FullReads

For five years all went well enough. If, at times, David’s longing for the sea troubled him, he stifled it, and listened not to its luring voice. He and Isabella were very happy; the only drawback to their happiness lay in the regretted fact that they were childless.

Then, in the sixth year, came a crisis and a change. Captain Barrett, an old crony of David’s, wanted him to go with him on a voyage as mate. At the suggestion all David’s long-repressed craving for the wide blue wastes of the ocean, and the wind whistling through the spars with the salt foam in its breath, broke forth with a passion all the more intense for that very repression. He must go on that voyage with James Barrett–he MUST! That over, he would be contented again; but go he must. His soul struggled within him like a fettered thing.

Isabella opposed the scheme vehemently and unwisely, with mordant sarcasm and unjust reproaches. The latent obstinacy of David’s character came to the support of his longing–a longing which Isabella, with five generations of land-loving ancestry behind her, could not understand at all.

He was determined to go, and he told Isabella so.

“I’m sick of plowing and milking cows,” he said hotly.

“You mean that you are sick of a respectable life,” sneered Isabella.

“Perhaps,” said David, with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders. “Anyway, I’m going.”

“If you go on this voyage, David Spencer, you need never come back here,” said Isabella resolutely.

David had gone; he did not believe that she meant it. Isabella believed that he did not care whether she meant it or not. David Spencer left behind him a woman, calm outwardly, inwardly a seething volcano of anger, wounded pride, and thwarted will.

He found precisely the same woman when he came home, tanned, joyous, tamed for a while of his wanderlust, ready, with something of real affection, to go back to the farm fields and the stock-yard.

Isabella met him at the door, smileless, cold-eyed, set-lipped.

“What do you want here?” she said, in the tone she was accustomed to use to tramps and Syrian peddlers.

“Want!” David’s surprise left him at a loss for words. “Want! Why, I–I–want my wife. I’ve come home.”

“This is not your home. I’m no wife of yours. You made your choice when you went away,” Isabella had replied. Then she had gone in, shut the door, and locked it in his face.

David had stood there for a few minutes like a man stunned. Then he had turned and walked away up the lane under the birches. He said nothing–then or at any other time. From that day no reference to his wife or her concerns ever crossed his lips.

He went directly to the harbor, and shipped with Captain Barrett for another voyage. When he came back from that in a month’s time, he bought a small house and had it hauled to the “Cove,” a lonely inlet from which no other human habitation was visible. Between his sea voyages he lived there the life of a recluse; fishing and playing his violin were his only employments. He went nowhere and encouraged no visitors.

Isabella Spencer also had adopted the tactics of silence. When the scandalized Chiswicks, Aunt Jane at their head, tried to patch up the matter with argument and entreaty, Isabella met them stonily, seeming not to hear what they said, and making no response. She worsted them totally. As Aunt Jane said in disgust, “What can you do with a woman who won’t even TALK?”

Five months after David Spencer had been turned from his wife’s door, Rachel was born. Perhaps, if David had come to them then, with due penitence and humility, Isabella’s heart, softened by the pain and joy of her long and ardently desired motherhood might have cast out the rankling venom of resentment that had poisoned it and taken him back into it. But David had not come; he gave no sign of knowing or caring that his once longed-for child had been born.