This Loving Torment by Valerie Sherwood

Author:Valerie Sherwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0446826499
Published: 2017-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

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

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