WITH every night piercing her like a new wound, and every morning
stinging her like salt in that wound, Ruth Dudley's broken engagement
had dragged itself out for four long, hideous months. There's so much
fever in a woman's sorrow.
At first, to be sure, there had been no special outward and visible sign
of heartbreak except the thunderstorm shadows under the girl's blue
eyes. Then, gradually, very gradually, those same plucky eyes had dulled
and sickened as though every individual thought in her brain was
festering. Later, an occasional loosened finger ring had clattered off
into her untouched plate or her reeking strong cup of coffee. At the end
of the fourth month the family doctor was quite busy attesting that she
had no tubercular trouble of any sort. There never yet was any
stethoscope invented that could successfully locate consumption of the
affections.
It was about this time that Ruth's Big Brother, strolling smokily into
her room one evening, jumped back in tragic dismay at the astonishing
sight that met his eyes. There, like some fierce young sacrificial
priestess, with a very modern smutty nose and scorched cheeks, Ruth
knelt on the hearth-rug, slamming every conceivable object that she
could reach into the blazing fire. The soft green walls of the room were
utterly stripped and ravished. The floor in every direction lay
cluttered deep with books and pictures and clothes and innumerable small
bits of bric-a-brac. Already the brimming fireplace leaked forth across
the carpet in little gray, gusty flakes of ash and cinder.
The Big Brother hooted right out loud. "Why, Ruthy Dudley," he gasped.
"What _are_ you doing? You look like the devil!"
Blissfully unconscious of smoke or smut, the girl pushed back the
straggling blond hair from her eyes and grinned, with her white teeth
shot like a bolt through her under lip to keep the grin in place.
"I'm not a 'devil,'" she explained. "I'm a god! And what am I doing? I'm
creating a new heaven and a new earth."
"You won't have much left to create it with," scoffed the Big Brother,
kicking the tortured wreck of a straw hat farther back into the flames.
The girl reached up impatiently and smutted her other hand across her
eyes. "Nothing left to create it with?" she mocked. "Why, if I had
anything left to create it with, I'd be only a--mechanic!"
Then, blackened like a coal-heaver and tousled like a Skye terrier, she
picked up the scarlet bellows and commenced to pump a savage yellow
flame into a writhing, half-charred bundle of letters.
Through all the sweet, calm hours of that warm June night the sacrifice
progressed with amazing rapacity. By midnight she had just finished
stirring the fire-tongs through the ghostly, lacelike ashes of her
wedding gown. At two o'clock her violin went groaning into the flames.
At three her Big Brother, yawning sleepily back in his nightclothes,
picked her up bodily and dumped her into her bed. He was very angry.
"Little Sister," he scolded, "there's no man living worth the fuss
you're making over Aleck Reese!" And the little sister sat up and rubbed
her smutty, scorched cheek against his cool, blue-shaven face as she
tilted the drifting ashes from the bedspread. "I'm not making any
'fuss,'" she protested. "I'm only just--burning my bridges." It was the
first direct allusion that she had ever made to her trouble.
Twice after that--between three o'clock and breakfast time--the Big
Brother woke from his sleep with a horrid sense that the house was on
fire. Twice between three o'clock and breakfast time he met the
Housekeeper scuttling along the halls on the same sniffy errand. Once
with a flickering candle-light Ruth herself crept out to the doorway and
laughed at them. "The house isn't on fire, you sillies," she cried.
"Don't you know a burnt bridge when you smell it?" But the doctor had
said quite distinctly: "You must watch that little girl. Sorrow in the
tongue will talk itself cured, if you give it a chance; but sorrow in
the eyes has a wicked, wicked way now and then of leaking into the
brain."
It was the Housekeeper, though, whose eyes looked worried and tortured
at breakfast time. It was the Big Brother's face that showed a bit sharp
on the cheek-bones. Ruth herself, for the first time in a listless,
uncollared, unbelted, unstarched month, came frisking down to the table
as white and fresh and crisp as linen and starch and curls could make
her.
"I'm going to town this morning," she announced nonchalantly to her
relieved and delighted hearers. The eyes that turned to her brother's
were almost mischievous. "Couldn't you meet me at twelve o'clock," she
suggested, "and take me off to the shore somewhere for lunch? I'll be
shopping on Main Street about that time, so suppose I meet you at Andrew
Bernard's office."
Half an hour later she was stealing out of the creaky back door into
the garden, along the gray, pebbly gravel walk between the tall tufts of
crimson and purple phlox, to the little gay-faced plot of heart's-ease
where the family doctor, symbolist and literalist, had bade her dig and
delve every day in the good, hot, wholesome, freckly sunshine. Close by
in the greensward an absurd pet lamb was tugging and bouncing at the end
of its stingy tether. In a moment's time the girl had transferred the
clumsy iron tether-stake to the midst of her posy bed. Then she started
for the gate.
Pausing for just one repentant second with her hand on the gate latch,
she turned and looked back to the ruthlessly trodden spot where the
bland-eyed lamb stood eyeing her quizzically with his soft, woolly mouth
fairly dripping with the tender, precious blossoms. "Heart's-ease.
B-a-a!" mocked the girl, with a flicker of real amusement.
"Heart's-ease. B-a-a-a!" scoffed the lamb, just because his stomach and
his tongue happened to be made like that. Then with a quick dodge across
the lane she ran to meet the electric car and started off triumphantly
for the city, shutting her faint eyes resolutely away from all the
roadside pools and ponds and gleams of river whose molten, ultimate
peace possibilities had lured her sick mind so incessantly for the past
dozen weeks.
Two hours later, with a hectic spurt of energy, she was racing up three
winding, dizzy flights of stairs in a ponderous, old-fashioned office
building.
Before a door marked "Andrew Bernard, Attorney at Law," she stopped and
waited a frightened moment for breath and courage. As though the
pounding of her heart had really sounded as loud as it felt, the door
handle turned abruptly, and a very tall, broad-shouldered, grave-faced
young man greeted her with attractive astonishment.
"Good morning, Drew," she began politely. "Why, I haven't seen you for a
year." Then, with alarming vehemence, she finished: "Are you all alone?
I want to talk with you."
Her breathlessness, her embarrassment, her fragile intensity sobered the
young man instantly as he led her into his private office and stood for
a moment staring inquiringly into her white face. Her mouth was just as
he had last seen it a year ago, fresh and whimsical and virginal as a
child's; but her eyes were scorched and dazed like the eyes of a
shipwreck survivor or any other person who has been forced unexpectedly
to stare upon life's big emotions with the naked eye.
"I hear you've been ill this spring," he began gently. "If you wanted to
talk with me, Ruthy, why didn't you let me come out to the house and see
you? Wouldn't it have been easier?"
She shook her head. "No," she protested, "I wanted to come here. What
I've got to talk about is very awkward, and if things get too
awkward--why, an embarrassed guest has so much better chance to escape
than an embarrassed host." She struggled desperately to smile, but her
lips twittered instead into a frightened quiver. With narrowing eyes the
young man drew out his big leather chair for her. Then he perched
himself on the corner of his desk and waited for her to speak.
"Ruthy dear," he smiled, "what's the trouble? Come, tell your old chum
all about it."
The girl scrunched her eyes up tight, like a person who starts to jump
and doesn't care where he lands. Twice her lips opened and shut without
a sound. Then suddenly she braced herself with an intense effort.
"Drew," she blurted out, "do you remember--three years ago--you asked me
to--marry--you?"
"Do I remember it?" gasped Drew. The edgy sharpness of his tone made the
girl open her eyes and stare at him. "Yes," he acknowledged, "I remember
it."
The girl began to smooth her white skirts with excessive precision
across her knees. "What made you--ask me?" she whispered.
"What made me ask you?" cried the man.
"What made me ask you? Why, I asked you because I love you."
The girl bent forward anxiously as though she were deaf. "You asked me
because--_what_?" she quizzed him.
"Because I love you," he repeated.
She jumped up suddenly and ran across the room to him. "Because
you--love me?" she reiterated. "'Love?' Not 'loved'? Not past tense? Not
all over and done with?"
There was no mistaking her meaning. But the man's face did not kindle,
except with pain. Almost roughly he put his hands on her shoulders and
searched down deep into her eyes. "Ruth," he probed, "what are you
trying to do to me? Open an old wound? You know I--love you."
The girl's mouth smiled, but her eyes blurred wet with fright and tears.
"Would you care anything--about--marrying me--now?" she faltered.
Drew's face blanched utterly, and the change gave him such a horridly
foreign, alien look that the girl drew away from his hands and scuttled
back to the big chair, and began all over again to smooth and smooth the
garish white skirt across her knees. "Oh, Drew, Drew," she pleaded,
"please look like--_you_. Please--please--don't look like anybody
else."
But Drew did not smile at her. He just stood there and stared in a
puzzled, tortured sort of way.
"What about Aleck Reese?" he began with fierce abruptness.
The girl met the question with unwonted flippancy. "I've broken my
engagement to Aleck Reese," she said coolly. "Broken it all to smash."
But the latent tremor in her voice did not satisfy the man. "Why did you
break it?" he insisted. "Isn't Aleck Reese the man you want?"
Her eyes wavered and fell, and then rallied suddenly to Drew's utmost
question.
"Yes, Drew," she answered ingenuously, "Aleck Reese _is_ the man I want,
_but he's not the kind of man I want_!" As the telltale sentence left
her lips, every atom of strength wilted out of her, and she sank back
into her chair all sick and faint and shuddery.
The impulsive, bitter laugh died dumb on Drew's lips. Instantly he was
at her side, gentle, patient, compassionate, the man whom she knew so
well. "Do you mean," he stammered in a startled sort of way, "do you
mean that--love or no love--I, I am the kind of man that you do want?"
Her hand stole shyly into his and she nodded her head. But her eyes were
turned away from him.
For the fraction of a second he wondered just what the future would hold
for him and her if he should snatch the situation into his arms and
crush her sorrow out against his breast. Then in that second's hesitancy
she shook her hair out of her eyes and looked up at him like a sick,
wistful child.
"Oh, Drew," she pleaded, "you've never, never failed me yet--all my hard
lessons, all my Fourth-of-July accidents, all my broken sleds and lost
skates. Couldn't you help me now we're grown up? I'm so unhappy."
The grimness came back to Drew's face.
"Has Aleck Reese been mean to you?" he asked.
Her eyebrows lifted in denial. "Oh, no--not specially," she finished a
trifle wearily. "I simply made up my mind at last that I didn't want to
marry him."
Drew's frown relaxed. "Then what's the trouble?" he suggested.
Her eyebrows arched again. "What's the trouble?" she queried. "Why, I
happen to love him. That's all."
She took her hand away from Drew and began to smooth her skirt once
more.
"Yes," she repeated slowly, "as long ago as last winter I made up my
mind that I didn't want to marry him--but I didn't make up my courage
until Spring. My courage, I think, is just about six months slower than
my mind. And then, too, my 'love-margin' wasn't quite used up, I
suppose. A woman usually has a 'love-margin,' you know, and, besides,
there's always so much more impetus in a woman's love. Even though she's
hurt, even though she's heartbroken, even though, worst of all, she's a
tiny bit bored, all her little, natural love courtesies go on just the
same of their own momentum, for a day or a week, or a month, or half a
lifetime, till the love-flame kindles again--or else goes out
altogether. Love has to be like that. But if I were a man, Drew, I'd be
awfully careful that that love-margin didn't ever get utterly exhausted.
Aleck, though, doesn't understand about such things. I smoothed his
headaches just as well, and listened to his music just as well, so he
shiftlessly took it for granted that I loved him just as well. What
nonsense! 'Love?'" Her voice rose almost shrilly. "'Love?' Bah! What's
love, anyway, but a wicked sort of hypnotism in the way that a mouth
slants, or a cheek curves, or a lock of hair colors? Listen to me. If
Aleck Reese were a woman and I were a man, I certainly wouldn't choose
his type for a sweetheart--irritable, undomestic, wild for excitement.
How's that for a test? And if Aleck Reese and I were both women, I
certainly shouldn't want him for my friend. Oughtn't that to decide it?
Not a vital taste in common, not a vital interest, not a vital ideal!"
She began to laugh hysterically. "And I can't sleep at night for
remembering the droll little way that his hair curls over his forehead,
or the hurt, surprised look in his eyes when he ever really did get
sorry about anything. My God! Drew, look at me!" she cried, and rolled
up her sleeves to her elbow. The flesh was gone from her as though a
fever had wasted her.
The muscles in Drew's throat began to twitch unpleasantly. "Was Aleck
Reese mean to you?" he persisted doggedly.
A little faint, defiant smile flickered across her lips. "Never mind,
Drew," she said, "whether Aleck Reese was mean to me or not. It really
doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter at all just exactly what a man
does or doesn't do to a woman as long as, by one route or another,
before her wedding day, he brings her to the place where she can
honestly say in her heart, 'This man that I want is not the kind of man
that I want.' Honor, loyalty, strength, gentleness--why, Drew, the man I
marry has _got_ to be the kind of man I want.
"I've tried to be fair to Aleck," she mused almost tenderly. "I've tried
to remember always that men are different from women, and that Aleck
perhaps is different from most men. I've tried to remember always that
he is a musician--a real, real musician with all the ghastly, agonizing
extremes of temperament. I've tried to remember always that he didn't
grow up here with us in our little town with all our fierce, little-town
standards, but that he was educated abroad, that his whole moral,
mental, and social ideals are different, that the admiration and
adulation of--new--women is like the breath of life to him--that he
simply couldn't live without it any more than I could live without the
love of animals, or the friendship of children, or the wonderfulness of
outdoors, all of which bore _him_ to distraction.
"Oh, I've reasoned it all out, night after night after night, fought it
out, _torn_ it out, that he probably really and truly did love me quite
a good deal--in his own way--when there wasn't anything else to do. But
how can it possibly content a woman to have a man love her as well as
_he_ knows how--if it isn't as well as _she_ knows how? We won't talk
about--Aleck Reese's morals," she finished abruptly. "Fickleness,
selfishness, neglect, even infidelity itself, are such purely minor,
incidental data of the one big, incurably rotten and distasteful fact
that--such and such a man is _stupid in the affections_."
With growing weakness she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.
For an anxious moment Drew sat and watched her. "Is that all?" he asked
at last.
She opened her eyes in surprise. "Why, yes," she said, "that's all--that
is, it's all if you understand. I'm not complaining because Aleck Reese
didn't love me, but because, loving me, he wasn't _intelligent_ enough
to be true to me. You do understand, don't you? You understand that it
wasn't because he didn't pay his love bills, but because he didn't know
enough to pay them. He took my loyalty without paying for it with his;
he took my devotion, my tenderness, my patience, without ever, ever
making any adequate return. Any girl ought to be able to tell in six
months whether her lover is using her affection rightly, whether he is
taking her affection and investing it with his toward their mutual
happiness and home. Aleck invested nothing. He just took all my love
that he could grab and squandered it on himself--always and forever on
himself. A girl, I say, ought to be able to tell in six months. But I am
very stupid. It has taken me three years."
"Well, what do you want _me_ to do?" Drew asked a bit quizzically.
"I want you to advise me," she said.
"Advise you--_what_?" persisted Drew.
The first real flicker of comedy flamed in the girl's face. Her white
cheeks pinked and dimpled. "Why, advise me to--marry _you_!" she
announced. "WELL, WHY NOT?" She fairly hurled the three-word bridge
across the sudden, awful chasm of silence that yawned before her.
Drew's addled mind caught the phrase dully and turned it over and over
without attempting to cross on it. "Well, why not? Well, why not?" he
kept repeating. His discomfiture filled the girl with hysterical
delight, and she came and perched herself opposite him on the farther
end of his desk and smiled at him.
"It seems to me perfectly simple," she argued. "Without any doubt or
question you certainly are the kind of man whom I should like to marry.
You are true and loyal and generous and rugged about things. And you
like the things that I like. And I like the people that you like. And,
most of anything in the world, you are _clever in the affections_. You
are heart-wise as well as head-wise. Why, even in the very littlest,
silliest thing that could possibly matter, you wouldn't--for
instance--remember George Washington's birthday and forget mine. And you
wouldn't go away on a lark and leave me if I was sick, any more than
you'd blow out the gas. And you wouldn't--hurt me about--other
women--any more than you'd eat with your knife." Impulsively she reached
over and patted his hand with the tips of her fingers. "As far as I can
see," she teased, "there's absolutely no fault in you that matters to me
except that I don't happen to love you."
Quick as her laugh the tears came scalding back to her eyes.
"Why, Drew," she hurried on desperately, "people seem to think it's a
dreadful thing to marry a man whom you don't love; but nobody questions
your marrying _any_ kind of a man if you do love him. As far as I can
make out, then, it's the love that matters, not the man. Then why not
love the right man?" She began to smile again. "So here and now, sir, I
deliberately choose to love _you_."
But Drew's fingers did not even tighten over hers.
"I want to be a happy woman," she pleaded. "Why, I'm only twenty-two. I
can't let my life be ruined now. There's _got_ to be some way out. And
I'm going to find that way out if I have to crawl on my hands and knees
for a hundred years. I'm luckier than some girls. I've got such a
shining light to aim for."
Almost roughly Drew pulled his hand away, the color surging angrily into
his cheeks. "I'm no shining light," he protested hotly, "and you shall
never, never come crawling on your hands and knees to me."
"Yes, I shall," whispered the girl. "I shall come creeping very humbly,
if you want me. And you do want me, don't you? Oh, please advise me. Oh,
please play you are my Father or my Big Brother and advise me to--marry
_you_."
Drew laughed in spite of himself. "Play I was your Father or your Big
Brother?" Mimicry was his one talent. "Play I was your Father or your
Big Brother and advise you to marry me?"
Instantly his fine, straight brows came beetling down across his eyes in
a fierce paternal scrutiny. Then, quick as a wink, he had rumpled his
hair and stuck out his chest in a really startling imitation of Big
Brother's precious, pompous importance. But before Ruth could clap her
hands his face flashed back again into its usual keen, sad gravity, and
he shook his head. "Yes," he deliberated, "perhaps if I truly were your
Father or your Brother, I really should advise you to marry--me--not
because I amount to anything and am worth it, but because I honestly
believe that I should be good to you--and I know that Aleck Reese
wouldn't be. But if I'm to advise you in my own personal capacity--no,
Ruthy, I don't want to marry you!"
"What? What?" Staggering from the desk, she turned and faced him, white
as her dress, blanched to her quivering lips.
But Drew's big shoulders blocked her frenzied effort to escape.
"Don't go away like that, Little Girl," he said. "You don't understand.
It isn't a question of caring. You know I care. But don't you, don't you
understand that a man doesn't like to marry a woman who doesn't love
him?"
Her face brightened piteously. "But I _will_ love you?" she protested.
"I _will_ love you. I promise. I promise you faithfully--I will love
you--if you'll only give me just a little time." The old flicker of
mischief came back to her eyes, and she began to count on her fingers.
"Let me see," she said. "It's June now--June, July, August, September,
October, November--six months. I promise you that I will love you by
November."
"I don't believe it." Drew fairly slashed the words into the air.
Instantly the hurt, frightened look came back to her eyes. "Why, Drew,"
she whispered, "if it were money that I wanted, if I were starving, or
sick, or any all-alone anything, you wouldn't refuse to help me just
because you couldn't possibly see ahead just how I was ever going to pay
you. Drew, I'm very unhappy and frightened and lost-feeling. I just want
to borrow your love. I promise you I will pay it back to you. You won't
be sorry. You won't. You won't!"
Drew's hand reached up and smothered the words on her lips. "You can't
borrow my love," he said sternly. "It's yours, always, every bit of it.
But I won't marry you unless you love me. I tell you it isn't fair to
you."
Impulsively she took his hand and led him back to the big chair and
pushed him gently into it, and perched herself like a little child on a
pile of bulky law books at his feet. The eyes that looked up to his were
very hopeful.
"Don't you think, Drew," she argued, "that just being willing to marry
you is love enough?"
He scanned her face anxiously for some inner, hidden meaning to her
words, some precious, latent confession; but her eyes were only blue,
and just a little bit shy.
She stooped forward suddenly, and took Drew's hand and brushed it across
her cheek to the edge of her lips. "I feel so safe with you, Drew," she
whispered, "so safe, and comforted always. Oh, I'm sure I can teach you
how to make me love you--and you're the only man in the world that I'm
willing to teach." Her chin stiffened suddenly with renewed
stubbornness. "_You_ are the Harbor that was meant for me, and Aleck
Reese is nothing but a--Storm. If you know it, and I know it, what's the
use of dallying?"
Drew's solemn eyes brightened. "Do you truly think," he said, "that
Aleck Reese is only an accident that happened to you on your way to me?"
She nodded her head. Weakness and tears were only too evidently
overtaking her brave little theories.
"And there's something else, too," she confided tremulously. "My head
isn't right. I have such hideous dreams when I do get to sleep. I dream
of drowning myself, and it feels good; and I dream of jumping off high
buildings, and it feels good; and I dream of throwing myself under
railroad trains, and it feels good. And I see the garish announcement in
the morning papers, and I picture how Uncle Terry would look when he got
the news, and I cry and cry and cry, and it feels good. Oh, Drew, I'm so
bored with life! It isn't right to be so bored with life. But I can't
seem to help it. Nothing in all the world has any meaning any more.
Flowers, sunshine, moonlight--everything I loved has gone stale. There's
no taste left to anything; there's no fragrance, there's no rhyme. Drew,
I could stand the sorrow part of it, but I simply can't stand the
emptiness. I tell you I _can't_ stand it. I wish I were dead; and, Drew,
there are so many, many easy ways all the time to make oneself dead. I'm
not safe. Oh, please take me and make me safe. Oh, please take me and
make me want to live!"
Driven almost distracted by this final appeal to all the chivalrous love
in his nature, Drew jumped up and paced the floor. Perplexity,
combativeness, and ultimate defeat flared already in his haggard face.
The girl sensed instantly the advantage that she had gained. "Of
course," she persisted, "of course I see now, all of a sudden, that I'm
not offering you very much in offering you a wife who doesn't love you.
You are quite right; of course I shouldn't make you a very good wife at
first--maybe not for quite a long, long time. Probably it would all be
too hard and miserable for you--"
Drew interrupted her fiercely. "Great heavens!" he cried out, "my part
would be easy, comfortable, serene, interesting, compared to yours.
Don't you know it's nothing except _sad_ to be shut up in the same
house, in the same life, with a person you love who doesn't love you?
Nothing but sad, I tell you; and there's no special nervous strain about
being sad. But to be shut up day and night--as long as life lasts--with
a person who takes the impudent liberty of loving you against your wish
to be loved--oh, the spiritual distastefulness of it, and the physical
enmity, and the ghastly, ghastly ennui! That's your part of it. Flower
or book or jewel or caress, no agonizing, heart-breaking, utterly
wholesome effort to please, but just one hideously chronic, mawkishly
conscientious effort to _be_ pleased, to act pleased--though it blast
your eyes and sear your lips--to _look_ pleased. I tell you I won't have
it!"
"I understand all that," said Ruth gravely. "I understand it quite
perfectly. But underneath it all--I would rather--you had taken me in
your arms--as though I were a little, little hurt girl--and comforted
me--"
But before Drew's choking throat-cry had reached his lips she had sprung
from her seat and was facing him defiantly. Across her face flared
suddenly for the first time the full, dark flush of one of Life's big
tides, and the fear in her hands reached up and clutched at Drew's
shoulders. The gesture tipped her head back like a fagged swimmer's
struggling in the water.
"I am pleading for my life, Drew," she gasped, "for my body, for my
soul, for my health, for my happiness, for home, for safety!"
He snatched her suddenly into his arms. "My God! Ruth," he cried, "what
do you want me to do?"
Triumph came like a holiday laugh to her haggard face.
"What do I want you to do?" she dimpled. "Why, I want you to come with
me now and get a license. I want to be married right away this
afternoon."
"What!" Drew hurled the word at her like a bomb, but it did not seem to
explode.
Laughingly, flushingly, almost delightedly, she stood and watched the
anger rekindle in his face.
"Do you think I am going to take advantage of you like this?" he asked
hotly. "You would probably change your mind to-morrow and be very, very
sorry--"
She tossed her head. It was a familiar little gesture. "I fully and
confidently expect to be sorry to-morrow," she affirmed cheerfully.
"That's why I want to be married to-day, this afternoon, this minute, if
possible, before I have had any chance to change my mind."
Then, with unexpected abruptness, she shook her recklessness aside and
walked back to him childishly, pulling a long, loose wisp of hair across
her face. "See," she said. "Smell the smoke in my hair. It's the smoke
from my burned bridges. I sat up nearly all night and burned everything
I owned, everything that could remind me of Aleck Reese, all my dresses,
all my books, all my keepsakes, all my doll houses that ever grew up
into dreams. So if you decide to marry me I shall be very expensive.
You'll have to take me just as I am--quite a little bit crumpled, not an
extra collar, not an extra hairpin, not anything. Aleck Reese either
loved or hated everything I owned. I haven't left a single bridge on
which one of my thoughts could even crawl back to him again--"
Half quizzically, half caressingly, Drew stooped down and brushed his
lips across the lock of hair. Fragrant as violets, soft as the ghost of
a kiss, the little curl wafted its dearness into his senses. But ranker
than violets, harsher than kisses, lurked the blunt, unmistakable odor
of ashes.
He laughed. And the laugh was bitter as gall. "Burning your bridges," he
mused. "It's a good theory. But if I take your life into my bungling
hands and sweat my heart out trying to make you love me, and come home
every night to find you crying with fear and heartbreak, will you still
protest that the sting in your eyes is nothing in the world except the
_smudge_ from those burnt bridges? Will you promise?"
With desperate literalness she clutched at the phrase. Everything else
in the room began to whirl round and round like prickly stars. "I
promise, I promise," she gasped. Then sight--not air, but just
sight--seemed to be smothered right out of her, and her brain reeled,
and she wilted down unconscious on the floor.
Cursing himself for a brute, Drew snatched her up in a little, white,
crumpled heap and started for the window. Halfway there, the office
door opened abruptly and Ruth's Big Brother stood on the threshold.
Surprise, anxiety, ultimate relief chased flashingly across the
newcomer's face, and in an instant both men were working together over
the limp little body.
"Well, old man," said the Big Brother, "I'm glad she was here safe with
you when she fainted." His spare arm clapped down affectionately across
Drew's shoulders and jarred Drew's fingers brownly against the
death-like pallor of the girl's throat. The Big Brother gave an ugly
gasp. "Damn Aleck Reese," he said.
Drew's eyes shut perfectly tight as though he was smitten by some
unbearable agony. Then suddenly, without an instant's warning, he pulled
himself together and burst out laughing uproariously like a schoolboy.
"Oh, what's the use of damning Aleck Reese?" he cried. "Aleck Reese is
as stale an issue as yesterday morning's paper. If you've no particular
objection to me as a brother-in-law as well as a tennis chum, Ruth and I
were planning to marry each other this afternoon. Maybe I was just a
little bit too vehement about it."
* * * * *
Three hours later, in a dusty, musty, mid-week church vestry, an
extraordinarily white and extraordinarily vivacious girl was quite busy
assuring a credulous minister and a credulous sexton and a credulous Big
Brother that she would love till death hushed her the perfectly
incredulous bridegroom who stood staring down upon her like a very tall
man in a very short dream.
And then, because neither groom nor bride could think of anything
specially married to say to each other, they kidnapped Big Brother and
bore him away in an automobile to a nervous, rollicking, wonderfully
entertaining "shore dinner," where they sat at an open window round a
green-tiled table in a marvelously glowering, ice-cool, artificial
grotto, and ate bright scarlet lobsters while the great, hot, blowzy
yellow moon came wallowing up out of the night-shadowed sea, and the
thrilly, thumpy brass band played "I Love You So"; and the only, only
light in the whole vague, noisy room seemed to be Big Brother's beaming,
ecstatic face gleaming like some glad phosphorescent thing through the
clouds of murky tobacco smoke.
Not till the wines and dines and roses and posies and chatter and
clatter were all over, and the automobile had carried Big Brother off to
his railroad station and whisked the bride and groom back to the wobbly
city pavements, did Drew begin to realize that the frolicking, jesting,
crisp-tongued figure beside him had wilted down into a piteous little
hunch of fear. Stooping to push her slippery new suit case closer under
her feet, he caught the sharp, shuddering tremor of her knees, and as
the automobile swayed finally into the street that led to his apartment,
her lungs seemed to crumple up in a paroxysm of coughing. Under the
garish lights that marked his apartment-house doorway her slight figure
drooped like a tired flower, and the footsteps that tinkled behind him
along the stone corridor rang in his ears with a dear, shy, girlish
reluctance. The elevator had stopped running. One flight, two flights,
three, four, five they toiled up the harsh, cool, metallic stairway.
Four times Ruth stopped to get her breath, and twice to tie her shoe.
Drew laughed to himself at the delicious subterfuge of it.
Then at the very top of the strange, gloomy, midnight building, when
Drew's nervous fingers fumbled a second with his door-lock, without the
slightest possible warning she reached out suddenly with one mad,
frenzied impulse and struck the key from his hand. To his startled eyes
she turned a face more wild, more agonized than any terror he had ever
dreamed in his most hideous, sweating nightmare. Instantly her hands
went clutching out to him.
"Oh, Drew, for God's sake take me home!" she gasped. "What have I done?
What have I done? What have I done? Oh, ALECK!"
Wrenching himself free from her hands, Drew dropped down on the floor
and began to hunt around for the key. The blood surged into his head
like a hot tide, and he felt all gritty-lunged and smothered, as though
he were crawling under water. After a minute he stumbled to his feet and
slipped the recreant key smoothly into the lock, and swung his door wide
open, and turned back to Ruth. She stood facing him defiantly, her eyes
blazing, her poor hands twisting.
Drew nodded toward the door, and shoved the suit case with his foot
across the threshold. His face was very stern and set.
"You want me to take you 'home'?" he said. "_This_ is home. What do you
mean? Take you back to your Brother's house? You can't go back to your
Brother's house on your wedding day. It wouldn't be fair to me. And I
won't help you do an unfair thing _even_ to me. You've _got_ to give me
a chance!"
He nodded again toward the open door, but the girl did not budge. His
face brightened suddenly, and he stepped back to where she was standing,
and lifted her up in his arms and swung her to his shoulder and stumbled
through the pitch-black doorway. "Do you remember," he cried, "the day
at your grammar-school picnic when I carried you over the railroad
trestle because the locomotive that was swooping down upon us round the
curve had scared all the starch out of your legs? Look out for your head
now, honey, and I'll give you a very good imitation of a cave man
bringing home his bride."
In another moment he had switched a blaze of electric light into his
diminutive library, and deposited his sobbing burden none too formally
in the big easy chair that blocked almost all the open space between his
desk and his bookcases. "What! Aren't you laughing, too?" he cried in
mock alarm. But the crumpled little figure in the big chair did not
answer to his raillery.
Until it seemed as though he would totter from his wavering foothold,
Drew stood and watched her dumbly. Then a voice that sounded strange
even to himself spoke out of his lips.
"Ruth--come here," he said.
She raised her rumpled head in astonishment, gaged for a throbbing
instant the new authoritative glint in his eyes, and then slipped
cautiously out of her chair and came to him, reeking with despair. For a
second they just stood and stared at each other, white face to white
face, a map of anger confronting a map of fear.
"You understand," said Drew, "that to-day, by every moral, legal,
religious right and rite, you have delivered your life over utterly into
my hands?" His voice was like ice.
"Yes, I understand," she answered feebly, with the fresh tears gushing
suddenly into her eyes.
Drew's mouth relaxed. "You understand?" he repeated. "Well--forget it!
And never, never, never, as long as you and I are together, never, I
say, understand anything but this: you can cry about Aleck Reese all you
want to, but you sha'n't cry about me. You can count on that anyway." He
started to smile, but his mouth twitched instead with a wince of pain.
"And I thought I could really bring you heart's-ease," he scoffed.
"Heart's-ease? Bah!"
"Heart's-ease. Bah!" The familiar phrase exploded Ruth's inflammable
nerves into hysterical laughter. "Why, that's what the lamb said," she
cried, "when I fed him on my pansy posies. 'Heart's-ease. B-a-h!'" And
her sudden burst of even unnatural delight cleared her face for the
moment of all its haggard tragedy, and left her once more just a very
fragile, very plaintive, very helpless, tear-stained child. "You _b-a-a_
exactly like the lamb," she suggested with timid, snuffling pleasantry;
and at the very first suspicion of a reluctant twinkle at the corner of
Drew's eyes she reached up her trembling little hands to his shoulders
and held him like a vise with a touch so light, so faint, so timorous
that it could hardly have detained the shadow of a humming-bird.
For a moment she stared exploringly round the unfamiliar, bright little
room crowded so horribly, cruelly close with herself, her mistake, and
the life-long friend loomed so suddenly and undesirably into a man. Then
with a quick, shuddery blink her eyes came flashing back wetly and
wistfully to the unsolved, inscrutable face before her. Her fingers dug
themselves frantically into his cheviot shoulders.
"Oh, Drew, Drew," she blurted out, "I am so
very--very--very--frightened! Won't you please take me and play you are
my--Mother?"
"Play I am your Mother? _Play I am your Mother!_" The phrase ripped out
of Drew's lips like an oath, and twitched itself just in time into
explosive, husky mirth. "Play I am your Mother?" The teeniest grimace
over his left shoulder outlined the soft silken swish and tug of a
lady's train. A most casual tap at his belt seemed to achieve instantly
the fashionable hour-glass outline of feminine curves. "Play I am your
Mother!" He smiled and, stooping down, took Ruth's scared white face
between his hands, and his smile was as bright--and just about as
pleasant--as a zigzag of lightning from a storm-black sky.
"Ruthy dear," he said, "I don't feel very much like your Mother. Now if
it was a cannibal that you wanted, or a pirate, or a kidnapper, or a
body-snatcher, or a general all-round robber of widows and orphans,
why, here I am, all dressed and trained and labeled for the part. But a
_Mother_--" The smile went zigzagging again across his face just as a
big, wet, scalding tear came trickling down the girl's cheek into his
fingers. The feeling of that tear made his heart cramp unpleasantly.
"Oh, hang it all," he finished abruptly, "what does a Mother do,
anyway?"
The little white face in his hands flooded instantly with a great
desolation. "I don't know," she moaned wearily. "I _never_ knew."
For some inexplainable reason Aleck Reese's devilish, insolent beauty
flaunted itself suddenly before Drew's vision, and he gave a bitter
gasp, and turned away fiercely, and brushed his arm potently across his
forehead as though Sex, after all, were nothing but a trivial mask that
fastened loosely to the ears.
When he turned round again, his conquered face had that strange, soft,
shining, translucent wonder-look in it which no woman all her life long
may reap twice from a man's face. Tenderly, serenely, uncaressingly,
without passion and without playfulness, he picked up his sad little
bride and carried her back to the big, roomy, restful chair, and
snuggled her down in his long arms, with her smoke-scented hair across
his cheek, and told her funny, giggly little stories, and crooned her
funny, sleepy little songs, till her shuddering sobs soothed
themselves--oh, so slowly--into lazy, languid, bashful little smiles,
and the lazy, languid, bashful little smiles droned off at last into
nestling, contented little sighs, and the nestling, contented little
sighs blossomed all of a sudden into merciful, peaceful slumber.
Then, when the warm, gray June dawn was just beginning to flush across
the roofs of the city, he put her softly down and slipped away, and took
his smallest military brushes, and his smallest dressing-gown, and his
smallest slippers, and carried them out to his diminutive guest-room.
"It isn't a very big little guest-room," he mused disconsolately, "but
then, she isn't a very big little guest. It will hold her, I guess, as
long as she's willing to stay."
"As long as she's willing to stay." The phrase puckered his lips. Again
Aleck Reese's face flashed before him in all its amazing beauty and
magical pathos, a face this time staring across a tiny, ornate cafe
table into the jaded, world-wise eyes of some gorgeous woman of the
theatrical demi-monde. At the vision Drew's shoulders squared suddenly
as though for a fair fight to the finish, and then wilted down with
equal abruptness as his eyes met accidentally in the mirror his own
plain, matter-of-fact reflection. The sight fairly mocked him. There was
no beauty there. No magic. No brilliance. No talent. No compelling
moodiness. No possible promise of "Love and Fame and Far Lands."
Nothing. Just eyes and nose and mouth and hair and an ugly baseball scar
on his left cheek. Merciful heavens! What had he to fight Aleck Reese
with, except the only two virtues that a man may not brag of--a decently
clean life and an unstaled love!
Grinning to rekindle his courage, he started tiptoeing back along the
hall to his bedroom and his kitchen, and rolled up his sleeves and began
to clean house most furiously; for even if you are quite desperately in
love, and a fairly good man besides, it is just a little bit
crowded-feeling and disconcerting to have the lady walk unannounced
right into your life and your neckties and your pictures, to say nothing
of your last week's unwashed cream-jars.
Frantically struggling with his coffee-pot at seven o'clock, he had
almost forgotten his minor troubles when a little short, gaspy breath
sound made him look up. Huddling her tired-out dress into the ample
folds of his dressing-gown, Ruth stood watching him bashfully.
"Hello!" he said. "Who are you?"
"I'm--Mrs.--Andrew Bernard, attorney at law," she announced with
stuttering nonchalance, and started off exploringly for the cupboard to
find Drew's best green Canton china to deck the kitchen breakfast
table. All through the tortuous little meal she sat in absolute
tongue-tied gravity, carving her omelet into a hundred infinitesimal
pieces and sipping like a professional coffee-taster at Drew's over-rank
concoction. Only once did her solemn face lighten with an inspirational
flash that made Drew's heart jump. Then, "Oh, Drew," she exclaimed, "do
you think you could go out to the house to-day and see if they fed the
lamb?"
"No, I don't," said Drew bluntly, and poured himself out his fifth cup
of coffee.
After breakfast, all the time that he was shaving, she came and sat on
the edge of a table and watched him with the same maddening gravity, and
when he finally started off for his office she followed him down the
whole length of his little hallway. "I like my cave!" she volunteered
with sudden sociability, and then with a great, pink-flushing wave of
consciousness she lifted up her face to him and stammered, "Do I kiss
you good-by?"
Drew shook his head and laughed. "No," he said, "you don't even have to
do that; I'm not much of a kisser," and turned abruptly and grabbed at
the handle of the door.
But before he had crossed the threshold she reached out and pulled him
back for a moment, and he had to stoop down very far to hear what she
wanted to tell him. "It's nothing much, Drew," she whispered. "It's
nothing much at all. I just wanted to say that--considering how strong
they are, and how--wild--and strange--I think men are--very--_gentle_
creatures. Thank you." And in another instant she had gone back alone to
face by crass daylight the tragedy that she had brought into three
people's lives.
Certainly in all the days and weeks that followed, Drew never failed to
qualify as a "gentle creature." Not a day passed at his office that he
did not telephone home with the most casual-sounding pleasantry, "Is
everything all right? Any burnt-bridge smoke in the air?" Usually, clear
as his own voice, and sometimes even with a little giggle tucked on at
the end, the answer came, "Yes, everything's all right." But now and
then over that telephone wire a minor note flashed with unmistakably
tremulous vibration: "N-o, Drew. Oh, could you come right home--and take
me somewhere?"
Drew's brown cheeks hollowed a bit, perhaps, as time went on, but always
smilingly, always frankly and jocosely, he met the occasionally
recurrent emergencies of his love-life. Underneath his smile and
underneath his frankness his original purpose never flinched and never
wavered. With growing mental intimacy and absolute emotional aloofness
he forced day by day the image and the consciousness of his personality
upon the girl's plastic mind: his picture, for instance, as a matter of
course for her locket; his favorite, rather odd, colors for her clothes;
his sturdy, adventuresome, fleet-footed opinions to run ahead and break
in all her strange new thought-grounds for her. More than this, in every
possible way that showed to the world he stamped her definitely as the
most carefully cherished wife among all her young married mates.
At first the very novelty of the situation had fed his eyes with rapture
and fired the girl's face with a feverish excitement almost as pink as
happiness. The surprise and congratulations of their friends, the speech
of the janitor, the floral offering of the elevator boy, the long
procession of silver spoons and cut-glass dishes, had filled their days
with interest and laughter. Trig in her light muslin house gowns or her
big gingham aprons, Ruth fluttered blissfully around her house like a
new, brainy sort of butterfly. By some fine, instinctive delicacy,
shrewder than many women's love, she divined and forestalled Drew's
domestic tastes and preferences, and lined his simplest, homespun needs
with all the quiver and sheen of silk. Resting his weariness, spurring
his laziness; equally quick to divine the need of a sofa pillow or a
joke; equally interested in his food and his politics; always ready to
talk, always ready to keep still; cramping her free suburban ways into
his hampered accommodations; missing her garden and her pets and her
piazzas without ever acknowledging it--she tried in every plausible way
except loving to compensate Drew for the wrong she had done him.
Only once did Drew's smoldering self-control slip the short leash he had
set for himself. Just once, round the glowing coziness of a rainy-night
open fire, he had dropped his book slammingly on the floor and reached
out his hand to her soft hair that brightened like bronze in the
lamplight. "Are you happy?" he had probed before he could fairly bite
the words back; and she had jumped up, and tossed her hair out of her
eyes, and laughed as she started for the kitchen. "No, I'm not exactly
happy," she had said. "But I'm awfully--interested."
So June budded into July, and July bloomed into August, and August
wilted into September, and September brittled and crisped and flamed at
last into October. Tennis and boating and picnics and horseback riding
filled up the edges of the days. Little by little the bright, wholesome
red came back to live in Ruth's rounding cheeks. Little by little the
good steady gleam of normal interests supplanted the wild
will-o'-the-wisp lights in her eyes. Little by little her accumulating
possessions began to steel shyly out from her tiny room and make
themselves boldly at home in the places where hitherto they had ventured
only as guests. Her workbasket crowded Drew's tobacco-jar deliberately
from the table to the top of the bookcase. Her daring hands nonchalantly
replaced a brutally clever cartoon with a soft-toned sketch of a little
child. Once, indeed, an ostentatiously freshly laundered dress, all lace
and posies and ruffles, went and hung itself brazenly in Drew's roomy
closet right next to his fishing clothes.
And then, just as Drew thought that at last he saw Happiness stop and
turn and look at him a bit whimsically, Aleck Reese came back to
town--Aleck Reese, not as Fate should have had him, drunken with
flattery, riotous with revelry, chasing madly some new infatuation, but
Aleck Reese sobered, dazed, temporarily purified by the shock of his
loss, if not by the loss itself.
For a week, blissfully unconscious of any cause, Drew had watched with
growing perplexity and anxiety the sudden, abrupt flag in the girl's
health and spirits and general friendliness. Flowers, fruit, candy,
books, excursion plans had all successively, one by one, failed to rouse
either her interest or her ordinary civility. And then one night,
dragging home extra late from a worried, wearisome day at the office,
faint for his dinner, sick for his sleep, he found the apartment
perfectly dark and cheerless, the fire unlighted, the table unset, and
Ruth herself lying in a paroxysm of grief on the floor under his
stumbling feet. With his dizzy head reeling blindly, and his hands
shaking like an aspen, he picked her up and tried to carry her to the
couch; but she wrenched herself away from him, and walked over to the
window and halfway back again before she spoke.
"Aleck Reese has come home," she announced dully, and reached up
unthinkingly and turned a blast of electric light full on her ghastly
face.
Drew clutched at the back of the nearest chair. "Have you seen him?" he
almost whispered.
The girl nodded. "Yes. He's been here a week. I've seen him twice.
Once--all day at the tennis club--and this afternoon I met him on the
street, and he came home with me to get--a book."
"Why didn't you tell me before that he was here?"
She shrugged her shoulders wearily. "I thought his coming wasn't going
to matter," she faltered, "but--"
"But what?" said Drew.
Her arms fell limply down to her sides and her chin began to quiver.
"He kissed me this afternoon," she stammered, "and I--kissed him. And,
worse than that, we were both--glad."
Trying to brush the fog away from his eyes, Drew almost sprang across
the room at her, and she gave a queer little cry and fled, not away
from him, but right into his arms, as though _there_ was her only haven.
"Would you be apt to hurt me?" she gasped with a funny-sad sort of
inquisitiveness. Then she backed away and held out her hand like a man's
to Drew's shaking fingers. "I'm very much ashamed," she said, "about
this afternoon. Oh, very, very, very much ashamed. I haven't ever been a
really good wife to you, you know, but I never have cheated before until
to-day. I promise you faithfully that it sha'n't happen again. But,
Drew"--her face flushed utterly crimson--"but, Drew--I honestly think
that it _had_ to happen to-day."
Drew's tortured eyes watched her keenly for a second and then his look
softened. "Will you please tell Aleck," he suggested, "that you told me
all about it and that I--laughed?"
It was not till some time in December, however, after a nervous,
evasive, speechless sort of week, that Ruth appeared abruptly one day at
Drew's office, looking for all the world like the frightened child who
had sought him out there the June before.
"Drew, you're five years older than I am, aren't you?" she began
disconnectedly. "And you've always been older than I am, and stronger
than I am, and wiser than I am. And you've always gone ahead in school
and play and everything, and learned what you wanted to and then come
back--and gotten me. And it always made everything--oh, so much easier
for me--and I thought it was a magic scheme that simply couldn't fail to
work. But I'm afraid I'm not quite as smart as I used to be--I can't
seem to catch up with you this time."
"What do you mean?" said Drew.
She began to fidget with her gloves. "Do you know what month it is?" she
asked abruptly.
"Why, yes," said Drew, just a bit drearily. "It's December. What of it?"
Her eyes blurred, but she kept them fixed steadily on her husband. "Why,
don't you remember," she gasped, "that when we were married I promised
you faithfully that I would love you within six months? The six months
were up in November--but I find I'm not quite ready--yet. You'll have to
give me a little more time," she pleaded. "You'll have to renew my
love-loan. Will you?"
Drew slammed down his law books and forced his mouth into a grin. "I'd
forgotten all about that arrangement," he said. "Of course I'll renew
what you call your 'love-loan.' Really and truly I didn't expect you to
love me before a full year was up. Heart-wounds don't ever even begin to
heal until their first anniversaries are passed--all the Christmases and
birthdays and Easters. And, really, I'd quite as soon anyway that you
didn't love me till Spring," he added casually. "I'm so hideously busy
and worried just now with business things."
She gave him an odd little look that barely grazed his face and settled
flutteringly on the book in his hand. It was a ponderous-looking
treatise on "The Annulment of Marriage." Her heart began to pound
furiously. "Drew!" she blurted out, "I simply can't stand things any
longer. I shall go mad. I've tried and tried and tried to be good, and
it's no use. I must be stupid. I must be a fool. BUT I WANT TO GO HOME!"
"All right," said Drew very quietly, "you--can--go--home."
In another instant, without good-by or regret, she had flashed out of
the office and was racing down the stairs. Halfway to the street she
missed her handkerchief, and started reluctantly back to get it. The
office door was locked, but she tiptoed round to a private side entrance
and opened the door very cautiously and peeped in.
Prostrate across his great, cluttered desk, Drew, the serene, the
laughing, the self-sufficient, lay sobbing like a woman.
Startled as though she had seen a ghost, the girl backed undetected out
of the door, and closed it very softly behind her, nor did she stop
tiptoeing until she had reached the street floor. Then, dropping down
weak-kneed upon the last step, she sat staring out into the dingy patch
of snow that flared now and then through the swinging doorway. Somewhere
out in that vista Aleck Reese was waiting and watching for her. Two or
three of her husband's business acquaintances paused and accosted her.
"Anything the matter?" they probed.
"Oh, no," she answered brightly. "I'm just thinking."
After a while she jumped up abruptly and stole back through a
box-cluttered hall to the rear door of the building, and slid out
unnoticed into a side street, gathering her great fur coat--Drew's
latest gift--closer and closer around her shivering body. The day was
gray and bleak and scarily incomplete, like the work of some amateur
creator who had slipped up on the one essential secret of how to make
the sun shine. The jingliest sound of sleigh-bells, the reddest flare of
holiday shop windows, could not cheer her thoughts away from the
stinging, shuddering memory of Drew's crumpled shoulders, the gasping
catch of his breath, the strange new flicker of gray at his temples.
Over and over to herself she kept repeating dully: "I've hurt Drew just
the way that Aleck hurt me. It mustn't be. It mustn't be--it mustn't!
There's got to be some way out!"
Then most unexpectedly, at the first street corner she was gathered up
joyously by a crowd of her young married chums who were starting off in
an automobile for their sewing-club in Ruth's own old-home suburb
fifteen miles away. It was a long time since she had played very freely
with women, and the old associations caught her interest with a novel
charm. Showered with candy, gay with questions, happy with laughter, the
party whizzed up at last to the end of its journey, and tumbled out rosy
with frost and mischief to join the women who had already arrived. From
every individual corner of the warm, lazy sewing-room some one seemed to
jump up and greet Ruth's return. "Oh, you pampered young bride!" they
teased, and "Will you look at the wonderful fur coat and hat that have
happened to Ruth!" Even the sad-faced, widowed little dressmaker who
always officiated professionally at the club wriggled out of her seat
and brought her small boy 'way across the room to stroke the girl's
sumptuous mink-brown softness.
"Why, am I so very wonderful?" stammered Ruth, staring down with her
hands in her pockets at the great fur length and breadth of her.
"Well, if I had a coat like that," scoffed a shrill voice from the sofa,
"I should think that it was the most wonderful thing in life that could
happen to me."
Standing there scorching herself in the fire-glow, Ruth looked up
suddenly with a fierce sort of intentness. "You wise old married
people," she cried, "tell me truly what really is the most wonderful
thing in life that can happen to a woman?"
"Goodness, is it a new riddle?" shouted her hostess, and instantly a
dozen noisy answers came rollicking into the contest. "Money!" cried the
extravagant one. "A husband who goes to the club every night!" screamed
the flirt. "Health!" "Curls!" "Dresden china!" "Single blessedness!" the
suggestions came piling in. Only the dressmaker's haggard face whitened
comprehendingly to the hunger underneath Ruth's laughing eyes. Staring
scornfully at the heaping luxuries all around her, the shabby,
widow-marked woman snatched up her child and cuddled it to her breast.
"The most wonderful thing in life that can happen to a woman?" she
quoted passionately. "I'll tell you what it is. It's being able to hope
that your son will be _exactly_ like his father."
"Exactly like his father?" The shrewd sting and lash of the words ripped
through Ruth's senses like the scorch of a red-hot fuse. Strength,
tenderness, patience, love, loyalty flamed up before her with such
dazzling brilliance that she could scarcely fathom the features behind
them, and the room whirled dizzily with sudden excessive heat. "Exactly
like his father." A dozen feminine voices caught up the phrase and
dropped it blisteringly. The wife of the town's _bon vivant_ winced a
trifle. The most radiant bride of the year jabbed her fingers
accidentally with her scissors. Some one started to sigh and laughed
instead. A satirical voice suggested, "Well, but of course there's got
to be some improvement in every generation."
Smothering for air, Ruth reached up bunglingly and fastened her big fur
collar and started for the door. "Oh, no," she protested to every one's
detaining hands, "honestly I didn't intend to stay. I've got to hurry
over to the house and get some things before dark," and, pleading
several equally legitimate excuses, she bolted out into the snowy fields
to take the quickest possible short cut to her Big Brother's house.
Every plowing step drove her heart pounding like an engine, and every
lagging footfall started her scared thoughts throbbing louder than her
heart. Hurry as fast as she could, stumbling over drift-hidden rocks or
floundering headlong into some hollow, she could not seem to outdistance
the startling, tumultuous memory of the little dressmaker's
passion-glorified eyes staring scornfully down on the slowly sobering
faces of the women around her. The vision stung itself home to the girl
like sleet in her eyes.
"O-h!" she groaned. "What a wicked thing Life is--wasting a man like
Drew on a girl--like me. 'To be able to hope that your son will be
exactly like his father!'" Her heart jumped. Merciful heavens! If
Happiness were really--only as simple a thing as that--just to look in
your husband's eyes and find them good. Years and years hence, perhaps,
she herself might have a son--with all his father's blessed, winsome
virtues. Her eyes flooded suddenly with angry tears. "Oh, could Fate
possibly, possibly be so tricky as to make a woman love her son because
he _was_ like his father, and yet all, all the long years make that
woman just miss loving the father himself?"
With a little frightened gasp she began to run. "If I only can get to
the house," she reasoned, "then everything will be all right. And I'll
never leave it again."
Half an hour later, panting and flushing, she twisted her latch-key
through the familiar home door. No one was there to greet her. From
attic to cellar the whole house was deserted. At first the emptiness and
roominess seemed to ease and rest her, but after a little while she
began to get lonesome, and started out to explore familiar corners, and
found them unfamiliar. "What an ugly new wall-paper!" she fretted; "and
what a silly way to set the table!" Her old room smote upon her with
strange surprise--not cunningly, like one's funny little baby clothes,
but distastefully, like a last year's outgrown coat. In the large, light
pantry a fresh disappointment greeted her. "What an insipid salad!" she
mourned. "It isn't half as nice as the salad Drew makes." Cookies,
cakes, doughnuts failed her successively. "And I used to think they were
the best I ever tasted," she puzzled. In the newly upholstered parlor a
queer unrest sickened her. "Why, the house doesn't seem quite to--fit me
any more," she acknowledged, and bundled herself into her coat again,
and stuffed her pockets with apples, and started off more gladly for the
barn.
As she pushed back the heavy sliding doors a horse whinnied, possibly
for welcome, but probably for oats. Teased by the uncertainty, the girl
threw back her head and laughed. "Hello, all you animals," she cried; "I
have come home. Isn't it fine?"
Up from the floor of his pen the lamb rose clatteringly like a
mechanical toy, and met the glad news with a peculiarly disdainful
"B-a-a-a!" Back to the sheltering wood-pile her old friends the
kittens--little cats now--fled from her with precipitous fear. The
white-nosed cow reared back with staring eyes. The pet horse snapped at
her fingers instead of the apple. The collie dog, to be sure, came
jumping boisterously, but the jumpiness was unmistakably because he was
"Carlo," and not because she was "Ruth." And yet only six months before
every animal on the place had looked like her with that strange, absurd
mimicry of human expression that characterizes the faces of all
much-cherished birds or beasties. And now even the collie dog had
reverted to the plain, blank-featured canine street type--and the pet
horse looked like the hired man.
[Illustration: "Hello, all you animals," she cried]
The girl's forehead puckered up into a bewildered sort of frown. "I
don't quite seem to belong anywhere," she concluded. The thought was
unpleasant. Worst of all, the increasing, utterly unexplainable sob in
her throat made her feel very reluctant to go back into the house and
wait for her Brother and the Housekeeper and the inevitable questions.
Dallying there on the edge of the wheelbarrow, munching her red-cheeked
apples, it was almost eight o'clock before her mind quickened to a
solution of her immediate difficulties. She would hide in the hay all
night, there in the sweetness and softness of last summer's beautiful
grass, and think out her problems and decide what to do.
Deep in the hay she burrowed out a nest, and lined it with the biggest
buffalo robe and the thickest carriage rug. Then one by one she carried
up the astonished kittens, and the heavy, fat lamb, and the
scrambling collie dog to keep her company, and snuggled herself down,
warm and content, to drowse and dream amidst the musty cobwebs, and the
short, sharp snap of straws, and the soothing sighs of the sleepy cow,
and the stamp, stamp of the horse, and all the extra, indefinite, scary,
lonesome night noises that keep your nerves exploding intermittently
like torpedoes and start your common sense scouring like a silver polish
at all the tarnished values of your everyday life.
Midnight found her lying wide awake and starry-eyed, with her red lips
twisted into an oddly inscrutable smile. Close in her left hand the
collie dog nestled his grizzly nose. Under her right arm the woolly lamb
slumbered. Over her quiet feet the little cats purred with fire-gleaming
faces.
Attracted by the barking of his new bulldog, Big Brother came out in the
early morning and discovered her in the hay.
"Well, for heaven's sake!" he began. "Where did you come from? Where
does Drew think you are? He's been telephoning here all night trying to
find you. I guess he's scared to death. Great Scott! what's the matter?
What are you hiding out here for? Have you had any trouble with Drew?"
She slid down out of her nest with the jolliest sort of a laugh. "Of
course I haven't had any trouble with Drew. I just wanted to come home.
That's all. Drew buys me everything else," she dimpled, "but he simply
won't buy me any hay--and I'm such a donkey."
Big Brother shrugged his shoulders. "You're just as foolish as ever," he
began, and then finished abruptly with "What a perfectly absurd way to
do your hair! It looks like fury."
An angry flush rose to her cheeks, and she reached up her hands
defensively. "It suits Drew all right," she retorted.
Big Brother laughed. "Well, come along in the house and get your
breakfast and telephone Drew."
The funniest sort of an impulse smote suddenly upon Ruth's mind. "I
don't want any breakfast," she protested, "and I don't want any
telephone. I'm going home this minute to surprise Drew. We were going
to have broiled chicken, and a new dining-room table, and a pot of
primroses as big as your head. Shall I have time to wash my face before
the car comes?"
Ten minutes after that she was running like mad to the main street. An
hour later the big, whizzing electric car that was speeding her back to
the city crashed headlong at a curve into another brittling, splintering
mass of screams and blood and broken glass and shivering woodwork.
When she came to her senses she was lying in her blood-stained furs on
some one's piazza floor, and the horrid news of the accident must have
traveled very quickly, for a great crowd of people was trampling round
over the snowy lawn, and Big Brother and Aleck Reese and the old family
doctor seemed to have dropped down right out of the snow-whirling sky.
Just as she opened her eyes, Aleck Reese, haggard with fear and
dissipation, was kneeling down trying to slip his arms under her.
With the mightiest possible effort she lifted her forefinger warningly.
"Don't you dare touch me," she threatened. "I promised Drew--"
The doctor looked up astonished into her wide-open eyes. "Now, Ruth," he
begged, "don't you make any fuss. We've got to get you into a carriage.
We'll try not to hurt you any more than is absolutely necessary."
Her shattered nerves failed her utterly. "What nonsense!" she sobbed.
"You don't have to hurt me at all. My own man never hurts me at all. I
tell you I want my own man."
"But we can't find Drew," protested the doctor.
Then the blood came gushing back into her eyes and some wicked brute
took her bruised knees, and her wrenched back, and her broken collar
bone, and her smashed head, and jarred them all up together like a bag
of junk, and she gave one awful, blood-curdling yell--and a horse
whinnied--and everything in the world stopped happening like a run-down
clock.
When Time began to tick normally again, she found herself lying with an
almost solid cotton face in a pleasant, puffy bed that seemed to rock,
and roll, and tug against her straining arm that clutched its fingers
like an anchor into somebody's perfectly firm, kind hand. As far away as
a voice on a shore, tired, hoarse, desperately incessant, some one was
signaling reassurance to her: "You're all right, honey, You're all
right, honey."
After a long time her fingers twittered in the warm grasp. "Who are
you?" she stammered perplexedly.
"Just your 'own man,'" whispered Drew.
The lips struggling out from the edge of the bandage quivered a little.
"My 'own man'?" she repeated with surprise. "Who was the tattletale that
told you?" She began to shiver suddenly in mental or physical agony.
"Oh, I remember it all now," she gasped. "Was the little boy killed who
sat in the corner seat?"
"Why, I don't know," said Drew, and his voice rasped unexpectedly with
the sickening strain of the past few hours.
At the sound she gave a panic-stricken sob. "I believe I'm dead myself,
Drew," she cried, "and you're trying to keep it from me. Where am I?
Tell me instantly where I am."
Drew's laugh rang out before he could control it. "You're here in your
own little room," he assured her.
"Prove it," she whimpered hysterically. "Tell me what's on my bureau."
He jumped up and walked across the room to make sure. "Why, there's a
silver-backed mirror, and a box of violet powder, and a package of
safety pins."
"Pshaw!" she said. "Those might be on any angel's bureau. What else do
you see?"
He fumbled a minute among the glass and silver and gave a quick sigh of
surprise. "Here's your wedding ring."
"Bring it to me," she pleaded, and took the tiny golden circlet blindly
from his hand and slipped it experimentally once or twice up and down
her finger. "Yes, that's it," she assented, and handed it back to him.
"Hurry--quick--before anybody comes."
"What do you want?" faltered Drew.
She reached up wilfully and yanked the bandage away from the corner of
one eye.
"Why, put the ring back on my finger where it belongs!" she said.
"We're going to begin all over again. Play that I am your wife!" she
demanded tremulously.
Drew winced like raw flesh. "You are my wife," he cried. "You are! You
are! You are!"
With all the strength that was left to her she groped out and drew his
face down to her lips.
"Oh, I've invented a lots better game than that," she whispered. "If
we're going to play any game at all--let's--play--that--I--love--you!"