"I suppose _you_ would think," she flamed, "that they ought to have met her at the train!"

"The idea doesn't seem to me preposterous," he answered.

Feeling the coldness in his own voice he realized how he was at the very start getting away from the thing he wanted to do, was estranging Amy by his resentment of her feeling about a thing she did not understand.

After all--as before, he quickly made this excuse for her--what more natural than that she should take on the feeling of these people she was thrown with, particularly when they were so very kindly in their reception of her?

"Dear," he began again, "I saw Ruth this afternoon. She seems so alone there. She's gone through such--such hard things. It's a pretty sad homecoming for her. I'm going over there again this evening, and, Amy dear, I do so want you to go with me."

Amy did not reply. He had not looked at her after he began speaking--not wanting to lose either his courage or his temper in seeing that stiffening in her. He did not look at her now, even though she did not speak.

"I want you to go, Amy. I ask you to. I want it--you don't know how much. I'm terribly sorry for Ruth. I knew her very well, we were very close friends. Now that she is here, and in trouble--and so lonely--I want to take my wife to see her."

As even then she remained silent, he turned to her. She sat very straight; red spots burned in her cheeks and there was a light in her eyes he had never seen there before. She pushed back her chair excitedly. "And may I ask,"--her voice was high, tight,--"if you see nothing insulting to your wife in this--proposal?"

For an instant he just stared at her. "Insulting?" he faltered. "I--I--"

He stopped, helpless, and helplessly sat looking at her, sitting erect, breathing fast, face and eyes aflame with anger. And in that moment something in his heart fell back; a desire that had been dear to him, a thing that had seemed so beautiful and so necessary, somehow just crept back where it could not be so much hurt. At the sight of her, hard, scornful, so sure in her hardness, that high desire of his love that she share his feeling fell back. And then to his disappointment was added anger for Ruth; through the years anger against so many people had leaped up in him because of their hardness to Ruth, that, as if of itself, it leaped up against Amy now.

"No," he said, his voice hard now too, "I must say I see nothing insulting in asking you to go with me to see Ruth Holland!"

"Oh, you don't!" she cried. "A woman living with another woman's husband! Why, this very afternoon I was with the wife of the man that woman is living with!--_she_ is the woman I would meet! And you can ask me--your wife--to go and see a woman who turned her back on society--on decency--a woman her own family cast out, and all decent people turn away from." She paused, struggling, unable to keep her dignity and yet say the things rushing up to be said.

He had grown red, as he always did when people talked that way about Ruth. "Of course,"--he made himself say it quietly--"she isn't those things to me, you know. She's--quite other things to me."

"I'd like to know what she _is_ to you!" Amy cried. "It's very strange--your standing up for her against the whole town!"

He did not reply; it was impossible to tell Amy, when she was like this, what Ruth had been--was--to him.

She looked at him as he sat there silent. And this was the man she had married!--a man who could treat her like this, asking her to go and see a woman who wasn't respectable--why, who was as far from respectable as a woman could be! This was the man for whom she had left her mother and father--and a home better than this home certainly,--yes, and that other man who had wanted her and who had so much more to offer! _He_ respected her. He would never ask her to go and see a woman who wasn't decent! But she had married for love; had given up all those other things that she might have love. And now.... Her throat tightened and it was hard to hold back tears. And then suddenly she wanted to go over to Deane, slip down beside him, put her arms around him, tell him that she loved him and ask him to please tell her that he loved her. But there was so strange an expression on his face; it checked that warm, loving impulse, holding her where she was, hard. What was he thinking about--_that woman_? He had so strange a look. She did not believe it had anything to do with her. No, he had forgotten her. It was this other woman. Why, he was in love with her--of course! He had always been in love with her.

Because it seemed the idea would break her heart, because she could not bear it, it was scoffingly that she threw out: "You were in love with her, I suppose? You've always been in love with her, haven't you?"

"Yes, Amy," he answered, "I was in love with Ruth. I loved her--at any rate, I sorrowed for her--until the day I met you."

His voice was slow and sad; the whole sadness of it all, all the sadness of a world in which men and women loved and hurt each other seemed closing in around him. He did not seem able to rise out of it, to go out to her; it was as if his new disappointment brought back all the hurt of old ones.

Young, all inexperienced in the ways of adjusting love to life, of saving it for life, the love in her tried to shoot through the self-love that closed her in, holding her tight. She wanted to follow that impulse, go over and put her arms around her husband, let her kisses drive away that look of sadness. She knew that she could do it, that she ought to do it, that she would be sorry for not having done it, but--she couldn't. Love did not know how to fight its way through pride.

He had risen. "I must go. I have a number of calls to make. I--I'm sorry you feel as you do, Amy."

He was not going to explain! He was just leaving her outside it all! He didn't care for her, really, at all--just took her because he couldn't get that other woman! Took _her_--Amy Forrester--because he couldn't get the woman he wanted! Great bands of incensed pride bound her heart now, closing in the love that had fluttered there. Her face, twisted with varying emotions, was fairly ugly as she cried: "Well, I must say, I wish you had told me this before we were married!"

He looked at her in surprise. Then, surprised anew, looked quickly away.

Feeling that he had failed, he tried to put it aside lightly. "Oh, come now, Amy, you didn't think, did you, that you could marry a man of thirty-four who had never loved any woman?"

"I should like to think he had loved a respectable woman!" she cried, wounded anew by this lightness, unable to hold back things she miserably knew she would be sorry she had not held back. "And if he had loved that kind of a woman--_did_ love her--I should like to think he had too much respect for his wife to ask her to meet such a person!"

"Ruth Holland is not a woman to speak like that about, Amy," he said with unconcealed anger.

"She's not a decent woman! She's not a respectable woman! She's a bad woman! She's a low woman!"

She could not hold it back. She knew she looked unlovely, knew she was saying things that would not make her loved. She could not help it.

Deane turned away from her. After a minute he got a little control of himself and instead of the hot things that had flashed up, said coldly: "I don't think you know what you're talking about."

"Of course I couldn't hope to know as much as _she_ does," she jeered.

"However," she went on, with more of a semblance of dignity, "I do know a few things. I know that society cannot countenance a woman who did what that woman did. I know that if a woman is going to selfishly take her own happiness with no thought of others she must expect to find herself outside the lives of decent people. Society must protect itself against such persons as she. I know that much--fortunately."

Her words fortified her. She, certainly, was in the right. She felt that she had behind her all those women of that afternoon. Did any of them receive Ruth Holland? Did they not all see that society must close in against the individual who defied it? She felt supported.

For the minute he stood there looking at her--so absolutely unyielding, so satisfied in her conclusions,--those same things about society and the individual that he had heard from the rest of them; like the rest of them so satisfied with the law she had laid down--law justifying hardness of heart and closing in against the sorrow of a particular human life; from Amy now that same look, those same words. For a little time he did not speak. "I'm awfully sorry, Amy," was all he said then.

He stood there in miserable embarra.s.sment. He always kissed her good-by.

She saw his hesitancy and turned to the other room. "Hadn't you better hurry?" she laughed. "You have so many calls to make--and some of them so important!"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was quiet that evening in the house of Cyrus Holland; the noises that living makes were m.u.f.fled by life's awe of death, even sounds that could not disturb the dying guarded against by the sense of decorum of those living on. Downstairs were people who had come to inquire for the man they knew would not be one of them again. For forty years Cyrus Holland had been a factor in the affairs of the town. He was Freeport's senior banker, the old-fashioned kind of banker, with neither the imagination nor the daring to make of himself a rich man, or of his bank an inst.i.tution using all the possibilities of its territory. In venturing days he remained cautious. His friends said that he was sane--responsible; men of a newer day put it that he was limited, lacking in that boldness which makes the modern man of affairs. He had advised many men and always on the side of safety. No one had grown rich through his suggestions, but more than one had been saved by his counsels. With the expansion of the business of the town newer banks had gone ahead of his, and when they said he was one of the good substantial men of the community they were indicating his limitations with his virtues. Such a man, not a brilliant figure through his lifetime, would be lamented in his pa.s.sing. They had often said that he failed in using his opportunities; what they said now was that he had never abused them--death, as usual, inducing the living to turn the kindly side to the truth about the dying.

Ruth did not go downstairs to see the people who were coming in. Ted was down there, and Flora Copeland, a spinster cousin of the Hollands, who for several years had lived in the house. Once, in pa.s.sing through the hall, she heard voices which she recognized. She stood there listening to them. It was so strange to hear them; and so good. She was hungry for voices she knew--old voices. Once there was a pause and her heart beat fast for she got a feeling that maybe they were going to ask for her.

But they broke that pause to say goodnight. She had received no message about anyone asking for her.

But even though she was not seeing the people who came she felt the added strangeness her presence made in that house which had suspended the usual affairs of living in waiting for death. The nurse was one of the girls of the town, of a family Ruth knew. She had been only a little girl at the time Ruth went away. She was conscious, in the young woman's scrupulously professional manner toward herself, of a covert interest, as in something mysterious, forbidden. She could see that to this decorous young person she was a woman out of another world. It hurt her, and it made her a little angry. She wished that this professional, proper young woman, stealing glances as at a forbidden thing, could know the world in which she actually lived.

And yet it occurred to her that the strain was less great than it would have been at any other time--something about a room of death making the living a little less p.r.o.ne to divide themselves into good and bad, approved and condemned. With the approach of death there are likely to be only two cla.s.ses--the living and the dead. After the first few hours, despite the estranging circ.u.mstances, there did seem to be some sort of a bond between her and this girl who attended her father.

Ruth and Ted and Flora Copeland had had dinner together. Her Cousin Flora had evidently pondered the difficult question of a manner with Ruth and was pursuing it scrupulously. Her plan was clearly indicated in her manner. She would seem to be acting as if nothing had happened and yet at the same time made it plain that she in no sense countenanced the person to whom she was being kind. Her manner was that most dismal of all things--a punctilious kindliness.

This same Cousin Flora, now an anaemic woman of forty-five, had not always been exclusively concerned with propriety. Ruth could remember Cousin Flora's love affair, which had so greatly disturbed the members of the family, and which, to save their own pride, they had thwarted.

Cousin Flora had had the misfortune to fall in love with a man quite outside the social sphere of the Copelands and the Hollands. He was a young laboring man whom she knew through the social affairs of the church. He had the presumption to fall in love with her. She had not had love before, being less generously endowed in other respects than with social position in Freeport. There had been a brief, mad time when Cousin Flora had seemed to find love greater than exclusiveness. But the undesirable affair was frustrated by a family whose democracy did not extend beyond a working together for the good of the Lord, and Cousin Flora was, as Ruth remembered their saying with satisfaction, saved.

Looking at her now Ruth wondered if there ever came times when she regretted having been saved.

She tried to make the most of all those little things that came into her mind just because this homecoming was so desolate a thing to be left alone with. She had many times lived through a homecoming. And when she had thought of coming home she had always, in spite of it all, thought of things as much the same. And now even she and Ted were strange with each other; it was Ted the little boy she knew; it was hard all at once to bridge years in which they had not shared experiences.

It was the house itself seemed really to take her in. When she got her first sight of it all the things in between just rolled away. She was back. What moved her first was not that things had changed but that they were so much the same--the gate, the walk up to the house, the big tree, the steps of the porch; as she went up the walk there was the real feeling of coming home.

Then they stepped up on the porch--and her mother was not there to open the door for her; she knew then with a poignancy even those first days had not carried that she would never see her mother again, knew as she stepped into the house that her mother was gone. And yet it would keep seeming her mother must be somewhere in that house, that in a little while she would come in the room and tell something about where she had been. And she would find herself listening for her grandfather's slow, uncertain step; and for Terror's bark--one of his wild, glad rushes into the room. Ted said that Terror had been run over by an automobile a number of years before.

Nor was it only those whom death kept away who were not there. Her sister Harriett had not been there to welcome her; now it was evening and she had not yet seen her. Ted had merely said that he guessed Harriett was tired out. He seemed embarra.s.sed about it and had hastily begun to talk of something else. And none of the old girls had come in to see her. The fact that she had not expected them to come somehow did not much relieve the hurt of their not coming. When a door opened she would find herself listening for Edith's voice; there was no putting down the feeling that surely Edith would be running in soon.

Most of the time she sat by her father's bed; though she was watching him dying, to sit there by him was the closest to comfort she could come. And as she watched the face which already had the look of death there would come pictures of her father at various times through the years. There was that day when she was a tiny girl and he came home bringing her a puppy; she could see his laughing face as he held the soft, wriggling, fuzzy little ball of life up to her, see him standing there enjoying her delight. She saw him as he was one day when she said she was not going to Sunday-school, that she was tired of Sunday-school and was not going any more. She could hear him saying, "Ruth, go upstairs and put on your clothes for Sunday-school!"--see him as plainly as though it had just happened standing there pointing a stern finger toward the stairs, not moving until she had started to obey him. And once when she and Edith and some other girls were making a great noise on the porch he had stepped out from the living-room, where he and some men were sitting about the table, looking over something, and said, mildly, affectionately, "My dears, what would you think of making a little less noise?" Queer things to be remembering, but she saw just how he looked, holding the screen door open as he said it.

And as she sat there thinking of how she would never hear his voice again, he reached out his hand as if groping for something he wanted; and when with a little sob she quickly took it he clasped her hand, putting into it a strength that astonished her. He turned toward her after that and the nature of his sleep changed a little; it seemed more natural, as if there were something of peace in it. It was as if he had turned to her, reached out his hand for her, knowing she was there and wanting her. He was too far from life for more, but he had done what he could. Her longing gave the little movement big meaning. Sitting there holding the hand of her father who would never talk to her nor listen to her again, she wanted as she had never wanted before to tell her story.

She had been a long time away; she had had a hard time. She wanted to tell him about it, wanted to try and make him understand how it had all happened. She wanted to tell him how homesick she had been and how she had always loved them all. It seemed if she could just make him know what it was she had felt, and what she had gone through, he would be sorry for her and love her as he used to.