Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 50

In the sad and cheated days that followed, she, with the milk of motherhood wasting in her, saw with new eyes--saw many things heretofore hidden from her.

She did not believe in any scriptural G.o.d. But she believed--she could not help believing--in an awful Justice overarching all human life with its law, as it overarched the very stars in heaven.

And this law she believed to rest in goodness, accessible to the pure conscience, but stern against the transgressor.

Because she believed this, she had felt that the marriage rite, with such an one as Mr. Silk for intercessor between her vows and a clean Heaven, could be but a sullying of marriage. Yes, and she felt it still; of this, at any rate, she was sure.

But in her pride--as truly she saw it, in her pride of chast.i.ty--she had left the child out of account. _He_ had inherited the world to face, not armed with her weapon of scorn. _He_ had not won freedom through a scourge. He had grown to his fate in her womb, and in the womb she had betrayed him.

She had been blind, blind! She had lived for her lover and herself.

To him and to her (it had seemed) this warm, transitory life belonged; a fleeting s.p.a.ce of time, a lodge leased to bliss. . . .

Now she fronted the truth, that between the selfish rapture of lovers Heaven slips a child, smiling at the rapture, provident for the race.

Now she read the secret of woman's nesting instinct; the underlying wisdom stirring the root of it, awaking pa.s.sion not to satisfy pa.s.sion, but that the world may go on and on to its unguessed ends.

Now she could read ironically the courtship of man and maid, dallying by river-paths, beside running water, overarched by boughs that had protected a thousand such courtships. Each pair in turn--poor fools!

--had imagined the world theirs, compressed into their grasp; whereas the wise world was merely flattering, coaxing them, preparing for the child.

She should have been preparing, too. For what are women made but for motherhood? She? She had had but a hand to turn, a word to utter, and this child--healthily begotten, if ever child was, and to claim, if ever child could, the best--has broken triumphing through the gate of her travail. But she had betrayed him. The new-born spirit had arrived expectant, had cast one look across the threshold, and with one wail had fled. Through and beyond her answering wail, as she laid her head on the pillow, she heard the lost feet, the small betrayed feet, pattering away into darkness.

When she grew stronger, it consoled her a little to talk with Mrs.

Strongtharm; not confiding her regrets and self-reproaches, but speculating much on this great book of Maternity into which she had been given a glimpse. The metaphor was Mrs. Strongtharm's.

"Ay," said that understanding female, "a book you may call it, and a wonderful one; written by all the women, white an' black, copper-skin an' red-skin, that ever groped their way in it with pangs an' joys; for every one writes in it as well as reads. What's more, 'tis all in one language, though they come, as my man would say, from all the airts o' Babel."

"I wonder," mused Ruth, "if somewhere in it there's a chapter would tell me why, when I lie awake and think of my lost one, 'tis his footsteps I listen for--feet that never walked!"

"Hush ye, now. . . . Isn't it always their feet, the darlings!

Don't the sound of it, more'n their voices, call me to door a dozen times a day? . . . I never bore child; but I made garments in hope o' one. Tell me, when you knitted his little boots, wasn't it different from all the rest?"

"Ah, put them away!"

"To be sure, dearie, to be sure--all ready for the next."

"I shall never have another child."

Mrs. Strongtharm smiled tolerantly.

"Never," Ruth repeated; "never; I know it."

With the same a.s.surance of prophesy she answered her lover on his return, a bare two months later.

"But you must have known. . . . Even your letters kept it secret.

Yet, had you written, the next ship would have brought me. Surely you did not doubt _that?_"

"No."

"Then why did you not tell me?"

It was the inevitable question. She had forestalled it so often in her thoughts that, when uttered at last, it gave her a curious sensation of re-enacting some long-past scene.

"I thought you did not care for children."

He was pacing the room. He halted, and stared at her in sheer astonishment. Many a beautiful woman touches the height of her beauty after the birth of her first child; and this woman had never stood before him in loveliness that, pa.s.sing comprehension, so nearly touched the divine. But her perversity pa.s.sed comprehension yet farther.

"Do you call that an answer?" he demanded.

"No. . . . You asked, and I had to say something; but it is no answer. Forgive me. It was the best I could find."

He still eyed her, between wrath and admiration.

"I think," she said, after a pause, "the true answer is just that I did wrongly--wrongly for the child's sake."

"That's certain. And your own?"

"My own? That does not seem to me to count so much. . . . Neither of us believe that a priest can hallow marriage; but once I felt that the touch of a certain one could defile it."

"You have never before reproached me with that."

"Nor mean to now. I chose to run from him; but, dear, I do not ask to run from the consequences."

"The blackguard has had his pretty revenge. Langton told me of it.

. . . All the prudes of Boston gather up their skirts, he says."

"What matter? Are we not happier missing them? . . . Honester, surely, and by that much at any rate the happier."

"Marry me, and I promise to force them all back to your feet."

She laughed quietly, almost to herself, a little wearily. "Can you not see, my dear lord, that I ask for no such triumph? It is good of you--oh, I see how good!--to desire it for me. But did we want these people in our forest days?"

"One cannot escape the world," he muttered.

"What? Not when the world is so quick to cast one out?"

"Ruth," he said, coming and standing close to her, "I do not believe you have given me the whole answer even yet. The true reason, please!"

"Must a woman give all her reasons? . . . She follows her fate, and at each new turning she may have a dozen, all to be forgotten at the next."

"I am sure you harbour some grudge--some reservation?" His eyes questioned her.

She kept him waiting for some seconds.

"My lord, women have no consistency but in this--they are jealous when they love. As your slave, I demand nothing; as your mistress, I demand only you. But if you wished also to set me high among women, you should have given me all or nothing. . . . You did not offer to take me with you. I was not worthy to be shown to that proud folk, your family."

"If you had breathed a wish, even the smallest hint of one--"

"I had no wish, save that you should offer it. I had only some pride. I was--I am--well content; only do not come back and offer me these women of Boston, or anything second best in your eyes, however much the gift may cost you."

"Have it as you will," said he, after a long pause. "I was wrong, and I beg your pardon. But I was less wrong than your jealousy suspects. My family will welcome you. Forgive me that I thought it well--that it might save you any chance of humiliation--to prepare them."