The Heart of Rachael Part 53

"Well," Rachael said, straightening up suddenly, and with resolute courage returning to her manner and voice, "you'll have, somebody look it up, will you, George?"

"You may depend upon it-immediately," George said huskily. "It--of course it will make an immense difference," he added, in his anxiety to be rea.s.suring saying exactly the wrong thing.

Rachael was pale.

"I don't know how anything can make a great difference now, George," she answered slowly. "The thing remains--a fact. Of course this ends, in one way, the sordid side, the fear of publicity, of notoriety. But that wasn't the phase of it that ever counted with me. This will probably hurt Warren--"

"Oh, Rachael, dear old girl, don't talk that way!" George protested. "You can't believe that Warren will feel anything but a--a most unbelievable relief! We all know that. He's not the first man who let a pretty face drive him crazy when he was working himself to death." George was studying her as he spoke, with all his honest heart in his look, but Rachael merely shook her head forlornly.

"Perhaps I don't understand men," she said with a mildness that George found infinitely more disturbing than any fury would have been.

"Well, I'll look up records at the City Hall," he said after a pause. "That's the first thing to do. And then I'll let you know.

Boys well this morning?"

"Lovely," Rachael smiled. "My trio goes fis.h.i.+ng to-day, packing its lunch itself, and asking no feminine a.s.sistance. The lunch will be eaten by ten o'clock, and the boys home at half-past ten, thinking it is almost sundown. They only go as far as the cove, where the men are working, and we can see the tops of their heads from the upstairs' porch, so Mary and I won't feel entirely unprotected. I'm to lunch with Alice, so my day is nicely planned!"

The bright look did not deceive him, nor the rea.s.suring tone. But George Valentine's friends.h.i.+p was more easily displayed by deeds than words, and now, with an affectionate pat for her hand, he touched his starter, and the car leaped upon its way. Just four hours later he telephoned Alice that the wedding license of Margaret Rose Clay and Richard Gardiner had indeed been issued a week before, and that Magsie was not to be found at her apartment, which was to be sublet at the janitor's discretion; that Bowman's secretary reported the absence of Miss Clay from the city, and the uncertainty of her appearing in any of Mr. Bowman's productions that winter, and that at the hospital a confident inquiry for "Mr.

and Mrs. Gardiner" had resulted in the discreet reply that "the parties" had left for California. George, with what was for him a rare flash of imagination, had casually inquired as to the name of the clergyman who had performed the ceremony, being answered dispa.s.sionately that the person at the other end of the telephone "didn't know."

"George, you are an absolute WONDER!" said Alice's proud voice, faintly echoed from Clark's Hills. "Now, shall you cable--anybody- -you know who I mean?"

"I have," answered the efficient George, "already."

"Oh, George! And what will he do?"

"Well, eventually, he'll come back."

"Do you THINK so? I don't!"

"Well, anyway, we'll see."

"And you're an angel," said Mrs. Valentine, finis.h.i.+ng the conversation.

Ten days later Warren Gregory walked into George Valentine's office, and the two men gripped hands without speaking. That Warren had left for America the day George's cable reached him there was no need to say. That he was a man almost sick with empty days and brooding nights there was no need to say. George was shocked in the first instant of meeting, and found himself, as they talked together, increasingly shocked at the other's aspect.

Warren was thin, his hair actually showed more gray, there were deep lines about his mouth. But it was not only that; his eyes had a tired and haunted look that George found sad to see, his voice had lost its old confident ring, and he seemed weary and shaken.

He asked for Alice and the children, and for Rachael and the boys.

"Rachael's well," George said. "She looks--well, she shows what she's been through; but she's very handsome. And the boys are fine. We had the whole crowd down as far as Shark Light for a picnic last Sunday. Rachael has little Breck Pickering down there now; he's a nice little chap, younger than our Katrina--Jim's age.

The youngster is in paradise, sure enough, and putting on weight at a great rate."

"I didn't know he was there," Warren said slowly. "Like her--to take him in. I wish I had been there--Sunday. I wish to the Lord that it was all a horrible dream!"

He stopped and sat silent, looking gloomily at the floor, his whole figure, George thought, indicating a broken and shamed spirit.

"Well, Magsie's settled, at least," said George after a silence.

"Yes. That wasn't what counted, though," Warren said, as Rachael had said. "She is settled without my moving; there's no way in which I can ever make Rachael feel that I would have moved." Again his voice sank into silence, but presently he roused himself.

"I've come back to work, George," he said with a quiet decision of manner that George found new and admirable. "That's all I can do now. If she ever forgives me--but she's not the kind that forgives. She's not weak--Rachael. But anyway, I can work.

I'll go to the old house, for the present, and get things in order. And you drop a hint to Alice, when she talks to Rachael, that I've not got anything to say. I'll not annoy her."

George's heart ached for him as Warren suddenly covered his face with his hands. Warren had always been the adored younger brother to him, Warren's wonderful fingers over the surgical table, a miracle that gave their owner the right to claim whatever human weaknesses and failings he might, as a balance. George had never thought him perfect, as so much of the world thought him; to George, Warren had always been a little more than perfect, a machine of inspired surgery, underbalanced in many ways that in this one supreme way he might be more than human. George had to struggle for what he achieved; Warren achieved by divine right.

The women were in the right of it now, George conceded, they had the argument. But of course they didn't understand--a thing like that had nothing to do with Warren's wife; Rachael wasn't brought into the question at all. And Lord! when all was said and done Warren was Warren, and professionally the biggest figure in George's world.

"I don't suppose you feel like taking Hudson's work?" said George now. "He's crazy to get away, and he was telling me yesterday that he didn't see himself breaking out of it. Mrs. Hudson wants to go to her own people, in Montreal, and I suppose Jack would be glad to go, too."

"Take it in a minute!" Warren said, his whole expression changing.

"Of course I'll take it. I'm going to spend this afternoon getting things into shape at the house, and I think I'll drop round at the hospital about five. But I can start right in to-morrow."

"It isn't too much?" George asked affectionately.

"Too much? It's the only thing that will save my reason, I think,"

Warren answered, and after that George said no more.

The two men lunched together, and dined together, five times a week, with a curious change from old times: it was Warren who listened, and George who did the talking now. They talked of cases chiefly, for Warren was working day and night, and thought of little else than his work; but once or twice, as September waned, and October moved toward its close, there burst from him an occasional inquiry as to his wife.

"Will she ever forgive me, George?" Warren asked one cool autumn dawning when the two men were walking away from the hospital under the fading stars. Warren had commenced an operation just before midnight, it was only concluded now, and George, who had remained beside him for sheer admiration of his daring and his skill, had suggested that they walk for a while, and shake off the atmosphere of ether and of pain.

"It's a time like this I miss her," Warren said. "I took it all for granted, then. But after such a night as this, when I would go home in those first years, and creep into bed, she was never too sleepy to rouse and ask me how the case went, she never failed to see that the house was quiet the next morning, and she'd bring in my tray herself--Lord, a woman like that, waiting on me!"

George shook his head but did not speak. They walked an echoing block or two in silence.

"George, I need my wife," Warren said then. "There isn't an hour of my life that some phase of our life together doesn't come back to me and wring my heart. I don't want anything else--our sons, our fireside, our interests together. I've heard her voice ever since. And I'm changed, George, not in what I always believed, because I know right from wrong, and always have, but I don't believe in myself any more. I want my kids to be taught laws--not their own laws. I want to go on my knees to my girl---"

His voice thickened suddenly, and they walked on with no attempt on either side to end the silence for a long time. The city streets were wet from a rain, but day was breaking in hopeful pearl and rose.

"I can say this," said George at last: "I believe that she needs you as much as you do her. But Rachael's proud--"

"Ah, yes, she's that!" Warren said eagerly as he paused.

"And Warren, she has been dragged through the muck during the last few years," George resumed in a mildly expostulatory tone.

"Oh, I know it!" Warren answered, stricken.

"She hates coa.r.s.eness," pursued George, "she hates weakness. I believe that if ever a divorce was justified in this world, hers was. But to have you come back at her, to have Magsie Clay break in on her, and begin to yap breezily about divorce, and how prevalent it is, and what a solution it is, why, of course it was enough to break her heart!"

"Don't!" Warren said thickly, quickening his pace, as if to walk away from his own insufferable thoughts.

For many days they did not speak of Rachael again; indeed George felt that there was nothing further to say. He feared in his own heart that nothing would ever bring about a change in her feeling, or rather, that the change that had been taking place in her for so many weeks was one that would be lasting, that Rachael was an altered woman.

Alice believed this, too, and Rachael believed it most of all.

Indeed, over Rachael's torn and shaken spirit there had fallen of late a peace and a sense of security that she had never before known in her life. She tried not to think of Warren any more, or at least to think of him as he had been in the happy days when they had been all in all to each other. If other thoughts would creep in, and her heart grow hot and bitter within her at the memory of her wrongs, she resolutely fought for composure; no matter now what he had been or done, that life was dead. She had her boys, the sunsets and sunrises, the mellowing beauty of the year. She had her books, and above all her memories. And in these memories she found much to blame in herself, but much to pity, too. A rudderless little bark, she had been set adrift in so inviting, so welcoming a sea twenty years ago! She had known that she was beautiful, and that she must marry--what else? What more serious thought ever flitted through the brain of little Rachael Fairfax than that it was a delicious adventure to face life in a rough blue coat and feathered hat, and steer her wild little sails straight into the heart of the great waters?

She would have broken Stephen's heart; but Stephen was dead. She had seized upon Clarence with never a thought of what she was to give him, with never a prayer as to her fitness to be his wife, nor his fitness to be the father of her children. She had laughed at self-sacrifice, laughed at endurance, laughed at married love-- these things were only words to her. And when she had tugged with all her might at the problem before her, and tried, with her pitiable, untrained strength to force what she wished from Fate, then she had flung the whole thing aside, and rushed on to new experiments--and to new failures.

Always on the surface, always thinking of the impression she made on the watching men and women about her, what a life it had been!

She had never known who made Clarence's money, what his own father had been like, what the forces were that had formed him, and had made him what he was. He did not please her, that began and ended the story. He had presently flung himself into eternity with as little heed as she had cast herself into her new life.