The Complete Short Stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Lucy Maud Montgomery
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final name on the list of wedding guests was the name of
David Spencer. David Spencer lived alone in a little cottage
down at the Cove. He was a combination of sailor and fisherman.
He was also Isabella Spencer’s husband and Rachel’s father.
“Rachel Spencer, have you taken leave of your senses? What do you mean by such nonsense as this?”
“I simply mean that I am going to invite my father to my wedding,” answered Rachel quietly.
“Not in my house,” cried Mrs. Spencer, her lips as white as if her fiery tone had scathed them.
Rachel leaned forward, folded her large, capable hands deliberately on the table, and gazed unflinchingly into her mother’s bitter face. Her fright and nervousness were gone. Now that the conflict was actually on she found herself rather enjoying it. She wondered a little at herself, and thought that she must be wicked. She was not given to self-analysis, or she might have concluded that it was the sudden assertion of her own personality, so long dominated by her mother’s, which she was finding so agreeable.
“Then there will be no wedding, mother,” she said. “Frank and I will simply go to the manse, be married, and go home. If I cannot invite my father to see me married, no one else shall be invited.”
Her lips narrowed tightly. For the first time in her life Isabella Spencer saw a reflection of herself looking back at her from her daughter’s face — a strange, indefinable resemblance that was more of soul and spirit than of flesh and blood. In spite of her anger her heart thrilled to it. As never before, she realized that this girl was her own and her husband’s child, a living bond between them wherein their conflicting natures mingled and were reconciled. She realized too, that Rachel, so long sweetly meek and obedient, meant to have her own way in this case — and would have it.
“I must say that I can’t see why you are so set on having your father see you married,” she said with a bitter sneer. “HE has never remembered that he is your father. He cares nothing about you — never did care.”
Rachel took no notice of this taunt. It had no power to hurt her, its venom being neutralized by a secret knowledge of her own in which her mother had no share.
“Either I shall invite my father to my wedding, or I shall not have a wedding,” she repeated steadily, adopting her mother’s own effective tactics of repetition undistracted by argument.
“Invite him then,” snapped Mrs. Spencer, with the ungraceful anger of a woman, long accustomed to having her own way, compelled for once to yield. “It’ll be like chips in porridge anyhow — neither good nor harm. He won’t come.”
Rachel made no response. Now that the battle was over, and the victory won, she found herself tremulously on the verge of tears. She rose quickly and went upstairs to her own room, a dim little place shadowed by the white birches growing thickly outside — a virginal room, where everything bespoke the maiden. She lay down on the blue and white patchwork quilt on her bed, and cried softly and bitterly.
Her heart, at this crisis in her life, yearned for her father, who was almost a stranger to her. She knew that her mother had probably spoken the truth when she said that he would not come. Rachel felt that her marriage vows would be lacking in some indefinable sacredness if her father were not by to hear them spoken.
Twenty-five years before this, David Spencer and Isabella Chiswick had been married. Spiteful people said there could be no doubt that Isabella had married David for love, since he had neither lands nor money to tempt her into a match of bargain and sale. David was a handsome fellow, with the blood of a seafaring race in his veins.
He had been a sailor, like his father and grandfather before him; but, when he married Isabella, she induced him to give up the sea and settle down with her on a snug farm her father had left her. Isabella liked farming, and loved her fertile acres and opulent orchards. She abhorred the sea and all that pertained to it, less from any dread of its dangers than from an inbred conviction that sailors were “low” in the social scale — a species of necessary vagabonds. In her eyes there was a taint of disgrace in such a calling. David must be transformed into a respectable, home-abiding tiller of broad lands.
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