The Torch Bearer Part 20

"It could not be happiness for her," argued Peter.

"Perhaps not. Perhaps she could do without happiness."

"That would require a great love of her," said Peter gravely, "a great love for a man who could not give a great love in return."

"Yes," she agreed, her voice very low now, but as clear and steady as ever, "yes, it would require a great love from her. But it is not impossible to find a woman who can feel a great love without hope of a full return."

She was still in her sheltering shadow, but upon Peter's end of the garden seat the moonlight, unchecked by the trees, streamed white and strong. She looked into his face, fully revealed to her now, and she realized, before he spoke, that he was going to refuse her sacrifice; she realized it because she saw in his face a deeper emotion for her than he had ever shown before. He loved her not enough--and yet too much!--to marry her. She saw that and was prepared for his next words.

"To such a woman the man I have in mind could not give less than his best," he said. And there was no longer any question, any hesitancy in his tone. "To one so generous no man could be ungenerous--I should have known that! Perhaps," he went on, with a note of distress and apology, "perhaps such things should not be talked about. Perhaps it is--humiliating----"

"To me the truth could never be humiliating," she answered, with quick rea.s.surance.

"Then it is best to speak it?" he pleaded, as if for self-justification. "Then it is best to speak it, after all? For it does make things--plain; it does show one the right, the decent course."

"It's best to speak it," she a.s.sented kindly; and she held out her hand to him.

He lifted her hand and kissed it. And when he spoke again, his voice faltered: "When a man knows a woman like you, Charlotte, he sees that happiness--or unhappiness--doesn't matter so much as he's thought.

There are other things--better things--to live for. You've found them--and now I'm going to find them, too, my dear."

So, for the second time that day, Peter went from a woman who loved him. The night and the stars and the flowers had done their best to quicken his pulses; to blur his vision of the truth; to blunt his sense of absolute, unswerving honor. But in the end Charlotte herself had defeated what the night was fain to do for her with its witchery; she had defeated the night's intents with her measureless honesty and generosity--to which Peter's own generosity and honesty could but respond. To use a woman like Charlotte as a barrier between himself and another woman was impossible to him. Neither for Sheila's safety, nor for any benefit to himself, could he do a thing so base. He recognized now that marriage with Charlotte--even without that utter love he had given to Sheila--might be a gracious, even a happy destiny for him. But having found her so ready to sacrifice herself, he could not sacrifice her. He could not rob her of the chance of being loved as she could love. Such a love might come to her some day; he could but leave her free for it.

As he walked homeward along the silent, wide street, other gardens than Charlotte's flung their fragrance to him; the night still whispered to him of the sweetness of being loved, of all those compensations from which he had turned away. But he was not allured; he was not vanquished. His course stretched before him--through the befogging, unmanning sweetness--to daylight and self-respect and an uncompromising sincerity of life. It stretched before him farther than he could descry--as far as the great fighting, suffering, achieving world. Mrs.

Caldwell had once told him that he had never grown up, and that some day he would have to grow up; that there could be no escape for him.

She had been right about it. Until now he had not grown up. Not even in his love for Sheila and the pain of it, had he grown up. He had been like a child playing in a garden, and though the sweetest rose there had torn him with its thorns, he had stayed on in the garden.

But now he was a child no longer; there had been no escape from growing up. He had put it off a long time--more than half his lifetime perhaps--but he had not been able to put it off forever. And now, yielding at last, he was willing to leave his garden; he was willing to go out into the world of men.

As he neared the hotel where he lived, he met Ted Kent, quitting his office--going home to Sheila.

At once Ted stopped and put out his hand. For in his mind no hostility against Peter had lingered. Indeed, on the occasion when he had upbraided Sheila about Peter, he had felt very little animosity toward Peter himself, and several months having pa.s.sed in a strict compliance to his wishes on Sheila's part, the whole matter had almost vanished from his memory. His was not a nature to cherish resentment, to brood over fancied wrongs; he liked to be at peace with all his fellow-men and upon genial terms with them. He was animated by a distinct cordiality toward Peter now, as he extended his hand to him.

"Been calling on the girls, Burnett?" he inquired jovially.

"On one of them," admitted Peter.

"Well, it's been a long while since I did anything like that--a long while. And I'm not sorry either. There's nothing like your slippers and your pipe and your paper at home! When I have to work late, as I did to-night, it's a real hards.h.i.+p. Have a drink with me before I go on?"

"Thanks," said Peter pleasantly, "but I'm in a bit of a hurry. I've got to pack up. I'm leaving town in the morning."

"Leaving town? For a vacation?"

"No, for work. I've had a job offered me in New York. Brentwood, of the Brentwood Publis.h.i.+ng Company, has been asking me to come to them for years, and I've finally decided to go."

"High-brows, aren't they--the Brentwood Company?" Ted questioned, somewhat impressed.

"Perhaps you'd call them so. They publish real literature--a good many translations; that's what they want me for."

"Well, well," pursued Ted, still detaining him, "and so you're going to leave little old Shadyville for good! And after spending all your days here, too--after making so many friends. I believe you'll miss us, Burnett!"

"I'm sure I shall," agreed Peter, with patient courtesy.

"Then why go? It may be a good change for you in ways, but I'm convinced there's more to be said against it than for it. For the life of me, I can't see why you're doing it."

"No," said Peter, a little drily, "you wouldn't see, Kent. But I'm sure it's the only thing to do. Tell Sheila I think so, please, and that I send her my good-byes."

"You aren't going to tell her good-bye yourself?"

"I'm afraid I can't." And as Peter spoke, he was acutely conscious of all that Ted did not see, of all that he would never understand. "I'm afraid I can't--I start early in the morning."

"All right! You know what's best for yourself, no doubt. Sorry you can't say good-bye to Sheila, though--she cares a lot for you, as much as if you were one of the family. I'll give her your message, but she'll be disappointed that you didn't deliver it yourself. Good luck to you, old man, and don't forget us!" And shaking hands again, Ted went cheerfully on his homeward way, serenely unaware of the sorrow--and of the irony!--that had confronted him from Peter's quiet eyes.

Up in his little room, Peter began to carry out his sudden plan for leaving Shadyville. It was true that he had had an offer, more than once, from Brentwood. Brentwood had been a chum of his at college, a friend who had never ceased to remember and appreciate him. The offer was still open, and it solved Peter's problem. He had told Sheila that he would marry Charlotte or do something else that would answer as well. He found that something else in going away.

He had not many possessions; shabby clothes--with an air to them; shabby books--that shone with their inner grace. The books took longest, and when he had finished packing them, it was dawn. He went to his window and watched the slow coming of the light, and in that silent, gray hour, he felt himself more alone than he had ever been.

Everything seemed to have been stripped from him; this town where he had been born, and where generations of his family had been born before him; his friends; the little room, so dismantled now, that for years had been his home-place; all these--and his hope of happy love. He remembered how, in his early, romantic boyhood, he had hoped for that--for happy love; and now that hope was gone and everything was gone with it. Everything was gone because of Sheila; he had given up everything that she might be safe, that she might have peace--the peace, at least, of being unafraid. He thought of her now with a calm tenderness--as if, having given so much for her peace, he had somehow gained peace for himself, too. And then he thought of Charlotte, and it was for Charlotte, not for Sheila, that tears--a man's slow, difficult tears--forced themselves into his eyes.

But Charlotte was strong. It was her strength that had roused strength in him; strength to leave the garden, to escape the insinuating, ensnaring sweetness of the night and go forth into the daylight world of men.

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 companions.h.i.+p 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 circ.u.mstances.

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 G.o.d 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 hara.s.sed 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 emanc.i.p.ation--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 h.o.a.rded, 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 s.h.i.+ne through the cunningly chosen medium of her simple, una.s.suming phrases! She had seen it s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sionate preoccupation, the little golden nugget of it--the simple, delicate phrases that were to reveal, to exploit it, did not appear.

She had always written with a singular ease, and it seemed strange to sit before her tempting pages and write not a word. But on the first morning, she felt no alarm. After all, it was but natural that she should have to spend some time in coaxing it out to the light--that talent of hers so long confined. It was but natural that it should not have courage to soar and sing at once. But on the second day her paper was as empty as before; it lay upon her table like a useless snare for some wild and lovely bird that no longer had vitality enough to flutter within reach of it.

And now, sitting at her writing-table in vain for several days, fear seized upon Sheila, fear that she would not name or a.n.a.lyze.

Well, as one grew older, one often wrote differently, with more difficulty. She had heard that, she reflected eagerly. She had heard that deliberate, intellectual effort had often to succeed the flushed, panting rush of youthful inspiration. This was probably the case with her now; of course it was, indeed. She must undertake the effort; she must accept and master a new method. Then all would be right with her.

And so she went about deliberately translating the gold of her idea into those dreamed-of words which were so fitly to interpret it. She went about it with an energy, a will to accomplish the feat, that should have been sufficient to achieve miracles. If there had been, hitherto, a strain of weakness in her, she was now all strength. And by that sheer strength--of purpose, of determination--she sought to realize her dream of perfection.