CHAPTER EIGHT

After the maelstrom of pa.s.sion had thrown her out where life left her time to think about what she had felt, Ruth Holland would wonder whether there was something in her that made her different from the good people of the world. Through it all she did not have the feeling that it would seem she would have; what she did did not make her feel as she knew, when she came to think it out, she would be supposed to feel about such a thing. In hours that would be most condemned she had had a simple feeling of life as n.o.ble. What would be called the basest things she had done had seemed to free something within her that made her more kind, more generous, more tender, made her as a singing part of a fine, beautiful world. Her degradation had seemed to burn away all that was not pure, giving her a sense of being lifted up; it was as if through this illicit love a spiritual fount was unsealed that made her consciously one with life at its highest. Afterwards she wondered about it, wondered whether she was indeed different from people who were good, or whether it could be that hearts had been shown, not as they were, but as it was deemed meet they should be shown.

When she and Deane, with Edith and Will Blair, went home from the dance that night, something new breathed through the night. It was hard to join in the talk; she wanted to be alone, alone with that new stir. She was gentle with Deane as they stood for a moment at the door. She felt tender toward him. A little throb of excitement in her voice, the way her eyes shone, made him linger there with her a moment or two. It was as if he wanted to say something but the timid, clumsy words he spoke just before leaving were, "That sure is a peach of a dress. You had them all beat tonight, Ruth," and Ruth went into the house knowing now for sure how impossible it would be ever to think of Deane "that way." In the hour before she went to sleep what she meant by "that way" was a more living thing than it had ever been before.

The year which followed was not a happy one; it was a disturbed, a fretted year; girlhood was too ruffled for contentment in the old things, and yet she was not swept on. The social life of the town brought her and Stuart Williams together from time to time. They always had several dances together at the parties. It was those dances that made the party for her. If he were not there, the evening was a dead thing. When he was, something came to life in her that made everything different. She would be excited; she had color; her eyes shone. It made her gay, as an intoxicant may make one gay. Though when she danced with him she went curiously silent; that stilled her. After going home she would lie awake for hours, live over every slightest thing he had said, each glance and move. It was an unreal world of a new reality--quickened, heightened, delirious, promising.

In that first year she sometimes wondered if it was what would be called a flirtation. It did not seem so to her, and it was true that after that first night at the Country Club the quality of flirtation somehow fell away. Afterwards, when it became the thing that made her life, she looked back in wonderment to the light little way it had begun. That too did not seem as it should be--that a thing of such tremendous and ruthless power, a thing that swept her whole life on at its will, should come into life in a way so slight, so light, so much of chance. At first it was just the faintest little breath; but it stirred something, it grew, it became a great wind that there was no force anywhere to combat.

In that first year there was between them, unspoken of, a consciousness of feeling touched in the other, a sense of the disturbance, the pull.

It seemed very wonderful to her that just his presence in the room could make her feel alive in a way she had never felt alive before. And it was sweet almost beyond belief, it was intoxicating, to come to know that her presence was that same strange wine to him. She had seen his eyes anxiously rove a crowded room and stop with her, his face lighting. She loved remembering his face once at a card party of the older crowd where she had been tardily summoned by a disappointed hostess. He had been in the room several minutes, she watching him unseen. He was not looking anxiously about this time, as she had seen him do at the dancing parties. She thought he looked tired as he and his wife came in, not as if antic.i.p.ating pleasure. Then he saw her and she never forgot that leap of glad surprise in his eyes, the quick change in him, the new buoyancy.

She would have supposed, thinking back to it afterward, that she would have drawn back; that before feeling really broke through, a girl such as she, reared as she had been, a part of such a society, a girl, as they afterward said, who should have known right from wrong would, in that time of its gathering, have drawn back from so shameful a thing as love with another woman's husband. It was as mystifying to her that she did not fight against it as it was that it should have come. She did not understand the one nor the other. Certainly it was not as she would have supposed it would be had she heard of such a thing. Something seemed to have caught her up, to have taken her. She was appalled at times, but the truth was that she was carried along almost without resistance; ideas of resistance were there, but they were pale things, not charged with power. She would suppose, had she known the story only through hearing it, that she would have thought intensely and become wretched in the thought of Mrs. Williams. Perhaps if Mrs. Williams had been a plain little woman, or a sad looking one, that would have come home to her harder. But one would not readily pity Marion Williams, or get the feeling of wronging her. As Marion Averley she had been the reigning girl of the town. Ruth, ten years younger, had not come far enough out from her little girl's awe of Marion Averley, the young lady, to be quick in getting the feeling of wronging Marion Williams, the wife.

Perhaps one would be more slow in getting a feeling of wronging the most smartly dressed woman in the room than would be the case with the wife dowdy or drab. Mrs. Williams, while not radiating happiness, seemed somehow impervious to unhappiness, and certainly to any hurt another woman could bring her. She had an atmosphere of high self-valuation.

While she never appeared to be having an especially good time she gave a sense of being perfectly able to command a better one had it pleased her to do so.

People had supposed that Marion Averley would make a brilliant marriage.

Her grandfather had made his money in lumber, in those early days of lumber kings on the Mississippi. Locally they were looked upon as rich people. Marion had gone to a fashionable school, to Europe. People of the town said there was nothing "local" about her. Other girls had been as much away and yet would return seeming just a part of the town. That was why everyone was surprised when the Averleys announced Marion's engagement to Stuart Williams. He was distinctly local and his people were less important than hers. He had come home from college and gone into business. His father had a small canning factory, an industry that for years had not grown much, remaining one of the small concerns in a town of rapidly growing manufactories. Stuart went into business with his father and very soon there were expansions, new methods; he brought imagination to bear upon it, and a big fund of young man's energy, until it rapidly came up from a "nice little business" to one of the things that counted in the town. He had a talent for business; his imagination worked that way and he was what they called a hustler. He soon became a part of a number of things, both personal affairs and matters of public concern. He came to be alluded to as one of the prominent young business men. Even before Marion Averley married him people were saying that he would make money.

They liked her for marrying him. They said it showed that there was more to her than they had supposed, that there was warmth she did not show.

For she must have married him for the good old reason that she had fallen in love with him. Their engagement brought Stuart Williams into a new social conspicuousness, though he had the qualities--in particular a certain easy, sunny manner--that had made him popular all along. During the engagement people spoke of the way Marion seemed to thaw out; they liked her much better than they had in the days of being awed by her sophistication, her aloofness.

After their marriage the Williams' were leaders of the young married set. Their house was the gayest place in town; Stuart Williams had the same talent in hospitality that he had for business--growing, perhaps, out of the same qualities. He was very generally and really deeply liked; they called him a good fellow, a lovable chap. For about four years people spoke of it as a successful marriage, though there were no children. And then, just what it was no one knew, but the Williams'

began to seem different, going to their house became a different thing.

The people who knew Marion best had a feeling that she was not the same after the visit of that gay little Southern matron whom she had known in school at Washington. It was very gay at the Williams' through that visit, and then Marion said she was tired out and they were going to draw in for a little, and somehow they just never seemed to emerge from that drawing in. Her friends wondered; they talked about how Stuart and this friend of Marion's had certainly hit it off wonderfully; some of them suspected, but Marion gave no confidences. She seemed to carry her head higher than ever; in fact, in some curious way she seemed to become Marion Averley again while Stuart Williams concentrated more and more upon the various business affairs he was being drawn into. It came about that the Williams' were less and less mentioned when the subject of happy marriages was up, and when time had swung Ruth Holland and Edith Lawrence into the social life of the town it was the a.n.a.lytical rather than the romantically minded citizens who were talking about them.

Perhaps life would have been quite another thing for a number of people if the Country Club had not decided to replenish its treasury by giving a play. Mrs. Lawrence was chairman of the entertainment committee. That naturally brought Edith and Ruth into the play, and one night after one of those periods of distraction into which the organizer of amateur theatricals is swept it was Mrs. Lawrence who exclaimed, "Stuart Williams! Why couldn't he do that part?"--and Stuart Williams, upon learning who was in the cast, said he would see what he could do with it.

Again, at the close of the first rehearsal, as they stood about in the hall at the Lawrences', laughing over mishaps, it was Mrs. Lawrence who said, "You and Ruth go the same way, don't you, Stuart?"

Tonight they were going that way after the final rehearsal. It was later than usual; they went slowly, saying little. They had fallen silent as they neared Ruth's home; they walked slowly and in silence outside the fence; paused an instant at the gate, then, very slowly, started up the walk which led to the big white square house and came to a stop beneath the oak tree which was so near the house that its branches brushed the upper window panes.

They stood there silent; the man knew that he ought to go at once; that in that silence the feeling which words had so thinly covered would break through and take them. But knowing he should go seemed without power to make him go. He watched the girl's slightly averted face. He knew why it was averted. He felt sure that he was not alone in what he felt.

And so he stood there in the sweetness of that knowing, the sweetness of that understanding why she held herself almost rigid like that, feeling surging higher in him in the thought that she too was fighting feeling.

The breeze moved the hair on her temples; he could see the throb in her uncovered throat, her thin white dress moving over her quick breathing.

Life was in her, and the desire for life. She seemed so tender, so sensitive.

He moved a step nearer her, unable to deny himself the sweetness of confirming what it was so wonderful to think. "I won't be taking you home tomorrow night," he said.

She looked at him, then swiftly turned away, but not before he had seen her eyes.

"Shall you care?" he pressed it, unsteadily.

He knew by her high head, her tenseness, that she was fighting something back; and he saw the quivering of her tender mouth.

She cared! She _did_ care. Here was a woman who cared; a woman who wanted love--his love; a woman for whom life counted, as it counted for him. After barren, baffled days, days of denial and humiliation, the sweetness of being desired possessed him overwhelmingly as they stood there in the still, fragrant night before the darkened house.

He knew that he must go; he _had_ to go; it was go now, or--. But still he just stood there, unable to do what he knew he should do, reason trying to get hold of that moment of gathering pa.s.sion, training striving to hold life.

It was she who brought them together. With a smothered pa.s.sionate little sob she had swayed toward him, and then she was in his arms and he was kissing her wet eyes, that tender mouth, the slim throbbing throat.

CHAPTER NINE

There followed three years of happiness wrung from wretchedness, years in which the splendor of love would blaze through the shame of concealment, when joy was always breaking out through fear, when moments of beautiful peace trembled there in the ugly web of circ.u.mstance. Life was flooded with beauty by a thing called shameful.

Her affairs as a girl went on just the same; the life on the surface did not change. She continued as Ruth Holland--the girl who went to parties with the boys of her own set, one of her particular little circle of girls, the chum of Edith Lawrence, the girl Deane Franklin liked best.

But a life grew underneath that--all the time growing, crowding. She appeared to remain a girl after pa.s.sion had swept her over into womanhood. To be living through the most determining, most intensifying experience of life while she appeared only to be resting upon the surface was the hara.s.sing thing she went through in those years before reality came crashing through pretence and disgrace brought relief.

She talked to but one person in those years. That was Deane. The night he told her that he loved her she let him see.

That was more than a year after the night Stuart Williams took her home from that last rehearsal; Deane was through school now and had come home to practice medicine. She had felt all along that once he was at home for good she might have to tell Deane; not alone because he would interfere with her meetings with Stuart, but because it seemed she could not bear the further strain of pretending with him. And somehow she would particularly hate pretending with Deane. Though the night she did let him see it was not that there was any determination for doing so, but because things had become too tense that night and she had no power to go on dissembling.

It began in irritation at him, the vicious irritation that springs out against the person who upsets a plan he knows nothing about, and cannot be told of.

She had come in from an errand down town and was about to dress hurriedly to go over to Edith's for dinner. She was going to make some excuse for getting away from there early and would have an hour with Stuart, one of those stolen hours that often crowded, agitated, a number of the hours before it, one of those hours of happiness when fear always stood right there, but when joy had a marvellous power to glow in an atmosphere of ugly things. A few nights before she had tried to arrange one of those times, and just as she was about to leave the house, saying some vague thing about running in somewhere--there was no strict surveillance on members of the Holland household--a friend who had been very ill and was just beginning to go about had come to see her and she had been obliged to sit there through the hour she had been living for, striving to crowd down what she was feeling and appear delighted that her friend was able to be about, chatting lightly of inconsequential things while she could think of nothing but Stuart waiting for her, had had to smile while she wanted to sob in the fury of disappointed pa.s.sion.

The year had brought many disappointments like that, disappointments which found their way farther into the spirit because they dared not show on the surface. Of late there had been so many of them that it was growing hard to hold from her manner her inner chafing against them.

There were times when all the people who loved her seemed trying to throw things in her way, and it was the more maddening because blindly done. It was hurting her relations with people; she hated them when they blunderingly stepped in the way of the thing that had come to mean everything to her.

She was particularly anxious about this night for Stuart was going out of town on a business trip and she would not see him again for more than a week. It was her grandfather who made the first difficulty; as she was going up the stairs he called, "You going over to the Lawrences'

tonight, Ruth?"

When she had answered yes he continued: "It wouldn't be much out of your way, would it, to run on over to the Allens'?"

She hesitated; anything her grandfather asked of her was hard to refuse, not only because she loved him and because he was old, but because it hurt her to see how he missed the visiting around among his old friends that his rheumatism had of late cut him off from.

"Why--no," she answered, wondering just how she could get it in, for it did take her out of her way, and old Mr. Allen would want to talk to her; it was going to be hard to get away from Edith's anyway, and the time would be so short, for Stuart would have to leave for his train at half past nine. She quickly decided that she would go over there before dinner, even though it made her a little late. Maybe she didn't need to comb her hair, after all.

She was starting up the stairs when her grandfather called: "Wait a minute. Come here, Ruth."

She came back, twirling the fingers of one hand nervously. Her grandfather was fumbling in the drawer of his secretary. "I want you to take this letter--tell him I got it yesterday--" He stopped, peering at the letter; Ruth stood there with hand clenched now, foot tapping. "Why no, that's not the one," he rambled on; "I must have put it up above here. Or could it--"

"Oh, I'm in a hurry, grandfather!" cried the girl.

He closed the drawer and limped over to his chair. "Just let it go, then," he said in the hurt voice of one who has been refused a thing he cannot do for himself.

"Now, grandfather!" Ruth cried, swiftly moving toward him. "How can you be so _silly_--just because I'm a little nervous about being late!"

"Seems to me you're always a little nervous about something lately," he remarked, rising and resuming the leisurely search for the letter. "You young folks make such hard work of your good times nowadays. Anybody'd think you had the world on your shoulders."

Ruth made no reply, standing there as quietly as she could, waiting while her grandfather scanned a letter. "Yes, this is the one," he finally said. "You tell him--" She had the letter and was starting for the stairs while listening to what she was to tell, considering at the same time how she'd take the short cut across the high-school ball park--she could make it all right by half past six. Feeling kindly toward her grandfather because it was going to be all right, after all, she called back brightly: "Yes, grandfather, I'll get it to him; I'll run right over there with it first thing."

"Oh, look here, Ruth!" he cried, hobbling out to the hall. "Don't do that! I want you to go in the evening. He'll not be home till eight o'clock. He's going--"