Youth Challenges Part 29

Lightener moved awkwardly and showed signs of embarra.s.sment. "And listen here," he said, gruffly, "a young girl's a pretty sweet and delicate piece of business. They're mighty easy to hurt, and the hurt lasts a long time....You want to be married a long time, I expect, and you want your wife to--er--love you right on along. Well, be darn careful, young fellow. Start the thing right. More marriages are smashed in the first few days than in the next twenty years....You be d.a.m.n gentle and considerate of that little girl."

"I--I hope I shall, Mr. Lightener."

"You'd better be....Where you going to-night?"

"To the club. I have some things there. I've always kept enough clothes there to get along on."

"Your club days are over for some time. Married man has no business with a club till he's forty....Evenings, anyhow. Stay at home with your wife. How'd you like to have her running out to some darn thing three or four nights a week?...Go on, now. I'll tell Hilda where you are.

Probably she'll want to call you up in the morning....Good night."

"Good night...and thank you."

"Huh!" said Malcolm Lightener, and without paying the slightest bit of attention to whether Bonbright stayed or went away, he took up the papers on his desk and lost himself in the figures that covered them.

Bonbright went out quietly, thankfully, his heart glad with its own song....The future was settled; safe. He had nothing to fear. And to-morrow he was going to enter into a land of great happiness. He felt he was entering a land of fulfillment. That is the way with the very young. They enter upon marriage feeling it is a sort of haven of perpetual bliss, that it marks the end of unhappiness, of difficulties, of loneliness, of griefs...when, in reality, it is but the beginning of life with all the diverse elements of joy and grief and anxiety and comfort and peace and discord that life is capable of holding....

CHAPTER XIX

Hilda Lightener had found Ruth strangely quiet, with a manner which was not indifference to her imminent marriage, but which seemed more like numbness.

"You act as if you were going to be hanged instead of married," Hilda told her, and found no smile answering her own.

Ruth was docile. She offered no objection to any suggestion offered by Hilda, accepted every plan without demurring. Hilda could not understand her, and was troubled. Wholly lacking was the girlish excitement to be expected. "Whatever you want me to do I will do, only get it over with," seemed to be Ruth's att.i.tude. She seemed to be holding herself in, communing with herself. A dozen times Hilda had to repeat a question or a statement which Ruth had not heard, though her eyes were on Hilda's and she seemed to be giving her attention.

She was saying to herself: "I must go through with it.... I can't draw back.... What I am doing is RIGHT--RIGHT."

She obeyed Hilda, not so much through pliancy as through listlessness, and presently Hilda was going ahead with matters and acting as a sort of specially appointed general manager of the marriage. She directed Ruth what to wear, saw it was put on, almost bundled Ruth and her mother into the carriage, and convoyed them to the church, where Bonbright awaited them. She could not prevent a feeling of exasperation, especially toward Mrs. Frazer, who had moved from chair to chair, uttering words of self-pity, and p.r.o.nouncing a constant jeremiad.... Such preliminaries to a wedding she had never expected to witness, and she witnessed them with awakened foreboding.

A dozen or so young folks and Malcolm Lightener and his wife witnessed the brief ceremony. Until Ruth's appearance there had been the usual chattering and gayety, but even the giddiest of the youngsters was restrained and subdued by her white, tense face, and her big, unseeing eyes.

"I don't like it," Lightener whispered to his wife.

"Poor child!... Poor child!" she whispered back, not taking her eyes from Ruth's face.

After the rector p.r.o.nounced the final words of the ceremony Ruth stood motionless. Then she turned slowly toward Bonbright, swaying a trifle as if her knees were threatening to fail her, and said in a half whisper, audible to those about: "It's over?... It's all over?"

"Yes, dear."

"It can't be undone," she said, not to her husband, but to herself. "We are--married."

Hilda, fearing some inauspicious act or word, bustled forward her bevy of young folks to offer their babel of congratulations. As she presented them one by one, Ruth mustered a wan smile, let them take her cold, limp hand. But her mind was not on them. All the while she was thinking: "This is my HUSBAND.... I belong to this man.... I am his WIFE." Once in a while she would glance at Bonbright; he seemed more a stranger to her than he had done the first time her eyes had ever rested on him--a stranger endowed with odious potentialities. ...

Mrs. Lightener took Ruth into her arms and whispered, "He's a dear, good boy...." There was comfort in Mrs. Lightener's arms, but scant comfort in her words, yet they would remain with Ruth and she would find comfort in them later. Now she heard Malcolm Lightener speaking to her husband. "You be good to that little girl, young man," he said. "Be mighty patient and gentle with her." She waited for Bonbright's reply.

"I love her," she heard Bonbright say in a low voice. It was a good answer, a rea.s.suring answer, but it stabbed Ruth with a new pang, for she had traded on that love; she was a cheat. Bonbright was giving her his love in exchange for emptiness. Somehow she could not think of the Cause now, for this was too intimate, too individual, too personal....

Presently Bonbright and Ruth were being driven to their hotel. The thought of wedding breakfast or of festivities of any sort had been repugnant to Ruth, and Hilda had not insisted. They were alone. Ruth lay back against the soft upholstery of Malcolm Lightener's limousine, colorless, eyes closed. Bonbright watched her face hungrily, scrutinizing it for some sign of happiness, for some vestige of feeling that reciprocated his own. He saw nothing but pallor, weariness.

"Dear," he whispered, and touched her hand almost timorously. Her hand trembled to his touch, and involuntarily she drew away from him. Her eyes opened, and in them his own eager eyes read FEAR.... He was startled, hurt. Being only a boy, with a boy's understanding and a boy's pride, he was piqued, and himself drew back. This was not what he had expected, not what the romances he had read had led him to believe would take place. In stories the bride was timid, yet eager; loving, yielding, happy. She clung to her husband, her heart beating against his heart, whispering her adoration and demanding whispered adoration from him.... Here all of this was lacking, and something which crouched at the opposite pole of human emotion was present--FEAR.

"You must be patient and gentle with her," Malcolm Lightener had said with understanding, and Bonbright was wise enough to know that there spoke experience; probably there spoke truth, not romance, as it is set down on the printed page. Even if Ruth's att.i.tude were unusual, so the circ.u.mstances were unusual. It was no ordinary marriage preceded by an ordinary, joyous courtship. In this moment Bonbright took thought, and it was given him to understand that now, as at no other moment in his life with Ruth, was the time to exercise patience and gentleness.

"Ruth," he said, taking her hand and holding it with both his own, "you mustn't be afraid of ME.... You are afraid. You're my wife," he said, boyishly. "It's my job to make you happy--the most important job I've got--and to look after you and to keep away from you everything that might--make you afraid." He lifted her fingers to his lips; they were cold. "I want to take you in my arms and hold you... but not until you want me to. I can wait.... I can do ANYTHING that you want me to do.

Both of us have just gone through unpleasant things--and they've tired and worried you.... I wish I might comfort you, dear...." His voice was low and yearning.

She let her hand remain in his, and with eyes from which the terror was fading she looked into his eyes to find them clear, honest, filled with love and care for her. They were good eyes, such as any bride might rejoice to find looking upon her from her husband's face.

"You're--so good," she whispered. Then: "I'm tired, Bonbright, so tired--and--Oh, you don't understand, you CAN'T understand.... I'll be different presently--I know I shall. Don't be angry..."

"Angry!"

"I'll be a good wife to you, Bonbright," she said, tremulously, a bit wildly. "I--You sha'n't be disappointed in me.... I'll not cheat. ...

But wait--WAIT. Let me rest and think. It's all been so quick."

"You asked that," he said, hurt and puzzled.

"Yes.... It had to be--and now I'm your wife... and I feel as if I didn't know you--as if you were a stranger. Don't you understand?...

It's because I'm so helpless now--just as if you owned me and could do what you wanted to with me... and it makes me afraid...."

"I--I don't understand very well," he said, slowly. "Maybe it's because I'm a man--but it doesn't seem as if it ought to be that way." He stopped and regarded her a moment, then he said, "Ruth, you've never told me you loved me."

She sensed the sudden fear in his voice and saw the question that had to be answered, but she could not answer it. To-day she could not bring herself to the lie--neither to the spoken lie nor the more difficult lying action. "Not now," she said, hysterically. "Not to-day....

Wait.... I've married you. I've given myself to you.... Isn't that enough for now?... Give me time."

It was not resentment he felt, not doubt of her. Her pitiful face, her cold little hands, the fear that lurked in her eyes, demanded his sympathy and forbearance, and, boy though he was, with all a boy's inexperience, he was man enough to give them, intuitive enough to understand something of the part he must play until she could adjust herself to her new condition.

He pressed her hand--and released it. "I sha'n't bother you," he said, "until you want me.... But it isn't because I don't want you--don't want to hold you--to LOVE you... and to have you love me.... It will be all right, dear. You needn't be afraid of me...."

The car was stopping before the hotel. Now the doorman opened the door and Bonbright helped his bride to alight. She tottered as her feet touched the sidewalk, and he took her arm to support her as he might have helped an invalid. The elevator carried them up to the floor on which were the rooms that had been prepared for them, and they stopped before the door while he inserted the key and turned the lock for their admission. On the threshold she halted, swept by a wave of terror, but, clenching her hands and pressing shut her eyes, she stepped within. The door closed behind them--closed out her girlhood, closed out her independence, shut away from her forever that ownership of herself which had been so precious, yet so unrecognized and unconsidered. It seemed to her that the closing of that door--even more than the ceremony of marriage--was symbolical of turning over to this young man the t.i.tle deeds of her soul and body. ...

Bonbright was helping her to rid herself of her wraps, leading her to a sofa.

"Lie down," he said, gently. "You're tired and bothered. Just lie down and rest."

"Are we going away?" she asked, presently. "Have I got to get ready?"

He had promised her they would go away--and had not seen her since that moment to tell her what had happened. Hilda would not let him go to her that morning, so she was in ignorance of the change in his condition, of his break with his family, and of the fact that he was nothing but a boy with a job, dependent upon his wages. Until this moment he had not thought how it might affect her; of her disappointment, of the fact that she might have expected and looked forward to the position he could give her as the wife of the heir apparent to the Foote dynasty.... It embarra.s.sed him, shamed him as a boy might be shamed who was unable to buy for his girl a trinket she coveted at some country fair. Now she must be told, and she was in no condition to bear disappointments.

"I promised you we should go away," he said, haltingly, "but--but I can't manage it. Things have happened....I've got to be at work in the morning. Maybe I should have told you. Maybe I should have come last night after it happened--"

She opened her eyes, and at the expression of his face she sat up, alarmed. It told her that no ordinary, small, casual mishap had befallen, but something vital, something which might affect him--and her tremendously.

"What is it?" she asked. "What has happened?"

"I went home last night," he said, slowly. "After--you promised to marry me--I went home to tell father....Mother was there. There was a row--but mother was worse than father. She was--rather bad."

"Rather bad--how, Bonbright?"