The Torch Bearer

by Reina Melcher Marquis

As if he had struck her, Sheila's face went livid, then scarlet. She opened her lips to answer, but no sound came. So, for an instant, they looked at each other, silent, motionless, transfixed by this horror that had risen between them, this horror of anger—almost of hate. Then Ted took a step toward her; already he was contrite: "I didn't mean that. I lost my temper and went too far. Forgive me, Sheila!"

But she did not say that she forgave him. She only said: "Never speak to me of this again—never in all our lives!" And then she turned from him and walked out of the room, leaving him to feel himself far more at fault than he had ever believed her to be.

But though her pride, her insulted innocence, had carried her unbroken through the interview, she was in reality cruelly humiliated. That final sentence of Ted's anger—"You've run after him—that's what you've done!"—rang in her ears for days afterward, shaming her as only the very proud can be shamed. It was not true of her, she told herself; it was not true—but it was hideous that it could have been said of her nevertheless. That Peter had never thought it of her, she was confident. It was impossible that Peter should misunderstand her in anything. But she dreaded seeing him with the accusation in her mind. She could not meet him now without an acute and painful self-consciousness. Her happy friendship with him was changed, was forever spoiled. At last she wrote to him, telling him not to come to see her for awhile—not to come until she should bid him. After she had sent the note, however, she suffered more than before, feeling that she had brought constraint between them, that she had suggested to Peter, by her request that he stay away from her, the same unworthy thoughts about them that Ted had flung at her. Far, far worse than meeting him was the growing certainty that she had made him self-conscious about their friendship, too; that she had shown it to him as possible of degrading misconstruction. For he would read from her note, carefully though she had refrained from reasons or explanations, just what had happened. Peter would never comfortably miss a thing like that; sensitive and subtle to a degree, he could never be spared by mere omissions, by lack of plain and definite statement.

It was unbearable that such a situation should have come about. Not for a moment did she forgive Ted for creating it. But she lived on with him in cool outward harmony, realizing that in marriage one may have to endure hurt and disappointment, and being much too high-bred a woman to take her revenge in petty breaches of courtesy.

That she was disappointed in Ted, as well as hurt by him, she now admitted to herself for the first time. It is curious how some final and serious issue between two people living together will cast a light on all the past; will disclose anew, and more flagrantly, lapses and shortcomings and injuries that had once seemed trifles and been ignored or condoned or forgotten. Thus Sheila now looked backward along the years of her marriage and saw how Ted had failed her in understanding, in generosity, in any selfless consideration and love. Small instances of his selfishness recurred to her and promptly became as signposts directing her to greater ones. His care for his creature comfort, his innocent vanities, his rather smug pleasure in his success—things which she had smiled over with a tender lenience—served now to remind her that he had never taken any account of her preferences, of her independent possibilities, of her talent; that he had not, at any time, made the least effort to comprehend or share her interests. He had used her in his own work, and he had dismissed hers with a wave of his hand, as he might have pushed away a child's toy. Whatever he had discerned of her mental quality and power, he had regarded only in its relation to himself; if she had been wonderful for him, she had been wonderful as his helpmate, not as the individual. He had wanted her to be wife and mother only, and he had accomplished that. With anything else in her nature, in her life, he had had neither tolerance nor patience nor sympathy.

Of course she went too far in her arraignment of him. She forgot, in her sudden bitterness, the warmth and kindness of his heart, the staunchness and integrity of his character, his desire and attempt to shield her from all things harsh and hard—even though he shielded her in his own particular way!—and the very real sincerity of his love for her. She forgot that, by his own standards, his own conception of a husband's duty, he had honestly and steadfastly done his best for her. She saw her whole life fed to his selfishness as to an insatiable monster; and most terrible of all, she knew that she saw too late. Their marriage was made. As a husband Ted was formed and could not be changed. If, in the beginning, she had had a clearer conception of his nature; if she had had a stronger sense of her own rights as an individual and the courage to assert those rights, everything would have been different. She would never have been subdued to mere wifehood and motherhood if that had been. She would never—she saw it now!—she would never have made that compact of renunciation with God!

It was to the matter of that compact she came at last—inevitably. And she said to herself, over and over now, that she would never have made it if she had known herself and Ted better in the beginning. She would never have made it because she would not have seen her work as a guilty thing.

Nor had her work been a guilty thing! No woman watched her child every moment; at least no woman did so who could have the relief of a nurse. She might as readily have been paying an afternoon call or playing bridge when Eric was exposed to scarlet fever. It was just an accident that she had been writing then instead of doing any one of a dozen other things of which Ted would have approved. Yes, it was an accident that she had been writing then, she repeated to herself. But back of that accident had been her morbid conscience and Ted's narrow-mindedness; and together they had translated it into a crime. Thus she had been driven into the compact with God for Eric's life—the compact that had ruined her own life. Her morbid conscience and Ted's selfish narrow-mindedness had wrought together for the frustration of her gift, of her happiness. And it was upon Ted that she put far the greater share of the blame.

Oddly enough, though she saw her husband so plainly now; though she censured his faults so unsparingly and regretted so passionately her own mistakes with him—mistakes of weakness, of cowardly submission, she told herself—she did not, even now, take the final step of considering what might have been if she had not married him; of what might have been if she had married some one altogether more congenial and unselfish.

It was Charlotte who thought of that for her.