemed to feel their ache, their hunger. Nothing would be born of those thoughts now; that gift of expression which had been a part of Sheila's soul would go barren to the grave. This was one of the wrongs he had done her—but it was not the worst.

For the worst that had befallen her through him, he told himself, was not that her gift had missed expression, but that she herself had missed the blinding glory of true love.

She was immature, she was undeveloped, because he had not made her his. And he wanted to make her his. Oh, my God, he wanted to make her his! His life was charred to ashes, but his soul was the quivering, torturing flame of his passion. It would not be quenched; it would not, in the least, be stilled; it drove him about the shabby little room as if it were literally a flame from which he must try to escape—though he knew he could not.

He had broken his heart over the disaster to Sheila's life, but as the night advanced and his passion flared the fiercer in hours securely dark and secret, self rose up within him and shrieked and cursed over his own disaster.

He wanted her! He was forty-six years old; not too old to love, but far, far too old to love calmly. The desires of half a lifetime were in him, desires that had lain low and fed upon his years until, in their accumulated strength, they were terrible—wild beasts that tore him, fires that burned him to the bone. And they were strangely compounded of instincts evil and lawless—when felt for another man's wife—and longings wholly innocent and sweet.

For the first time he longed for a home. He looked about his tiny, dingy room with a feeling of desolation, seeing in his mind so different a place—a home with her. He longed for simple, innocent things—her face across the table from him at his meals; her little possessions scattered about with his; the sound of her step in the rooms around him. And he longed to reach out in the night and touch her; he longed to reach out in the night and take her into his arms. He wanted—and now soul and flesh merged in one flame—he wanted her to bear him a child.