A great new thing had happened to her: she was no longer afraid to face things! In those last few days she had been tossed, now this way, now that; it seemed she had rather been made a fool of, but things had got through to her--she was awake, alive, unafraid. Something had been liberated in her. She turned to Deane, who was looking with a somber steadiness ahead at the town. She touched his arm and he looked at her, amazed at her shining eyes, shining just as they used to when as a girl she was setting out for a good time, for some mischief, excitement.

"Well, anyway, Deane," she said in a voice that seemed to brush everything else aside, "we're alive!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The summer had gone by and Ted Holland, who had gone West with Ruth in May, was back in Freeport "breaking up the house." The place was offered for sale; things had to be cleared out in one way or another. What none of the children wanted was being sold to anybody who did happen to want it; what n.o.body wanted was to be given away to such people as had to take what they could get. And there was a great deal of it not even in the cla.s.s for giving away; "just truck" Ted kept callously calling it to Harriett and their Cousin Flora. He whistled vigorously over some of the "truck,"--a worn dog's collar, an old pair of the queer kind of house shoes his mother wore, a spectacle case he had used to love to hear his father snap shut, dusty, leaky sofa-pillows that had bristled with newness in the "den" which was the delight of his sixteen-year-old heart. He kept saying to Cousin Flora that there was no end to the junk--old school readers, Ruth's party slippers. Just burn it all up, he said, in a crisp voice of efficiency; what was it good for, anyhow?

Certainly it had taught him a lesson. He'd never keep anything.

They had been at it for a week--sorting, destroying, disbursing, scattering what a family's life through a generation had a.s.sembled, breaking up "the Hollands." Ted, in his own room that morning, around him the things he was going to put in his trunk for taking back West, admitted to himself that it was gruesome business.

Things were over; things at home were all over. This pulling to pieces drove that home hard. Father and mother were gone and now "their stuff"

was being got out of the way. After this there would not even be a place where the things they had used were. But he would be glad when they could get through with it; he was finding that there was something wrenching about things that were left, things that had been used and that now there was no longer any use for. The sight of them stabbed as no mere thinking about things could do. It was hard work throwing away "truck" that something seemed to cling to. It was hard to really _get_ it, he was thinking; a family lived in a place--seemed really a part of that place, an important part, perhaps; then things changed--people died, moved away, and that family simply _wasn't_ any more--and things went on just about the same. Whistling, he put some shirts in his trunk, trying to fix his mind on how many new shirts he needed.

He was going back West--to live, to work. Not right where Ruth was, in southwestern Colorado, but in the country a little to the north. He and a fellow he had made friends with out there had bought an apple orchard--the money he was to have from his father would go into it and some of Ruth's money--she wanted him to invest some of hers with his. It was that had made it possible for him to go in with this fellow. He was glad he could do it. The West had "got" him. He believed he could make things go.

And he shouldn't have liked staying on in Freeport. Too many things were different for him to want to stay there. And too many things hurt. Ruth had come to mean too much to him to let him be happy with people who felt as the people there did about her.

He heard Harriett downstairs and went down to speak to her about the price the stove man offered for the kitchen range. He remembered his mother's delight in that range as new; somehow it made him hate selling it for this pittance.

Harriett thought, however, that they had better let it go. One couldn't expect to get much for old things, and they didn't want it on their hands.

They stayed there awhile in the dining-room, considering the problem of getting out of the way various other things there was no longer any use for. Harriett was looking at the bay window. "If the Woodburys take the house," she said, "they won't want these shades."

"Oh, no," replied Ted, "they wouldn't be good enough for Mildred."

The Woodburys had been there the night before to look at the house; they thought of buying it and Mildred, just recently home from Europe with Edith Blair--they had had a hard time getting home, because of the war--had, according to his own way of putting it, made Ted tired. She was so fretful with her father and her ideas of how the place could perhaps be made presentable by being all done over had seemed to Ted "pretty airy." He'd rather strangers had the house. He heard that Mildred was going about a lot with Bob Gearing--one of the fellows in town who had money.

Ted pulled out his watch. "I want to get down and see Deane at his noon office hours," he said.

Harriett turned from the window. "What have you got to see him about?"

she asked sharply.

"Why--just see him," he answered in surprise. "Why shouldn't I want to see him? Haven't seen him since I got back. He'll want to hear about Ruth."

Harriett seemed about to speak, then looked at the door of the kitchen, where a man was packing dishes. "I don't think I'd go to him for _that_," she said in lowered voice.

Ted looked at her in bewildered inquiry.

"Mrs. Franklin has left him," she said shortly. She glanced at the kitchen door, then added in a voice that dropped still lower: "And the talk is that it's because of Ruth."

For a minute Ted just stood staring at her. Then his face was aflame with angry blood. "The _talk_!" he choked. "So that's the new 'talk'!

Well--"

"S--h," warned Harriett, and stepped over and closed the kitchen door.

"I'd like to tell some of them what I think of their 'talk,'" he blazed.

"Oh, I'd like to tell some of these _warts_--"

"Ted!" she admonished, nodding her head toward the closed door.

"What do I care? I'd like to have 'em hear me! I _want_ them to know that I--" He broke off and stood looking at her. "It doesn't seem to worry you much!" he thrust at her.

"It did, Ted," she said patiently. "I--it did." She looked so distressed, so worn as she said it that it mollified him until she added: "And still, you mustn't be too hard on people. A woman who has put herself in that position--"

"There you go! 'Put herself' in that position! Put herself!" he jeered angrily, "in that position! As if the position was something Ruth got into on purpose! And after all these years!--still talking about her 'position.' Let me tell you something! I'll tell you the woman that's 'put herself' in the position I'd think would make her hate herself!

That's Mrs. Williams! _She's_ the one that's 'put herself'--"

"Ted," she broke in sternly, "you must _not_!"

But, "You make me _sick_!" he flung back at her and s.n.a.t.c.hed hat and coat from the hall rack and left the house with a violent bang of the front door.

He did not go down to Deane's office. He stalked ahead, trying to hold down the bitter rage that was almost choking him. At one time when he looked up he saw that he was pa.s.sing the house Deane Franklin had built before his marriage and noted that it was closed, all the shades were clear down. Flower beds that had been laid out in the spring had been let go. It looked all wrong to see a new place so deserted, so run down.

He remembered seeing Deane working out in that yard in the spring. He hurried on by. His heart was hot with resentment--real hatred--of the town through which he walked. He loathed the place! he told himself.

Picking on Ruth for _this_--ready to seize on her for anything that put her in bad! He had been with Ruth for four months. He knew now just how things were with her. It gave him some idea of what it was she had gone through. It made him hate the town that had no feeling for her.

He had walked out from town, not giving any thought to where he was going, just walking because he had to be doing something. He was about to cross a little bridge and stepped to the side of the road to let the vehicle right behind him get ahead. He stood glaring down at the creek and did not look up until he heard the wagon, just as it struck the bridge, stop. Then he saw that it was a woman driving the market wagon and recognized her as Mrs. Herman, who had been so good to Ruth.

He stepped up eagerly to greet her; his face quickly cleared as he held out his hand and he smiled at her with a sudden boyish warmth that made her face--it was thin, tired--also light with pleasure. He kept shaking her hand; it seemed wonderfully good of her to have come along just then--she was something friendly in a hostile world. He went out eagerly, gratefully, to the something friendly. He had had about all he could stand of the other things, other feelings. He had told Ruth that he would be sure to go and see Mrs. Herman. He got in with her now and they talked of Ruth as they jogged through the country which he now noticed was aflame with the red and gold of October.

He found himself chatting along about Ruth just as if there was not this other thing about her--the thing that made it impossible to speak of her to almost anyone else in the town. It helped a lot to talk of Ruth that way just then. He had seemed all clogged up with hatred and resentment, fury at the town made him want to do something to somebody, and pity for Ruth made him feel sick in his sense of helplessness. Now those ugly things, those choking, blinding things fell away in his talking about Ruth to this woman who wanted to hear about her because she cared for her, who wanted to hear the simple little things about her that those other people had no interest in. He found himself chatting along about Ruth and Stuart--their house, their land, the field of peas into which they turned their sheep, the potatoes grown on their place that summer.

He talked of artesian wells and irrigation, of riding western horses and of camping in the mountains. Thinking of it afterwards he didn't know when he had talked so much. And of course, as everyone was doing those days, they talked about the war. She was fairly aflame with feeling about it.

He rode all the way home with Mrs. Herman, stayed for lunch and then lingered about the place for an hour or more after that. He felt more like himself than he had at any time since coming home; he could forget a little about that desolate house that was no longer to be his home, and the simple friendly interest of this woman who was Ruth's friend helped to heal a very sore place in his heart.

But afterwards, back there at home where it was as if he was stripping dead years, what came over him was the feeling that things were not as they had seemed out there with Mrs. Herman. She was like that, but in being that way she was different from the whole world, at least from practically the whole of the world that he knew. Working with old things cast him back to it all. He brooded over it there in the desolate place of things left behind; the resentful feeling toward the town, together with that miserable, helpless feeling of pa.s.sionate pity for Ruth settled down upon him and he could not throw it off.

He saw Deane that night; he saw him at the Club where he went to play a game of pool, because he had to get away from the house for awhile.

Deane was sitting apart from the various groups, reading a magazine. Ted stood in the door of that room looking at him a minute before Deane looked up from the page. He saw that his face was thinner; it made him look older; indeed he looked a good deal older than when, just the spring before, Ted used to see him working around that place that was all shut up now. And in that moment of scrutiny he saw something more than just looking older. If you didn't know Deane you'd think--well, you'd think you didn't want to know him. And he looked as if he didn't care about your knowing him, either; he looked as if he'd thank people to let him alone. Then he glanced up and saw Ted and it seemed there were a few people he didn't want to have let him alone.

But though he brightened on seeing him, looked like himself as he came quickly up to shake hands, he was not like himself in the talk that followed. It was as if he wanted to be, tried to be, but he was constrained in asking about the West, "the folks." He seemed to want to hear, yet he wasn't like himself, though Ted could scarcely have defined the difference. He was short in what he said, cut things off sharply, and in little pauses his face would quickly settle to that moroseness.

Ted told of his own plans and Deane was enthusiastic about that. Then he fell silent a moment and after that said with intensity: "I wish _I_ was going to pull out from here!"

"Well, why don't you?" laughed Ted, a little diffidently.

"Haven't got the gumption, I guess," said Deane more lightly, and as he smiled gave Ted the impression of trying to pull himself out from something.

Later in the evening a couple of men were talking of someone who was ill. "They have Franklin, don't they?" was asked, and the answer came, "Not any more. They've switched."

Walking home, he thought it had been said as if there was more to it, as if there had been previous talk about other people who had "switched."

Why, surely it couldn't be that because--for some reason or other--his wife had left him people were taking it out on his practice? That seemed not only too unfair but too preposterous. Deane was the best doctor in town. What had his private affairs--no matter what the state of them--got to do with him as a physician? Surely even _that_ town couldn't be as two-by-four as that!

But it troubled him so persistently that next morning, when they were alone together in the attic, he brought himself to broach it to Harriett, asking, in the manner of one interested in a thing because of its very absurdity, just what the talk was about Ruth and the Franklins.

Harriett went on to give the town's gossip of how Deane had gone to Indianapolis to see his wife, to try and make it right, but her people were strongly of the feeling that she had been badly treated and it had ended with her going away somewhere with her mother. Harriett sighed heavily as she said she feared it was one of those things that would not be made right.