Fidelity Part 17

And of a sudden she wanted terribly to see her mother. It seemed if she could see her mother now that she could make her understand. She saw it more simply than she had seen it before. She wanted to tell her mother that she loved because she could not help loving. She wanted to tell her that after all those years of paying for it she saw that love as the thing illumining her life; that if there was anything worthy in her, anything to love, it was in just this--that she had fought for love, that she would fight for it again. She wanted to see her mother! She believed she could help the hurt she had dealt.

She had walked slowly on, climbing a little hill. From there she looked back at the town. With fresh pain there came the consciousness that her mother was not there, that she could not tell her, that she had gone--gone without understanding, gone bewildered, broken. Her eyes dimmed until the town was a blur. She wanted to see her mother!

She was about to start back, but turned for a moment's look the other way, across that lovely country of little hills and valleys--brooks, and cattle in the brooks, and fields of many shades of green.

And then her eye fixed upon one thing and after that saw no other thing.

Behind her was the place where the living were gathered together; but over there, right over there on the next hill, were the dead. She stood very still, looking over there pa.s.sionately through dimmed eyes. And then swiftly, sobbing a little under her breath, she started that way.

She wanted to see her mother!

And when she came within those gates she grew strangely quiet. Back there in the dwelling place of the living she had felt shut out. But she did not feel shut out here. As slowly she wound her way to the hillside where she knew she would find her mother's grave, a strange peace touched her. It was as if she had come within death's tolerance; she seemed somehow to be taken into death's wonderful, all-inclusive love for life. There seemed only one distinction: they were dead and she still lived; she had a sense of being loved because she still lived.

Slowly, strangely comforted, strangely taken in, she pa.s.sed the graves of many who, when she left, had been back there in the place of the living. The change from dwelling place to dwelling place had been made in the years she was away. It came with a shock to find some of those tombstones; she found many she had thought of as back there, a few hills away, where men still lived. She would pause and think of them, of the strangeness of finding them here when she had known them there--of life's onward movement, of death's inevitability. There were stones marking the burial places of friends of her grandfather--old people who used to come to the house when she was a little girl; she thought with a tender pleasure of little services she had done them; she had no feeling at all that they would not want her to be there. Friends of her father and mother too were there; yes, and some of her own friends--boys and girls with whom she had shared youth.

She sat a long time on the hillside where her mother had been put away.

At first she cried, but they were not bitter tears. And after that she did not feel that, even if she could have talked to her mother, it would be important to say the things she had thought she wanted to say. Here, in this place of the dead, those things seemed understood. Vindication was not necessary. Was not life life, and should not one live before death came? She saw the monuments marking the graves of the Lawrences, the Blairs, the Williams', the Franklins,--her mother's and her father's people. They seemed so strangely one: people who had lived. She looked across the hills to the town which these people had built. Right beside her was her grandfather's grave; she thought of his stories of how, when a little boy, he came with his people to that place not then a town; his stories of the beginnings of it, of the struggles and conflicts that had made it what it was. She thought of their efforts, their disappointments, their hopes, their loves. Their loves.... She felt very close to them in that. And as she thought of it there rose a strange feeling, a feeling that came strangely strong and sure: If these people who had pa.s.sed from living were given an after moment of consciousness, a moment when they could look back on life and speak to it, she felt that their voices, with all the force they could gather, would be raised for more living. Why did we not live more abundantly? Why did we not hold life more precious? Were they given power to say just one word, would they not, seeing life from death, cry--Live!

Twilight came; the world had the sweetness of that hour just before night. A breeze stirred softly; birds called lovingly--loving life. The whole fragrance of the world was breathed into one word. It was as if life had caught the pa.s.sionate feeling of death; it was as if that after consciousness of those who had left life, and so knew its preciousness, broke through into things still articulate. The earth breathed--Live!

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Cyrus Holland died just before daybreak next morning. It seemed to Deane Franklin that he had only just fallen asleep when the telephone beside him was ringing. When tired out he slept through other noises, but that one always instantly reached--a call to him that got through sleep. He wakened just enough to reach out for the 'phone and his "h.e.l.lo!" was cross. Was there never a time when one could be let alone? But the voice that came to him banished both sleep and irritation. It was Ruth's voice, saying quietly, tensely: "Deane? I'm sorry--but we want you.

There's a change. I'm sure father's going."

He was dressing almost the instant he hung up the receiver. To Amy, who had roused, he said: "It's Ruth. Her father's going. I can't do a thing--but they want me there."

At first Amy made no reply. He thought nothing about that, engrossed in getting dressed as quickly as possible. When she burst out, "So of course you're going!" he was dumbfounded at the pa.s.sionateness of her voice. He looked at her in astonishment; then, for the first time the other side of it, as related to their quarrel about Ruth, turned itself to him. "Why, of course I'm going, Amy," he said quietly.

"It makes a difference who it is, doesn't it?" she cried, stormily. "The other night when somebody called you and there wasn't a thing you could do, you _said_ so! You _told_ them they mustn't ask you! But _this_ is different, isn't it?"

The words had piled up tumultuously; she seemed right on the verge of angry, tumultuous tears. He paused in what he was doing. "Why, Amy," he murmured in real astonishment. And then helplessly repeated in tender reproach, "Why, Amy!"

But she laughed, it seemed sneeringly. He colored, quickly finished dressing and left the room without saying anything more.

When she heard the front door close, heard Deane running down the steps, she sat up in bed and burst into tears of rage. Always that woman!

Running away to her in the middle of the night! He didn't _have_ to go!

There was nothing for him to do as a doctor--he could do nothing for a man who had been dying for a couple of days. He _said_ that--just a couple of nights before when someone wanted him to come. But this was Ruth Holland! She had only to telephone. Of course he'd go anywhere--any time--for her! Her sobs grew more and more pa.s.sionate. Her head down on her knees she rocked back and forth in that miserable fury only jealousy and wounded pride can create.

This gathered together, brought to a head, the resentment acc.u.mulating through a number of incidents. That afternoon she had gone over to the Lawrences' to thank Edith and her mother for the flowers from the tea which they had sent her that morning. They had urged her to run in often, to be friendly. Her unhappiness about her talk with Deane the night before, when he had actually proposed that she go to see this Ruth Holland, made her want to be with friends; she wanted to see people who felt as she did that--though it did not so present itself to her--she might fortify herself in the conviction that Deane was preposterously wrong, and she taking the only course a good woman could take in relation to a bad one. She was prepared to feel that men did not see those things as clearly as women did, that it was woman who was the guardian of society, and that she must bear with man in his failure to see some things right. She had been eager to strengthen herself in that feeling, not alone because it would, in her own mind, get her out of reach of any possible charge of hardness or narrowness, but because it would let her break through her feeling against Deane; she wanted to get back to the days of his complete adoration of her, back where his pa.s.sion for her would sweep all else out of their world. She knew well enough that Deane loved her, but there was a tightened up place around her knowing that. It made her miserable. Things would not be right until she found a way through that tightened up place--a way that would make her right and Deane wrong, but would let her forgive, largely and gently understanding. Such, not thought out, were the things that took her to the Lawrences' that afternoon.

It was apparent that Edith had been crying. She and her mother were gracious to Amy, but there was a new constraint. She felt uncomfortable.

When they were alone Edith broke out and told her how she was just sick at heart about Ruth. Deane had been there that morning urging her to go and see Ruth--instantly there was all anew that tightening up that held her from Deane, that feeling against him and against this Ruth Holland that was as if something virulent had been poured into her blood, changing her whole system. Edith cried as she told how Deane and her mother had quarreled because he felt so strongly on the subject, and didn't seem able to understand her mother's standpoint. Then, she too wanting to set herself right with herself, she went over the whole story--the shock to her, how it had hurt her ideal of friends.h.i.+p, had even seemed to take something from the sanct.i.ty of her own marriage. She silenced something within herself in recounting the wrong done her, fortified herself in repeating the things she had from her mother about one's not being free, about what the individual owed to society.

Amy went home in a turmoil of resentment against her husband. It was hard to hold back the angry tears. A nice position he was putting himself in--going about the town pleading for this woman whom n.o.body would take in!--estranging his friends--yes, probably hurting his practice. And _why_? _Why_ was he so wrought up about it? Why was he making a regular business of going about fighting her battles? Well, _one_ thing it showed! It showed how much consideration he had for his own wife. When she came in sight of their house it was harder than ever to hold back the tears of mortification, of hot resentment. She had been so sure she was going to be perfectly happy in that house! Now already her husband was turning away from her--humiliating her--showing how much he thought of another woman, and _such_ a woman! She did not know what to do with the way she felt, did not know how to hold from the surface the ugly things that surged through her, possessed her. Until now she had had nothing but adulation from love. A pretty, petted girl she had formed that idea of pretty women in youth that it was for men to give love and women graciously to accept it. For her vanity to be hurt by a man who had roused her pa.s.sion turned that pa.s.sion to fury against him and made it seem that a great wrong had been done her.

As she approached she saw that Deane was standing before the house talking to a woman in a vegetable wagon. He had one foot up on the spoke of the wheel and was talking more earnestly than it seemed one would be talking to a vegetable woman. Doubtless she was one of his patients. As she came up he said: "Oh, Amy, I want you to know Mrs. Herman."

She stiffened; his tone in introducing her to a woman of what she thought of as the lower cla.s.ses seeming just a new evidence of his inadequate valuation of her.

"Your husband and I went to school together," said Mrs. Herman, pleasantly, but as if explaining.

"Oh?" murmured Amy.

Deane abruptly moved back from the wagon. "Well, you do that, Annie.

Ruth would love to see you, I know."

So _that_ was it! She turned away with a stiff little nod to the woman in the wagon. Always the same thing!--urging Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry to go and see that woman!--taking up with a person like this, introducing his wife in that intimate way to a woman who peddled vegetables just because she was willing to go and see Ruth Holland! She didn't know that she had to stand such things!--she didn't know that she _would_. She guessed she could show him that she wasn't going to play second fiddle to that Ruth Holland!

Deane came to the door of the room where she was taking off her hat. Her fingers were trembling so that she could scarcely get the pins. "That little woman you were so chilly to is a pretty fine sort, Amy," he said incisively.

"Because she is going to see Ruth Holland?" she retorted with an excited laugh.

"Oh, you were pretty stand-offish before you knew that," he answered coolly.

Vanity smarting from deeper hurts made her answer, haughtily: "I'm rather inexperienced, you know, in meeting people of that cla.s.s."

In his heart too there were deeper disappointments than this touched.

"Well, I must say--" he began hotly, "I think if I felt as sn.o.bbish as that I'd try pretty hard to conceal it!"

Amy was carefully putting away her hat; she had an appearance of cold composure, of a sense of superiority. It was because she wanted to keep that that she did not speak. The things within would so completely have destroyed it.

"I guess you don't understand, Amy," said Deane, quieted by her silence; "if you knew all about Annie Morris I think you'd see she is a woman worth meeting." Thinking of his talk with Edith and her mother that morning, he added, a good deal of feeling breaking into his voice: "A good sight more so than some of the people you are meeting!"

"And of course," she could not hold back, "they--those inferior people--won't go to see Ruth Holland, and this wonderful woman will!

That's the secret of it, isn't it?"

"It's one thing that shows her superiority," he replied coolly. "Another thing is her pluck--grit. Her husband is a dolt, and she's determined her three children shall have some sort of a show in life, so she's driven ahead--worked from daylight till dark many a time--to make decent things possible for them."

"Well, that's very commendable, I'm sure," replied Amy mildly, appearing to be chiefly concerned with a loose b.u.t.ton on the wrap she had just taken off.

"And with all that she's kept her own spirit alive; she's not going to let life get clear ahead of _her_, either. She's pretty valiant, I think." He was thinking again of Edith and her mother as he added contentiously, "I don't know any woman in this town I'd rather talk to!"

Amy, appearing quite outside the things that were disturbing him, only smiled politely and threaded a needle for sewing on the b.u.t.ton. He stood there in the doorway, fidgeting, his face red. She seemed so uncaring; she seemed so far away. "Oh, Amy!" he cried, miserably, appealingly.

Quickly she looked up; her mouth, which had been so complacent, twitched. He started toward her, but just then the doorbell rang. "I presume that's your mother," she said, in matter of fact tone.

Mrs. Franklin was with them for dinner that night. Amy's social training made it appear as if nothing were disturbing her. She appeared wholly composed, serene; it was Deane who seemed ill at ease, out of sorts.

After dinner he had to go to the hospital and when she was alone with his mother Amy was not able to keep away from the subject of Ruth Holland. For one thing, she wanted to hear about her, she was avid for detail as to how she looked, things she had done and said--that curious human desire to press on a place that hurts. And there was too the impulse for further self-exoneration, to be a.s.sured that she was right, to feel that she was injured.

All of those things it was easy to get from Mrs. Franklin. Amy, not willing to reveal what there had been between her and Deane, and having that instinct for drawing sympathy to herself by seeming self-depreciation, spoke gently of how she feared she did not altogether understand about Deane's friend Ruth Holland. Was she wrong in not going with Deane to see her?

Mrs. Franklin's explosion of indignation at the idea, and the feeling with which, during the hour that followed, she expressed herself about Deane's friend Ruth Holland, acted in a double fas.h.i.+on as both fortification and new hurt. Mrs. Franklin, leader in church and philanthropic affairs, had absolutely no understanding of things which went outside the domain of what things should be. The poor and the wicked did terrible things that society must do something about. There was no excuse whatever for people who ought to know better. That people should be dominated by things they ought not to feel was perversity on their part and the most wilful kind of wickedness. She had Mrs.

Lawrence's point of view, but from a more provincial angle. Deane did not get his questioning spirit, what she called his stubbornness, from his mother.

Added to what she as a church woman and worker for social betterment felt about the affair was the resentment of the mother at her son's having been, as she put it, dragged into the outrage. She grew so inflamed in talking of how this woman had used Deane that she did not take thought of how she was giving more of an impression of her power over him than might be pleasant hearing for Deane's young wife. The indignation of the whole Franklin family at what they called the way Deane had been made a cat's paw was fanned to full flame in this preposterous suggestion that Amy should go to see Ruth Holland. In her indignation at the idea she gave a new sense of what the town felt about Ruth, and she was more vehement than tactful in her expressions against Deane for holding out that way against the whole town. "It just shows, my dear," she said, "what a woman of no principle can do with a man!"