The Heart of Rachael Part 33

Perhaps once a month Magsie came in to see Rachael, ready to pour tea, to flirt with any casual caller, or to tickle the roaring baby with the little fox head on her m.u.f.f. She had been playing in a minor part in a successful production. Among all the callers who came and went perhaps Magsie was the most at home in the Gregory house--a harmless little affectionate creature, unimportant, but always welcome.

Slowly health and strength came back, and one by one Rachael took up the dropped threads of her life. The early spring found her apparently herself again, but there was a touch of gray here and there in her dark hair, and Elinor and Judy told each other that her spirits were not the same.

They did not know what Rachael knew, that there was a change in Warren, so puzzling, so disquieting, that his wife's convalescence was delayed by many a wakeful hour and many a burst of secret tears on his account. She could not even a.n.a.lyze it, much less was she fit to battle with it with her old splendid strength and sanity.

His general att.i.tude toward her, in these days, was one of paternal and brisk kindliness. He liked her new gown, he didn't care much for that hat, she didn't look awfully well, better telephone old George, it wouldn't do to have her sick again! Yes, he was going out, unless she wanted him for something? She was reminded hideously of her old days with Clarence.

Shaken and weak still, she fought gallantly against the pain and bewilderment of the new problem. She invited the persons he liked to the house, she effaced her own claim, she tried to get him to talk of his cases. Sometimes, as the spring ripened, she planned whole days with him in the car. They would go up to Ossining and see the Perrys, or they would go to Jersey and spend the day with Doctor Cheseborough.

Perhaps Warren accepted these suggestions, and they had a cloudless day. Or when Sunday morning came, and the boys, coated and capped, were eager to start, he might evade them.

"I wonder if you'll feel badly, Petty, if I don't go?"

"Oh, WARREN!"

"Well, my dear, I've got some work to do. I ought to look up that meningitis case--the Italian child. Louise'll give me a bite of lunch--"

"But, dearest, that spoils our day!" Rachael would fling her wraps down, and face him ruefully. "How can I go alone!_ I don't want to. And it's SUCH a day, and the babies are so sweet--"

"There's no reason why you and the children shouldn't go." She had come to know that mild, almost reproachful, tone.

"Oh, but Warren, that spoils it all!"

"I'm sorry!"

Rachael would shut her lips firmly over protest. At best she might wring from him a reluctant change of mind and an annoyed offer of company which she must from sheer pride decline. At worst she would be treated with a dignified silence--the peevish and exacting woman who could not understand.

So she would go slowly down to the car, to Mary beaming beside Martin in the front seat, to the delicious boys tumbling about in the back, eager for Mother. With one on each side of her, a retaining hand on the little gaiters, she would wave the attentive husband and father an amiable farewell. The motor car would wheel about in the bare May suns.h.i.+ne, the river would be a ripple of dancing blue waves, morning riders would canter on the bridle- path, and white-frocked babies toddle along the paths. Such a morning for a ride, if only Warren were there! But Rachael would try to enjoy her run, and would eat Mrs. Perry's or Mrs.

Cheseborough's fried chicken and home-made ices with gracious enthusiasm; everyone was quite ready to excuse Warren; his beautiful wife was the more popular of the two.

He was always noticeably affectionate when they got home. Rachael, her color bright from sun and wind, would entertain him with a spirited account of the day while she dressed.

"I wish I'd gone with you; I will next time!" he invariably said.

On the next Sunday she might try another experience. No plans to- day. The initiative should be left to him. Breakfast would drag along until after ten o'clock, and Mary would appear with a low question. Were the boys to go out to the Park? Rachael would pause, undecided. Well, yes, Mary might take them, but bring them in early, in case Doctor Gregory wished to take them somewhere.

And ten minutes later he might jump up briskly. Well! how about a little run up to Pelham Manor, wonderful morning--could she go as she was? Rachael would beg for ten minutes; she might come downstairs in seven to find him wavering.

"Would you mind if we made it a pretty short run, dear, and then if I dropped you here and went on down to the hospital for a little while?"

"Why, Warren, it was your suggestion, dear! Why take a drive at all if you don't feel like it!"

"Oh, it's not that--I'm quite willing to. Where are the kids?"

"Mary took them out. They've got to be back for naps at half-past eleven, you see."

"I see." He would look at his watch. "Well, I'll tell you what I think I'll do. I'll change and shave now--" A pause. His voice would drop vaguely. "What would YOU like to do?" he might suggest amiably.

Such a conversation, so lacking in his old definite briskness where their holidays were concerned, would daunt Rachael with a sense of utter forlornness. Sometimes she offered a plan, but it was invariably rejected. There were friends who would have been delighted at an unexpected lunch call from the Gregorys, but Warren yawned and shuddered negatives when she mentioned their names. In the end, he would go off to the hospital for an hour or two, and later would telephone to his wife to explain a longer absence: he had met some of the boys at the club and they were rather urging him to stay to lunch; he couldn't very well decline.

"Would you like to have me come down and join you anywhere later?"

his wife might ask in the latter case.

"No, thank you, no. I may come straight home after lunch, and in that case I'd cross you. Boys all right?"

"Lovely." Rachael would sit at the telephone desk, after she had hung up the receiver, wrapped in bitter thought, a bewildered pain at her heart. She never doubted him; to-morrow good, old, homely, trustworthy George Valentine, whose wife and children were visiting Alice's mother in Boston, would speak of the bridge game at the club. But with his wife waiting for him at home, his wife who lived all the six days of the week waiting for this seventh day, why did he need the society of his men friends?

A commonplace retaliation might have suggested itself to her, but there was no fighting instinct in Rachael now. She did not want to pique him, to goad him, to flirt with him. He should be hers honorably and openly, without devices, without intrigue. Stirred to the deeps of her being by wifehood and motherhood, by her pa.s.sionate love for her husband and children, it was a humiliating thought that she must coquette with and flatter other men. As a matter of fact, she found it difficult to talk with any interest of anything except Warren, his work and his plans, of Jimmy and Derry, and perhaps of Home Dunes. If it were a matter of necessity she might always turn to the new plays and books, the opera of the season, or the bill for tenement requirements or juvenile delinquents, but mere personalities and intrigue she knew no more.

These matters were all of secondary interest to her now; it seemed to Rachael that the time had come when mere personalities, when bridge and c.o.c.ktails and dancing and half-true scandals were not satisfying.

"Warren," she said one evening when the move to Home Dunes was near, "should you be sorry if I began to go regularly to church again?"

"No," he said indifferently, giving her rather a surprised glance over his book. "Churchgoing coming in again?"

"It's not that," Rachael said, smiling over a little sense of pain, "but I--I like it. I want the boys to think that their mother goes to church and prays--and I really want to do it myself!"

He smiled, as always a little intolerant of what sounded like sentiment.

"Oh, come, my dear! Long before the boys are old enough to remember it you'll have given it up again!"

"I hope not," Rachael said, sighing. "I wish I had never stopped.

I wish I were one of these mild, nice, village women who put out clean stockings for the children every Sat.u.r.day night, and clean s.h.i.+rts and ginghams, and lead them all into a pew Sunday morning, and teach them the Golden Rule, and to honor their father and their mother, and all the rest of it!"

"And what do you think you would gain by that?" Warren asked.

"Oh, I would gain--security," Rachael said vaguely, but with a suspicion of tears in her eyes. "I would have something to--to stand upon, to be guided by. There is a purity, an austerity, about that old church-going, loving-G.o.d-and-your-neighbor ideal.

Truth and simplicity and integrity and uprightness--my old great- grandmother used to use those words, but one doesn't ever hear them any more! Everything's half black and half white nowadays; we're all as good or as bad as we happen to be born. There's no more discipline, no more self-denial, no more development of character! I want to--to hold on to something, now that forces I can't control are coming into my life."

"What do you mean by forces you can't control?" he asked with a sort of annoyed interest.

"Love, Warren," she answered quickly. "Love for you and the boys, and fear for you and the boys. Love always brings fear. And illness--I never thought of it before I was ill. And jealousy--"

"What have you got to be jealous of?" he asked, somewhat gruffly, as she paused.

"Your work," Rachael said simply; "everything that keeps you away from me!"

"And you think going to Saint Luke's every Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, and listening to Billy Graves, will fix it all up?" he smiled not unkindly. But as she did not answer his smile, and as the tears he disliked came into her eyes, his tone changed.

"Now I'll tell you what's the matter with you, my dear," he said with a brisk kindliness that cut her far more just then than severity would have done, "you're all wound up in self-a.n.a.lysis and psychologic self-consciousness, and you're spinning round and round in your own ent.i.ty like a kitten chasing her tail. It's a perfectly recognizable phase of a sort of minor hysteria that often gets hold of women, and curiously enough, it usually comes about five or six years after marriage. We doctors meet it over and over again. 'But, Doctor, I'm so nervous and excited all the time, and I don't sleep! I worry so--and much as I love my husband, I just can't help worrying!'"

Looking up and toward his wife as she sat opposite him in the lamp-light, Warren Gregory found no smile on the beautiful face.

Rachael's hurt was deeper than her pride; she looked stricken.

"Don't put yourself in their cla.s.s, my dear!" her husband said leniently. "You need some country air. You'll get down to Clark's Hills in a week or two and blow some of these notions away.

Meanwhile, why don't you run down to the club every morning, and play a good smas.h.i.+ng game of squash, and take a plunge. Put yourself through a little training!" He reopened his book.

Rachael did not answer. Presently glancing at her he saw that she was reading, too.