And just then the first ray of sunlight touched his window sill, touched it and stole within the room. The day had come; and though he was forty-six years old and not born for fighting, a sudden elation seized upon Peter's sad heart—as if the finger of the sunlight had touched it, too.
CHAPTER XVII
Sheila had thought herself acquainted with loneliness in the days immediately following her grandmother's death—days when she had had the consolation and companionship of Peter's frequent visits; but after Peter left Shadyville, she knew loneliness indeed. Charlotte had taken flight to Paris soon after Peter's departure, and there remained in Sheila's small world not one to comprehend the depths of her, the real needs and desires and aspirations of her mind and spirit.
To all outward seeming, her life flowed on in its usual channels; she occupied herself with her housewifely duties, with her care for her husband's and child's well-being; she exchanged visits with her neighbors and went to afternoon tea-parties. Certainly her life appeared to flow on smoothly enough, but in fact it did not flow at all—that which was really the life current; it was checked, stemmed, thrown back upon itself in a tempestuous flood. Heart, mind, spirit, all had come up against an obstacle which there was no surmounting, no eluding—the indestructible obstacle of a mistaken marriage. Those were the bitterest days of Sheila's existence—the days when all the vital, matured forces of her throbbed and surged and clamored, prisoned things that beat in vain against the walls of circumstances.
Worn out at last by this inner rebellion and conflict, she began to question whether she might not write once more. What she felt for Peter must forever be suppressed; must, if possible, be crushed out altogether; for her heart, importunate though it was with her woman's maturity, there could be no satisfying outlet. And in her conscientious recognition of this, in her resolution to abide by it, her very genuine affection for Ted—despite all the differences of temperament that divided them, despite even her realization and resentment of the wrong his selfishness had done her—was her greatest source of strength. But though she thus armed herself with her affection for her husband, though she so strove for utter loyalty to him, the suppression of her gift was no part of her conception of wifely duty now. And, thanks to Charlotte, she no longer regarded her compact with God for Eric's life as a thing sacred and binding. Even before Charlotte had expressed herself so vigorously on the subject, Sheila had, indeed, grown to see that her vow to renounce her gift had been unfairly wrung from her by a too effective combination of accident and Ted's opinions. And after Charlotte had cried out upon that vow as "morbid, hysterical nonsense," after she had exclaimed that Sheila's only fault had been in wasting her gift, it was but a step for Sheila to the conclusion that her vow could not—should not!—bind her. At last she saw herself free for work, if not for love; she saw herself the more free for work because love must be denied. Her work should be her recompense; she had earned it now, as all things worth the having must be earned—by what one suffers for them. And she believed that her work would be the better for all that she had suffered, all that she had endured. It would be the better for that secret, unceasing ache of her heart for a love forbidden to her; and it would be the better for all the hours of pure suffering for itself alone.
She had suffered for the loss of her work—Oh, very really! Even through years that had been altogether happy otherwise, the restlessness and hunger and depression of a talent unappeased had come upon her at times, come upon her almost unbearably. Though she had set her little son between it and her, it had reached her; it had harassed her unspeakably with demands that she had, perforce, refused to gratify. The sudden note of a violin, the sight of a flowering tree pearly against an April sky, a glimpse of tranquil stars through her window at night—such things as these had been enough to bring her gift's importuning and torment upon her. Earnestly and sincerely as she had tried to steel herself from such importunity and torment, they had come upon her again and again; they still came; they would come always—unless she flung off the shackles of that foolish, unnecessary vow.
Fling off its shackles she did, with a sudden, blessed sense of liberty and strength. With neither confession to Ted, nor any attempt at concealment, she set herself to write. For the first time since her marriage—at least since her motherhood—she felt her life, in some measure, her own. That she made no announcement of her independence to Ted was significant of the complete independence she had begun to feel. Perhaps it was significant of it, also—of the extent to which she conveyed, without words, her emancipation—that Ted, discovering, in the ensuing days, what she was about, said nothing of it either.
When she sat down, at last, to her writing-table, to her clean sheaf of paper, it was with the conviction of her individual rights spurringly upon her. But though she was finally so sure of her right to set free her gift, she felt within her no stir and flutter of a thing mad to fly and now released to do it. No winged words sprang upon her paper to leave bright traces of a heavenly flight. At the end of a long, uninterrupted morning, there was upon her paper no word at all.
Not for lack of ideas did the paper remain thus bare. There were ideas enough and to spare in the treasure chamber of her brain, ideas long hoarded, but still fresh with the glamour of their first conception. There was one idea which had especially tantalized and allured her through years of resistance on her part, an idea for a story really insolently quiet and unpretentious—because its stuff was such pure gold. How that gold would shine through the cunningly chosen medium of her simple, unassuming phrases! She had seen it shining so through all the time that she had resisted it. But now—though she gave herself unreservedly to the cherished idea, though she turned over and over, with a passionate preoccupation, the little golden nugget of it—the simple, delicate phrases that were to reveal, to exploit it, did not appear.