THE REMORSE OF WONDERING NANCY

She awoke to the sun, glad-hearted and made newly buoyant by one of those soundless black sleeping-nights that come only to the town-tired when they have first fled.  She ran to the glass to know if the restoration she felt might also be seen.  With unbiassed calculation the black-fringed lids drew apart and one hand pushed back of the temple, and held there, a tangled skein of hair that had thrown the dusk of a deep wood about her eyes.  Then, as she looked, came the little dreaming smile that unfitted critic eyes for their office; a smile that wakened to a laugh as she looked ­a little womanish chuckle of confident joy, as one alone speaking aloud in an overflowing moment.

An hour later she was greeting Bernal where the sun washed through the big room.

“Young life sings in me!” she said, and felt his lightening eyes upon her lips as she smiled.

There were three days of it ­days in which, however, she grew to fear those eyes, lest they fall upon her in judgment.  She now saw that his eyes had changed most.  They gave the face its look of absence, of dreaming awkwardness.  They had the depth of a hazy sky at times, then cleared to a coldly lucid glance that would see nothing ever to fear, within or without; that would hide no falseness nor yet be deceived by any ­a deadly half-shut, appraising coolness that would know false from true, even though they mated amicably and distractingly in one mind.

The effect of this glance which she found upon herself from time to time was to make Nancy suspect herself ­to question her motives and try her defenses.  To her amazement she found these latter weak under Bernal’s gaze, and there grew in her a tender remorse for the injustice she had done her husband.  From little pricking suspicions on the first day she came on the last to conviction.  It seemed that being with Bernal had opened her eyes to Allan’s worth.  She had narrowly, flippantly misjudged a good man ­good in all essentials.  She was contrite for her unwifely lack of abnegation.  She began to see herself and Allan with Bernal’s eyes:  she was less than she had thought ­he was more.  Bernal had proved these things to her all unconsciously.  Now her heart was flooded with gratitude for his simple, ready, heartfelt praise of his brother ­of his unfailing good-temper, his loyalty, his gifts, his modesty so often distressed by outspoken admiration of his personal graces.  She listened and applauded with a heart that renewed itself in all good resolves of devotion.  Even when Bernal talked of himself, he made her feel that she had been unjust to Allan.

Little by little she drew many things from him ­the story of his journeyings and of his still more intricate mental wanderings.  And it thrilled her to think he had come back with a message ­even though he already doubted himself.  Sometimes he would be jocular about it and again hot with a passion to express himself.

“Nance,” he said on another night, “when you have a real faith in God a dead man is a miracle not less than a living ­and a live man dying is quite as wondrous as a dead man living.  Do you know, I was staggered one day by discovering that the earth didn’t give way when I stepped on it?  The primitive man knowing little of physics doesn’t know that a child’s hand could move the earth through space ­but for a certain mysterious resistance.  That’s God.  I felt him all that day, at every step, pushing the little globe back under me ­counteracting me ­resisting me ­ever so gently.  Those are times when you feel you must tell it, Nance ­when the God-consciousness comes.”

“Oh, Bernal, if you could ­if you could come back to do what your grandfather really wanted you to do ­to preach something worth while!”

“I doubt the need for my message, Nance.  I need for myself a God that could no more spare a Hottentot than a Pope ­but I doubt if the world does.  No one would listen to me ­I’m only a dreamer.  Once, when I was small they gave me a candy cane for Christmas.  It was a thing I had long worshipped in shop-windows ­actually worshipped as the primitive man worshipped his idol.  I can remember how sad I was when no one else worshipped with me, or paid the least attention to my treasure.  I suspect I shall meet the same indifference now.  And I hope I’ll have the same philosophy.  I remember I brought myself to eat the cane, which I suppose is the primary intention regarding them ­and perhaps the fruits of one’s faith should be eaten quite as practically.”

They had sent no word to Allan, agreeing it were better fun to surprise him.  When they took the train together on the third day, the wife not less than the brother looked forward to a joyous reunion with him.  And now that Nancy had proved in her heart the perverse unwifeliness of her old attitude and was eager to begin the symbolic rites of her atonement, it came to her to wonder how Bernal would have judged her had she persisted in that first wild impulse of rebellion.  She wanted to see from what degree of his reprobation she had saved herself.  She would be circuitous in her approach.

“You remember, Bernal, that night you went away ­how you said there was no moral law under the sky for you but your own?”

He smiled, and above the noise of the train his voice came to her as his voice of old came above the noise of the years.

“Yes ­Nance ­that was right.  No moral law but mine.  I carried out my threat to make them all find their authority in me.”

“Then you still believe yours is the only authority?”

“Yes; it sounds licentious and horrible, doesn’t it; but there are two queer things about it ­the first is that man quite naturally wishes to be decent, and the second is that, when he does come to rely wholly upon the authority within himself, he finds it a stricter disciplinarian than ever the decalogue was.  One needs only ordinary good taste to keep the ten commandments ­the moral ones.  A man may observe them all and still be morally rotten!  But it’s no joke to live by one’s own law, and yet that’s all anybody has to keep him right, if we only knew it, Nance ­barring a few human statutes against things like murder and keeping one’s barber-shop open on the Sabbath ­the ruder offenses which no gentleman ever wishes to commit.

“And must poor woman be ruled by her own God, too?”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s not so long ago that the fathers of the Church were debating in council whether she had a soul or not, charging her with bringing sin, sickness and death into the world.”

“Exactly.  St. John Damascene called her ’a daughter of falsehood and a sentinel of hell’; St. Jerome came in with ’Woman is the gate of the devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion’; St. Gregory, I believe, considered her to have no comprehension of goodness; pious old Tertullian complimented her with corrupting those whom Satan dare not attack; and then there was St. Chrysostom ­really he was much more charitable than his fellow Saints ­it always seemed to me he was not only more humane but more human ­more interested, you might say.  You know he said, ’Woman is a necessary evil, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, a painted ill.’  It always seemed to me St. Chrysostom had a past.  But really, I think they all went too far.  I don’t know woman very well, but I suspect she has to find her moral authority where man finds his ­within herself.”

“You know what made me ask ­a little woman in town came to see Allan not long ago to know if she mightn’t leave her husband ­she had what seemed to her sufficient reason.”

“I imagine Allan said ‘no.’”

“He did.  Would you have advised her differently?”

“Bless you, no.  I’d advise her to obey her priest.  The fact that she consulted him shows that she has no law of her own.  St. Paul said this wise and deep thing:  ’I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him that esteemeth anything unclean, to him it is unclean!’”

“Then it lay in her own view of it.  If she had felt free to go, she would have done right to go.”

“Naturally.”

“Yet Allan talked to her about the sanctity of the home.”

“I doubt if the sanctity of the home is maintained by keeping unwilling mates together, Nance.  I can imagine nothing less sanctified than a home of that sort ­peopled by a couple held together against the desire of either or both.  The willing mates need no compulsion, and they’re the ones, it seems to me, that have given the home its reputation for sanctity.  I never thought much about divorce, but I can see that much at once.  Of course, Allan takes the Church’s attitude, which survives from a time when a woman was bought and owned; when the God of Moses classed her with the ox and the ass as a thing one must not covet.”

“You really think if a woman has made a failure of her marriage she has a right to break it.”

“That seems sound as a general law, Nance ­better for her to make a hundred failures, for that matter, than stay meekly in the first because of any superstition.  But, mind you, if she suspects that the Church may, after all, have succeeded in tying up the infinite with red-tape and sealing-wax ­believes that God is a large, dark notary-public who has recorded her marriage in a book ­she will do better to stay.  Doubtless the conceit of it will console her ­that the God who looks after the planets has an eye on her, to see that she makes but one guess about so uncertain a thing as a man.”

“Then you would advise ­”

“No, I wouldn’t.  The woman who has to be advised should never take advice.  I dare say divorce is quite as hazardous as marriage, though possibly most people divorce with a somewhat riper discretion than they marry with.  But the point is that neither marriage nor divorce can be considered a royal road to happiness, and a woman ought to get her impetus in either case from her own inner consciousness.  I should call divorcing by advice quite as silly as marrying by it.”

“But it comes at last to her own law in her own heart?”

“When she has awakened to it ­when she honestly feels it.  God’s law for woman is the same as for man ­and he has but two laws for both that are universal and unchanging:  The first is, they are bound at all times to desire happiness; the second is, that they can be happy only by being wise ­which is what we sometimes mean when we say ‘good,’ but of course no one knows what wisdom is for all, nor what goodness is for all, because we are not mechanical dolls of the same pattern.  That’s why I reverence God ­the scheme is so ingenious ­so productive of variety in goodness and wisdom.  Probably an evil marriage is as hard to be quit of as any vice.  People persist long after the sanctity has gone ­because they lack moral courage.  Hoover was quite that way with cigarettes.  If some one could only have made Jim believe that God had joined him to cigarettes, and that he mustn’t quit them or he’d shatter the foundations of our domestic integrity ­he’d have died in cheerful smoke ­very soon after a time when he says I saved his life.  All he wanted was some excuse to go on smoking.  Most people are so ­slothful-souled.  But remember, don’t advise your friend in town.  Her asking advice is a sign that she shouldn’t have it.  She is not of the coterie that Paul describes ­if you don’t mind Paul once more ­’Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth.’”

There had come to the woman a vast influx of dignity ­a joyous increase in the volume of that new feeling that called to her husband.  She would have gone back, but one of the reasons would have been because she thought it “right” ­because it was what the better world did!  But now ­ah! now ­she was going unhampered by that compulsion which galls even the best.  She was free to stay away, but of her own glad, loyal will she was going back to the husband she had treated unjustly, judged by too narrow a standard.

“Allan will be so astonished and delighted,” she said, when the coupe rolled out of the train-shed.

She remembered now with a sort of pride the fine, unflinching sternness with which he had condemned divorce.  In a man of principles so staunch one might overlook many surface eccentricities.