The One Woman Part 50

For the past year Lucy would often sit for an hour at a time in reverie, and then lift her little face to her mother with the question:

"Where is Papa?"

Since their return from the railway accident she had never asked again. She only sat now and looked into her mother's face with dumb pain.

Ruth soothed her to sleep, and was standing by her window trying to look out into the storm, which was lashing great sheets of wet snow against the gla.s.s.

The bell in the kitchen rang feebly.

She listened. Some one was fumbling at the front door, but the roar of the wind drowned the noise.

The bell rang loud and clear. She sprang to the stairs and went down with quick, nervous step. She fastened the chain-latch, opened the door an inch, and the dim light of the hall flashed on Gordon's haggard, blood-stained face.

She flung the door open, drew him quickly within, slammed and bolted it.

Throwing her arms around his dripping form, she drew him down and kissed his cold lips.

"Frank, my darling, what is it?" she cried, in breathless amazement.

"You must help me, Ruth, dear," he gasped. "We had a fight. I have killed Overman. If you can hide me for a few days, I can escape.

I don't deserve it--but I know that you love me--"

"Yes, yes," she sobbed, kissing his hand, "through life and death, through evil report and good report!"

She put him to bed, washed and dressed his wounds. One of them, an ugly hole over his left lung, kept spouting bruised blood as he breathed. The dark eyes grew dim as she watched it.

"Oh! Frank, I must have a doctor," she said, tremulously.

"No, Ruth; I can sleep now. I'll be better in the morning. A doctor will know me."

"But I have one I can trust," she replied, pressing his hand.

He shook his head, closing his eyes.

"You can't stand up against the wind and sleet. It's awful. You can't walk a block. Don't try it."

She watched his mouth twitch with pain.

"I will try it," she answered, firmly. "Lucy will watch with you till I get back."

When Ruth called and told her, the little hands clasped, a cry burst from her heart, and she kissed her mother impulsively.

While his daughter sat by the bedside gently stroking his big blue-veined hand, Gordon dozed in sleep and Ruth crept out into the wild night on her mission of love.

She was half an hour going and coming four blocks. Three times the wind threw her on the freezing pavements. When she climbed up her own steps her clothing was shrouded in an inch of snow and ice, her cheeks were red and swollen, and her hands were bleeding, but a smile played about her lips. The doctor was coming.

He a.s.sured her that the wounds were not fatal, and left instructions for dressing them. A few days of rest and all danger would be past.

Through the night, while the wind howled and moaned and roared, the mother and daughter sat by the bedside and smiled into each other's faces.

The meaning of the tragedy had not yet dawned on Ruth. She only knew that her beloved had come, that she was soothing and ministering to him, and her heart was singing its song of triumphant love. The long night of the soul was over. The morning had come. The storm without was on another planet.

As they watched he began to talk in fevered half-dream, half-delirium words, phrases and broken sentences that revealed the inner yearnings and conflicts of his soul.

"Silly fool," he muttered. "Beauty-marvelous--Ruth-dear dark eyes-I-love-her."

As day approached, Ruth began to dread its message. Already she could see the officers at the door.

When day broke she tried to look out of the window, and could only see across the street. The park and the city below were blotted out. The whole world seemed one white, swirling, howling smother of snow. The wind came in long gusts of shrieking fury. She could count its pulse-beats in the lulls which were growing shorter. And, child of the sea that she was, she knew that the advancing cyclone had not reached its climax. She breathed a prayer of relief. They could not find him to-day.

The cook did not come. Not a milk-wagon or bread-cart echoed through the street. Not a call of newsboy, whistle of postman, or cry of a schoolboy. The house-girl had not come. Ruth descended to the kitchen, made a fire, and cooked breakfasts. With her own hands she was serving her Love, and her heart was singing.

At ten o'clock, she looked out of her window, and the snow was piled to the second story of the houses opposite, which were receiving the full fury of the blast.

The wind was visible. It blew in white, roaring sheets of snow, howling, whistling, screaming, shrieking. Tin roofs, signs, battered chimney-tops, blinds, awnings, brackets, flagpoles, sheet-iron eaves and every odd and end began to crash and rain in the streets and bury themselves in the drifts.

The woman's heart rode on the wings of the storm. Her beloved was hiding safe beneath its white feathers. She wondered if any one else in all the world were singing for joy with its wild music.

For three hours of the morning, struggling men had braved the storm and fought to reach their places of business. Shouts, curses, calls, laughter, the screams of boys, at first; and then defeat, silence and the roar of the wind.

Street-cars were piled on their sides, and the tracks jammed with debris and mountains of snow.

At eleven o'clock, from Manhattan there was no Jersey or Brooklyn.

The ferries were still. The great dead Bridge hung swaying in the dark sky, a white festoon of ice and snow, like a jeweled garland swung from heaven to soften the terrible beauty of a frozen world.

The waters below were lashed into a white smother of spray. The air cut like a knife with the sand blown from the flying waves of the distant beaches.

Policemen crouched and shivered in barred doorways. The storm had caged every thief, burglar and murderer, as it had sheathed the claws of every bear and wolf on the distant mountain-side.

The snow was piled over the tops of the doors of the City Hall and Court House. There was no Mayor, no court, no jury.

The Stock Exchange was closed, the Custom House and Sub-Treasury silent, and every school without teacher or scholar. Every depot was placarded, and not a wheel was moving. Not a newspaper found its way to a home, or a single piece of mail arrived in New York, or was sent from it, or delivered within its gates. Every telegraph and telephone office was silent and the fire department was paralysed.

The elevated trains crawled and slipped and stalled and fought on their steel trestles till ten o'clock, and the last wheel stopped and froze.

At three o'clock a Staten Island ferry-boat ventured her nose out of her slip. The wind snapped off both flag-staffs and smokestack, hurled them into s.p.a.ce, caught her in its mighty claws, dragged her helpless across the bay and flung her on the Staten Island sh.o.r.e.

Wherever men could gather they talked in low, helpless and bewildered tones.

The storm signal, set by the Weather Bureau, was torn to shreds and the wind-gage hurled into the sky as it registered eighty-two miles an hour.

On the mountains of Colorado and over the plains of Dakota it had begun, a fine, misty rain sweeping eastward, throwing out its soft skirmish-line of breezes, drawn by the summons of the Storm King far out on the waste of the sea. And then the king had blown his frozen breath on the earth and the mighty city had been blotted from the map and its tumult stilled in soft white death.

Ruth drew Gordon to the window against which the sparrows crouched and shivered, that he might watch the storm's wild pranks.

"After all," the wounded man cried, "it has been conquered, the rushing, tumultuous city! Beyond the rim of man's map of the world broods in silence the One to whom its noise is the rustle of a leaf and this wind but a sigh of His breath! What can endure?"

His eyes rested on the smiling, lovelit face of Ruth, and he forgot the storm in the deeper wonder of a pure woman's love.