The Torch Bearer

by Reina Melcher Marquis

After all, this was left to him, Peter reflected; it was left to him to do things for Sheila. And perhaps he would find nothing she needed of him impossible. The love that had been so dark with the dark and secret hours could have its white vision, too.

CHAPTER XIV

Peter had felt that he could not be much with Sheila henceforth; that neither his own heart nor conventional Shadyville's standards would permit it. But Sheila herself ordained otherwise, and under the circumstances of her bereavement, Peter could but obey her.

Never had Sheila been so lonely as in the weeks immediately following Mrs. Caldwell's death. Whatever reserves of speech had existed between the two in these latter years, there had been no reserve of feeling, of comprehension. Close friends they had always been; and if Sheila was alone in a shared life, so far as her marriage was concerned, she had had a satisfying refuge in her grandmother's sympathetic companionship. Now, with that companionship lost to her, she began to feel, as she had never done before, the limitations of her marriage. Her nervous restlessness increased and sharpened to a positive hunger which Ted's affection and compassion were powerless to alleviate. In her loss and sorrow he could do nothing for her, earnestly as he tried. It was as if he could not reach her, and she realized it with amazement. If he had not compelled from her the greatest passion of which she was capable, he had certainly won love of a kind from her, love warm and sincere, and their life together had bound her to him with such ties of loyalty and habit and common experience, with such dear memories of young tenderness and joy, that she had never doubted the completeness of their union. That he could not reach her now, that he could bring no peace to her in her trouble, seemed to her unexplainable—until she recalled the fact that he and Mrs. Caldwell, though fond of each other, had not been really near each other in spirit. Theirs had been a pleasant, light affection, an amiable, surface relation, bred of the accident of their connection rather than of any genuine attraction between them. Remembering this, Sheila assured herself of its being the reason that Ted could not comfort her for Mrs. Caldwell's death. There was so much in her grandmother that he had never seen, so much of which he could not speak at all.

Peter, on the other hand, had been almost as dear to her grandmother as she herself had been—almost as dear and quite as near. He had a thousand sweet and intimate memories of Mrs. Caldwell, and he suffered, in the loss of her, a grief akin to Sheila's own. So to Peter she turned. With the perfect unconsciousness of self that a child might have shown, she made her demands upon him, upon his pity, upon his time; and if he did not come often to see her, she sent for him.

She was really strangely unworldly, and in this renewed comradeship with her old friend, she saw nothing for anyone to criticize. Neither did she recognize in it any danger for Peter or herself. Peter had always been there in her life, an accepted and unexciting fact. She did not allow for change in him or herself in the ten years of her marriage, years during which they had met hut seldom and casually. She had simply resumed the way of her girlhood, her childhood, with him, never considering that it might now be surcharged with peril for them; never for an instant fearing that she might some day find herself unable to do without him. She needed him; he was at hand; and she demanded fulfillment of her need. He brought her the consolation that Ted could not bring her; he gave her aching heart peace. Repeatedly he displayed a disposition to efface himself, after the first days of her mourning were over, but she would not have it so. In her innocence she still insisted on his frequent presence, and was sometimes puzzled and hurt that he evinced so little gladness in being with her. That he had the look of one harassed almost beyond endurance, she did finally perceive, but she understood it not at all, and at last dismissed it from her mind as something outside her province. Men had worries, worries about money and trivial things like that, she reflected. Peter was probably bothered about something of the sort, something that did not greatly matter after all. A real trouble he would have brought to her; of that she was sure.

So the winter passed in a close companionship between them, and it was to Peter's honor that she knew neither her own heart nor his at the end of it.

Ted it was, and not Peter, who made the situation impossible of continuance. Ted it was who plucked from it, at least for Sheila, its concealing innocence. He had been cordial to Peter; at first he had even been grateful to him, seeing Sheila comforted by him. But after a time he grew tired of Peter's face at his dinner table two or three times a week; he wearied of finding Peter in his little sitting-room whenever he came home particularly early; he sickened, with a sudden and profound distaste, of having Peter drawn into all the intimate concerns and happenings of his own and Sheila's life. Not for a moment did he suspect Sheila of any sentimental inclinations toward Peter, for he fully appreciated and trusted her fidelity. But he thought her behavior foolish and imprudent, and in spite of his trust in her, he was jealous of this friendship which so absorbed and satisfied her. Why should she require a man's friendship at all? Why should she require anyone but himself and Eric? And having once questioned thus, his patience speedily gave way, and a climax ensued.

"Sheila," he said to her one day, a day when he had come home to discover Peter reading Maeterlinck to her, "Sheila, why on earth do you have Burnett here so much?"