The two days when the natural course of life was arrested by death had
passed. Their father had been buried that afternoon, and in the early
evening Ted and Ruth were sitting on the little upper porch, very quiet
in the new poignant emptiness of the house. Many people had been coming
and going in those last few days; now that was over and there was a
pause before the routine of life was to be resumed. The fact that the
nurse had gone seemed to turn the page.
Ruth had just asked how long Cyrus was going to stay and Ted replied
that he wanted to stay on a week or perhaps more, attending to some
business. She knew how crowded it must be for them at Harriett's, knew
that if she went away Cyrus would come home. There seemed nothing more
to keep her; she would like to be with Ted awhile, but it seemed she
could not do that without continuing a hard condition for them all. They
could settle into a more natural order of things with her not there. It
was time for her to go.
It was hard to have to think that. She would love to have stayed a
little while. She had been away so long--wanting home for so long. She
knew now, facing the going away, how much she had secretly hoped might
result from this trip back home.
She had seen a number of people in the past few days--relatives, old
friends of the family, friends of Ted. She had done better in meeting
them than, just a little while before, she would have thought possible.
Something remained with her from that hour at her mother's grave, that
strange hour when she had seemed to see life from outside, beyond it.
That had summoned something within herself that no personal hurt could
scatter, as if taking her in to something from which no circumstance
could drive her out. She had felt an inner quiet, a steadiness within;
there was power in it, and consolation. It took her out of that feeling
of having no place--no right to a place, the feeling that had made her
wretched and powerless. She was of life; her sure inner sense of the
reality and beauty of that seemed a thing not to be broken down from
without. It was hers, her own. It sustained her; it gave her poise. The
embarrassment of other people gave way before her simple steadiness. She
had had but the one point of contact with them--that of her father's
death; it made her want more, made going away hard. It was hard to leave
all the old things after even this slight touch with them again.
And that new quiet, that new force within was beginning to make for new
thinking. She had thought much about what she had lived through--she
could not help doing that, but she was thinking now with new
questionings. She had not questioned much; she had accepted. What was
gathering within her now was a feeling that a thing so real, so of life
as her love had been should not be a thing to set her apart, should not
be a thing to blight the lives that touched hers. This was not something
called up in vindication, a mere escape from hard thinking, her own way
out from things she could not bear; it was deeper than that, far less
facile. It came from that inner quiet--from that strange new
assurance--this feeling that her love should not have devastated, that
it was too purely of life for that; that it was a thing to build up
life, to give to it; this wondering, at once timid and bold, if there
was not something wrong with an order that could give it no place, that
made it life's enemy.
She had been afraid of rebellious thinking, of questionings. There had
been so much to fight, so much to make her afraid. At first all the
strength of her feeling had gone into the fight for Stuart's health; she
was afraid of things that made her rebellious--needing all of herself,
not daring to break through. The circumstances had seemed to make her
own life just shut down around her; and even after those first years,
living itself was so hard, there were so many worries and
disappointments--her feeling about it was so tense, life so stern--that
her thoughts did not shoot a long way out into questionings. She had
done a thing that cut her off from her family; she had hurt other people
and because of that she herself must suffer. Life could not be for her
what it was for others. She accepted much that she did not try to
understand. For one thing, she had had no one to talk to about those
things. Seeing how Stuart's resentment against the state of things
weakened him, keeping him from his full powers to meet those hard
conditions, she did not encourage their talking of it and had tried to
keep herself from the thinking that with him went into brooding and was
weakening. She had to do the best she could about things; she could not
spend herself in rebellion against what she had to meet. Like a man who
finds himself on a dizzy ledge she grew fearful of much looking around.
But now, in these last few days, swept back into the wreckage she had
left, something fluttered to life and beat hard within her spirit,
breaking its way through the fearfulness that shut her in and sending
itself out in new bolder flights. Not that those outgoings took her away
from the place she had devastated; it was out of the poignancy of her
feeling about the harm she had done, out of her new grief in it that
these new questionings were born. The very fact that she did see so
well, and so sorrowingly, what she had done, brought this new feeling
that it should not have been that way, that what she had felt, and her
fidelity to that feeling--ruthless fidelity though it was--should not
have blighted like this. There was something that seemed at the heart of
it all in that feeling of not being ashamed in the presence of
death--she who had not denied life.
Silence had fallen between her and Ted, she saddened in the thought of
going away and open to the puzzling things that touched her life at
every point; looking at Ted--proud of him--hating to leave him now just
when she had found him again, thinking with loving gratefulness and
pride of how generous and how understanding he had been with her, how he
was at once so boyish and so much more than his years. The fine
seriousness of his face tonight made him very dear and very comforting
to her. She wanted to keep close to him; she could not bear the thought
of again losing him. If her hard visit back home yielded just that she
would have had rich gain from it. She began talking with him about what
he would do. He talked freely of his work, as if glad to talk of it; he
was not satisfied with it, did not think there was much "chance" there
for him. Ted had thought he wanted to study law, but his father, in one
of his periods of depression, had said he could not finish sending him
through college and Ted had gone into one of the big manufactories
there. He was in the sales department, and he talked to Ruth of the
work. He told her of his friends, of what they were doing; they talked
of many things, speaking of the future with that gentle intimacy there
can be between those sorrowing together for things past. Their sensitive
consciousness of the emptiness of the house--the old place, their
home,--brought them together through a deep undercurrent of feeling.
Their voices were low as they spoke of more intimate things than it is
usual to speak of without constraint, something lowered between them as
only a grief shared can lower bars to the spirit, their thinking set in
that poignant sense of life which death alone seems able to create.
Ted broke a pause to say that he supposed it was getting late and he
must be starting for Harriett's. Cyrus had asked him to come over awhile
that evening. Mr. McFarland, their family lawyer, was going out of town
for a few days, leaving the next morning. He was coming in that evening,
more as the old friend than formally, to speak to them about some
business matters, Cyrus's time being limited and there being a number of
things to arrange.
"I hate leaving you alone, Ruth," said Ted, lingering.
She looked over to him with quick affectionate smile. "I don't mind,
Ted. Somehow I don't mind being alone tonight."
That was true. Being alone would not be loneliness that evening. Things
were somehow opened; all things had so strangely opened. She had been
looking down the deep-shadowed street, that old street down which she
used to go. The girl who used to go down that street was singularly real
to her just then; she had about her the fresh feeling, the vivid sense,
of a thing near in time. Old things were so strangely opened, old
feeling was alive again: the wild joy in the girl's heart, the delirious
expectancy--and the fear. It was strange how completely one could get
back across the years, how things gone could become living things again.
That was why she was not going to mind being alone just then; she had a
sense of the whole flow of her life--living, moving. It did not seem a
thing to turn away from; it was not often that things were all open like
that.
"I shouldn't wonder if Deane would drop in," said Ted, as if trying to
help himself through leaving her there alone.
"He may," Ruth answered. She did not say it with enthusiasm, much as she
would like to talk with Deane. Deane was just the one it would be good
to talk with that night. But Deane never mentioned his wife to her. At
first, in her preoccupation, and her pleasure in seeing him, she had not
thought much about that. Then it had come to her that doubtless Deane's
wife would not share his feeling about her, that she would share the
feeling of all the other people; that brought the fear that she might,
again, be making things hard for Deane. She had done enough of that;
much as his loyalty, the rare quality of his affectionate friendship
meant to her, she would rather he did not come than let the slightest
new shadow fall upon his life because of her. And yet it seemed all
wrong, preposterous, to think anyone who was close to Deane, anyone whom
he loved, should not understand this friendship between them. She
thought of how, meeting after all those years, they were not strange
with each other. That seemed rare--to be cherished.
"What's Deane's wife like, Ted?" she asked.
"I haven't met her," he replied, "but I've seen her. She's awfully
good-looking; lots of style, and carries herself as if--oh, as if she
knew she was somebody," he laughed. "And I guess Deane thinks she _is_,"
he added with another laugh. "Guess he decided that first time he met
her. You know he stopped in Indianapolis to see a classmate who was
practising there--met her at a party, I believe, and--good-by Deane! But
somehow she isn't what you'd expect Deane's wife to be," he went on more
seriously. "Doesn't look that way, anyhow. Looks pretty frigid, I
thought, and, oh--fixed up. As if she wasn't just real."
Ruth's brows puckered. If there was one thing it seemed the wife of
Deane Franklin should be, it was real. But doubtless Ted was wrong--not
knowing her. It did not seem that Deane would be drawn to anyone who was
not real.
She lingered in the thought of him. Real was just what Deane was. He had
been wonderfully real with her in those days--days that had made the
pattern of her life. Reality had swept away all other things between
them. That carried her back to the new thinking, the questions. It
seemed it was the things not real that were holding people apart. It was
the artificialities people had let living build up around them made
those people hard. People would be simpler--kinder--could those unreal
things be swept away. She dwelt on the thought of a world like that--a
world of people simple and real as Deane Franklin was simple and real.
She was called from that by a movement and exclamation from Ted, who had
leaned over the railing. "There goes Mildred Woodbury," he said,--"and
alone."
His tone made her look at him in inquiry and then down the street at the
slight figure of a girl whose light dress stood out clearly between the
shadows. Mildred was the daughter of a family who lived in the next
block. The Woodburys and the Hollands had been neighbors and friends as
far back as Ruth could remember. Mildred was only a little girl when
Ruth went away--such a pretty little girl, her fair hair always gayly
tied with ribbons. She had been there with her mother the night before
and Ruth had been startled by her coming into the room where she was and
saying impulsively: "You don't remember me, do you? I'm Mildred--Mildred
Woodbury."
"And you used to call me Wuth!" Ruth had eagerly replied.
It had touched her, surrounded as she was by perfunctoriness and
embarrassment that this young girl should seek her out in that warm way.
And something in the girl's eyes had puzzled her. She had returned to
thought of it more than once and that made her peculiarly interested in
Ted's queer allusion to Mildred now.
"Well?" she inquired.
"Mildred's getting in rather bad," he said shortly.
"Getting--what do you mean, Ted?" she asked, looking at him in a
startled way.
"People are talking about her," he said.
"People are--?" she began, but stopped, looking at him all the while in
that startled way.
"Talking about her," he repeated. "I guess it's been going on for some
time--though I didn't hear about it until a little while ago."
"About what, Ted?" Her voice faltered and it seemed to make him suddenly
conscious of what he was saying, to whom he spoke.
"Why,"--he faltered now too, "Mildred's acting sort of silly--that's
all. I don't know--a flirtation, or something, with Billy Archer. You
don't know him; he came here a few years ago on some construction work.
He's an engineer. He is a fascinating fellow, all right," he added.
Ruth pushed back her chair into deeper shadow. "And--?" she suggested
faintly.
"He's married," briefly replied Ted.
She did not speak for what seemed a long time. Ted was beginning to
fidget. Then, "How old is Mildred, Ted?" Ruth asked in a very quiet
voice.
"About twenty, I guess; she's a couple of years younger than I am."
"And this man?--how old is he?" That she asked a little sharply.
"Oh, I don't know; he's in the older crowd; somewhere in the thirties, I
should say."
"Well--" But she abruptly checked what she had sharply begun to say, and
pushed her chair still further back into shadow. When Ted stole a timid
glance at her a minute later he saw that she seemed to be holding her
hands tight together.
"And doesn't Mildred's mother--?" It seemed impossible for her to finish
anything, to say it out.
He shook his head. "Guess not. It's funny--but you know a person's
folks--"
There was another silence; then Ted began to whistle softly and was
looking over the railing as if interested in something down on the lawn.
"And you say people are really--talking about Mildred, Ted?" Ruth
finally asked, speaking with apparent effort.
He nodded. "Some people are snubbing her. You know this town is long on
that," he threw in with a short laugh. "I saw Mrs. Brewer--remember
her?--she used to be Dorothy Hanlay--out and out snub Mildred at a party
the other night. She came up to her after she'd been dancing with
Billy--Lord knows how many times she'd danced with him that night--and
Mrs. Brewer simply cut her. I saw it myself. Mildred got white for a
moment, then smiled in a funny little way and turned away. Tough on her,
wasn't it?--for really, she's a good deal of a kid, you know. And say,
Ruth, there's something mighty decent about Edith--about Mrs. Blair. She
saw it and right afterwards she went up to Mildred, seemed particularly
interested in her, and drew her into her crowd. Pretty white, don't you
think? That old hen--Mrs. Brewer--got red, let me tell you, for Edith
can put it all over her, you know, on being somebody, and that _got_
her--good and plenty!"
There was a queer little sound from Ruth, a sound like a not quite
suppressed sob; Ted rose, as if for leaving, and stood there awkwardly,
his back to her. He felt that Ruth was crying, or at least trying not to
cry. Why had he talked of a thing like that? Why did he have to bring in
Edith Lawrence?
It seemed better to go on talking about it now, as naturally as he
could. "I never thought there was much to Mildred," he resumed, not
turning round. "She always seemed sort of stuck up with the fellows of
our crowd. But I guess you never can tell. I saw her look at Billy
Archer the other night." He paused with a little laugh. "There wasn't
anything very stuck up about that look."
As still Ruth did not speak he began to talk about the property across
the street being for sale. When he turned around for taking leave--it
being past the time for going to Harriett's--it made him furious at
himself to see how strained and miserable Ruth's face was. She scarcely
said good-by to him; she was staring down the street where Mildred had
disappeared a few moments before. All the way over to Harriett's he
wondered just what Ruth was thinking. He was curious as well as
self-reproachful.