This Loving Torment

by Valerie Sherwood

  He started violently and moved back, casting a sudden almost fearful look up at her.

  “It’s all right, Ben,” she said brokenly, her head bent over his as she let down her pale gold hair, letting it cascade down over his shoulders and tenderly stroked the back of his neck. She was nearly crying herself. “It’s all right.”

  He buried his head between her white breasts, his lips moving along them as if for succor, and she strained against him, hoping to relieve some of the agony that coursed through him, and feeling within her a quiver of mounting desire as his lips pressed softly at her neck, as his hands sought her waist and below them her hips, and he groaned. She relaxed against him, melted into his arms in complete submission and he lifted his head again and gave her a look of wonder—and of hunger.

  Suddenly, he pulled away and gave her a look of terrible consternation. “What have I done?” he cried in such a wild voice that Charity sat up, bewildered, and reached out a hand to touch him.

  “No!” He leaped up and ran toward the house, and Charity rose and shook back her tumbled hair and followed, frowning uneasily. Ben was already in his bed when she came in, lying with his back turned toward her. So, she bolted the door and closed the shutters and barred them, and made her way tiredly up the ladder to her straw mattress, pondering on the puzzling ways of men.

  CHAPTER 24

  At breakfast Ben kept his head turned away from her and could not meet her eyes.

  “I am sorry,” he burst out at last. “I am not a free man that I could stand up before the meeting and take thee to wife. I have wronged thee—and I have wronged Rachel.”

  Charity considered him soberly.

  “Ben,” she said gently, “we both know Rachel is dead.”

  The words lingered in the air. He gave a great sob. “I know it,” he said in a voice of anguish. “In my mind I know it. But in my heart she still lives.”

  The words went through Charity with a bittersweet pain. Last night Ben had held her most tenderly in his arms, but in his heart he still cradled the young wife who had come with him to work this land and had had his child alone in this wilderness, and then had been so cruelly wrested from him.

  “It’s right you should love her, Ben,” she said softly, and turned away with blurred eyes.

  And why should her treacherous fancy summon up at that moment not the good man who had held her the night before, but the wicked arms of sardonic Roger Derwent, who had held her body contemptuously yet made heat lightning race through it at his very touch?

  Impatiently, she brushed back a lock of gold hair that kept falling into her eyes. Hers was an unruly heart that refused to follow the road down which her head would fling it. But she would master these wild deep yearnings, she would become wise and calm if not—her lip curled a little—if not virtuous as the world viewed virtue.

  She sighed and began her morning’s chores, leaving Ben brooding at the table. Finally he went outside, where she could hear his axe savagely biting into the wood of a tall pine tree which he had felled yesterday.

  The baby cried and Charity picked her up to feed her. Such a lovely child was little Letty, so pink cheeked, with big trusting eyes. Rachel was lucky to have—the smile died on her face. Rachel was not lucky. Rachel’s luck had run out. Rachel had had all the world—a place of her own, a man who loved her, a child smiling up into her face—but Rachel’s perfect world had been rent asunder ... Rachel was dead.

  With these dark thoughts Charity went to the window and pensively watched Ben as, axe in hand, he cleared his land. She looked at his straining body, his strong limbs, and wondered if he would ever allow himself to do more than want her.

  A whole week went by that way, with Ben obviously warring with his troubled conscience at the “injury” he had done Charity, and the sad disrespect to Rachel’s memory. Then, one evening his mood changed.

  Charity had spent the day churning butter in a wooden churn, making beeswax candles, and roasting to a succulent turn a brace of heath hens which Ben had brought in and silently laid on the wooden table. After the cleaning up was done and the baby rocked to sleep in her cradle, Charity climbed wearily up to bed and sank down with a groan upon her straw mattress and lay there drowsily, sinking slowly into sleep.

  There was a sudden creaking of the wooden ladder. Charity’s eyes flew open. Ben had been watching her all through dinner, almost covertly, but she had paid no attention. Now, she saw his head come through the opening in the attic floor.

  She lay quietly, waiting, her heartbeat quickening.

  “Charity,” he said hoarsely, “I would thee wouldst come down and share my bed below. I would deem it a great privilege.”

  So humbly spoken were his words that Charity was touched. She sat up, leaning on an elbow, her head almost bumping the low slanting roof above her head.

  “Are you . . . sure you want me, Ben?” she asked hesitantly. Her voice was wistful. Poor Ben had tortured himself enough and—yes, she had unintentionally had a hand in that torture. She had meant only to console him, but he had turned his recriminations against himself.

  “Yes,” he cried, his whole body now thrusting through the opening in the floor as, bending over, he made for her straw mattress, knelt there beside her.

  “I know that I have no right to ask thee,” he said humbly, kneeling there. “But thou hast done so much for me and for the child. I do think I would have gone mad with grief without thee, Charity. Thou didst come into my life like an angel to make me whole again.”

  “No, Ben, no.” Tears spilled over her lashes as she touched his cheek with a gentle hand. “Not an angel—and it was the other way around. I was lost and bitter when I came here, and you have helped me see my way again. It is I who should be grateful to you.”

  He bent over her, kissing her hands, and she felt his own hot tears fall on her hands. He was doing what for him was a very great thing, she knew, a momentous thing. He was casting out the ghost of Rachel, his lovely lost young wife, and asking her to supplant Rachel, to share with him Rachel’s bed, in which Rachel’s child had been born.

  Charity’s heart throbbed so painfully she felt that it would burst.

  “I will do as you ask, Ben,” she said, smoothing back his thick brown hair that fell over her hands as he bent over them. “But not tonight. Tomorrow . . . tomorrow I will come downstairs and I will sleep in your bed.”

  “Thou dost know that I cannot offer thee marriage?” he cried in an anguished voice. “For I have no proof Rachel is dead.”

  “Yes, I know that, Ben.” She caressed his head with her hands.

  “But to me it will be a marriage, Charity,” he added fiercely. “For I will hew to you even as I hewed to Rachel, and strive to make thee happy always.” His voice broke.

  Charity closed her eyes and swallowed.

  “Hush, Ben,” she said at last and kissed him lovingly.

  After a few moments, he stood up and said in a strong voice, more confident than she had ever heard him, “I will go down now; it is best that I be downstairs the better to guard thee and the child.” And before his head disappeared through the hole in the attic flooring, he added gravely, “And tomorrow, Charity, thou wilt become my wife in my sight and I will take thee before God here in this home that I have built with my hands—although we may never be man and wife in the sight of man.”

  And he disappeared from view.

  She awoke to the full blaze of the late morning sun and sat up with a guilty start. How had she slept so late? The baby! The poor little thing must be hungry!

  “Ben,” she called, reaching out for her clothes. There was no answer. She saw that her worn, torn dress was gone. Replacing it, neatly folded on the floor near the top of the ladder, was another dress, one she had seen before when she had been searching through Rachel’s wooden chest looking for a ribbon to tie the baby’s bonnet. It was a dress of russet linen with collar and cuffs of fine white cambric. She felt a lump rise in her throat.

  Ben had search
ed the chest for a wedding dress for her—and had found one, for this was obviously Rachel’s “go-to-meeting” dress. She put it on. It was a little tight about the bust, for Rachel had been not quite so rounded as she, and yet a little loose about the waist, for her own waist cut in more deeply than had Rachel’s. But the length was all right and the buttons could be set over later. Careful not to dirty the cuffs, she turned up the sleeves and, holding up the skirt carefully, started down the ladder, calling once again, “Ben.”

  “I let thee sleep,” his voice called happily from below. “And I have milked the cow and fed little Letty and brought the water from the stream and cooked our breakfast.”

  “Ben, you shouldn’t have,” she said contritely. As she climbed down the ladder in haste, Ben was just setting down the two buckets of water he had brought from the stream. “These things are woman’s work and you have so much to do—so many heavy things that I cannot even attempt.”

  “But this is thy wedding day.” He smiled at her. “Tonight this room becomes a bridal chamber.”

  He looked so happy when he said that, that Charity smiled back at him, trying to reflect his joy. She felt a hurt in her heart that she could not love him more, that she could not be in all ways the wife he desired. In a way she did love him, she told herself fiercely. She admired Ben, she was grateful to him, and if her divided heart was still unruly and would not be stilled, that too would change in time.

  She went toward him and kissed him and felt him tremble at her touch. Then his arms went round her and he said hoarsely, “Charity, Charity, I do not deserve thee.” She thought his mind toyed with doing something more than merely hold her, but he thrust her away from him suddenly as if the thought were unworthy, with a merry, “But thou hast had no breakfast and I have prepared for us a wedding feast!” He led her toward the crude trestle table he had fashioned from a fallen beech tree, and she smiled to see the wooden trenchers piled high with the bread she had made yesterday and some trout he must have caught this morning.

  She watched him fondly as he ate with a healthy morning appetite. Then he rose from the table and announced that he would this day tackle “yon great tree that has defied my axe.” She knew he meant the grand old sycamore that threw its shade about the cabin like a cool umbrella.

  “No—not the sycamore, Ben,” she said, touching his arm. “It is such a lovely tree beneath which to rest in the shade. And besides, beneath its branches was where you first held me in your arms. We should keep the tree and hope that our life together will grow as strong and as upright.”

  He looked at her as if she had said something profound, and nodded.

  “Thou art right,” he agreed. “We should keep the tree. I will work at the eastward edge of the clearing where there is much red pine.”

  Charity sang a little snatch of song as she cleared the breakfast leavings and took them out to feed the great sow whose fitter of little pigs would soon be fattening on the chestnuts that abounded in the forest. Her heart had lightened now that she had decided upon her course of action.

  She had “looked up,” as her mother would have wished her to, at Daarkenwyck—and she had come to grief. Now she had “looked down,” as her mother would have viewed it, and had found the arms of a plain and simple man, but one deserving of her love, one she felt would always cherish and protect her.

  She had found security.

  Still feeling light-hearted and happy, she took a bucket of washwater and moved out into the little planted “patch” that surrounded the house on three sides and served them for a yard. She intended to dump the washwater on some bean plants, when she came to a sudden halt, the bucket held forgotten in her arms.

  Out of the trees staggered a figure, a living scarecrow. And when the scarecrow saw Ben, axe in hand, at the far side of the clearing, it broke into a run.

  Charity stared, speechless.

  The scarecrow had a woman’s face. Tangles of light brown hair flew about the head, and a few scraps of a fabric that had once been a dress of serviceable gray-green holland, flapped about her ragged petticoat and scrawny shanks.

  “Ben!” cried the figure brokenly, and rapture transformed her face with its hollowed cheeks as the woman stumbled forward across the uneven ground.

  No one had to tell Charity that this was Rachel.

  Rachel, returned from the dead, Rachel come back from hell itself to claim her husband and her child.

  CHAPTER 25

  Ben stood frozen, as if he had no power to move, his mouth open, his eyes fixed on the figure that staggered toward him. Then, “Rachel!” The cry was ripped from his lips and he sped toward her, flinging away the axe, and enfolded her with his arms as she collapsed in tears against him.

  “Oh, Ben, Ben, all that sustained me on the trail was the thought of thee,” sobbed Rachel. “Many’s the time I would sink down and think to die, but each time I would hear thy voice urging me on and somehow manage to go another weary mile.” She lifted her head, her face anxious, and pushed him away. “The baby, what of the baby, Ben?” she cried.

  “Letty’s fine, Rachel,” he said, his gruff voice full of tears, and Rachel sank back against him with a grateful sob. He nestled her thin body against him and buried his face in her emaciated neck. “Ah, Rachel, I went to find thee, I searched the woods for thee, and others searched also, but we lost thy trail among the rocks by the waterside. And I sent word to the French trappers who frequent the great Indian slave market by the northern lake to buy thee, that I would repay them—but word came back to me that you had never reached the slave market.”

  “Nor did I, Ben, My captors fell out among themselves, and while they fought I slipped away and sloshed down a little stream and hid in a small cave. I heard them go by as they searched for me, but then they gave up and went away. Night had fallen, but I started out anyway, so wild was I to return—and that, that is where I made my mistake, Ben. For I must have turned the wrong way in the dark and I became lost and I have wandered from that day to this, living only on berries and nuts and the water from the streams. Twice I saw Indians, but always I hid and they went by without seeing me. Ah, sometimes I thought I’d never find my way to thee, Ben, that I would leave my bones bleaching with the winter snows, or that some wild animal would eat me, but God has given me his grace, Ben, and brought me home to thee.”

  Charity’s throat closed at this recital of Rachel’s sufferings.

  As she continued, Rachel’s voice caught raggedly. “I did fear, Ben, that the Indians who took me—or some others of their group—had attacked our home and had killed thee and and my little Letty.” Her voice quavered, and Ben, almost crying himself, said, “Letty is fine, Rachel. She’s just fine. Come see for yourself.”

  Gently, he disengaged those wasted clawlike hands and, with one arm about Rachel’s thin shoulders, led her toward the cabin. As they walked, her eyes fell on something she had not up to this time observed—Charity—and flew full open.

  In shock and fear, Rachel’s face, which had been so happy, now fell apart.

  “Who’s—who’s this, Ben?” she asked in a trembling voice, and in that moment Charity saw herself as Rachel must see her: young and strong and well-fed, a woman with pink cheeks and sunshiny hair and bright challenging eyes—the kind of woman a man would wish to make his own.

  Standing in her yard before her cabin and wearing her best go-to-meeting dress!

  Beside Rachel, Ben—who in the intensity of the moment of Rachel’s return had forgotten her too—now gazed at Charity in silent anguish. His brown eyes begged her to be kind, not to hurt more this pitiful shadow of a woman whom life had already used so cruelly.

  Charity, her eyes brighter than usual with unshed tears, took a deep breath and said in a steady voice, “I am Charity Woodstock. I was living in Albany and was on my way downriver to take ship in New York for Virginia, where my betrothed awaits me. But our boat capsized and all were lost. I swam ashore and tried to find my way through the forest, but 1 became lost
. Your husband found me and saved my life and in gratitude I have tended your child for you until you should be found and returned to him.”

  Gradually a little of the fear left Rachel’s white face. “Is this the truth, Ben?” She turned to him, her face upturned anxiously.

  For a moment Charity feared Ben’s straight-laced conscience. She wanted to shout at him, Tell her it’s true!

  But she need not have worried. As Ben looked down into that sweet exhausted white face he so loved, he could never have destroyed the anxious hope that shone in her tired eyes.

  “Did she not tell thee?” he asked gently. “Dost she look to be a liar, Rachel?” His voice was ever so lightly chiding and Rachel looked confused.

  “No, of course she does not,” Rachel said hastily. “I am sorry, Mistress Woodstock. It was—the shock of seeing thee standing there clad in my best gown.”

  “I’ll go take it off,” said Charity abruptly.

  “No, no.” This walking skeleton raised its hand. “I give it to thee freely. It is little enough for caring for my little Letty and for my Ben. It is hard for a man in the wilderness alone—and impossible with a small baby.”

  Charity inclined her head gravely. Then she carried the bucket of washwater over to the bean plants and watered them more carefully than beans had ever been watered before. From the cabin she could hear Rachel’s happy cry and her gentle sobbing as she murmured over and over again. “Oh, Letty, Letty, my little Letty. I had thought never to see thee again!”

  Charity, looking for some other task—for she could not bear to go into the cabin just now—stumbled toward the stream with the bucket. She would fill the bucket with water before she returned.