The Torch Bearer Part 14

She never spared herself by reflecting that she had not been reluctant for motherhood until Ted had shown his antagonism to the work that was already the child of her brain, and Mrs. North had, from her different viewpoint, justified his att.i.tude. She never conceded in her behalf that it had not even occurred to her, until then, to regard motherhood and art as conflicting elements, and that it was the shock of seeing them thus in her own life that had made her temporarily resentful of maternity. She never excused or exonerated herself by that ultimate joy of motherhood which had possessed her so utterly. She had not been glad in the beginning; later, she had not been glad enough to give him--her little, helpless son--all her life. How, indeed, could she hope to keep him now?

Over and over this she went; and all the while she kept on about her tasks, deft, skillful, terribly calm.

Mrs. Caldwell observed her with an alarm hardly less than she felt for the child. "It will kill Sheila if Eric dies," she said to Ted.

"Yes," he groaned, "I think it will."

"What is it, Ted?--the thing that's eating into her heart? There's more here than even a mother's grief."

"She was writing a story when--when Lila exposed the boy to the fever.

Of course, if she hadn't been--! Oh, poor Sheila!--poor Sheila!" he ended brokenly.

For all blame had gone out of Ted; his gentleness to Sheila was no longer that of forbearance, but of an immense and inarticulate pity.

It racked him that he could not stand between her and her contrition, her pitiful sorrow; it hurt him intolerably that he could not hold them from her with his very hands. Almost he lost the sense of his own sick pain in watching hers. Once he tried to take her in his arms and comfort her. "Don't suffer so!" he pleaded. "Don't suffer so!"

But she pulled away from him, denying herself the solace of his sympathy. "I can't suffer _enough_!" she cried. "I can _never_ suffer enough to atone for what I've done!"

There came a night when they put Sheila out of the room--Mrs. Caldwell and Ted; literally put her out, with hands so tender and so firm.

"I have a right to be with him when he dies!" she cried.

"Sheila--he will need you to-morrow. You _must_ rest--for his sake."

So they sought to deceive and compel her.

"No," she insisted, "he will not need me to-morrow. But he needs me now--to die with."

"He may not die."

"He 'may' not die. You don't say he _will_ not die! Oh, he will die!--and he's too little to die without his mother!"

And then they put her out.

Ted led her away to the room where she was to "rest" and shut her within it, and she lay down on the couch as he had bidden her to do.

It was easy enough to be obedient in this, since she was barred out from the one place where she yearned to be. Since she could not be there, it did not matter where she was or what she did. It was easiest just to do what she was told.

She knew only too well that she had spoken truly when she had said that her little son might die that night. She knew only too surely why she had been shut out. And almost she submitted--the blow seemed so certain, so close. The despair that resembles resignation in its apathy almost conquered her, as she waited for the hand of death to strike.

But while she waited, lying in the quiet darkness, there suddenly came to her the idea that she might still save Eric. Morbid from grief and fatigue, she had not a doubt that his death was a "judgment" on herself; a punishment. Because she had neglected him for her own selfish ends; nay, more, because she had not been glad of his coming in the beginning, G.o.d was about to take him from her. She was mercilessly sure of this--sure with the awakened blood, the inherited traditions of many Calvinistic ancestors, the stern forefathers of her father. Her own more liberal faith, her personal conception of a G.o.d benignant and very tender, went down before that grim heritage of more rigorous consciences. But with the self-conviction springing from that heritage, there came, too, the suggestion that she might make her peace with G.o.d; that with sufficient proof of her penitence, she might prevail upon Him to spare Eric.

Again and again the suggestion reached her, in the "still, small voice"

which may have been the voice of her own inner self, or of the surviving, guiding souls of her ancestors, or of G.o.d Himself. Again and again it spoke to her--whatever it was, from whatever source it rose; again and again, until it was still and small no longer, but strong and purposeful, and its message unmistakable.

She could but heed it--thankfully. And so she began to cast about in her mind for the proof of her contrition. It could be no light thing, no trivial surrender of self. It must be a sacrifice--a sacrifice such as the ancient tribes of Israel would have offered an incensed G.o.d. It must be--she saw it in a flas.h.!.+--it must be her work.

"If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into h.e.l.l.

"And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into h.e.l.l."

This, then, must she do. She must pluck out that thing which had offended her, which had betrayed her into a sin against her own motherhood, and cast it from her. She must pluck out her gift and offer it up in expiation.

And so she knelt there in the darkness and tendered her sacrifice; so she thrust from her the thing which had been so dear to her; so she entered into her compact with G.o.d.

"Oh, G.o.d, grant me my child's life, and I will never write again. I have sinned in selfishness and vanity, but I am repentant and will sin no more. I have plucked out my right eye. I have cut off my right hand. I have cast my gifts from me forever. Grant me my son's life, and I will never write again!"

Hour after hour she entreated G.o.d to make terms with her. The night crept by, slow-footed and silent, but she was not aware of the pa.s.sing of time, or of the deepening of the stillness within the house, or of the quivering of the sword above her head. She no longer listened for sounds from that distant room. She no longer strove to pierce the intervening walls with her mother's sixth sense. She heard nothing but the voice which had counselled her; she strove for nothing but to obey that voice. Her whole being concentrated itself into a prayer. She was conscious only of herself and G.o.d, and of her pa.s.sionate effort to reach Him.

"Oh, G.o.d, _hear_ me! I have sinned, but I will sin no more. My heart is broken with remorse. I will never write again!"

So she pleaded with G.o.d throughout the long night. And pitiful and insolent as was her bargaining, G.o.d must have found in it something to weigh.

For with the first light of the morning, Ted opened the door--and there was light in his worn face, too.

"Sheila--_Sheila_!----"

And then they fell into each other's arms, sobbing--sobbing as they could not have done if their little son had died.

CHAPTER XI

With tragic sincerity Sheila had entered into the compact for her son's life, and she kept it to the letter. She saw no reason why she should have a poorer sense of honor toward G.o.d than she had toward men and women; her child had been spared to her, and henceforth it was for her to fulfill her part, to keep her given word.

She had never understood, indeed, why people made--and broke--promises to G.o.d so lightly. She had found them ready enough to complain if they considered G.o.d unjust to them, but they never seemed to think that it mattered whether they were "square" with G.o.d or not. To them He was a sort of divine creditor who need not be paid. They even made it a proof of reverence--a comfortable proof!--to place Him far above the consideration they had to show their fellow men. This viewpoint was impossible to Sheila. Morbid, hysterical, as her offered price for Eric's life had been, she felt herself bound, and she paid punctiliously.

It was easy enough thus to pay as she watched her child growing strong and rosy again. His little life--Ah, what was it not worth? A dozen times a day the memory of that night when she had believed that he would die sent her shuddering to her knees with fresh prayers and promises. And always the recollection of that loss escaped roused in her a very pa.s.sion of thanksgiving. She had her son!--that was her answer to all the dreams which, unrealized, sometimes stole back to tempt her with their wistful faces.

When Eric was well enough for her now and then to leave him--at first she could not leave him lest, with her sheltering hands removed, his life should flicker out--she gave burial to the little brain children that, for the child of her body, she had sacrificed. Every bit of verse, every little sketch, and the unfinished story which was, in her sight, most guilty, and most dear of all, she laid away; not with ribbon and lavender and rites of sentiment and tears, but sternly, barely, ruthlessly, as one puts away things discarded by the heart itself. She might have burned them less harshly, and that she did not was only because she conceived it a finer deed to keep them and resist them. So she put her honor to the uttermost test.

It was thus, and with her own hands, she poured her life into the mould Ted had desired for it; it was thus she thrust from her all that did not pertain to her husband and her child and her home. Yet between Ted and herself not a word about it pa.s.sed. He never reproached her for what her writing had so nearly cost them; he never asked her to give it up; he never even inquired as to whether she were still pursuing it.

He simply stood aloof from that element in her, with what queer mixture of disapproval and pride and magnanimity she could but guess.

They continued to be happy together, the happier as the months pa.s.sed and Ted saw her more and more his and Eric's. In the beginning he had probably thought that, after the shock of Eric's peril receded, Sheila would try to write again; that fear must have lurked behind his non-committal silence; but time gave him his security about it. Sheila never told him of the compact of that anguished night, but gradually he became as sure that she had given up her talent forever as if he had heard her pledge. "Little wife!" he often called her, "Little mother!"

And always it was as if he said to her, "What other name could be half so sweet?"

And she told herself that he was right. Never had there been a better husband. And to be loved by a man like that, a man clean and fine and kind; to be the mother of such a man's child, she was very certain was worth more to a woman than any other honors or fulfillments which life could bring her. She had known that always, even when she first discovered--so bitterly!--that Ted was not in sympathy with her gift and her ambitions; and she knew it more surely as time went on. There were moments when she wished ardently that the sympathy between them had been more absolute; when she thought that, happy as she was, she would have been happier if their tastes had gone hand-in-hand like their hearts. But there was never a time when she would have exchanged Ted for any other man, or when she felt it possible to have done without him. There are women who, married, feed their discontents with visions of what life could have been in freedom or with some other man than they have chosen. Sheila was not of this sort. Having crossed the threshold of marriage, she did not look behind her at the alluring--and elusive--road of might-have-been.

She hoped, now, for other children. With this utter surrender of herself to the woman's life, there came to her the longing for many children, for all her arms could hold. The sum of that creative force which, under different circ.u.mstances, would have flowed into her work, all its denied pa.s.sion and vitality, was trans.m.u.ted into the instinct of motherhood. Because of her creative gift, there was literally more life within her, more life to bestow, and so, the channel of artistic expression being closed to her, she yearned to spend it all upon maternity; to have, indeed, as many children as her arms could hold.

Had these desired children come to her, peace might have been hers finally and entirely. But the desire was not granted. Eric grew out of his babyhood to a fine, st.u.r.dy boyhood, and was still the only child. And now Sheila, a woman of thirty and ten years married, began to feel again, and more strongly than ever in her life, the urge of her gift, the unrest of dreams stifled, thwarted, but never destroyed.

She had made a compact with G.o.d, and she continued to keep it; but more and more hunger stared out of her eyes and a nervous restlessness betrayed itself in her manner. She was happy, but she was not satisfied. Something clamored in her unappeased.

If she had lived in a large city, there would at least have been food, if not activity, for that clamoring, aching thing within her. There would have been pictures and music and plays to lift her, at times, into the world of poetic beauty for which she longed. But Shadyville could offer nothing to one of her mental quality; as a girl she had found diversion in its social gaiety, but as a matron, the mother of a nine-year-old son, even the social life of the town was restricted for her to card-parties and the doubtful amus.e.m.e.nt of chaperonage.

For in Shadyville, the young married people early abdicated in favor of those still younger, those still seeking mates. Society was, in fact, merely a means of finding one's mate, so primitive had the little town remained; companions.h.i.+p between men and women, save as an opportunity for the eternal quest, was unknown. Wives and mothers sat placidly, or wearily, against the walls at dances, watching the game of man and maid, and slaked their thirst for entertainment, for stimulating comrades.h.i.+p, at the afternoon teas and bridge parties of their own s.e.x.

Now and then a reading club or a study cla.s.s was organized, a nave effort toward an understanding of things which Shadyville vaguely perceived to be of importance beyond its boundaries; and always the cla.s.s or club died of insufficient nourishment. Within thirty miles of a large town, the life of Shadyville remained uncorrupted--and unimproved; a healthy, simple, joyous affair of the love-quest in youth; a healthy, simple, and usually contented, matter of home-making and child-rearing later. Sheila, having stepped over into the second stage with her marriage, was not supposed to feel any longings which her domestic existence could not satisfy; and feeling them, in defiance of Shadyville's standards and traditions, she could but suppress and starve them.