Ten o'clock found Ruth sitting on the porch at home with her mother and
father, her brother Cyrus and Deane. Her father was talking with Deane
about the operation that had been performed on the book-keeper in Mr.
Holland's bank; Cyrus talked of somebody's new touring car, the number
of new machines there were in town that year; her mother wondered where
some of the people who had them got the money for them. The talk moved
placidly from one thing to another, Mr. Holland saying at intervals that
he must be going to bed, his wife slapping at the mosquitoes and talking
about going inside--both delaying, comfortably stupid.
Ruth was sitting on the top step leaning back against the porch pillar.
She said little, she was very tired now. Something in this dragging talk
soothed her. It seemed safe just because it was so commonplace; it was
relaxing. She was glad to be back to it--to the world of it; in
returning safely to it she felt a curiously tender feeling for it, a
perhaps absurd sense of having come through something for it. She could
rest in it while within herself she continued to live back in that hour
with Stuart, that hour which struggle and fear and the passionate
determination to have in spite of everything had made terribly intense.
They had closed themselves in with that little while of love, holding it
apart from everything else, and yet every minute of it was charged with
the consciousness of what was all around them. They had clung to that
hour with a desperate passion, the joy of the moment that was there
always stabbed with pain for a moment passing. At the last they had
clung to each other as if time too--time, over which they had no
control--was going to beat them apart. So much had been hard that in
returning she had a warm feeling of gratitude to all of them for not
making it harder for her, not questioning, exposing her; relief was so
great that they were all newly dear for thus letting her alone. She had
managed all right with Deane, the clumsy arrangement she had been forced
into appeared to have just that haphazardness which characterizes most
of the arrangements of life. Her mother had merely asked what the
Lawrence's had for dinner; her father joked about the way she had
trained the roses in the back yard. Strangely enough instead of feeling
she had outraged them, been unworthy this easy, affectionate
intercourse, she had a sense, now that she had again come through a
precarious thing safely, of having saved them from something they knew
not of, a strange lifted-up feeling of bearing something for them.
Certainly that would not seem the feeling she should be having, but
there was the odd part of it: the feelings she had were so seldom those
she would expect herself to have.
Her mother and father had gone indoors; Cyrus sat out there with her and
Deane for a time. Ruth did not love Cyrus as she loved Ted; he had
always had too superior a manner with her for her feeling to be more
than the perfunctory thing which sometimes passes for personal affection
in families. It was simply that she had never admitted, even to herself,
that she did not love him. He belonged to the set just older than
Ruth's, though she and Deane and their friends were arriving now at the
time of ceasing to be a separate entity as the young crowd and were
being merged in the group just above them. That contributed to Cyrus's
condescension, he being tempered for condescension.
When she and Deane were alone the talk lagged, Ruth sitting there at the
head of the steps leaning against the pillar, he a few steps below her,
sprawled out in awkward boyish fashion, looking up at her from time to
time as she said something. Her silence did not make him feel cut off
from her; the things she said were gently said; her tired smile was
sweet. He spoke several times of going, but lingered. He was held by
something in Ruth; it stirred something in him, not knowing that he was
drawn by what another man had brought into life. He drew himself up and
stole timid glances at Ruth as she looked out into the night, feeling
something new in her tonight, something that touched the feeling that
had all the time been there in him, growing as he grew, of itself
waiting for the future as simply and naturally as all maturing things
wait for the future. Ruth was the girl he had all the time cared for; he
was shy about emotional things--awkward; he had had almost no emotional
life; he had all the time been diffident about what she made him feel
and so they had just gone along for a little time longer than was usual
as boy and girl. But something sweet, mysterious, exhaling from her
tonight liberated the growing, waiting feeling in him. It took him as he
had not been taken before; he watched Ruth and was stilled, moved,
drawn.
Finally, as if suddenly conscious of a long silence, she turned to him
with something about the plans for Cora Albright's wedding--she was to
be a bridesmaid and he an usher. She went on talking of the man Cora was
to marry, a man she met away from home and had fallen desperately in
love with. He associated the light of her face, the sweetness of her
voice, with the things of romance of which she talked. All in a moment
his feeling for her, what her strange, softened mood touched in him,
leaped up, surging through him, not to be stayed. He moved nearer her.
"You know, Ruth," he said, in queer, jerky voice, "_I_ love you."
She gave a start, drew a little back and looked at him with a certain
startled fixity as if he had stopped all else in her. For the moment she
just looked at him like that, startled, fixed.
"Could you care for me at all, Ruth?" he asked wistfully, and with a
bated passionateness.
And then she moved, and it seemed that feeling, too, moved in her again;
there was a flow of emotions as she sat looking at him now. And then her
strangely shining eyes were misty; her face quivered a little and very
slowly she shook her head.
"Don't do that, Ruth," he said quickly, in a voice sharp with pain.
"Don't do that! You don't _know_--maybe you hadn't thought about
it--maybe--" He broke off, reached out for her hands, and could only
stammer, "Oh, Ruth!--I love you so!"
He had her hands; he was clutching them very tight; he looked up at her
again, imploring. She started to shake her head again, but did not
really do it. She seemed about to speak, but did not. What could she say
to Deane--how make him understand?--unless she told him. She thought of
the years she had known him, how much they had been together, how good
he had been to her. Again her eyes were misty. It was all so tangled.
There was so much pain.
Feeling her softening, her tenderness, he moved nearer, her two hands
pressed together so tight in his that it hurt her. "It wouldn't be so
bad, would it, Ruth?" he urged wistfully, with a little laugh that broke
with emotion. "You and I--mightn't life go pretty well for us?"
She turned away, looking out into the night. Feeling something in her
that he did not understand he let her hands go. She put one of them up,
still further averting her face, lost to him in the picture forming
itself before her of how life would be if love came right; what it would
mean not to have to hide, but to have those who cared for her happy in
her happiness; what it would mean to give herself to love without fear,
to wear her joy proudly before the world, revealing her womanhood. She
was not thinking of what life with Deane would be but of what love that
could have its place would be: telling her mother and father and Edith,
being able to show the pride of being loved, the triumph of loving.
Sitting there, turning her face from this friend who loved her, she
seemed to be turning it to the years awaiting her, years of desperately
clutching at happiness in tension and fear, not understood because
unable to show herself,--afraid, harassed, perhaps disgraced. She wanted
to take her place among women who loved and were loved! She did not want
to be shut away from her friends, not seeming to understand what she
understood so well. This picture of what life would be if love could
have its place brought home to her what it meant to love and perpetually
conceal, stealing one's happiness from the society in which one lived.
Why could it not have gone right for her too, as it had for Cora and
would for Edith? She too wanted a wedding, she too wanted rejoicing
friends.
She hid her face in her hands. Her body was quivering.
The boy's arm stole round her shoulders. She was feeling--maybe she did
care. "Ruth," he whispered, "love does mean something to you, doesn't
it?"
She raised her head and looked at him. And that look was a thing Deane
Franklin never forgot; all the years did not blur his memory of it--that
flaming claim for love that transformed her face.
And then it was lost in contrition, for she saw what he had seen, and
what he hoped from that; in her compunction for having let him see what
was not for him, the tender, sorrowing look, the impulsive outreaching
of her hand, there was the dawn of understanding.
At first he was too bewildered to find words. Then: "You care for some
one else?" he groped unbelievingly.
She looked away, but nodded; her tears were falling.
He moved a little away and then sat there quite still. A breeze had come
up and the vines beat against the porch, making a sound that like the
flaming look of a moment ago he never forgot.
She knew that he must be wondering; he knew her life there, or what
seemed her life. He must be wondering who it was she cared for like
that.
She laid her hand upon his arm; and when he turned to her she did not
say anything at all, but the appeal that looked through pain perhaps
went where words could not have gone.
"But you're not happy!" he exclaimed, in a sort of harsh exulting in
that.
She shook her head; her eyes were brimming over.
He looked away from her, his own hurt and surprise rousing a savage
thing in him that did not want to do what the pleading pain of her eyes
so eloquently asked of him. He had always thought that _he_ was to have
Ruth. Well, he was not to have her--there were ugly things which, in
that first moment, surged into his disappointment. Some one else was to
have her. But she was not happy! Defeated feeling wrenched its own sorry
satisfaction from that.
"Why aren't you happy?" he asked of her abruptly, roughly.
She did not answer, and so he had to look at her. And when he saw Ruth's
face his real love for her broke through the ugliness of thwarted
passion. "Can't you tell me, Ruth?" he asked gently.
She shook her head, but the concern of his voice loosed feeling she was
worn out with holding in. Her eyes were streaming now.
His arm went round her shoulder, gently, as if it would shield, help.
His love for her wrenched itself free--for that moment, at least,--from
his own hurt. "Maybe I can help you, Ruth," he was murmuring.