The One Woman Part 12

"Madam, I'm not very sorry for you. I tried to prevent you marrying him that night. I begged you to go back to Jersey City to your own church."

"You will keep it secret, Doctor?" she begged.

"I'll not publish it. But the certificate is on file in the Hall of Records. Any one can see it who wishes. It is beyond my control."

An old woman with bedraggled skirt, reddened eyes and a fat, motherly face timidly approached. She had been overlooked.

"Doctor, you're my last chance. I come up to New York to see my son-in-law, as grand a rascal as ever lived. He owes me a thousand dollars and won't pay it. We lost our crop down in Old Virginia.

So I sc.r.a.ped up the money and got here to squeeze what he owed out of that rascal. Now he's turned me out into the street and moved where I can't find him. I'm starvin' to death. I ain't got a cent to go home; an' what's worse'n all, I got a letter this mornin'

tellin' me my idiot boy's down sick an' cryin' for me. I'm the only one can do anything for him. He can't understand n.o.body else."

Her voice broke and she bit her lips to keep back the tears.

"I've begged all day. Everybody laughs at me. I heard you preach one Sunday. I knowed you wouldn't laugh at me. I want you to loan me twenty dollars to get home quick. I'll start the minute I can get to the train, an' I'll pay you back if I have to sell my feather beds. Now, will you do it?"

"Well, a more improbable story was never told a New Yorker, but something whispers to me you're telling the truth."

"You'll do it?"

"Yes."

She drew a deep breath, and cried with streaming eyes:

"Oh, Lord, have mercy on my poor soul, that I doubted You, and thought You had forsaken me!"

Gordon handed her the cheque.

"I'm going to kiss you!" she fairly screamed.

Before he could lift his hand or protest, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

As he took her hands down from his shoulders and drew his face away from the mouldy-smelling old shawl, he looked toward the door, and Ruth stood in the entrance. Her eyes blazed with wrath, but as she saw the faded and bedraggled dress and moth-eaten shawl and looked into the tear-stained motherly old face she burst into hysterical laughter.

Gordon rose and escorted the woman to the door with courtesy.

"You will find the bank at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street--the Garfield National. Write me how your son is when you reach home, and send me the money when you are able."

"I will. G.o.d bless you, sir," she answered with fervour.

When he returned to his study, Ruth was still hysterical, and he sat down without a word and began to write.

"Frank, I'm sorry to have been so rude," she said at length.

"Is that all?"

"No; I'm sorry I humiliated myself by spying on you."

She sat twisting her handkerchief, glancing at him timidly.

"And you can't understand how deeply you have wounded me by such an act, Ruth. I hope you have heard all that pa.s.sed here this morning."

"It's strange how I always seem to be in the wrong. Frank, I am very sorry. You must forgive me. And I have another confession.

I've been receiving anonymous letters about you for the past three weeks. I was too weak and cowardly to show them to you. It was one of these letters which caused me to come here this morning. And now I've wounded you, and alienated your heart from me more than ever. I feel I shall die."

She began to sob.

"Come, Ruth, you must conquer this insanity. Naturally you are bright, witty, cheerful and altogether charming. Jealousy reduces you to a lump of stupidity."

"You do forgive me?"

"Yes; and don't, for heaven's sake, do such a thing again. Ask me what you wish to know. I am not a liar; I will tell you the truth."

"But I don't want to hear it if it's cruel," she protested.

"The truth is best, gentle or cruel."

She kissed him impulsively and left.

He sat for an hour, tired, sore and brooding over this scene with his wife. He caught the perfume of the flowers on his desk, and in the tints of the roses saw the warm blushes of the woman who had sent them. Her voice was friendly and caressing and her speech, words of sweetest flattery--flattery that cleared the stupor from his brain and gave life and new faith in himself and his work; flattery that had in it a mysterious personal flavour that piqued his curiosity and fed his vanity. How clearly he recalled her--the superb figure, with rounded bust and arms full and magnificent, in the ripe glory of youth, her waving auburn hair so thick and long it could envelop half her body. Often he had watched the light blaze through its red tints while he talked to her of his dreams, her lips half parted with lazy tenderness and ready with gentle words. He recalled the rhythmic music of her walk, strong and insolent in its luxury of health. And he was grateful for the cheer she had brought into his life.

CHAPTER VIII

SWEET DANGER

Kate Ransom had attempted no close a.n.a.lysis of her absorbing interest in Gordon's work. The change in her life from weariness to thrilling interest had been its own justification. Wealth had robbed her of the mystery and charm of accident. The future was fixed; there could be no unknown. The men she had met in society were mere fops, or expert butlers who wrote books on etiquette.

Life was a problem for them of what the tailors could do.

She had been isolated from humanity. Now she felt the red blood tingling to her finger tips. Her days were full of sweet surprises or sudden revelations of drama and tragedy, and her woman's soul responded with eager interest.

She had never loved. Such a woman could not love a tailor's dummy.

Her nature was warm, rich and pa.s.sionate, and she was consumed with longing for the moment of bliss when her whole being would so burn with sacrificial fire for her beloved that she could walk with him naked in winter snows, unconscious of cold.

Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her beauty, and she used these with the ease and a.s.surance of an expert.

She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and held them as divine gifts, the surest tokens of the fulfilment of her desires.

Her heart, rich in the ripened treasures of unspent motherhood, brooded in tenderness over her new work--the tortures of half-starved mothers, their doomed babes, their idle fathers, and the misery of the poor and the fallen. This yearning to help she knew to be the cry within her own soul for peace. How to express this fullness of life Gordon was teaching her. Slowly and unconsciously she was clothing this powerful, athletic man with every attribute of her ideal. His steel-gray eyes seemed to pierce her very soul and say, "I understand you; come with me." His eloquence and emotional thinking were more and more to her the voice of a prophet seer. His face, that flashed and trembled, smiled and clouded with fires of smouldering pa.s.sion, held her as in a spell. She knew this power was slowly tightening about her heart, yet she rejoiced in its very pain. When she greeted him, and he unconsciously held her soft hand in his big blue-veined grasp, a sense of restful joy came she knew not whence nor why.

Her enthusiasm in his work, her faith and cheering flattery were drawing him with resistless magnetism.

As the summer advanced the heat became so terrific and the suffering in the city so great that Gordon determined to stay at his post and take his vacation in the fall. Mrs. Ransom fussed and fumed over Kate's determination to stay, but there was no help for it.