Everyone who talked about it—and that meant all who knew anything about it—blamed Deane Franklin for not stopping Ruth. Perhaps the reason he did not try to defend himself was simply that he could not hope to show how simple was his acceptance of the fact that it would have been impossible to stop her. To understand that, one would have to have seen. Oh, to be sure, he could have put obstacles in her way, tightened it around her, but anything he might have done would only have gone to making it harder for Ruth to get away; it would not have kept her from going. And after all, he himself saw it as, if not the thing she should do, the thing—it being what it was then—she could not help doing. But one would have to have seen Ruth's face, would need to have been with her in those days to understand that.
As to warning her family, as he was so blamed by them and by all the town for not doing, that would have seemed to him just one of those things he could have thrown in her way. He did feel that he must try to talk to her of what it was going to mean to her people; he saw that she saw, that it had cruel power to make her suffer—and no power to stop her. Nothing could have stopped her; she was like a maddened thing—desperate, ruthless, indomitable. She would have fought the world; she would have let the whole world suffer. Love's fear possessed her utterly. He had had the feeling all along that it was rushing on to disaster. He stood back from it now with something like awe: a force not for him to control.
And he, with it from within, was the only one who did not condemn Stuart Williams for letting Ruth go. A man, and older than she, they scorned him for letting an infatuated girl throw her life away like that. And it was not only that he saw that the man was sick and broken; it was that he saw that Stuart, just as Ruth, had gone in love beyond his power to control love, that he was mastered, not master, now. And in those last days, at least, it was Ruth who dominated him. There was something terrible in the simplicity with which she saw that she had to go; she never once admitted it to the things that were to be argued about. He talked to her, they both tried to talk to her, about the danger of getting tuberculosis. When he began on that she laughed in his face—and he could not blame her. As ifthatcould keep her! And as she laughed her tortured eyes seemed mockingly to put to him—"What difference would it make?"
When, after it all came out, he did not join the outraged town in the outcry against Ruth, when it further transpired that he had known about her going and had not tried to stop it, he was so much blamed that it even hurt his practice. There were women who said they would not countenance a young physician who had the ideas of life he must have. His own people were incensed at what they called the shameful advantage Ruth had taken of him, holding that she, as an evil woman, had exerted an influence over him that made him do what was against his own nature. As to the Hollands, there had been a stormy hour with Mr. Holland and Cyrus, and a far worse half hour with Mrs. Holland, when her utterly stricken face seemed to stiffen in his throat the things he wanted to say for Ruth, things that might have helped Ruth's mother. And then he was told that the Hollands were through, not alone with Ruth, but with him.
But he was called there two years later when Mrs. Holland was dying. She had been begging for him. That moved him deeply because of what in itself it told of her long yearning for Ruth. After that there were a number of years when he was not inside that gate. Cyrus did not speak to him and the father might as well not have done so. He was amazed, then, when Mr. Holland finally came to him about his own health. "I've come to you, Deane," he said, "because I think you're the best doctor in town now—and I need help." And then he added, and after that first talk this was the closest to speaking of it they ever came: "And I guess you didn't understand, Deane; didn't see it right. You were young—and you're a queer one, anyway."
Perhaps the reason he was never able to do better in explaining himself, or in defending Ruth, was simply because in his own thinking about it there were never arguments, or thoughts upon conduct, but always just that memory of Ruth's face as he had seen it in revealing moments.
Everyone saw something that Ruth should have done differently. In the weeks they spent upon it they found, if not that they would be able to forgive her, at least that they could think of her with less horror had she done this, had she not done that. But Ruth lived through that week seeing little beyond the one thing that she must get through it. She was driven; she had to go ahead, bearing things somehow, getting through them. She had a strange power to steel herself, to keep things, for the most part, from really getting through to her. She could not go ahead if she began letting things in. She sealed herself over and drove ahead with the singleness of purpose, the exclusions, of any tormented thing. It was all terrible, but it was as if she were frozen at the heart to all save the one thing.
She stayed through the week because it was the time of Edith Lawrence's wedding and she was to be maid-of-honor. "I'll have to stay till after Edith's wedding," she said to Deane and Stuart. Then on her way home from Deane's office she saw that she could not go on with her part in Edith's wedding. That she could see clearly enough despite the thing driving her on past things she should be seeing. What would she say to Edith?—how getthatover?
Someone was giving a party for Edith that night; every day now things were being given for her. She must not go to them. How could she go? It would be absurd to expect that of herself. She would have to tell Edith that she could not be her bridesmaid. What a terrible thing Edith would think that was! She would have to give a reason—a big reason. What would she tell her?—that she had been called away?—but where? Should she tell her the truth? Could she? Edith would find it almost unbelievable. It was almost unbelievable to herself that her life could be permeated by a thing Edith knew nothing about. It was another of the things she would have said, had she known her story only through hearing it, would not be possible. But it was with Edith as it was with her own family—simply that such a thing would never occur to her. She winced in thinking of it that way. A number of times she had been right on the edge of a thing it seemed would surely be disclosing, but it strangely happened she had never quite gone over that edge. For one thing, Edith had been away from Freeport a good deal in those three years. Mrs. Lawrence had opposed Edith's marrying so young, and had taken her to Europe for one year, and in the last year they had spent part of the time in California. In the last couple of months, since Edith's return from the West, she had spoken of Ruth's not seeming like herself, of fearing she was not well. She had several times hurt Edith's feelings by refusing, for no apparent reason, to do things with her. But she had always been able to make that up afterwards and in these plans for the wedding she and Edith had been drawn close again.
When she went over to the Lawrences' late that afternoon she had decided that she would tell Edith. It seemed she must. She could not hope to tell it in a way that would make Edith sympathize. There was not time for that, and she dared not open herself to it. She would just say it briefly, without any attempts at justifying it. Something like: "Edith, there's been something you haven't known. I'm not like you. I'm not what you think I am. I love Stuart Williams. We've loved each other for a long time. He's sick. He's got to go away—and I'm going with him. Good-bye, Edith,—and I hope the wedding goes just beautifully."
But that last got through—got down to the feeling she had been trying to keep closed, the feeling that had seemed to seal itself over the moment she saw that she must go with Stuart. "I hope the wedding goes just beautifully!" Somehow the stiff little phrase seemed to mean all the old things. There was a moment when sheknew: knew that she was walking those familiar streets, that she would not be walking them any more; knew that she was going over to Edith's—that all her life she had been going over to Edith's—that she would not be going there any more; knew that she was going away from home, that she loved her father and mother—Ted—her grandfather—and Terror, her dog. Realization broke through and flooded her. She had to walk around a number of blocks before she dared go to Edith's.
Miss Edith was up in her room, Emma, the maid, said, taking it for granted that Ruth would go right up. Yes, she always did go right up, she was thinking. She had always been absolutely at home at the Lawrences'. They always wanted her; there were times of not wanting to see anyone else, but it seemed both Edith and her mother always wanted her. She paused an instant on the stairs, not able to push past that thought, not able to stay the loving rush of gratefulness that broke out of the thought of having always been wanted.
She had a confused sense of Edith as barricaded by her trousseau. She sat behind a great pile of white things; she had had them all out of her chest for showing to some of her mother's friends, she said, and her mother had not yet put them back. Ruth stood there fingering a wonderfully soft chemise. It had come to her that she was not provided with things like these. What would Edith think of her, going away without the things it seemed one should have? It seemed to mark the setting of her apart from Edith, though there was a wave of tenderness—she tried to hold it back but could not—for dear Edith because she did have so many things like this.
Edith was too deep in the occupation of getting married to mark an unusual absorption in her friend. She was full of talk about what her mother's friends had said of her things, the presents that were coming in, her dress for the party that night, the flowers for the wedding.
It made Edith seem very young to her. And in her negligee, her hair down, she looked childish. Her pleasure in the plans for her wedding seemed like a child's pleasure. It seemed that hurting her in it would be horribly like spoiling a child's party. Edith's flushed face, her sparkling eyes, her little excited, happy laugh made it impossible for Ruth to speak the words she had come to say.
For three days it went on like that: going ahead with the festivities, constantly thinking she would tell Edith as soon as they got home from this place or that, waiting until this or that person had gone, then dumb before the childish quality of Edith's excitement, deciding to wait until the next morning because Edith was either too happy or too tired to talk to her that night. That ingenuousness of her friend's pleasure in her wedding made Ruth feel, not only older, but removed from her by experience. Those days of her own frozen misery were days of tenderness for Edith, that tenderness which one well along the road of living feels for the one just setting feet upon the path.
She was never able to understand how she did get through those days. It was an almost unbelievable thing that, knowing, she was able, up to the very last, to go right on with the old things, was able to talk to people as if nothing were different, to laugh, to dance. There were times when something seemed frozen in her heart and she could go on doing the usual things mechanically, just because she knew so well how to do them; then there were other times when every smallest thing was stabbed through and through with the consciousness that she would not be doing it again. And yet even then, she could go on, could appear the same. They were days of a terrible power for bearing pain. When the people of the town looked back to it, recalling everything they could about Ruth Holland in those days, some of them, remembering a tenderness in her manner with Edith, talked of what a hypocrite she was, while others satisfied themselves of her utter heartlessness in remembering her gaiety.
It was two days before the wedding when she saw that she was not going to be able to tell Edith and got the idea of telling Edith's mother. Refusing to let herself consider what she would say when she began upon it, she went over there early that morning—Edith would not be up.
Mrs. Lawrence was at breakfast alone. Ruth kept herself hard against the welcoming smile, but it seemed she was surely going to cry when, with a look of concern, Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed: "Why, Ruth dear, how pale you are!"
She was telling Emma to bring Ruth a cup of coffee, talking of how absurd it was the way the girls were wearing themselves out, how, for that reason, she would be glad when it was all over. She spoke with anxiety of how nervous Edith had grown in the past week, how tired she was as a result of all the gaiety. "We'll have to be very careful of her, Ruth," she said. "Don't go to Edith with any worries, will you? Come to me. The slightest thing would upset Edith now."
Ruth only nodded; she did not know what to say to that; certainly, after that, she did not know how to say the things she had come to tell. For what in the world could upset Edith so much as to have her maid-of-honor, her life-long friend, the girl she cared for most, refuse, two days before her wedding, to take her part in it?
"And you can do more than anyone else, Ruth," Mrs. Lawrence urged. "You know Edith counts so on you," she added with an intimate little smile.
And again Ruth only nodded, and bent over her coffee. She had a feeling of having been caught, of being helpless.
Mrs. Lawrence was talking about the caterer for the wedding; she wished it were another kind of salad. Then she wanted Ruth to come up and look at her dress; she wasn't at all satisfied with the touch of velvet they had put on it. After that some one else came in and Mrs. Lawrence was called away. Ruth left without saying what she had come to say. She knew now that she would not say it.
She went home seeing that she must go through with the wedding. It was too late now to do anything else. Edith would break down—her pleasure in her wedding spoiled; no, Edith must be spared—helped. She must do this for Edith. No matter what people thought of her, no matter what Edith herself thought—thoughwouldn'tshe understand? Ruth considered with a tortured wistfulness—the thing to do now was to go through with it. Edith must look beautiful at her wedding; her happiness must be unmarred. Later, when she was away with Will—happy—she could bear it better. And she would understand that Ruth had wished to spare her; had done it to help her. She held that thought with her—and drove ahead.
There were moments in those last two days at home when it seemed that now her heart was indeed breaking: a kindly note in the voice of her father or mother—one of Ted's teasing jokes—little requests from her grandfather; then doing things she had done for years and knowing while doing them that she would not be doing them any more—the last time she cut the flowers, and then that last night when she went to bed in her own room, the room she had had ever since old enough to have a room of her own. She lay there that night and listened to the branches of the great oak tapping the house. She had heard that sound all her life; it was associated with all the things of her life; it seemed to be speaking for all those things—mourning for them. But the closest she came to actual breaking down was that last day when her dog, laying his head upon her knee, looked with trust and affection up into her eyes. As she laid her hand upon his head his eyes seemed to speak for all the love she had known through all the years. It seemed she could not bear it, that her heart could not bear it, that she would rather die. But she did bear it; she had that terrible power for bearing.
If only she had told her mother, they said over and over again. But if she told her mother she would not go—that was how she saw that; they would not let her; or rather, she would have no strength left to fight through their efforts to keep her. And then how could she tell her mother when her mother would never in the world understand? She did not believe that her mother could so much as comprehend that she could love where she should not, that a girl like Ruth—or rather,Ruth—could love a man it was not right she love. She had never talked with her mother of real things, had never talked with her of the things of her deepest feeling. She would not know how to do it now, even had she dared.
Her mother helped her dress for the wedding, talking all the while about plans for the evening—just who was going to the church, the details about serving. Ruth clung to the thought that thosewerethe things her mother was interested in; they always had been, surely they would continue to be. In her desperation she tried to think that in those little things her mother cared so much about she would, after a time, find healing.
With that cruel power for bearing pain she got away from home without breaking down; she got through that last minute when she realized she would not see Ted or her grandfather again,—they would not be at the wedding and would be in bed when she returned from it, and she was to leave that night on the two o'clock train. It was unbelievable to her that she had borne it, but she had driven ahead through utter misery as they commented on her dress, praising her and joking with her. That was in the living-room and she never forgot just how they were grouped—her grandfather's newspaper across his knees; Mary, who had worked for them for years, standing at the door; her dog Terror under the reading table—Ted walking round and round her. Deane was talking with her father in the hall. Her voice was sharp as she went out and said: "We must hurry, Deane."
The wedding was unreal; it seemed that all those people were just making the movements of life; there were moments when she heard them from a long way off, saw them and was uncertain whether they were there. And yet she could go on and appear about the same; if she seemed a little queer she was sure it was attributed to natural feeling about her dearest friend's wedding—to emotion, excitement. There were moments when things suddenly became real: a moment alone with Edith in her room, just before they went to the church; a moment when Mrs. Lawrence broke down. Walking down the aisle, the words of the service—that was in a vague, blurred world; so was Edith's strained face as she turned away, and her own walking down the aisle with Deane, turning to him and smiling and saying something and feeling as if her lips were frozen. Yet for three hours she laughed and talked with people. Mrs. Williams was at the reception; several times they were in the same group. Oh, it was all unreal—terrible—just a thing to drive through. There was a moment at the last when Edith clung to her, and when it seemed that she could not do the terrible thing she was going to do, that she wasnotgoing to do it—that the whole thing was some hideous nightmare. She wanted to stay with Edith. She wanted to be like Edith. She felt like a little girl then, just a frightened little girl who did not want to go away by herself, away from everything she knew, from people who loved her. She did not want to do that awful thing! She tried to pretend for a moment she was not going to do it—just as sometimes she used to hide her face when afraid.
At last it was all over; she had gone to the train and seen Edith and Will off for the East. Edith's face was pressed against the window of the Pullman as the train pulled out. It was Ruth she was looking for; it was to Ruth her eyes clung until the train drew her from sight.
Ruth stood there looking after the train; the rest of their little group of intimate friends had turned away—laughing, chattering, getting back in the carriages. Deane finally touched Ruth's arm, for she was standing in that same place looking after the train which had now passed from sight. When he saw the woe of her wet face he said gruffly: "Hadn't we better walk home?" He looked down at her delicate slippers, but better walk in them than join the others looking like that. He supposed walking would not be good for that frail dress; and then it came to him, and stabbed him, that it didn't much matter. Probably Ruth would not wear that dress again.
She walked home without speaking to him, looking straight ahead in that manner she all along had of ruthlessly pressing on to something; her face now was as if it were frozen in suffering, as if it had somehow stiffened in that moment of woe when Edith's face was drawn from her sight. And she looked so tired!—so spent, so miserable; as if she ought to be cared for, comforted. He took her arm, protectingly, yearningly. He longed so in that moment to keep Ruth, and care for her! He wanted to say things, but he seemed to be struck dumb, appalled by what it was they were about to do. He held her arm close to him. She was going away! Now that the moment had come he did not know how he was going to let her go. And looking like this!—suffering like this—needing help.
But he must not fail her now at the last; he must not fail her now when she herself was so worn, so wretched, was bearing so much. As they turned in at the gate he fought with all his strength against the thought that they would not be turning in at that gate any more and spoke in matter of fact tones of where he would be waiting for her, what time she must be there. But when they reached the steps they stood there for a minute under the big tree, there where they had so many times stood through a number of years. As they stood there things crowded upon them hard; Ruth raised her face and looked at him and at the anguish of her swimming eyes his hands went out to her arms. "Don't go, Ruth!" he whispered brokenly. "Ruth!—don't go!"
But that made her instantly find herself, that found the fight in her, to strengthen herself, to resist him; she was at once erect, indomitable, the purpose that no misery could shake gleamed through her wet eyes. Then she turned and went into the house. Her mother called out to her, sleepily asking if she could get out of her dress by herself. She answered yes, and then Mrs. Holland asked another sleepy question about Edith. Then the house was still; she knew that they were all asleep. She got her dress off and hung it carefully in the closet. She had already put some things in her bag; she put in a few more now, all the while sobbing under her breath.
She took off her slippers. After she had done that she stood looking at her bed. She saw her nightgown hanging in the closet. She wanted to put on her nightgown and get into bed! She leaned against the bed, crying. She wanted to put on her nightgown and get into bed! She was so tired, so frightened, so worn with pain. Then she shook herself, steeled again, and began putting on her shoes; put on her suit, her hat, got out her gloves. And then at the very last she had to do what she had been trying to make herself do all that day, and had not dared begin to do. She went to her desk and holding herself tight, very rapidly, though with shaking hand, wrote this note:
"Dear Mother; I'm going away. I love Stuart Williams. I have for a long time. Oh, mother—I'm so sorry—but I can't help it. He's sick. He has to go away, so you see I have to go with him. It's terrible that it is like this. Mother, try to believe that I can't help it. After I get away I can write to you more about it. I can't now. It will be terrible for you—for you all. Mother, it's been terrible for me. Oh, try not to feel any worse than you can help. People won't blameyou. I wish I could help it. I wish—Can't write more now. Write later. I'm so sorry—for everybody. So good to me always. I love all—Ruth."
"Dear Mother; I'm going away. I love Stuart Williams. I have for a long time. Oh, mother—I'm so sorry—but I can't help it. He's sick. He has to go away, so you see I have to go with him. It's terrible that it is like this. Mother, try to believe that I can't help it. After I get away I can write to you more about it. I can't now. It will be terrible for you—for you all. Mother, it's been terrible for me. Oh, try not to feel any worse than you can help. People won't blameyou. I wish I could help it. I wish—Can't write more now. Write later. I'm so sorry—for everybody. So good to me always. I love all—Ruth."
She put her head down on the desk and cried. Finally she got up and blindly threw the note over on her bed; with difficulty, because of the shaking of her hands, put on her gloves, picked up her bag. And then she stood there for a moment before turning off the light; she saw her little chair, her dressing-table. She reached up and turned off the light and then for another moment stood there in the darkened room. She listened to the branches of the oak tree tapping against the house. Then she softly opened her bedroom door and carefully closed it behind her. She could hear her father's breathing; then Ted's, as she passed his door. On the stairs she stood still: she wanted to hear Ted's breathing again. But she had already gone where she could not hear Ted's breathing. Her hand on the door, she stood still. There was something so unreal about this, so preposterous—not a thing that really happened, that could happen toher. It seemed that in just a minute she would wake up and find herself safe in her bed. But in another minute she was leaning against the outside door of her home, crying. She seemed to have left the Ruth Holland she knew behind when she finally walked down the steps and around the corner where Deane was waiting for her.
They spoke scarcely a word until they saw the headlight of her train. And then she drew back, clinging to him. "Ruth!" he whispered, holding her, "don't!" But that seemed to make her know that she must; she straightened, steeled herself, and moved toward the train. A moment later she was on the platform, looking down at him. When she tried to smile good-by, he whirled and walked blindly away.
She did not look from the window as long as the lights of the town were to be seen. She sat there perfectly still, hands tight together, head down. For two hours she scarcely moved. Such strange things shot through her mind. Maybe her mother, thinking she was tired, would not go to her room until almost noon. At least she would have her coffee first. Had she remembered to put Edith's handkerchiefs in her bag? Had anyone else noticed that the hook at the waist of Edith's dress had come unfastened? Edith was on a train too—going the other way. How strange it all was! How terrible beyond belief! Just as she neared the junction where she would meet Stuart and from which they would take the train South together, the thought came to her that none of the rest of them might remember always to have water in Terror's drinking pan. When she stepped from the train she was crying—because Terror might want a drink and wonder why she was not there to give it to him. He would not understand—and oh, he would miss her so! Even when Stuart, stepping from the darkness to meet her, drew her to him, brokenly whispering passionate, grateful words, she could not stop crying—for Terror, who would not understand, and who would miss her so! He became the whole world she knew—loving, needing world, world that would not understand, and would miss her so!
The woman who, on that train from Denver, had been drawn into this story which she had once lived was coming now into familiar country. She would be home within an hour. She had sometimes ridden this far with Deane on his cases. Her heart began to beat fast. Why, there was the very grove in which they had that picnic! She could scarcely control the excitement she felt in beginning to find old things. There was something so strange in the old things having remained there just the same when she had passed so completely away from them. Seeing things she knew brought the past back with a shock. She could hardly get her breath when first she saw the town. And there was the Lawrences'! Somehow it was unbelievable. She did not hear the porter speaking to her about being brushed off; she was peering hungrily from the window, looking through tears at the town she had not seen since she left it that awful night eleven years before. She was trembling as she stood on the platform waiting for the slowing train to come to a stop. There was a moment of wanting to run back in the car, of feeling she could not get off.
The train had stopped; the porter took her by the arm, thinking by her faltering that she was slipping. She took her bag from him and stood there, turned a little away from the station crowd.
Ted Holland had been waiting for that train, he also with fast beating heart; he too was a little tremulous as he hurried down to the car, far in the rear, from which passengers were alighting from the long train. He scanned the faces of the people who began passing him. No, none of them was Ruth. His picture of Ruth was clear, though he had not seen her for eleven years. She would be looking about in that eager way—that swift, bright way; when she saw him there would be that glad nodding of her head, her face all lighting up. Though of course, he told himself, she would be older, probably a little more—well, dignified. The romance that secretly hung about Ruth for him made him picture her as unlike other women; there would be something different about her, he felt.
The woman standing there half turned from him was oddly familiar. She was someone he knew, and somehow she agitated him. He did not tell himself that that was Ruth—but after seeing her he was not looking at anyone else for Ruth. This woman was not "stylish looking." She did not have the smart look of most of the girls of Ruth's old crowd. He had told himself that Ruth would be older—and yet it was not a woman he had pictured, or rather, it was a woman who had given all for love, not a woman who looked as if she had done just the things of women. This woman stooped a little; care, rather than romance, had put its mark upon her; instead of the secretly expected glamour of those years of love there had been a certain settling of time. He knew before he acknowledged it that it was Ruth, knew it by the way this woman made him feel. He came nearer; she had timidly—not with the expected old swiftness—started in the direction he was coming. She saw him—knew him—and in that rush of feeling which transformed her anything of secret disappointment was swept from him.
He kissed her, as sheepishly as a brother would any sister, and was soon covering his emotion with a practical request for her trunk check. But as they walked away the boy's heart was strangely warmed. Ruth was back!
As to Ruth, she did not speak. She could not.
It was the afternoon of Ruth Holland's return to Freeport that Edith Lawrence—now Edith Lawrence Blair—was giving the tea for Deane Franklin's bride and for Cora Albright, introducing Amy to the society of the town and giving Cora another opportunity for meeting old friends. "You see Cora was of our old crowd," Edith was laughingly saying to one of the older women in introducing her two guests of honor, "and Amy has married into it." She turned to Amy with a warm little smile and nod, as if wanting to assure her again that they did look upon her as one of them.
They had indeed given her that sense of being made one of them. Their quick, warm acceptance of her made them seem a wonderfully kindly people. Her heart warmed to them because of this going out to her, a stranger. That informality and friendliness which in a society like theirs prevails well within the bounds made them seem to her a people of real warmth. She was pleased with the thought of living among them, being one of them; gratified, not only in the way they seemed to like her, but by the place they gave her. There were happy little anticipations of the life just opening up. She was flushed with pleasure and gratification.
She was seeing the society of the town at its best that afternoon; the women who constituted that society were there, and at their best. For some reason they always were at their best at the Lawrences', as if living up to the house itself, which was not only one of the most imposing of the homes of that rich little middle-western city, but had an atmosphere which other houses, outwardly equally attractive, lacked. Mrs. Lawrence had taste and hospitality; the two qualities breathed through her house. She and Edith were Freeport's most successful hostesses. The society of that town was like the particular thing known as society in other towns; not distinguished by any unique thing so much as by its likeness to the thing in general. Amy, knowing society in other places, in a larger place, was a little surprised and much pleased at what she recognized.
And she felt that people were liking her, admiring her, and that always put her at her best. Sometimes Amy's poise, rare in one so young, made her seem aloof, not cordial, and she had not been one to make friends quickly. Edith's friendliness had broken through that; she talked more than was usual with her—was gayer, more friendly. "You're making a great hit, my dear," Edith whispered to her gayly, and Amy flushed with pleasure. People about the room were talking of how charming she was; of there being something unusual in that combination of girlishness and—they called it distinction; had Amy been in different mood they might have spoken of it less sympathetically as an apparent feeling of superiority. But she felt that she was with what she called her own sort, and she was warmed in gratification by the place given herself.
She was gayly telling a little group of an amusing thing that had happened at her wedding when she overheard someone saying to Edith, by whom she was standing: "Yes, on the two o'clock train. I was down to see Helen off, and saw her myself—walking away with Ted."
Amy noticed that the other women, who also had overheard, were only politely appearing to be listening to her now, and were really discreetly trying to hear what these two were saying. She brought her story to a close.
"You mean Ruth Holland?" one of the women asked, and the two groups became one.
Amy drew herself up; her head went a little higher, her lips tightened; then, conscious of that, she relaxed and stood a little apart, seeming only to be courteously listening to a thing in which she had no part. They talked in lowered tones of how strange it seemed to feel Ruth was back in that town. They had a different manner now—a sort of carefully restrained avidity. "How does she look?" one of the women asked in that lowered tone.
"Well," said the woman who had been at the train, "she hasn't kept herselfup. Really, I was surprised. You'd think a woman in her position would make a particular effort to—to make the most of herself, now, wouldn't you? What else has she to go on? But really, she wasn't at all good style, and sort of—oh, as if she had let herselfgo, I thought. Though,"—she turned to Edith in saying this—"there's that same old thing about her; I saw her smile up at Ted as they walked away—and she seemed all different then. You know how it always used to be with Ruth—so different from one minute to another."
Edith turned away, rather abruptly, and joined another group. Amy could not make out her look; it seemed—why it seemed pain; as if it hurt her to hear what they were saying. Could it be that she stillcared?—after the way she had been treated? That seemed impossible, even in one who had the sweet nature Mrs. Blair certainly had.
While the women about her were still talking of Ruth Holland, Amy saw Stuart Williams' wife come out of the dining room and stand there alone for a minute looking about the room. It gave her a shock. The whole thing seemed so terrible, so fascinatingly terrible. And it seemed unreal; as a thing one might read or hear about, but not the sort of thing one's own life would come anywhere near. Mrs. Williams' eyes rested on their little group and Amy had a feeling that somehow she knew what they were talking about. As her eyes followed the other woman's about the room she saw that there were several groups in which people were drawn a little closer together and appeared to be speaking a little more intimately than was usual upon such an occasion. She felt that Mrs. Williams' face became more impassive. A moment later she had come over to Amy and was holding out her hand. There seemed to Amy something very brave about her, dignified, fine, in the way she went right on, bearing it, holding her own place, keeping silence. She watched her leave the room with a new sense of outrage against that terrible woman—that woman Deane stood up for! The resentment which in the past week she had been trying to put down leaped to new life.
The women around her resumed their talk: of Mrs. Williams, the Holland family, of the night of Edith's wedding when—in that very house—Ruth Holland had been there up to the very last minute, taking her place with the rest of them. They spoke of her betrayal of Edith, her deception of all her friends, of how she was the very last girl in the world they would have believed it of.
A little later, when she and Edith were talking with some other guests, Ruth Holland was mentioned again. "I don't want to talk of Ruth," Edith said that time; "I'd rather not." There was a catch in her voice and one of the women impulsively touched her arm. "It was so terrible for you, dear Edith," she murmured.
"Sometimes," said Edith, "it comes home to me that it was pretty terrible for Ruth." Again she turned away, leaving an instant's pause behind her. Then one of the women said, "I think it's simply wonderful that Edith can have anything but bitterness in her heart for Ruth Holland! Why there's not another person in town—oh, except Deane Franklin, of course—"
She caught herself, reddened, then turned to Amy with a quick smile. "And it's just his sympathetic nature, isn't it? That's exactly Deane—taking the part of one who's down."
"And then, too, men feel differently about those things," murmured another one of the young matrons of Deane's crowd.
Their manner of seeming anxious to smooth something over, to get out of a difficult situation, enraged Amy, not so much against them as because of there being something that needed smoothing over, because Deane had put himself and her in a situation that was difficult. How did it look?—what must people think?—his standing up for a woman the whole town had turned against! But she was saying with what seemed a sweet gravity, "I'm sure Deane would be sorry for any woman who had been so—unfortunate. And she," she added bravely, "was a dear old friend, was she not?"
The woman who had commiserated with Edith now nodded approval at Amy. "You're sweet, my dear," she said, and the benign looks of them all made her feel there was something for her to be magnanimous about, something queer. Her resentment intensified because of having to give that impression of a sweet spirit. And so people talked about Deane's standing up for this Ruth Holland!Whydid they talk?—just what did they say? "There's more to it than I know," suspicion whispered. In that last half hour it was hard to appear gracious and interested; she saw a number of those little groups in which voices were low and faces were trying not to appear eager.
She wished she knew what they were saying; she had an intense desire to hear more about this thing which she so resented, which was so roiling to her. It fascinated as well as galled her; she wanted to know just how this Ruth Holland looked, how she had looked that night of the wedding, what she had said and done. The fact of being in the very house where Ruth Holland had been that last night she was with her friends seemed to bring close something mysterious, terrible, stirring imagination and curiosity. Had she been with Deane that night? Had he taken her to the wedding?—taken her home? She hardened to him in the thought of there being this thing she did not know about. It began to seem he had done her a great wrong in not preparing her for a thing that could bring her embarrassment. Everyone else knew about it! Coming there a bride, and the very first thing encountering something awkward! She persuaded herself that her pleasure in this party, in this opening up of her life there, was spoiled, that Deane had spoiled it. And she tormented herself with a hundred little wonderings.
She and Cora Albright went home together in Edith's brougham. Cora was full of talk of Ruth Holland, this new development, Ruth's return, stirring it all up again for her. Amy's few discreet questions brought forth a great deal that she wanted to know. Cora had a worldly manner, and that vague sympathy with evil that poetizes one's self without doing anything so definite as condoning, or helping, the sinner.
"I do think," she said, with a little shrug, "that the town has been pretty hard about it. But then you know what these middle-western towns are." Amy, at this appeal to her sophistication, gravely nodded. "I do feel sorry for Ruth," Cora added in a more personal tone.
"Will you go to see her?" Amy asked, rather pointedly.
"Oh, I couldn't do that," replied Cora. "My family—you know,—or perhaps you don't know. I'm related to Mrs. Williams," she laughed.
"Oh!" Amy ejaculated, aghast, and newly fascinated by the horror, what somehow seemed the impossibleness of the whole thing—that she should be talking of Ruth Holland to a woman related to Mrs. Williams!
"I supposeshefelt terribly," Amy murmured.
Cora laughed a little. "Oh, I don't know. It never seemed to me that Marion would do much feeling. Feeling is so—ruffling."
"She looks," said Amy, a little aggressively, "as though she might not show all she feels."
"Oh, I suppose not," Cora agreed pleasantly. "Perhaps I do Marion an injustice. She may have suffered in silence. Certainly she's kept silence. Truth is, I never liked her so very well. I like Ruth much the better of the two. I like warmth—feeling."
She was leaning forward and looking from the window. "That's the Hollands'," she said. And under her breath, compassionately, she murmured, "Poor Ruth!"
"I should think youwouldgo and see her," said Amy, curiously resentful of this feeling.
With a little sigh Cora leaned back in the luxurious corner. "We're not free to do what we might like to do in this life," she said, looking gravely at Amy and speaking as one actuated by something larger than personal feeling. "Too many people are associated with me for me to go and see Ruth—as, for my own part, I'd gladly do. You see it's even closer than being related to Marion. Cyrus Holland,—Ruth's brother—married into my family too. Funny, isn't it?" she laughed at Amy's stare. "Yes, Cyrus Holland married a second cousin of Stuart Williams' wife."
"Why—" gasped Amy, "it's positively weird, isn't it?"
"Things are pretty much mixed up in this world," Cora went on, speaking with that good-natured sophistication which appealed to Amy as worldly. "I think one reason Cy was so bitter against Ruth, and kept the whole family so, was the way it broke into his own plans. He was in love with Louise at the time Ruth left; of course all her kith and kin—being also Marion's—were determined she should not marry a Holland. Cy thought he had lost her, but after a time, as long as no one was quite so bitter against Ruth as he, the opposition broke down a little—enough for Louise to ride over it. Oh, yes, in these small towns everybody's somehow mixed up with everyone else," she laughed. "And of course," she went on more gravely, "that is where it is hard to answer the people who seem so hard about Ruth. It isn't just one's self, or even just one's family—though it broke them pretty completely, you know; but a thing like that reaches out into so many places—hurts so many lives."
"Yes," said Amy, "it does." She was thinking of her own life, of how it was clouding her happiness.
"One has to admit," said Cora, in the tone of summing it all up, "that just taking one's own happiness is thorough selfishness. Society as a whole is greater than the individual, isn't it?"
That seemed to Amy the heart of it. She felt herself as one within society, herself faithful to it and guarding it against all who would do it harm; hard to the traitor, not because of any personal feeling—she wished to make that clear to herself—but because society as a whole demanded that hardness. After she had bade Cora good-by and as she was about to open the door of the house Deane had prepared for her, she told herself that it was a matter of taking the larger view. She was pleased with the phrase; it seemed to clear her own feeling of any possible charge of smallness.
Despite the fact that he knew he was going to be late getting home for dinner, Dr. Franklin was sending his car very slowly along the twelve-mile stretch of road that lay between him and home. This was not so much because it was beautiful country through which he went, and the spring freshness in the softness of late afternoon was grateful to him, nor because too tired for any kind of hurrying, as it was that he did not want to cover those twelve miles before he had thought out what he was going to say to Amy.
He had seen Ruth that afternoon. He went, as usual, to see her father, and as he entered the room Ruth was sitting beside the bed. She sat with her back to him and did not seem to know at once that he was there. She was bending forward, elbow on her knee, hand to her face, looking at her father who was asleep, or, rather, in that stupor with which death reaches out into life, through which the living are drawn to the dead. She was sitting very still, intent, as she watched the man whom life was letting go.
He had not seen Ruth since that night, eleven years before, when she clung to him as she saw the headlight of her train, then turned from him to the car that was to carry her away from the whole world she knew. It had seemed that the best of life was pulling away from him as he heard her train pull out. He fairly ran away from the sound of it; not alone because it was taking Ruth out of his own life, but because it was bearing her to a country where the way would be too hard.
He knew that that way had been hard, that the years had not spared her; and yet there had been a little shock when he saw Ruth that afternoon; he knew now that his fears for her had rather given themselves a color of romance. She looked worn, as if she had worked, and, just at first, before she saw him, she looked older than it would seem that number of years should make her.
But when she heard him and turned, coming to him with outstretched hand, it was as it used to be—feeling illumining, transforming her. She was the old flaming Ruth then, the years that lined her defied. Her eyes—it was like a steady light shining through trembling waters. No one else ever gave him that impression Ruth did of a certain deep steadiness through changing feeling. He had thought he remembered just how wonderful Ruth's eyes were—how feeling flamed in them and that steady understanding looked through from her to him—that bridge between separateness. But they were newly wonderful to him,—so live, so tender, so potent.
She had been very quiet; thinking back to it, he pondered that. It seemed not alone the quiet that comes with the acceptance of death, the quiet that is the subduing effect of strange or moving circumstances, but an inner quiet, a quiet of power. The years had taken something from Ruth, but Ruth had won much from them. She was worn, a little dimmed, but deepened. A tragedy queen she was not; he had a little smile for himself for that subconscious romantic expectation that gave him, just at the first, a little shock of disappointment when he saw Ruth. A tragedy queen would hold herself more imposingly—and would have taken better care of her hands. But that moment of a lighted way between Ruth and him could let him afford to smile at disappointed romantic expectation.
He had been there for only a few minutes, having the long trip out in the country to make. Ruth and Ted seemed to be alone in the house. He asked her if she had seen Harriett, and she answered, simply, "Not yet."
She had said, "You're married, Deane—and happy. I'm so glad." That, too, she had said very simply; it was real; direct. As he thought of it now it was as if life had simplified her; she had let slip from her, like useless garments, all those blurring artificialities that keep people apart.
As usual he would go over again that evening to see his patient; and then he would remain for a visit with Ruth. And he wanted to take Amy with him. He would not let himself realize just how much he wanted to do that, how much he would hate not doing it. He was thinking it out, trying to arrive at the best way of putting it to Amy. If only he could make it seem to her the simple thing it was to him!
He would be so happy to do this for Ruth, but it was more than that; it was that he wanted to bring Amy within—within that feeling of his about Ruth. He wanted her to share in that. He could not bear to leave it a thing from which she was apart, to which she was hostile. He could not have said just why he felt it so important Amy become a part of what he felt about Ruth.
When at last they were together over their unusually late dinner the thing he wanted to say seemed to grow more difficult because Amy was so much dressed up. In her gown of that afternoon she looked so much the society person that what he had in mind somehow grew less simple. And there was that in her manner too—like her clothes it seemed a society manner—to make it less easy to attempt to take her into things outside the conventional round of life. He felt a little helpless before this self-contained, lovely young person. She did not seem easy to get at. Somehow she seemed to be apart from him. There was a real wistfulness in his desire to take her into what to him were things real and important. It seemed if he could not do that now that Amy would always be a little apart from him.
Her talk was of the tea that afternoon: who was there, what they wore, what they had said to her, how the house looked; how lovely Mrs. Lawrence and Edith were.
What he was thinking was that it was Ruth's old crowd had assembled there—at Edith's house—to be gracious to Amy that afternoon. She mentioned this name and that—girls Ruth had grown up with, girls who had known her so well, and cared for her. And Ruth? Had they spoken of her? Did they know she was home? If they did, did it leave them all unmoved? He thought of the easy, pleasant way life had gone with most of those old friends of Ruth's. Had they neither the imagination nor the heart to go out in the thought of the different thing it had been to her?
He supposed not; certainly they had given no evidence of any such disposition. It hardened him against them. He hated the thought of the gay tea given for Amy that afternoon when Ruth, just back after all those years away, was home alone with her father, who was dying. Amy they were taking in so graciously—because things had gone right with her; Ruth, whom they knew, who had been one of them, they left completely out. There flamed up a desire to take Amy with him, as against them, to show them that she was sweeter and larger than they, that she understood and put no false value on a cordiality that left the heart hard.
But Amy looked so much one of them, seemed so much one with them in her talk about them, that he put off what he wanted to say, listening to her. And yet, he assured himself, that was not the whole of Amy; he softened and took heart in the thought of her tenderness in moments of love, her sweetness when the world fell away and they were man and woman to each other. Those real things were stronger in her than this crust of worldliness. He would reach through that to the life that glowed behind it. If he only had the skill, the understanding, to reach through that crust to the life within, to that which was real, she would understand that the very thing bringing them their happiness was the thing which in Ruth put her apart from her friends; she would be larger, more tender, than those others. He wanted that triumph for her over them. He would glory in it so! There would be such pride in showing Amy to Ruth as a woman who was real. And most of all, because it was a thing so deep in his own life, he wanted Amy to come within, to know from within, his feeling about Ruth.
"You know, dear, that was Ruth's old crowd you were meeting this afternoon," he finally said.
He saw her instantly stiffen. Her mouth looked actually hard. That, he quickly told himself, was what those people had done to her.
"And that house," he went on, his voice remaining quiet, "was like another home to Ruth."
Amy cleared her throat. "She didn't make a very good return for the hospitality, do you think?" she asked sharply.
Flushing, he started to reply to that, but instead asked abruptly, "Does Edith know that Ruth is home?"
"Yes," Amy replied coldly, "they were speaking of her."
"Speakingof her!" he scoffed.
"I supposeyouwould think," she flamed, "that they ought to have met her at the train!"
"The idea doesn't seem to me preposterous," he answered.
Feeling the coldness in his own voice he realized how he was at the very start getting away from the thing he wanted to do, was estranging Amy by his resentment of her feeling about a thing she did not understand. After all—as before, he quickly made this excuse for her—what more natural than that she should take on the feeling of these people she was thrown with, particularly when they were so very kindly in their reception of her?
"Dear," he began again, "I saw Ruth this afternoon. She seems so alone there. She's gone through such—such hard things. It's a pretty sad homecoming for her. I'm going over there again this evening, and, Amy dear, I do so want you to go with me."
Amy did not reply. He had not looked at her after he began speaking—not wanting to lose either his courage or his temper in seeing that stiffening in her. He did not look at her now, even though she did not speak.
"I want you to go, Amy. I ask you to. I want it—you don't know how much. I'm terribly sorry for Ruth. I knew her very well, we were very close friends. Now that she is here, and in trouble—and so lonely—I want to take my wife to see her."
As even then she remained silent, he turned to her. She sat very straight; red spots burned in her cheeks and there was a light in her eyes he had never seen there before. She pushed back her chair excitedly. "And may I ask,"—her voice was high, tight,—"if you see nothing insulting to your wife in this—proposal?"
For an instant he just stared at her. "Insulting?" he faltered. "I—I—" He stopped, helpless, and helplessly sat looking at her, sitting erect, breathing fast, face and eyes aflame with anger. And in that moment something in his heart fell back; a desire that had been dear to him, a thing that had seemed so beautiful and so necessary, somehow just crept back where it could not be so much hurt. At the sight of her, hard, scornful, so sure in her hardness, that high desire of his love that she share his feeling fell back. And then to his disappointment was added anger for Ruth; through the years anger against so many people had leaped up in him because of their hardness to Ruth, that, as if of itself, it leaped up against Amy now.
"No," he said, his voice hard now too, "I must say I see nothing insulting in asking you to go with me to see Ruth Holland!"
"Oh, you don't!" she cried. "A woman living with another woman's husband! Why, this very afternoon I was with the wife of the man that woman is living with!—sheis the woman I would meet! And you can ask me—your wife—to go and see a woman who turned her back on society—on decency—a woman her own family cast out, and all decent people turn away from." She paused, struggling, unable to keep her dignity and yet say the things rushing up to be said.
He had grown red, as he always did when people talked that way about Ruth. "Of course,"—he made himself say it quietly—"she isn't those things to me, you know. She's—quite other things to me."
"I'd like to know what sheisto you!" Amy cried. "It's very strange—your standing up for her against the whole town!"
He did not reply; it was impossible to tell Amy, when she was like this, what Ruth had been—was—to him.
She looked at him as he sat there silent. And this was the man she had married!—a man who could treat her like this, asking her to go and see a woman who wasn't respectable—why, who was as far from respectable as a woman could be! This was the man for whom she had left her mother and father—and a home better than this home certainly,—yes, and that other man who had wanted her and who had so much more to offer!Herespected her. He would never ask her to go and see a woman who wasn't decent! But she had married for love; had given up all those other things that she might have love. And now.... Her throat tightened and it was hard to hold back tears. And then suddenly she wanted to go over to Deane, slip down beside him, put her arms around him, tell him that she loved him and ask him to please tell her that he loved her. But there was so strange an expression on his face; it checked that warm, loving impulse, holding her where she was, hard. What was he thinking about—that woman? He had so strange a look. She did not believe it had anything to do with her. No, he had forgotten her. It was this other woman. Why, he was in love with her—of course! He had always been in love with her.
Because it seemed the idea would break her heart, because she could not bear it, it was scoffingly that she threw out: "You were in love with her, I suppose? You've always been in love with her, haven't you?"
"Yes, Amy," he answered, "I was in love with Ruth. I loved her—at any rate, I sorrowed for her—until the day I met you."
His voice was slow and sad; the whole sadness of it all, all the sadness of a world in which men and women loved and hurt each other seemed closing in around him. He did not seem able to rise out of it, to go out to her; it was as if his new disappointment brought back all the hurt of old ones.
Young, all inexperienced in the ways of adjusting love to life, of saving it for life, the love in her tried to shoot through the self-love that closed her in, holding her tight. She wanted to follow that impulse, go over and put her arms around her husband, let her kisses drive away that look of sadness. She knew that she could do it, that she ought to do it, that she would be sorry for not having done it, but—she couldn't. Love did not know how to fight its way through pride.
He had risen. "I must go. I have a number of calls to make. I—I'm sorry you feel as you do, Amy."
He was not going to explain! He was just leaving her outside it all! He didn't care for her, really, at all—just took her because he couldn't get that other woman! Tookher—Amy Forrester—because he couldn't get the woman he wanted! Great bands of incensed pride bound her heart now, closing in the love that had fluttered there. Her face, twisted with varying emotions, was fairly ugly as she cried: "Well, I must say, I wish you had told me this before we were married!"
He looked at her in surprise. Then, surprised anew, looked quickly away. Feeling that he had failed, he tried to put it aside lightly. "Oh, come now, Amy, you didn't think, did you, that you could marry a man of thirty-four who had never loved any woman?"
"I should like to think he had loved a respectable woman!" she cried, wounded anew by this lightness, unable to hold back things she miserably knew she would be sorry she had not held back. "And if he had loved that kind of a woman—didlove her—I should like to think he had too much respect for his wife to ask her to meet such a person!"
"Ruth Holland is not a woman to speak like that about, Amy," he said with unconcealed anger.
"She's not a decent woman! She's not a respectable woman! She's a bad woman! She's a low woman!"
She could not hold it back. She knew she looked unlovely, knew she was saying things that would not make her loved. She could not help it. Deane turned away from her. After a minute he got a little control of himself and instead of the hot things that had flashed up, said coldly: "I don't think you know what you're talking about."
"Of course I couldn't hope to know as much asshedoes," she jeered. "However," she went on, with more of a semblance of dignity, "I do know a few things. I know that society cannot countenance a woman who did what that woman did. I know that if a woman is going to selfishly take her own happiness with no thought of others she must expect to find herself outside the lives of decent people. Society must protect itself against such persons as she. I know that much—fortunately."
Her words fortified her. She, certainly, was in the right. She felt that she had behind her all those women of that afternoon. Did any of them receive Ruth Holland? Did they not all see that society must close in against the individual who defied it? She felt supported.
For the minute he stood there looking at her—so absolutely unyielding, so satisfied in her conclusions,—those same things about society and the individual that he had heard from the rest of them; like the rest of them so satisfied with the law she had laid down—law justifying hardness of heart and closing in against the sorrow of a particular human life; from Amy now that same look, those same words. For a little time he did not speak. "I'm awfully sorry, Amy," was all he said then.
He stood there in miserable embarrassment. He always kissed her good-by.
She saw his hesitancy and turned to the other room. "Hadn't you better hurry?" she laughed. "You have so many calls to make—and some of them so important!"
It was quiet that evening in the house of Cyrus Holland; the noises that living makes were muffled by life's awe of death, even sounds that could not disturb the dying guarded against by the sense of decorum of those living on. Downstairs were people who had come to inquire for the man they knew would not be one of them again. For forty years Cyrus Holland had been a factor in the affairs of the town. He was Freeport's senior banker, the old-fashioned kind of banker, with neither the imagination nor the daring to make of himself a rich man, or of his bank an institution using all the possibilities of its territory. In venturing days he remained cautious. His friends said that he was sane—responsible; men of a newer day put it that he was limited, lacking in that boldness which makes the modern man of affairs. He had advised many men and always on the side of safety. No one had grown rich through his suggestions, but more than one had been saved by his counsels. With the expansion of the business of the town newer banks had gone ahead of his, and when they said he was one of the good substantial men of the community they were indicating his limitations with his virtues. Such a man, not a brilliant figure through his lifetime, would be lamented in his passing. They had often said that he failed in using his opportunities; what they said now was that he had never abused them—death, as usual, inducing the living to turn the kindly side to the truth about the dying.
Ruth did not go downstairs to see the people who were coming in. Ted was down there, and Flora Copeland, a spinster cousin of the Hollands, who for several years had lived in the house. Once, in passing through the hall, she heard voices which she recognized. She stood there listening to them. It was so strange to hear them; and so good. She was hungry for voices she knew—old voices. Once there was a pause and her heart beat fast for she got a feeling that maybe they were going to ask for her. But they broke that pause to say goodnight. She had received no message about anyone asking for her.
But even though she was not seeing the people who came she felt the added strangeness her presence made in that house which had suspended the usual affairs of living in waiting for death. The nurse was one of the girls of the town, of a family Ruth knew. She had been only a little girl at the time Ruth went away. She was conscious, in the young woman's scrupulously professional manner toward herself, of a covert interest, as in something mysterious, forbidden. She could see that to this decorous young person she was a woman out of another world. It hurt her, and it made her a little angry. She wished that this professional, proper young woman, stealing glances as at a forbidden thing, could know the world in which she actually lived.
And yet it occurred to her that the strain was less great than it would have been at any other time—something about a room of death making the living a little less prone to divide themselves into good and bad, approved and condemned. With the approach of death there are likely to be only two classes—the living and the dead. After the first few hours, despite the estranging circumstances, there did seem to be some sort of a bond between her and this girl who attended her father.
Ruth and Ted and Flora Copeland had had dinner together. Her Cousin Flora had evidently pondered the difficult question of a manner with Ruth and was pursuing it scrupulously. Her plan was clearly indicated in her manner. She would seem to be acting as if nothing had happened and yet at the same time made it plain that she in no sense countenanced the person to whom she was being kind. Her manner was that most dismal of all things—a punctilious kindliness.
This same Cousin Flora, now an anæmic woman of forty-five, had not always been exclusively concerned with propriety. Ruth could remember Cousin Flora's love affair, which had so greatly disturbed the members of the family, and which, to save their own pride, they had thwarted. Cousin Flora had had the misfortune to fall in love with a man quite outside the social sphere of the Copelands and the Hollands. He was a young laboring man whom she knew through the social affairs of the church. He had the presumption to fall in love with her. She had not had love before, being less generously endowed in other respects than with social position in Freeport. There had been a brief, mad time when Cousin Flora had seemed to find love greater than exclusiveness. But the undesirable affair was frustrated by a family whose democracy did not extend beyond a working together for the good of the Lord, and Cousin Flora was, as Ruth remembered their saying with satisfaction, saved. Looking at her now Ruth wondered if there ever came times when she regretted having been saved.
She tried to make the most of all those little things that came into her mind just because this homecoming was so desolate a thing to be left alone with. She had many times lived through a homecoming. And when she had thought of coming home she had always, in spite of it all, thought of things as much the same. And now even she and Ted were strange with each other; it was Ted the little boy she knew; it was hard all at once to bridge years in which they had not shared experiences.
It was the house itself seemed really to take her in. When she got her first sight of it all the things in between just rolled away. She was back. What moved her first was not that things had changed but that they were so much the same—the gate, the walk up to the house, the big tree, the steps of the porch; as she went up the walk there was the real feeling of coming home.
Then they stepped up on the porch—and her mother was not there to open the door for her; she knew then with a poignancy even those first days had not carried that she would never see her mother again, knew as she stepped into the house that her mother was gone. And yet it would keep seeming her mother must be somewhere in that house, that in a little while she would come in the room and tell something about where she had been. And she would find herself listening for her grandfather's slow, uncertain step; and for Terror's bark—one of his wild, glad rushes into the room. Ted said that Terror had been run over by an automobile a number of years before.
Nor was it only those whom death kept away who were not there. Her sister Harriett had not been there to welcome her; now it was evening and she had not yet seen her. Ted had merely said that he guessed Harriett was tired out. He seemed embarrassed about it and had hastily begun to talk of something else. And none of the old girls had come in to see her. The fact that she had not expected them to come somehow did not much relieve the hurt of their not coming. When a door opened she would find herself listening for Edith's voice; there was no putting down the feeling that surely Edith would be running in soon.
Most of the time she sat by her father's bed; though she was watching him dying, to sit there by him was the closest to comfort she could come. And as she watched the face which already had the look of death there would come pictures of her father at various times through the years. There was that day when she was a tiny girl and he came home bringing her a puppy; she could see his laughing face as he held the soft, wriggling, fuzzy little ball of life up to her, see him standing there enjoying her delight. She saw him as he was one day when she said she was not going to Sunday-school, that she was tired of Sunday-school and was not going any more. She could hear him saying, "Ruth, go upstairs and put on your clothes for Sunday-school!"—see him as plainly as though it had just happened standing there pointing a stern finger toward the stairs, not moving until she had started to obey him. And once when she and Edith and some other girls were making a great noise on the porch he had stepped out from the living-room, where he and some men were sitting about the table, looking over something, and said, mildly, affectionately, "My dears, what would you think of making a little less noise?" Queer things to be remembering, but she saw just how he looked, holding the screen door open as he said it.
And as she sat there thinking of how she would never hear his voice again, he reached out his hand as if groping for something he wanted; and when with a little sob she quickly took it he clasped her hand, putting into it a strength that astonished her. He turned toward her after that and the nature of his sleep changed a little; it seemed more natural, as if there were something of peace in it. It was as if he had turned to her, reached out his hand for her, knowing she was there and wanting her. He was too far from life for more, but he had done what he could. Her longing gave the little movement big meaning. Sitting there holding the hand of her father who would never talk to her nor listen to her again, she wanted as she had never wanted before to tell her story. She had been a long time away; she had had a hard time. She wanted to tell him about it, wanted to try and make him understand how it had all happened. She wanted to tell him how homesick she had been and how she had always loved them all. It seemed if she could just make him know what it was she had felt, and what she had gone through, he would be sorry for her and love her as he used to.
Someone had come into the room; she did not turn at once, trying to make her blurred eyes clear. When she looked around she saw her sister Harriett. Her father had relaxed his hold on her hand and so she rose and turned to her sister.
"Well, Ruth," said Harriett, in an uncertain tone. Then she kissed her. The kiss, too, was uncertain, as if she had not known what to do about it, but had decided in its favor. But she had kissed her. Again that hunger to be taken in made much of little. She stood there struggling to hold back the sobs. If only Harriett would put her arms around her and really kiss her!
But Harriett continued to stand there uncertainly. Then she moved, as if embarrassed. And then she spoke. "Did you have a—comfortable trip?" she asked.
The struggle with sobs was over. Ruth took a step back from her sister. It was a perfectly controlled voice which answered: "Yes, Harriett, my trip was comfortable—thank you."
Harriett flushed and still stood there uncertainly. Then, "Did the town look natural?" she asked, diffidently this time.
But Ruth did not say whether the town had looked natural or not. She had noticed something. In a little while Harriett would have another baby. And she had not known about it! Harriett, to be sure, had had other babies and she had not known about it, but somehow to see Harriett, not having known it, brought it home hard that she was not one of them any more; she did not know when children were to be born; she did not know what troubled or what pleased them; did not know how they managed the affairs of living—who their neighbors were—their friends. She had not known about Harriett; Harriett did not know about her—her longing for a baby, longing which circumstances made her sternly deny herself. Unmindful of the hurt of a moment before she now wanted to pour all that out to Harriett, wanted to talk with her of those deep, common things.
The nurse had come in the room and was beginning some preparations for the night. Harriett was moving toward the door. "Harriett," Ruth began timidly, "won't you come in my room a little while and—talk?"
Harriett hesitated. They were near the top of the stairs and voices could be heard below. "I guess not," she said nervously. "Not tonight," she added hurriedly; "that's Edgar down there. He's waiting for me."
"Then good night," said Ruth very quietly, and turned to her room.
All day long she had been trying to keep away from her room. "Thought probably you'd like to have your old room, Ruth," Ted had said in taking her to it. He had added, a little hurriedly, "Guess no one's had it since you left."