Bedelia (12 page)

The lamp hung from his wrist as he cupped his hands before his mouth calling, “Bedelia! Bedelia!” He squinted through the snowfall, but could see nothing but the white restless circles rising from the ground and the white flakes falling from the burdened sky.

He pushed his way through the drifts and worked up the slight slope that led to the gate. The snow was high and although it was dry and light, the ground below was uneven and he could not be sure of his footing.

On the road he stumbled over something, saw a dark patch in the snow. As he leaned over, the wind seized his cap and whirled it away. He clapped his hands over his ears, which had begun to sting as if a swarm of bees had been at them. A wraith of snow rose, filling his eyes with its bitter powder. Tears prevented his seeing properly and it was through a cloud that he recognized the dark patch as the traveling bag of ox-blood morocco which he had bought as a birthday present for Bedelia.

A few feet farther on, half in the ditch and almost covered by the snow, lay his wife. “Thank God!” cried Charlie. The wind
seized his voice and whirled it away along with the cold and the snowflakes.

He picked her up and struggled with her to the house. It took all of his strength to get her across the yard to the door of the shed. There he almost collapsed, and he leaned against the wall to rest and recover his breath. When he had finally got her into the house and laid her on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, he knelt beside her and listened for her heartbeat. In his excitement he missed it. He lifted the still figure, clasped it to his breast, forgetting suspicion and anger, forgetting that she had tried to run away, remembering only that he loved her and had been happy with this woman.

She did not open her eyes until he had carried her to the couch in his den and covered her with a fur rug. A shadow crossed her face as she looked around the room, recognizing the house from which she had not been able to escape. She closed her eyes again, shutting out the sight of her failure. Her suffering was acute.

Charlie hurried to the basement, heaped coal on the fire, rushed back to the den, turned on the radiator. When the room was warm, he uncovered her and removed her wet clothes. She opened her eyes and looked at him squarely. A wan smile curved her lips. Charlie rubbed her with rough towels until her flesh was red, but she did not cease shivering. The pathos of her dark eyes, the tremors and muteness, reminded him of a spaniel he had owned when he was a boy, and he felt sorry for her as he used to feel sorry for the dog because it depended on him for food and affection. He wrapped her in blankets and carried her up the stairs to bed. Not once while he was working over her did he show resentment nor ask the reason for her strange conduct.

“Now, my dear,” he said tenderly, “you're to have brandy and hot milk, and then you're going straight to sleep.” He covered her with wool blankets, the down quilt and the comforter his mother had stitched in the Snake and Apple design.

She drank the milk and brandy like a good child, her dimpled hands clasped around the old silver mug. And with the same docility she obeyed Charlie's command to sleep.

He left the room on tiptoe. There was nothing more that he could do for her, but he decided that he had better consult the doctor anyway. While he was on way to the telephone, he wondered what to say if the doctor should ask how his wife had got such a severe chill. Then he discovered that the line was dead. The storm had disconnected the telephone wires. Charlie was glad of that. A sense of duty had prompted him to call Doctor Meyers, but he was relieved when he found that he would not have to answer any questions.

All this effort, the strength he had expended and the anxiety, should have wearied him. But he was wide-awake and restless. In vain he tried to quiet his curiosity. When Bedelia had recovered from the chill, he would ask her a few important questions. He would approach the subject calmly, show neither anger nor distrust, but prove by his love and firmness that she might fearlessly confide in him. As he planned it, Charlie saw himself and Bedelia beside the fire, heard his voice gently urging her to full confession. The vision did not quiet him. He could not help recalling his talks with Doctor Meyers and wondering whether she had overheard the doctor's warning. But if this were so, why had she waited four days before wounded pride forced her to flee? And what had it to do with her sudden rage against Ben Chaney?

His thoughts traveled in dark circles and left him bewildered. At the end of a tortured hour he was no wiser than he had been at the beginning. Then he remembered the traveling bag and went outside for it. Ordinarily Charlie would not have opened his wife's bag nor examined its contents. This would have been cheap and unworthy, the action of a man who would consider it right to read his wife's mail. He had an excuse, however. The bag was wet and its contents would become moldy unless they were taken out and dried.

Bedelia had packed stockings, a change of underwear, a nightgown, slippers, a black silk crepe kimono with a turquoise-blue lining, and an extra shirtwaist. There were also her toilet things, the padded leather box in which she kept her knickknacks, and a sheaf of travel folders showing schedules
of Cunard, White Star, and Hamburg-Amerika sailings. The discovery of these pamphlets unnerved Charlie. They were evidence that Bedelia's idea of running off to Europe had not occurred spontaneously at the table last night.

Idly he opened the leather box. It contained trifles, the sort of souvenirs that young girls cherish. In a heart-shaped locket he saw Bedelia's dark eyes under a mass of fair curls and he wondered why his wife had never showed him this picture of her mother. A pressed rose, dry and breaking apart, and a spray from a cerise plume were in a faded lavender envelope. There was a miniature Japanese fan, a penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle and broken blade, and a round pillbox with a blank label. In it was a white powder like the powder his wife used for polishing her fingernails. Last of all he pulled out the swollen velvet box which had held his garnet ring.

He snapped it open. There was the black pearl in its setting of platinum and diamonds.

We can't give Abbie that ring, Charlie, I don't have it any more. I've given it away.

Hastily Charlie replaced the ring and put the velvet box back in the padded leather container. He put away the travel folders, too, and the rest of his wife's tawdry souvenirs.

“ARE YOU ANGRY with me, Charlie?”

He pulled down the shade. The light disturbed him. He did not wish to look at Bedelia's face nor show his to her. “We'll talk about it later. How are you feeling?”

“I've caught a bad cold.”

“Yes. You'll have to stay in bed.”

Dark hair outlined the pale oval of her face. She moaned lightly.

“Are you in pain?”

“My chest hurts. It's my own fault, though. I've been naughty, I deserve punishment.”

She waited for Charlie to comment upon her naughtiness. The word she had chosen was far too frivolous to describe her thoroughly abnormal conduct. Charlie could not speak at all.
Pretending to be busy with the knob of the radiator, he kept his face toward the wall.

“Charlie!”

“Yes?”

Huskily she whispered, “Have you heard from Ben?”

Charlie turned, still squatting beside the radiator, glared across the room at his wife. His voice was thickened by new, coarse notes. “No, and we're not likely to for a few days. The road's blocked, the electricity's off, and the telephone wires are down.”

“Oh!” Bedelia said, and after she had thought about it, laughed lightly. “Snowbound, Charlie! Are we snowbound?”

“Yes.”

“When I was in school we studied a poem about a family who were snowbound. Do you know it, Charlie?”

He could not answer. Bedelia was making an effort to restore the old relationship; she was pretending that there had been no attempt to run off, no lies, no unanswered questions.

“You must know it,” she persisted and her voice was actually blithe. “You know so much poetry, Charlie. I think it's by Lowell.”

“No, Whittier.”

“Yes, of course, Whittier. I wish I had your memory, dear.”

He looked at her obliquely and saw that she was smiling and trying to win him. It was as if nothing extraordinary had happened, as if they had gone to bed comfortably last night and awakened side by side that morning.

“After we've had breakfast, I want to ask you some questions, Bedelia.”

She pushed up in bed. “Yes, of course, dear. But we must have breakfast first, I'm hungry. Will you pull up the shades, please?” There were the dimples again, dancing in her cheeks, the shining eyes, the creamy luster of her skin. She was rosier, too, flushed with fever but prettier for it.

“What about Mary? Didn't she get back?”

“Not in this storm,” Charlie said. “She's probably snowed in at Blackman's farm.”

“With her young man,” Bedelia laughed. “I hope she makes the most of her good luck.” Then the smile disappeared and she frowned and sucked in her cheeks, worrying about the housekeeping. If Mary was away and she was ill in bed, how was Charlie to be fed and the house kept clean?

“Leave everything to me, I'll take care of it.”

“But you can't do housework, Charlie.”

“Why not? I can't get to the office.”

“I don't like to see a man do housework.”

There was no other way of handling it. Charlie fled gladly to the lonely kitchen where he need not face deceit, nor suffer remorse because he had not the courage to ask his wife a few questions. This was weak of him and he despised himself for it, but he knew that once he had put them into words his fears would have substance and reality, and he would be forced to take action.

Bedelia had no excuses to offer. So long as Charlie avoided the questions, she was content to let the answers wait. One would think she had caught cold shaking her rugs out of the window. As the day passed, both she and Charlie seemed to have forgotten that she had tried to desert him. Whatever urge had sent her off in the midst of the blizzard was lost in the lethargy of fever and comfort.

If Bedelia had sought a way, deliberately, to recapture Charlie's love, she could have found none more effective than fever, confinement in bed, helplessness. The more she depended on him, the richer grew his affection and the firmer his belief that strength such as his was capable of forgiveness. His enjoyment of her weakness was no sign of cruelty in him. It carried out the pattern of his training. He had been taught that man is strong, woman frail; that devotion and self-sacrifice are love's glowing crown. He cooked, washed dishes, carried trays, cleaned lamps, ran gladly whenever she had an errand. She had given in completely to her illness, enjoying the weakness that made him her slave. She leaned upon his arm while he arranged her pillows and depended upon his moral strength in trusting him to abandon his grievance.

In the afternoon she felt better, wanted to sit up in bed, and asked him to bring one of her robes from the closet. Charlie chose the black crepe kimono with the turquoise lining.

As he held it for her, he said, “I unpacked your bag, you know.”

“Thank you,” she said.

She knotted the sash, straightened the seams and pulled at the wide sleeves. “This is pretty, don't you think?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Would you get me my silver mirror, please? And my brush and comb. I'd like my powder and chamois, too. And yes, Charlie, that naughty little box.”

Charlie frowned.

Bedelia laughed. “So you've discovered my little secret? I hope you don't despise me for it.”

“Bedelia,” he said, determined to have it out with her now, “I have become more and more mystified by your behavior. There is nothing funny about this to me, and I shall be grateful if you'll explain the situation.”

The wayward creature laughed even more frivolously. “Oh, Charlie, don't be so pompous. I'm talking about the little box that contains the secret of my pretty red lips and cheeks.”

“I'm sorry, I don't understand you.”

“Rouge,” she said merrily. “Paint, if that's what you call it. Abbie paints, too, but she uses that horrid dry powder. She thinks it doesn't show, but even a blind man would notice.”

Silently Charlie watched while she brushed and combed her hair, braided it and wound the braids in snails over her ears. She smiled and winked as she dipped her little finger into the rouge pot, reddened her lips and rubbed color into her pale cheeks.

“I do look better now, don't I?”

“Are you quite done?”

She put her hairbrush and cosmetics in the drawer where she had left his digestive powders. “I'll keep these handy so you won't have to do so many errands.”

“Bedelia!”

“Yes, dear.”

“There are some things we ought to discuss. I believe you're well enough now.”

“Why are you so cross, darling? Have I done something again?”

Her teasing made Charlie feel that he had been pompous. He had been standing before the mantel with his arms crossed on his chest. He relaxed, slouched forward, and put his hands in his pockets so that he should not appear so formidable. But his voice was cold. “My dear, I should like some explanations of your conduct.”