Other Things Being Equal Part 34

My pen keeps trailing on; like summer twilight it is loath to depart. I am such a woman. I may never see your face again. Will you not forgive me?

RUTH.

He looked up with a bloodless face at Burke standing with the smoking soup.

"I--I--thought you had forgotten to ring," he stammered, shocked at the altered face.

"Take it away," said his master, hoa.r.s.ely, rising from his chair. "I do not wish any dinner, Burke. I am going to my office, and must not be disturbed."

The man looked after him with a sadly wondering shake of his head, and went back to his more comprehensible pots and kettles.

Kemp walked steadily into his office, lit the gas, and sat down at his desk. He began to re-read the letter slowly from the beginning. It took a long time, for he read between the lines. A deep groan escaped him as he laid it down. It was written as she would have spoken; he could see the expression of her face in the written words, and a miserable empty feeling of powerlessness came upon him. He did not blame her,--how could he, with that sad evidence of her breaking heart before him? He got up and paced the floor. His head was throbbing, and a cold, sick feeling almost overpowered him. The words of the letter repeated themselves to him. "Paradise with some other, better woman,"--she might have left that out; she knew better; she was only trying to cheat herself. "I too shall be happy." Not that, not some other man's wife,--the thought was demoniacal. He caught his reflection in the gla.s.s in pa.s.sing. "I must get out of this," he laughed with dry, parched lips. He seized his hat and went out. The wind was blowing stiffly; for hours he wrestled with it, and then came home and wrote to her:--

I can never forgive you; love's litany holds no such word. Be happy if you can, my santa Filomena; it will help me much,--the fact that you are somewhere in the world and not desolate will make life more worth the living. If it will strengthen you to know that I shall always love you, the knowledge will be eternally true. Wherever you are, whatever the need, remember--I am at hand.

HERBERT KEMP.

Mr. Levice's face was more haggard than Ruth's when, after this answer was received, she came to him with a gentle smile, despite the heavy shadows around her eyes.

"It is all over, Father," she said; "we have parted forever. Perhaps I did not love him enough to give up so much for him. At any rate I shall be happier with you, dear."

"Are you sure, my darling?"

"Quite sure; and there is no more to be said of it. Remember, it is dead and buried; we must never remind each other of it again. Kiss me, Father, and forget that it has been."

Mr. Levice drew a long sigh, partly of relief, partly of pain, as he looked into her lovely, resolute face.

Chapter XX

We do not live wholly through ourselves. What is called fate is but the outcome of the spinning of other individuals twisted into the woof of our own making; so no life should be judged as a unit.

Ruth Levice was not alone in the world; she was neither recluse nor a genius, but a girl with many loving friends and a genial home-life.

Having resolved to bear to the world an unchanged front, she outwardly did as she had always done. Her mother's zealous worldliness returned with her health; and Ruth fell in with all her plans for a gay winter,--that is, the plans were gay; Ruth's presence could hardly be termed so. The old spontaneous laugh was superseded by a gentle smile, sympathetic perhaps, but never joyous. She listened more, and seldom now took the lead in a general conversation, though there was a charm about a tete-a-tete with her that earnest persons, men and women, felt without being able to define it. For the change, without doubt, was there.

It was as if a quiet hand had been pa.s.sed over her exuberant, happy girlhood and left a serious, thoughtful woman in its stead. A subtile change like this is not speedily noticed by outsiders; it requires usage before an acquaintance will account it a characteristic instead of a mood. But her family knew it. Mrs. Levice, wholly in the dark as to the cause, wondered openly.

"You might be thirty, Ruth, instead of twenty-two, by the staidness of your demeanor. While other girls are laughing and chatting as girls should, you look on with the tolerant dignity of a woman of grave concerns. If you had anything to trouble you, there might be some excuse; but as it is, why can't you go into enjoyments like the rest of your friends?"

"Don't I? Why, I hardly know another girl who lives in such constant gayety as I. Are we not going to a dinner this evening and to the ball to-morrow night?"

"Yes; but you might as well be going to a funeral for all the pleasure you seem to antic.i.p.ate. If you come to a ball with such a grandly serious air, the men will just as soon think of asking a statue to dance as you. A statue may be beautiful in its niche, but people do not care to study its meaning at a ball."

"What do you wish me to do, Mamma? I should hate the distinction of a wall-flower, which you think imminent. I am afraid I am too big a woman to be frolicsome."

"You never were that, but you were at least a girl. People will begin to think you consider yourself above them, or else that you have some secret trouble."

The smile of incredulity with which she answered her would have been heart-breaking had it been understood. No flush stained the ivory pallor of her face at these thrusts in the dark; Louis was never annoyed in this way now. Her old-time excited contradictions never obtruded themselves in their conversations. A silent knowledge lay between them which neither, by word or look, ever alluded to. Mrs. Levice noted with delight their changed relations. Louis's sarcasm ceased to be directed at Ruth; and though the familiar sparring was missing, Mrs. Levice preferred his deferential bearing when he addressed her, and Ruth's grave graciousness with him. She drew her own conclusions, and accepted Ruth's quietness with more patience on this account.

Louis understood somewhat; and in his manliness he could not hide that her suffering had cost him a new code of actions. But he could not understand as her father did. Despite her brave smile, Levice could almost read her heart-beats, and the knowledge brought a hardness and a bitter regret. He grew to scanning her face surrept.i.tiously, looking in vain for the old, untroubled delight in things; and when the unmistakable signs of secret anguish would leave traces at times, he would turn away with a groan. Yet there was nothing to be done. He knew that her love had been no light thing nor could her giving up be so; but feeling that no matter what the present cost, the result would compensate, he trusted to time to heal the wound. Meanwhile his own self-blame at these times left its mark upon him.

For Ruth lived a dual life. The real one was pa.s.sed in her quiet chamber, in her long solitary walks, and when she sat with her book, apparently reading. She would look up with blank, despairing eyes, clinched hands, and hard-set teeth when the thought of him and all her loss would steal upon her. Her father had caught many such a look upon her face. She had resolved to live without him, but accomplishment is not so easy. Besides, it was not as if she never saw him. San Francisco is not so large a city but that by the turning of a corner you may not come across a friend. Ruth grew to study the sounds the different kinds of vehicles made; and the rolling wheels of a doctor's carriage behind her would set her pulses fluttering in fright.

She was walking one day along Sutter Street toward Gough from Octavia.

The street takes a sudden down-grade midway in the block. She was approaching this declension just before the Boys' High School when a carriage drove quickly up the hill toward her. The horses gave a bound as if the reins had been jerked; there was the momentary flash of a man's stern, white face as he raised his hat; and Ruth was walking down the hill, trembling and pale. It was the first time; and for one minute her heart seemed to stop beating and then rushed wildly on. Whether she had bowed or made any sign of recognition, she did not know. It did not matter, though; if he thought her cold or strange or anything, what difference could it possibly make? For her there would be left forever this dead emptiness. These casual meetings were inevitable; and she would come home after them worn-out and heavy-eyed. "A slight headache"

was a recurrent excuse with her.

They had common friends, and it would not have been surprising had she met him at the different affairs to which she went, always through her mother's desire. But the dread of coming upon him slowly departed as the months rolled by and with them all token of him. Time and again she would hear allusions to him. "Dr. Kemp has developed into a misogynist,"

pouted Dorothy Gwynne. "He was one of the few decided eligibles on the horizon, but it requires the magnet of illness to draw him now. I really must look up the symptoms of a possible ache; the toilet and expression of an invalid are very becoming, you know."

"Dr. Kemp made a splendid donation to our kindergarten to-day. I have not seen him since we were in the country, and he thought me looking very well. He inquired after the family, and I told him we had a residence, at which he smiled." This from Mrs. Levice. Ruth would have given much to have been able to ask after him with self-possession, but the muscles of her throat seemed to swell and choke her while silent.

She went now and then to see Bob Bard in his flower-store; he would without fail inquire after "our friend" or tell her of his having pa.s.sed that day. Here was her one chance of inquiring if he was looking well, to which the answer was invariably "yes."

She sat one night at the opera in her wonted beauty, with her soft, dusky hair rolled from her sweet Madonna face. Many a lorgnette was raised a second and a third time toward her. Louis, seated next to her, resented with unaccountable ferocity this free admiration that she did not see or feel.

As the curtain went down on the first act, he drew her attention to some celebrity then pa.s.sing out. She raised her gla.s.s, but her hand fell nerveless in her lap. Immediately following him came Dr. Kemp. Their eyes met, and he bowed low, pa.s.sing on immediately. The rest of the evening pa.s.sed like a nightmare; she heard nothing but her heart-throbs, saw nothing but his beloved face regarding her with simple courtesy.

Louis knew that for her the opera was over; the tell-tale bistrous shadows grew around her eyes, and she became deadly silent.

"What a magnificent man he is," murmured Mrs. Levice, "and what an impressive bow he has!" Ruth did not hear her; but when she reached her own room, she threw herself face downward on her bed in intolerable anguish. She was not a girl who cried easily. If she had been, her suffering would not have been so intense,--when the flood-gates are opened, the river finds relief. Over and over again she wished she might die and end this eager, pa.s.sionate craving for some token of love from him, or for the power of letting him know how it was with her. And it would always be thus as long as she lived. She did not deceive herself; no mere friendship would have sufficed,--all or nothing after what had been.

Physically, however, she bore no traces of this continual restraint. On the contrary, her slender figure matured to womanly proportions. Little children, seeing her, smiled responsively at her, or clamored to be taken into her arms, there was such a tender mother-look about her. By degrees her friends began to feel the repose of her intellect and the sympathy of her face, and came to regard her as the queen of confidantes. Young girls with their continual love episodes and excitements, ambitious youths with their whimsical schemes of life and aspirations of love, sought her out openly. Few of these latter dared hope for any individual thought from her, though any of the older men would have staked a good deal for the knowledge that she singled him for her consideration.

Arnold viewed it all with inward satisfaction. He regarded memory but as a sort of palimpsest; and he was patiently waiting until his own name should appear again, when the other's should have been sufficiently obliterated.

It was a severe winter, and everybody appreciated the luxury of a warm home. December came in wet and cold, and la grippe held the country in its disagreeable hold. The Levices were congratulating themselves one evening on their having escaped the epidemic.

"I suppose the secret of it lies in the fact that we do not coddle ourselves," observed Levice.

"If you were to coddle yourself a little more," retorted his wife, "you would not cough every morning as you do. Really, Jules, if you do not consult a physician, I shall send for Kemp myself. I actually think it is making you thin."

"Nonsense!" he replied carelessly; "it is only a little irritation of the throat every morning. If the weather is clear next week, I must go to New York. Eh, Louis?"

"At this time of the year!" cried Mrs. Levice, in expostulation.

"Some one has to go, and the only one that should is I."

"I think I could manage it," said Louis, "if you would see about the other adjustment while I am gone."

"No, you could not,"--when Levice said "no," it seldom meant an ultimate "yes." "Besides, the trip will do me good."

"I shall go with you," put in Mrs. Levice, decidedly.

"No, dear; you could not stand the cold in New York, and I could not be bothered with a woman's grip-sack."

"Take Ruth, then."

"I should love to go with you, Father," she replied to the questioning glance of his eyes. He seemed to ponder over it for a while, but shook his head finally.