Part 26 (2/2)

I was living alone at the Willard.

Soon after the death of Burbank's wife, his sister and brother-in-law, the Gracies, had come with their three children to live with him and to look after his boy and girl. Trouble between his family and mine, originating in some impertinences of the oldest Gracie girl, spread from the children to the grown people until, when he went into the White House, he and I were the only two on speaking terms. I see now that this situation had large influence on me in holding aloof and waiting always for overtures from him. At the time I thought, as no doubt he thought also, that the quarrel was beneath the notice of men.

At any rate my family decided not to come to Was.h.i.+ngton during his first winter in the White House. I lived alone at the Willard. One afternoon toward the end of February I returned there from the Senate and found Woodruff, bad news in his face. ”What is it?” I asked indifferently, for I a.s.sumed it was some political tangle.

”Your wife--was taken--very ill--very suddenly,” he said. His eyes told me the rest.

If I had ever asked myself how this news would affect me, I should have answered that it would give me a sensation of relief. But, instead of relief, I felt the stunning blow of a wave of sorrow which has never wholly receded. Not because I loved her--that I never did. Not because she was the mother of my children--my likes and dislikes are direct and personal. Not because she was my wife--that bond had been galling. Not because I was fond of her--she had one of those cold, angry natures that forbid affection. No; I was overwhelmed because she and I had been intimates, with all the closest interests of life in common, with the whole world, even my children whom I loved pa.s.sionately, outside that circle which fate had drawn around us two. I imagine this is not uncommon among married people,--this unhealable break in their routine of a.s.sociation when one departs. No doubt it often pa.s.ses with the unthinking for love belatedly discovered.

”She did not suffer,” said Woodruff gently. ”It was heart disease. She had just come in from a ride with your oldest daughter. They were resting and talking in high spirits by the library fire. And then--the end came--like putting out the light.”

Heart disease! Often I had noted the irregular beat of her heart--a throb, a long pause, a flutter, a short pause, a throb. And I could remember that more than once the sound had been followed by the shadowy appearance, in the door of my mind, of one of those black thoughts which try to tempt hope but only make it hide in shame and dread. Now, the memory of those occasions tormented me into accusing myself of having wished her gone. But it was not so.

She had told me she had heart trouble; but she had confided to no one that she knew it might bring on the end at any moment. She left a letter, sealed and addressed to me:

Harvey--

I shall never have the courage to tell you, yet I feel you ought to know. I think every one attributes to every one else less shrewdness than he possesses. I know you have never given me the credit of seeing that you did not love me. And you were so kind and considerate and so patient with my moods that no doubt I should have been deceived had I not known what love is. I think, to have loved and to have been loved develops in a woman a sort of sixth sense--sensitiveness to love. And that had been developed in me, and when it never responded to your efforts to deceive me, I knew you did not love me.

Well, neither did I love you, though I was able to hide it from you. And it has often irritated me that you were so un.o.bservant.

You know now the cause of many of my difficult moods, which have seemed causeless.

I admired you from the first time we met. I have liked you, I have been proud of you, I would not have been the wife of any other man in the world, I would not have had any other father for my children. But I have kept on loving the man I loved before I met you.

Why? I don't know. I despised him for his weaknesses. I should never have married him, though mother and Ed both feared I would. I think I loved him because I knew he loved me. That is the way it is with women--they seldom love independently. Men like to love; women like to be loved. And, poor, unworthy creature that he was, still he would have died for me, though G.o.d had denied him the strength to live for me. But all that G.o.d gave him--the power to love--he gave me. And so he was different in my eyes from what he was in any one's else in the world. And I loved him.

I don't tell you this because I feel regret or remorse. I don't; there never was a wife truer than I, for I put him completely aside. I tell you, because I want you to remember me right after I'm gone, Harvey dear. You may remember how I was silly and jealous of you, and think I am mistaken about my own feelings. But jealousy doesn't mean love. When people really love, I think it's seldom that they're jealous. What makes people jealous usually is suspecting the other person of having the same sort of secret they have themselves. It hurt my vanity that you didn't love me; and it stung me to think you cared for some one else, just as I did.

I want you to remember me gently. And somehow I think that, after you've read this, you will, even if you did love some one else. If you ever see this at all, Harvey--and I may tear it up some day on impulse--but if you ever do see it, I shall be dead, and we shall both be free. And I want you to come to me and look at me and--

It ended thus abruptly. No doubt she had intended to open the envelope and finish it--but, what more was there to say?

I think she must have been content with the thoughts that were in my mind as I looked down at her lying in death's inscrutable calm. I had one of my secretaries hunt out the man she had loved--a sad, stranded wreck of a man he had become; but since that day he has been sheltered at least from the worst of the bufferings to which his incapacity for life exposed him.

There was a time when I despised incapables; then I pitied them; but latterly I have felt for them the sympathetic sense of brotherhood. Are we not all incapables? Differing only in degree, and how slightly there, if we look at ourselves without vanity; like practice-sketches put upon the slate by Nature's learning hand and impatiently sponged away.

x.x.x

A PHILOSOPHER RUDELY INTERRUPTED

After the funeral I lingered at our Fredonia place. There was the estate to settle; my two daughters had now no one to look after them; Junior must be started right at learning the business of which he would soon be the head, as his uncle had shown himself far too easy-going for large executive responsibility. So, I stayed on, doing just enough to keep a face of plausibility upon my pretexts for not returning to Was.h.i.+ngton.

The fact was that Carlotta's death had deepened my mood of distaste into disgust. It had set me to brooding over the futility and pettiness of my activities in politics, of all activities of whatever kind. I watched Ed and my children resuming the routine of their lives, swiftly adjusting themselves to the loss of one who had been so dear to them and apparently so necessary to their happiness. The cry of ”man overboard,”

a few ripples, a few tears; the sailing on, with the surface of the water smooth again and the faces keen and bright.

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