Fidelity Part 20

Then Ten blazed out. "Well, if you want to know what I think, I don't think a little 'countenancing' of Ruth is going to do this community--or anybody else--any harm!"

Cyrus looked at him with that slightly sneering smile that always enraged Ted. "You're proud of your sister, I suppose?" he inquired politely.

Ted reddened. Then he grew strangely quiet. "Yes," he said, "I believe I am. I've come pretty close to Ruth these last few days, and I think that's just what I am--proud of her. I can't say I'm proud of what Ruth did; I'd have to think more about that. But I'm proud of what she _is_.

And I don't know--I don't know but what it's what a person _is_ that counts." He fell silent, thinking of what he meant by that, of the things he felt in Ruth.

Cyrus laughed mockingly. "Rather a curious thing to be proud of, I should say. What she 'is' is--"

Ted jumped up. "Don't say it, Cy! Whatever it is you're going to say--just don't say it!"

Cyrus had risen and was putting in his pocket a paper Mr. McFarland had given him. "No?" he said smoothly, as if quite unperturbed. "And why not?"

At that uncaring manner something seemed to break inside Ted's head, as if all the things Cyrus had said about Ruth had suddenly gathered there and pressed too hard. His arm shot out at his brother.

"That's why not!" he cried.

He had knocked Cyrus back against the wall and stood there threatening him. To the minister, who had stepped up, protesting, he snapped: "None of _your_ put-in! And after this, just be a little more careful in _your_ talk--see?"

He stepped back from Cyrus but stood there glaring, breathing hard with anger. Cyrus, whose face had gone white, but who was calm, went back to the table and resumed what he had been doing there.

"A creditable performance, I must say, for the day of your father's funeral," he remarked after a moment.

"That's all right!" retorted Ted. "Don't think I'm sorry! I don't know any better way to start out new--start out alone--than to tell you what I think of you!--let you know that I'll not take a thing off of you about Ruth. You've done enough, Cy. Now you quit. You kept mother and father away when they didn't want to be kept away--and I want to tell you that I'm _on_ to you, anyway. Don't think for a minute that I believe it's your great virtue that's hurting you. You can't put that over on me. It's pride and stubbornness and just plain meanness makes you the way you are! Yes, I'm glad to have a chance to tell you what I think of you--and then I'm through with you, Cy. I think you're a pin-head! Why, you haven't got the heart of a flea! I don't know how anybody as fine as Ruth ever came to have a brother like you!"

His feeling had grown as he spoke, and he stopped now because he was too close to losing control; he reddened as his brother--calm, apparently unmoved--surveyed him as if mildly amused. That way Cyrus looked at him when they were quarrelling always enraged him. If he would only _say_ something--not stand there as if he were too superior to bother himself with such a thing! He knew Cyrus knew it maddened him--that that was why he did it, and so it was quietly that he resumed: "No, Cy, I'm not with you, and you might as well know it. I'm for Ruth. You've got the world on your side--and I know the arguments you can put up, and all that, but Ruth's got a--" he fumbled a minute for the words--"Ruth's got a power and an understanding about her that you'll never have. She's got a heart. More than that, she's got--character."

He paused, thinking, and Cyrus did speak then. "Oh, I don't think I'd use that word," he said suavely.

"No, you wouldn't; you wouldn't see it, but that's just what I mean." He turned to the minister. "Character, I say, is what my sister Ruth has got. Character is something more than putting up a slick front. It's something more than doing what's expected of you. It's a kind of--a kind of being faithful to yourself. _Being_ yourself. Oh, I know--" at a sound from his brother--"just how you can laugh at it, but there's something to it just the same. Why, Ruth's got more real stuff in her than you two put together! After being with her these days you, Cy, strike a fellow as pretty shallow."

That brought the color to his brother's face. Stung to a real retort, he broke out with considerable heat: "If to have a respect for decency is 'shallow'--!" He quickly checked himself as the door opened and Harriett's maid entered.

She paused, feeling the tension, startled by their faces. "Excuse me, sir," she said to the minister, "but Mrs. Tyler said I was to tell you she had gone out for a few minutes. She said to tell you she had gone to see her sister."

She looked startled at Ted's laugh. After she had gone he laughed again.

"Hard luck!" he said to his brother-in-law, and walked from the room.

He did not go directly home. He was too upset to face Ruth just then; he did not want her to know, it would trouble her. And he wanted to walk--walk as fast as he could, walk off steam, he called it. His heart was pounding and there seemed too much blood in his head. But he wasn't sorry, he told himself. Cy would have it in for him now, but what did he care for that? He could get along without him. But his lips trembled as he thought that. He had had to get along without his mother; from now on he would have to get along without his father. He had a moment of feeling very much alone. And then he thought of Ruth. Yes,--there was Ruth! He wheeled toward home. He wanted to tell her. He hoped Harriett hadn't got it told; he wanted to tell her himself. Bless dad! He loved him for doing that. If only he'd known it in time to let him know what he thought of him for doing it!

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Harriett had been with Ruth for half an hour and still she had not told her what she had come to tell her. She was meaning to tell it before she left, to begin it any minute now, but, much as she wanted to tell it, she shrank from doing so. It seemed that telling that would open everything up--and they had opened nothing up. Harriett had grown into a way of shrinking back from the things she really wanted to do, was unpracticed in doing what she felt like doing.

Acting upon an impulse, she had started for Ruth. There had been a moment of real defiance when she told Mamie to tell Mr. Tyler that she had gone to see her sister. She had a right to go and see her sister! No one should keep her from it. Her heart was stirred by what her father had done about Ruth. It made her know that she too felt more than she had shown. His having done that made her want to do something. It moved her to have this manifestation of a softening she had not suspected. It reached something in her, something that made her feel a little more free, more bold, more loving. His defiance, for she felt that in it too, struck a spark in her. She even had a secret satisfaction in the discomfiture she knew this revelation of her father's--what they would call weakening--caused her husband and her brother. Unacknowledged dissatisfactions of her own sharpened her feeling about it. She had not looked at either her husband or Cyrus when the announcement was made, but beneath her own emotion was a secret, unacknowledged gloating at what she knew was their displeasure, at their helplessness to resent.

Ted was a dear boy! Ted's shining eyes somehow made her know just how glad she herself was.

So she had hurried along, stirred, eager to tell Ruth. But once with her she held back from telling her, grew absurdly timid about it. It seemed so much else might come when that came--things long held back, things hard to let one's self talk about.

And then Ruth was so strange tonight. After that first day it had been easy to talk with Ruth; that first embarra.s.sment over, she had seemed simple and natural and Harriett could talk with her about the little things that came up and at times just forget the big thing that held them apart. After that first meeting she had felt much more comfortable with Ruth than she would have supposed the terrible circ.u.mstances would let her feel. But tonight Ruth was different, constrained, timid; she seemed holding herself back, as if afraid of something. It made Harriett conscious of what there was holding them apart. She did not know how to begin what she had been so eager to tell.

And so they talked of surface things--current things: the service that afternoon; some of the relatives who had been there; of old friends of their father's. They kept away from the things their hearts were full of.

Ruth had been glad to see Harriett; it touched her that Harriett should come. But she was nervous with her; it was true that she was holding back. That new a.s.surance which had helped her through the last few days had deserted her. Since Ted told her of Mildred that inner quiet from which a.s.surance drew was dispelled. She seemed struck back--bewildered, baffled. Was it always to be that way? Every time she gained new ground for her feet was she simply to be struck back to new dismays, new incert.i.tudes, new pain? Had she only deluded herself in that feeling which had created the strengthening calm of the last few days?

After Ted left her she had continued to sit looking down the street where Mildred had gone; just a little while before she had been looking down that street as the way she herself had gone--the young girl giving herself to love, facing all perils, daring all things for the love in her heart. But now she was not thinking of the love in Mildred's heart; she was thinking of the perils around her--the pity of it--the waiting disaster. A little while before it had seemed there should always be a place in the world for love, that things shutting love out were things unreal. And now she longed to be one with Edith in getting Mildred back to those very things--those unreal things that would safeguard. The mockery of it beat her back, robbing her of the a.s.surance that had been her new strength. That was why Harriett found her strange, hard to talk to. She wanted to cower back. She tried not to think of Mildred--to get back to herself. But that she could not do; Mildred was there in between--confusing, a mockery.

Harriett spoke of the house, how she supposed the best thing to do would be to offer it for sale. Ruth looked startled and pained. "It's in bad repair," Harriett said; "it's all run down. And then--there's really no reason for keeping it."

And then they fell silent, thinking of years gone--years when the house had not been all run down, when there was good reason for keeping it. To let the house go to strangers seemed the final acknowledgment that all those old things had pa.s.sed away. It was a more intimate, a sympathetic silence into which that feeling flowed--each thinking of old days in that house, each knowing that the other was thinking of those days.

Harriett could see Ruth as a little girl running through those rooms.

She remembered a certain little blue gingham dress--and Ruth's hair braided down her back; pictures of Ruth with their grandfather, their mother, their father--all those three gone now. She started to tell Ruth what she had come to tell her, then changed it to something else, still holding back, afraid of emotion, of breaking through, seeming powerless and hating herself for being powerless. She would tell that a little later--before she left. She would wait until Ted came in. She seized upon that, it let her out--let her out from the thing she had been all warm eagerness to do. To bridge that time she asked a few diffident questions about the West; she really wanted very much to know how Ruth lived, how she "managed." But she put the questions carefully, it would seem reluctantly, just because almost everything seemed to lead to that one thing,--the big thing that lay there between her and Ruth. It was hard to ask questions about the house Ruth lived in and not let her mind get swamped by that one terrible fact that she lived there with Stuart Williams--another woman's husband.

Harriett's manner made Ruth bitter. It seemed Harriett was afraid to talk to her, evidently afraid that at any moment she would come upon something she did not want to come near. Harriett needn't be so afraid!--she wasn't going to contaminate her.

And so the talk became a pretty miserable affair. It was a relief when Flora Copeland came in the room. "There's someone here to see you, Ruth," she said.

"Deane?" inquired Ruth.

"No, a woman."

"A woman?"--and then, at the note of astonishment in her own voice she laughed in an embarra.s.sed little way.

"Yes, a Mrs. Herman. She says you may remember her as Annie Morris. She says she went to school with you."

"Yes," said Ruth, "I know." She was looking down, pulling at her handkerchief. After an instant she looked up and said quietly: "Won't you ask her to come in here?"

The woman who stood in the doorway a moment later gave the impression of life, work, having squeezed her too hard. She had quick movements, as if she were used to doing things in a hurry. She had on a cheap, plain suit, evidently bought several years before. She was very thin, her face almost pinched, but two very live eyes looked out from it. She appeared embarra.s.sed, but somehow the embarra.s.sment seemed only a surface thing.

She held out a red, rough hand to Ruth and smiled in a quick, bright way as she said: "I don't know that you remember me, Ruth."

"Oh, yes I do, Annie," Ruth replied, and held on to the red, rough hand.

"I didn't know; I'm sure," she laughed, "that you've always meant more to me than I could to you."

After Ruth had introduced Harriett the stranger explained that with: "I thought a great deal of Ruth when we were in school together. She never knew it--she had so many friends." A little pause followed that.

"So I couldn't bear to go away," Annie went on in her rather sharp, bright way, "without seeing you, Ruth. I hope I'm not intruding, coming so--soon."

"You are not intruding, Annie," said Ruth; her voice shook just a little.

Ted had come home, and came in the room then and was introduced to Annie, with whom, though frankly surprised at seeing her, he shook hands warmly. "But we do know each other," he said.

"Oh, yes," she laughed, "I've brought you many a cauliflower."

"And oh, those eggs!" he laughed back.