Fidelity Part 16

She did not raise her eyes at that. "Business hasn't gone very well, has it, Ted?" she asked after a moment of silence, still not looking up.

"Pretty bad. And of course _that_ gets Cy," he added.

She nodded. "I guess there's a good deal to be said on Cy's side," she murmured after a little, her hands working and her voice not steady.

Ted grunted something disdainful, then muttered: "He played things up for all they were worth. Don't you think he ever missed anything!"

"Was that why Cy left town, Ted?" Ruth asked, speaking all the while in that low, strange voice.

"Oh, he claims so," scoffed Ted. "But he can't make me believe any family humiliation would have made him leave town if he hadn't had a better thing somewhere else. But of course he _says_ that. That it was too hard for him and Louise! Too bad about that little doll-face, isn't it?"

Ruth made a gesture of remonstrance, but the boyish partisanship brought the tears she had until then been able to hold back.

Ted rose. And then he hesitated, as if not wanting to leave it like this. "Well, Ruth, I can tell you one thing," he said gently, a little bashfully; "with all Cy's grand talk about the wrong done mother and father, neither of them ever loved him the way they loved you."

"Oh, _did_ they, Ted?" she cried, and all the held back feeling broke through, suffusing her. "They _did_?--in spite of everything? Tell me about that, Ted! Tell me about it!"

"Mother used to talk a lot to me," he said. "She was always coming into my room and talking to me about you."

"Oh, _was_ she, Ted?" she cried again, feeling breaking over her face in waves. "She _did_ talk about me? What did she say? Tell me!"

"Just little things, mostly. Telling about things you had said and done when you were a kid; remembering what you'd worn here and there--who you'd gone with. Oh,--you know; just little things.

"Of course," he went on, Ruth leaning forward, hanging on his words, "I was a good deal of a kid then; she didn't talk to me much about the--serious part of it. Maybe that was the reason she liked to talk to me--because she could just talk about the little things--old things.

Though once or twice--"

"Yes, Ted?" she breathed, as he paused there.

"Well, she did say things to me, too. I remember once she said, 'It wasn't like Ruth. Something terrible happened. She didn't know what she was doing.'"

Ruth's hands were pressed tight together; unheeded tears were falling on them.

"And she used to worry about you, Ruth. When it was cold and she'd come into my room with an extra cover she'd say--'I wish I knew that my girl was warm enough tonight.'"

At that Ruth's face went down in her hands and she was sobbing.

"I don't know what I'm talking like this for!" muttered the boy angrily.

"Making you feel so bad!"

She shook her head, but for a little could not look up. Then she choked: "No, I want to know. Never mind how it hurts, I want to know." And then, when she had controlled herself a little more she said, simply: "I didn't know it was like that. I didn't know mother felt--like that."

"She'd start to write to you, and then lots of times she wouldn't seem to know how. She wanted to write to you lots more than she did. But I don't know, Ruth, mother was queer. She seemed sort of bewildered.

She--wasn't herself. She was just kind of powerless to do anything about things. She'd come in this room a lot. Sit in here by herself. One of the last days mother was around she called me in here and she had that dress you wore to Edith Lawrence's wedding spread out on the bed and was--oh, just kind of fussing with it. And the reason she called me in was that she wanted to know if I remembered how pretty you looked in it that night."

But Ruth had thrown out a hand for him to stop, had covered her face as if shutting something out. "Oh, I'm sorry, Ruth!" murmured Ted. "I'm a fool!" he cried angrily. But after a minute he added haltingly, "And yet--you did want to know, and--maybe it's fairer to mother, Ruth.

Maybe--" but he could not go on and went over and stood by the window, not wanting to leave her like that, not knowing what to do.

"Well, one thing I want you to know, Ruth," he said, as he did finally turn to the door. "I've been talking along about how hard it was for the rest of us, but don't for a minute think I don't see how terrible it was for _you_. I get that, all right."

She looked up at him, wanting to speak, but dumb; dumb in this new realization of how terrible it had been for them all.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

An hour later she had to get away from that room. She did not know where she was going, but she had to have some escape. Just the physical act of getting away was something.

Ted and Harriett were talking in the lower hall. They looked in inquiry at the hat she held and her face made Ted lay a hand on her arm. She told them she had to have exercise--air--and was going out for a little walk. She thought Harriett looked aghast--doubtless preferring Ruth be seen as little as possible. But she could not help that; she had to get away--away from that room, that house, away from those old things now newly charged. Something left with them shut down around her as a fog in which she could not breathe. Ted asked if he should go with her, but she shook her head and started for the side door, fearing he might insist.

He called after her that Harriett was going to have Cyrus stay at her house, that she could make room for him. He said it with a relief which told how he had really hated having his brother go to the hotel. As she turned with something about that being better, she noticed how worn and worried Harriett looked, and then hurried on, wanting to get away, to escape for a little while from that crushing realization of how hard she made things for them all. But she could not shut out the thought of the empty rooms upstairs at their house--Cyrus's old home--and the crowded quarters at Harriett's. Yet of course this would be better than the hotel; she was glad Harriett and Ted had been able to arrange it; she hoped, for their sakes, that Cyrus would not, to emphasize his feeling, insist upon staying downtown.

She walked several blocks without giving any thought to where she was going. She was not thinking then of those familiar streets, of the times she had walked them. She was getting away, trying, for a little while, to escape from things she had no more power to bear. She could not have stayed another minute in her old room.

A little ahead of her she saw a woman sitting in a market wagon, holding the horse. She got the impression that the woman was selling vegetables.

She tried to notice, to be interested. She could see, as she came along toward the wagon, that the vegetables looked nice and fresh. She and Stuart had raised vegetables once; they had done various things after what money they had was exhausted and, handicapped both by his lack of ruggedness and by the shrinking from people which their position bred in them, they had to do the best they could at making a living. And so she noticed these vegetables, but it was not until she was close to her that she saw the woman had relaxed her hold on the lines and was leaning forward, peering at her. And when she came a little nearer this woman--a thin, wiry little person whose features were sharp, leaned still further forward and cried: "Why, how do you do? How d'do, Ruth!"

For a moment Ruth was too startled to make any reply. Then she only stammered, "Why, how do you do?"

But the woman leaned over the side of the wagon. Ruth was trying her best to think who she was; she knew that she had known her somewhere, in some way, but that thin, eager little face was way back in the past, and that she should be spoken to in this way--warm, natural--was itself too astonishing, moving, to leave her clear-headed for casting back.

And then, just as she seemed about to say something, her face changed a little. Ruth heard a gate click behind her and then a man, a stolid farmer, he appeared, came up to the wagon. The woman kept nodding her head, as if in continued greeting, but she had leaned back, as though she had decided against what she had been about to say. Ruth, starting on, still bewildered, stirred, nodded and smiled too; and then, when the man had jumped in the wagon and just as the horse was starting, the woman called: "It seems awful good to have you back on these streets, Ruth!"

Ruth could only nod in reply and hurried on; her heart beat fast; her eyes were blurring. "It seems awful good to have you back on these streets, Ruth!" Was _that_ what she had said? She turned around, wanting to run after that wagon, not wanting to lose that pinched, shabby, eager little woman who was glad to have her back on those streets. But the wagon had turned a corner and was out of sight. Back on those streets!

It opened her to the fact that she was back on them. She walked more slowly, thinking about that. And she could walk more slowly; she was less driven.

After a block of perplexed thinking she knew who that woman was; it flashed from her memory where she had known that intent look, that wistful intentness lighting a thin little face. It was Annie Morris, a girl in her cla.s.s at the high-school, a plain, quiet girl--poor she believed she was, not in Ruth's crowd. Now that she searched back for what she remembered about it she believed that this Annie Morris had always liked her; and perhaps she had taken more notice of her than Edith and the other girls had. She could see her now getting out of the shabby buggy in which she drove in to school--she lived somewhere out in the country. She remembered talking to her sometimes at recess--partly because she seemed a good deal alone and partly because she liked to talk to her. She remembered that she was what they called awfully bright in her cla.s.ses.

That this girl, whom she had forgotten, should welcome her so warmly stirred an old wondering: a wondering if somewhere in the world there were not people who would be her friends. That wondering, longing, had run through many lonely days. The people she had known would no longer be her friends. But were there not other people? She knew so little about the world outside her own life; her own life had seemed to shut down around her. But she had a feeling that surely somewhere--somewhere outside the things she had known--were people among whom she could find friends. So far she had not found them. At the first, seeing how hard it would be, how bad for them both, to have only each other, she had tried to go out to people just as if there were nothing in her life to keep her back from them. And then they would "hear"; that hearing would come in the most unforeseen little ways, at the most unexpected times; usually through those coincidences of somebody's knowing somebody else, perhaps meeting someone from a former place where they had already "heard"; it was as if the haphazardness of life, those little accidents of meetings that were without design, equipped the world with a powerful service for "hearing," which after a time made it impossible for people to feel that what was known in one place would not come to be known in another. After she had several times been hurt by the drawing away of people whom she had grown to like, she herself drew back where she could not be so easily hurt. And so it came about that her personality changed in that; from an outgoing nature she came to be one who held back, shut herself in. Even people who had never "heard" had the feeling she did not care to know them, that she wanted to be let alone. It crippled her power for friendship; it hurt her spirit. And it left her very much alone. In that loneliness she wondered if there were not those other people--people who could "hear" and not draw away. She had not found them; perhaps she had at times been near them and in her holding back--not knowing, afraid--had let them go by. Of that, too, she had wondered; there had been many lonely wonderings.

She came now to a corner where she stopped. She stood looking down that cross street which was shaded by elm trees. That was the corner where she had always turned for Edith's. Yes, that was the way she used to go.

She stood looking down the old way. She wanted to go that way now!

She went so far as to cross the street, and on that far corner again stood still, hesitating, wanting to go that old way. It came to her that if this other girl--Annie Morris--a girl she could barely remember, was glad to see her back, then surely Edith--_Edith_--would be glad to see her. But after a moment she went slowly on--the other way. She remembered; remembered the one letter she had had from Edith--that letter of a few lines sent in reply to her two letters written from Arizona, trying to make Edith understand.

"Ruth"--Edith had written--she knew the few words by heart; "Yes, I received your first letter. I did not reply to it because it did not seem to me there was anything for me to say. And it does not seem to me now that there is anything for me to say." It was signed, "Edith Lawrence Blair." The full signature had seemed even more formal than the cold words. It had hurt more; it seemed actually to be putting in force the decree that everything between her and Edith was at an end. It was never to be Ruth and Edith again.

As she walked slowly on now, away from Edith's, she remembered the day she walked across that Arizona plain, looking at Edith's letter a hundred times in the two miles between the little town and their cabin.

She had gone into town that day to see the doctor. Stuart had seemed weaker and she was terribly frightened. The doctor did not bring her much comfort; he said she would have to be patient, and hope--probably it would all come right. She felt very desolate that day in the far-away, forlorn little town. When she got Edith's letter she did not dare to open it until she got out from the town. And then she found those few formal, final words--written, it was evident, to keep her from writing any more. The only human thing about it was a little blot under the signature. It was the only thing a bit like Edith; she could see her making it and frowning over it. And she wondered--she had always wondered--if that little blot came there because Edith was not as controlled, as without all feeling, as everything else about her letter would indicate. As she looked back to it now it seemed that that day of getting Edith's letter was the worst day of all the hard years. She had been so lonely--so frightened; when she saw Edith's handwriting it was hard not to burst into tears right there at the little window in the queer general store where they gave out letters as well as everything else. But after she had read the letter there were no tears; there was no feeling of tears. She walked along through that flat, almost unpeopled, half desert country and it seemed that the whole world had shrivelled up. Everything had dried, just as the bushes along the road were alive and yet dried up. She knew then that it was certain there was no reach back into the old things. And that night, after they had gone to bed out of doors and Stuart had fallen asleep, she lay there in the stillness of that vast Arizona night and she came to seem in another world. For hours she lay there looking up at the stars, thinking, fearing. She reached over and very gently, meaning not to wake him, put her hand in the hand of the man asleep beside her, the man who was all she had in the world, whom she loved with a pa.s.sion that made the possibility of losing him a thing that came in the night to terrorize her. He had awakened and understood, and had comforted her with his love, lavishing upon her tender, pa.s.sionate a.s.surance of how he was going to get strong and make it all come right for them both. There was something terrible in that pa.s.sion for one another that came out of the consciousness of all else lost. They had each other--there were moments when that burned with a terrible flame through the feeling that they had nothing else. That night they went to sleep in a wonderful consciousness of being alone together in the world. Time after time that swept them together with an intensity of which finally they came to be afraid. They stopped speaking of it; it came to seem a thing not to dwell upon.

The thought of Edith's letter had brought some of that back now. She turned from it to the things she was pa.s.sing, houses she recognized, new houses. Walking on past them she thought of how those homes joined. With most of them there were no fences between--one yard merging into another. Children were running from yard to yard; here a woman was standing in her own yard calling to a woman in the house adjoining. She pa.s.sed a porch where four women were sitting sewing; another where two women were playing with a baby. There were so many meeting places for their lives; they were not shut in with their own feeling. That feeling which they as individuals knew reached out into common experiences, into a life in common growing out of individual things. Pa.s.sing these houses, she wanted to share in that life in common. She had been too long by herself. She needed to be one with others. Life, for a time, had a certain terrible beauty that burned in that sense of isolation. But it was not the way. One needed to be one with others.

She thought of how it was love, more than any other thing, that gave these people that common life. Love was the fabric of it. Love made new combinations of people--homes, children. The very thing in her that had shut her out was the thing drawing them into that oneness, that many in one. Homes were closed to her because of that very impulse out of which homes were built.

She had, without any plan for doing so, turned down the little street where she used to go to meet Stuart. And when she realized where she was going thoughts of other things fell away; the feeling of those first days was strangely revivified, as if going that old way made her for the moment the girl who had gone that way. Again love was not a thing of right or wrong, it was the thing that had to have its way--life's great imperative. Going down that old street made the glow of those days--the excitement--come to life and quicken her again. It was so real that it was as if she were living it again--a girl palpitating with love going to meet her lover, all else left behind, only love now! For the moment those old surroundings made the old days a living thing to her. The world was just one palpitating beauty; the earth she walked was vibrant; the sweetness of life breathed from the air she breathed. She was charged with the joy of it, bathed in the wonder. Love had touched her and taken her, and she was different and everything was different. Her body was one consciousness of love; it lifted her up; it melted her to tenderness. It made life joyous and n.o.ble. She lived; she loved!

Standing on the spot where they had many times stood in moments of meeting a very real tenderness for that girl was in the heart of this woman who had paid so terribly for the girl's love. It brought a feeling that she had not paid too much, that no paying was ever too much for love. Love made life; and in turn love was what life was for. To live without it would be going through life without having been touched alive. In that moment it seemed no wrong love could bring about would be as deep as the wrong of denying love. There was again that old feeling of rising to something higher in her than she had known was there, that feeling of contact with all the beauty of the world, of being admitted to the inner sweetness and wonder of life. She had a new understanding of what she had felt; that was the thing added; that was the gift of the hard years.