Certainly that would not seem the feeling she should be having, but there was the odd part of it: the feelings she had were so seldom those she would expect herself to have.

Her mother and father had gone indoors; Cyrus sat out there with her and Deane for a time. Ruth did not love Cyrus as she loved Ted; he had always had too superior a manner with her for her feeling to be more than the perfunctory thing which sometimes pa.s.ses for personal affection in families. It was simply that she had never admitted, even to herself, that she did not love him. He belonged to the set just older than Ruth's, though she and Deane and their friends were arriving now at the time of ceasing to be a separate ent.i.ty as the young crowd and were being merged in the group just above them. That contributed to Cyrus's condescension, he being tempered for condescension.

When she and Deane were alone the talk lagged, Ruth sitting there at the head of the steps leaning against the pillar, he a few steps below her, sprawled out in awkward boyish fashion, looking up at her from time to time as she said something. Her silence did not make him feel cut off from her; the things she said were gently said; her tired smile was sweet. He spoke several times of going, but lingered. He was held by something in Ruth; it stirred something in him, not knowing that he was drawn by what another man had brought into life. He drew himself up and stole timid glances at Ruth as she looked out into the night, feeling something new in her tonight, something that touched the feeling that had all the time been there in him, growing as he grew, of itself waiting for the future as simply and naturally as all maturing things wait for the future. Ruth was the girl he had all the time cared for; he was shy about emotional things--awkward; he had had almost no emotional life; he had all the time been diffident about what she made him feel and so they had just gone along for a little time longer than was usual as boy and girl. But something sweet, mysterious, exhaling from her tonight liberated the growing, waiting feeling in him. It took him as he had not been taken before; he watched Ruth and was stilled, moved, drawn.

Finally, as if suddenly conscious of a long silence, she turned to him with something about the plans for Cora Albright's wedding--she was to be a bridesmaid and he an usher. She went on talking of the man Cora was to marry, a man she met away from home and had fallen desperately in love with. He a.s.sociated the light of her face, the sweetness of her voice, with the things of romance of which she talked. All in a moment his feeling for her, what her strange, softened mood touched in him, leaped up, surging through him, not to be stayed. He moved nearer her.

"You know, Ruth," he said, in queer, jerky voice, "_I_ love you."

She gave a start, drew a little back and looked at him with a certain startled fixity as if he had stopped all else in her. For the moment she just looked at him like that, startled, fixed.

"Could you care for me at all, Ruth?" he asked wistfully, and with a bated pa.s.sionateness.

And then she moved, and it seemed that feeling, too, moved in her again; there was a flow of emotions as she sat looking at him now. And then her strangely shining eyes were misty; her face quivered a little and very slowly she shook her head.

"Don't do that, Ruth," he said quickly, in a voice sharp with pain.

"Don't do that! You don't _know_--maybe you hadn't thought about it--maybe--" He broke off, reached out for her hands, and could only stammer, "Oh, Ruth!--I love you so!"

He had her hands; he was clutching them very tight; he looked up at her again, imploring. She started to shake her head again, but did not really do it. She seemed about to speak, but did not. What could she say to Deane--how make him understand?--unless she told him. She thought of the years she had known him, how much they had been together, how good he had been to her. Again her eyes were misty. It was all so tangled.

There was so much pain.

Feeling her softening, her tenderness, he moved nearer, her two hands pressed together so tight in his that it hurt her. "It wouldn't be so bad, would it, Ruth?" he urged wistfully, with a little laugh that broke with emotion. "You and I--mightn't life go pretty well for us?"

She turned away, looking out into the night. Feeling something in her that he did not understand he let her hands go. She put one of them up, still further averting her face, lost to him in the picture forming itself before her of how life would be if love came right; what it would mean not to have to hide, but to have those who cared for her happy in her happiness; what it would mean to give herself to love without fear, to wear her joy proudly before the world, revealing her womanhood. She was not thinking of what life with Deane would be but of what love that could have its place would be: telling her mother and father and Edith, being able to show the pride of being loved, the triumph of loving.

Sitting there, turning her face from this friend who loved her, she seemed to be turning it to the years awaiting her, years of desperately clutching at happiness in tension and fear, not understood because unable to show herself,--afraid, hara.s.sed, perhaps disgraced. She wanted to take her place among women who loved and were loved! She did not want to be shut away from her friends, not seeming to understand what she understood so well. This picture of what life would be if love could have its place brought home to her what it meant to love and perpetually conceal, stealing one's happiness from the society in which one lived.

Why could it not have gone right for her too, as it had for Cora and would for Edith? She too wanted a wedding, she too wanted rejoicing friends.

She hid her face in her hands. Her body was quivering.

The boy's arm stole round her shoulders. She was feeling--maybe she did care. "Ruth," he whispered, "love does mean something to you, doesn't it?"

She raised her head and looked at him. And that look was a thing Deane Franklin never forgot; all the years did not blur his memory of it--that flaming claim for love that transformed her face.

And then it was lost in contrition, for she saw what he had seen, and what he hoped from that; in her compunction for having let him see what was not for him, the tender, sorrowing look, the impulsive outreaching of her hand, there was the dawn of understanding.

At first he was too bewildered to find words. Then: "You care for some one else?" he groped unbelievingly.

She looked away, but nodded; her tears were falling.

He moved a little away and then sat there quite still. A breeze had come up and the vines beat against the porch, making a sound that like the flaming look of a moment ago he never forgot.

She knew that he must be wondering; he knew her life there, or what seemed her life. He must be wondering who it was she cared for like that.

She laid her hand upon his arm; and when he turned to her she did not say anything at all, but the appeal that looked through pain perhaps went where words could not have gone.

"But you're not happy!" he exclaimed, in a sort of harsh exulting in that.

She shook her head; her eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g over.

He looked away from her, his own hurt and surprise rousing a savage thing in him that did not want to do what the pleading pain of her eyes so eloquently asked of him. He had always thought that _he_ was to have Ruth. Well, he was not to have her--there were ugly things which, in that first moment, surged into his disappointment. Some one else was to have her. But she was not happy! Defeated feeling wrenched its own sorry satisfaction from that.

"Why aren't you happy?" he asked of her abruptly, roughly.

She did not answer, and so he had to look at her. And when he saw Ruth's face his real love for her broke through the ugliness of thwarted pa.s.sion. "Can't you tell me, Ruth?" he asked gently.

She shook her head, but the concern of his voice loosed feeling she was worn out with holding in. Her eyes were streaming now.

His arm went round her shoulder, gently, as if it would shield, help.

His love for her wrenched itself free--for that moment, at least,--from his own hurt. "Maybe I can help you, Ruth," he was murmuring.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He went away from there that night not knowing more than that; it was merely that she let him see. He knew now that there was some big thing in her life he had known nothing about; that he had not understood Ruth, though he had known her through all the years and had thought he knew her so well. He was bewildered, his pain was blunted in that bewilderment. There was a sick sense of life as all different, but he was too dazed then for the pain that came later with definite knowing.

He went home that night and because he could not sleep tried to read a medical book; usually that took all his mind, for the time other things would not exist for him. But that was not true tonight; that world of facts could not get him; he lived right on in the world of his own feeling. He was not to have Ruth; he did not seem able to get a real sense of that either, there was just a sick feeling about it rather than actual realization, acceptance. And what did it mean? Surely he knew Ruth's life, the people she went with; it was always he, when he was at home, Ruth went about with. Someone away from home? But she had been very little away from home. Who could it be? He went over and over that.

It came to seem unreal; as if there were some misunderstanding, some mistake. And yet, that look.... His own disappointment was at times caught up into his marvel at her; that moment's revelation of what her caring could be was so wonderful as to bear him out of the fact that it was not for him she cared. That was the way it was all through, his love for her deepening with his marvel at her, the revelation of what she felt for another man claiming more and more of himself for her. It was a thing he would have scoffed at if told of, it was a thing he could not somehow justify even to himself, but it was true that the more he saw of what love meant to Ruth the more Ruth came to mean to him.

In those next few months, the months before he actually knew, there were times when he could almost persuade himself that there was something unreal about it all, torturous wonderings as to who the man could be trailing off into the possibility of there being no man, because he knew of none; sometimes he tried to persuade himself that this pa.s.sionate feeling he had glimpsed in Ruth was a thing apart from any particular man--for who _was_ the man? Sometimes he could, for a moment, let in the hope that since she could care like that she would care for him. Though he more than half knew he deluded himself in that; there was, now that his eyes were opened, that in Ruth's manner to indicate something in her life which did not appear on the surface. He saw how nervous she was--how strained at times, how worried and cross, which was not like Ruth at all. There were times when her eyes were imploring, times when they were afraid, again there were moments of that lovely calm, when feeling deep and beautiful radiated from her, as it had that night they sat on the steps and, drawn by something in her, he had to tell her that he loved her. She did queer unreasonable things, would become exasperated at him for apparently nothing at all. Once when she had told him she was going somewhere with her mother he later saw her hurrying by alone; another time she told him she was going to Edith's, and when he called up there, wanting to take them both with him for a long trip he had to make into the country, Edith said Ruth had not been there.

Thoughts that he did not like, that he could not believe, came into his mind. He was not only unhappy, but he grew more and more worried about Ruth.

That went on for several months, and then one day late that same summer she came to him with the truth. She came because she had to come. He was a doctor; he was her friend; she was in a girl's most desperate plight and she had no one else to turn to. It was in his office that she told him, not looking at him, her face without color and drawn out of shape, her voice quick, sharp, hard, so unlike Ruth's sweet voice that without seeing her he would not have known it. She threw out the bare facts at him as she sat there very straight, hands gripped. He was stupefied at first, but it was fury which then broke through, the fury of knowing it was _this_, that not only was he not to have Ruth, but that another man _had_ her, the fury that rose out of the driving back of all those loose ends of hope that had eased pain a little. And _Ruth_--_this_! He little knew what things he might not have said and done in those first moments of failing her, turning on her because he himself was hurt beyond his power to bear. And then Ruth spoke to him. "But I thought you believed in love, Deane," she said, quietly.

"_Love!_" he brutally flung back at her.

"Yes, Deane, love," she said, and the simplicity, the dignity of her quiet voice commanded him and he had to turn from himself to her. She was different now; she looked at him, steadily, proudly. Out of the humiliation of her situation she raised a proud face for love; love could bring her disgrace, it could not strip her of her own sense of the dignity of loving. Her power was in that, in that claim for love that pain and humiliation could not beat back.

"I notice _he's_ not here," he sneered, still too overwhelmed to be won from his own rage to her feeling.

"I thought it better for me to come," she said simply, and as she said it and he remembered her drawn, wretched face in telling him, he was quieted a little by a sense of what it had cost her to come. "Because,"

she added, "you're my friend, you know."

He did not say anything, miserably wondering what she now thought of him as her friend.

"Oh, Deane," she broke out, "don't be hard! If you could know what he's suffering! Being a man--being a little older--what's that? If you can understand me, Deane, you've got to understand him, too!"

He stood there in silence looking at Ruth as, looking away from him now, she brooded over that. In this hour of her own humiliation her appeal was for the man who had brought it upon her. "How you love him!" escaped from him, in bitterness, and yet marvelling.

She turned to him then in her swift way, again, as on that night of his first seeing, her face transformed by that flaming claim for love; it was as if life was shining triumphant through the cloud of misery it had brought down around her. He could not rage against that look; he had no scorn for it. It lighted a country between them which words could not have undarkened. They came together there in that common understanding of the power and beauty of love. He was suddenly ashamed, humbled, feeling in her love a quality upon which no shameful circ.u.mstance could encroach. And after that she found relief in words, the words she had had to deny herself so long. It was as if she found it wonderfully good to talk, in some little measure linking her love, as love wants to link itself, with the other people of the world, coming within the human unit. Things which circ.u.mstances had prisoned in her heart, too intensified by solitude, leaped out like winged things let loose. But in that hour of talking with him, though words served her well, it was that proud, flaming claim for love which again and again lighted her face that brought him into understanding, winning him for her against his own love of her.

In the year which followed, that last year before circ.u.mstances closed in too tight and they went away, it was he who made it possible for Ruth to move a little more freely in the trap in which she found herself. He helped her in deceiving her family and friends, aided them in the ugly work of stealing what happiness they could from the society in which they lived. He did not like doing it. Neither did he like attending the agonies of child-birth, or standing impotently at the bed of the dying.

It might seem absurd, in trying to explain one's self, to claim for this love the inevitability of the beginning and the end of life, and yet, seeing it as he saw it he did think of it, not as a thing that should or should not be, but as a thing that was; not as life should or should not be lived, but as life. This much he knew: that whatever they might have been able to do at the first, it had them now. They were in too powerful a current to make a well considered retreat to shoals of safety. No matter what her mood might have been in the beginning, no matter what she could have done about it then, Ruth was mastered not master now.

Love _had_ her--he saw that too well to reason with her. What he saw of the way all other people mattered so much less than the pa.s.sion which claimed her made him feel, not that Ruth was selfish, but that the pa.s.sion was mastering; the way she deceived made him feel, not that she was deceitful, but that love like that was as unable to be held back in the thought of wrong to others as in the consideration of safety for one's self; the two were equally inadequate floodgates. Not that those other things did not matter--he knew how they did make her suffer--but that this one thing mattered overwhelmingly more was what he felt in Ruth in those days when she would be thought to be with him and would be with Stuart Williams.

For himself that was a year of misery. He saw Ruth in a peculiarly intimate way, taken as he was into the great intimacy of her life. His love for her deepened with his knowing of her; and anxiety about her preyed upon him all the time, pa.s.sionate resentment that it should have gone like that for her, life claiming her only, as it seemed, to destroy her.

He never admitted to himself how much he really came to like Stuart Williams. There seemed something quixotic in that; it did not seem natural he should have any sympathy with this man who not only had Ruth's love, but was endangering her whole life. Yet the truth was that as time went on he not only came to like him but to feel a growing concern for him.