Fidelity Part 9

For the man changed in that last year. It was not only that he looked older--hara.s.sed, had grown so much more silent, but Deane as a physician noticed that he was losing weight and there was a cough that often made him look at him sharply. A number of times Ruth said, "I don't think Stuart's well," but she looked so wretched in saying it that he always laughed at her. The Williams' were not patients of his, so he felt that professional hesitance, even though he thought it foolish professionalism, in himself approaching Stuart about his health. Once when he seemed particularly tired and nervous Deane did venture to suggest a little lay-off from work, a change, but Stuart had answered irritably that he couldn't stop work, and didn't want to go away, anyhow.

It was almost a year after the day Ruth came to him steeled for telling what had to be told that the man of whom she that day talked came to tell him what he had been suspecting, that he had tuberculosis and would have to take that lay-off Deane had been hinting at. It seemed it was either go away or die, probably, he added, with an attempted laugh, it was go away and die, but better go away, he thought, than stay there and give his friends an exhibition in dying.

They talked along over the surface of it, as is people's way, Deane speaking mildly of tuberculosis, how prevalent, how easily controlled, how delightful Arizona was, the charms of living out-of-doors, and all the time each of them knew that the other was not thinking of that at all, but thinking of Ruth.

Finally, bracing himself as for a thing that was all he could do, Stuart spoke of her. "Ruth said she was coming in to see you about something this afternoon. I thought I'd get in first and tell you. I wondered what you'd think--what we'd better do--"

His voice trailed off miserably. He turned a little away and sat there in utter dejection.

And as he looked at him it came to Deane that love could be the most ruthless, most terrible thing in the world. People talked to him afterwards about this man's selfishness in taking his own pleasure, his own happiness, at the cost of everyone else. He said little, for how could he make real to anyone else his own feeling about what he had seen of the man's suffering, utter misery, as he spoke of the girl to whom he must bring new pain. Some one spoke to him afterwards of this "light love" and he laughed in that person's face. He knew that it was love bathed in pain.

A new sense of just how hideous the whole thing was made him suddenly demand: "Can't you--_do_ anything about it? Isn't there any _way_?--any way you can get a divorce?" he bluntly asked.

"Mrs. Williams does not believe in divorce," was the answer, spoken with more bitterness than Deane had ever heard in any voice before.

Deane turned away with a little exclamation of rage, rage that one person should have this clutch on the life of another, of two others--and one of them Ruth--sickened with a sense of the waste and the folly of it,--for what was _she_ getting out of it? he savagely put to himself. How could one get anything from life simply by holding another from it?

"Does she know anything about Ruth?" he asked with an abrupt turn to Stuart.

"She has mentioned her name several times lately and looked at me in doing it. She isn't one to speak directly of things," he added with a more subtle bitterness than that of a moment before. They sat there for a couple of minutes in silence--a helpless, miserable silence.

When, after that, Deane stepped out into the waiting-room he found Ruth among those there; he only nodded to her and went back and told Stuart that she was there. "But it's only three," said he helplessly, "and she said she was coming at four."

"Well, I suppose she came earlier than she intended," Deane replied, about as helplessly, and went over and stood looking out the window.

After a moment he turned. "Better get it over with, hadn't you! She's got to be told," he said, a little less brusquely, as he saw the man wince,--"better get it over with."

Stuart was silent, head down. After a moment he looked up at Deane. It was a look one would turn quickly away from. Again Deane stood looking from the window. He was considering something, considering a thing that would be very hard to do. After a moment he again abruptly turned around. "Well, shall I do it!" he asked quietly.

The man nodded in a wretched gratefulness that went to Deane's heart.

So he called Ruth in from the waiting-room. He always remembered just how Ruth looked that day; she had on a blue suit and a hat with flowers on it that was very becoming to her. She looked very girlish; he had a sudden sense of all the years he had known her.

The smile with which she greeted Deane changed when she saw Stuart sitting there; the instant's pleased surprise went to apprehension at sight of his face. "What's the matter!" she asked sharply.

"Stuart's rather b.u.mmed up, Ruth," said Deane.

Swiftly she moved over to the man she loved. "What is it!" she demanded in quick, frightened voice.

"Oh, just a bad lung," Deane continued, not looking at them and speaking with that false cheerfulness so hard fought for and of so little worth.

"Don't amount to much--happens often--but, well--well, you see, he has to go away--for awhile."

He was bending over his desk, fumbling among some papers. There was no sound in the room and at last he looked up. Stuart was not looking at Ruth and Ruth was standing there very still. When she spoke her voice was singularly quiet. "When shall we go?" she asked.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Everyone who talked about it--and that meant all who knew anything about it--blamed Deane Franklin for not stopping Ruth. Perhaps the reason he did not try to defend himself was simply that he could not hope to show how simple was his acceptance of the fact that it would have been impossible to stop her. To understand that, one would have to have seen.

Oh, to be sure, he could have put obstacles in her way, tightened it around her, but anything he might have done would only have gone to making it harder for Ruth to get away; it would not have kept her from going. And after all, he himself saw it as, if not the thing she should do, the thing--it being what it was then--she could not help doing. But one would have to have seen Ruth's face, would need to have been with her in those days to understand that.

As to warning her family, as he was so blamed by them and by all the town for not doing, that would have seemed to him just one of those things he could have thrown in her way. He did feel that he must try to talk to her of what it was going to mean to her people; he saw that she saw, that it had cruel power to make her suffer--and no power to stop her. Nothing could have stopped her; she was like a maddened thing--desperate, ruthless, indomitable. She would have fought the world; she would have let the whole world suffer. Love's fear possessed her utterly. He had had the feeling all along that it was rus.h.i.+ng on to disaster. He stood back from it now with something like awe: a force not for him to control.

And he, with it from within, was the only one who did not condemn Stuart Williams for letting Ruth go. A man, and older than she, they scorned him for letting an infatuated girl throw her life away like that. And it was not only that he saw that the man was sick and broken; it was that he saw that Stuart, just as Ruth, had gone in love beyond his power to control love, that he was mastered, not master, now. And in those last days, at least, it was Ruth who dominated him. There was something terrible in the simplicity with which she saw that she had to go; she never once admitted it to the things that were to be argued about. He talked to her, they both tried to talk to her, about the danger of getting tuberculosis. When he began on that she laughed in his face--and he could not blame her. As if _that_ could keep her! And as she laughed her tortured eyes seemed mockingly to put to him--"What difference would it make?"

When, after it all came out, he did not join the outraged town in the outcry against Ruth, when it further transpired that he had known about her going and had not tried to stop it, he was so much blamed that it even hurt his practice. There were women who said they would not countenance a young physician who had the ideas of life he must have.

His own people were incensed at what they called the shameful advantage Ruth had taken of him, holding that she, as an evil woman, had exerted an influence over him that made him do what was against his own nature.

As to the Hollands, there had been a stormy hour with Mr. Holland and Cyrus, and a far worse half hour with Mrs. Holland, when her utterly stricken face seemed to stiffen in his throat the things he wanted to say for Ruth, things that might have helped Ruth's mother. And then he was told that the Hollands were through, not alone with Ruth, but with him.

But he was called there two years later when Mrs. Holland was dying. She had been begging for him. That moved him deeply because of what in itself it told of her long yearning for Ruth. After that there were a number of years when he was not inside that gate. Cyrus did not speak to him and the father might as well not have done so. He was amazed, then, when Mr. Holland finally came to him about his own health. "I've come to you, Deane," he said, "because I think you're the best doctor in town now--and I need help." And then he added, and after that first talk this was the closest to speaking of it they ever came: "And I guess you didn't understand, Deane; didn't see it right. You were young--and you're a queer one, anyway."

Perhaps the reason he was never able to do better in explaining himself, or in defending Ruth, was simply because in his own thinking about it there were never arguments, or thoughts upon conduct, but always just that memory of Ruth's face as he had seen it in revealing moments.

Everyone saw something that Ruth should have done differently. In the weeks they spent upon it they found, if not that they would be able to forgive her, at least that they could think of her with less horror had she done this, had she not done that. But Ruth lived through that week seeing little beyond the one thing that she must get through it. She was driven; she had to go ahead, bearing things somehow, getting through them. She had a strange power to steel herself, to keep things, for the most part, from really getting through to her. She could not go ahead if she began letting things in. She sealed herself over and drove ahead with the singleness of purpose, the exclusions, of any tormented thing.

It was all terrible, but it was as if she were frozen at the heart to all save the one thing.

She stayed through the week because it was the time of Edith Lawrence's wedding and she was to be maid-of-honor. "I'll have to stay till after Edith's wedding," she said to Deane and Stuart. Then on her way home from Deane's office she saw that she could not go on with her part in Edith's wedding. That she could see clearly enough despite the thing driving her on past things she should be seeing. What would she say to Edith?--how get _that_ over?

Someone was giving a party for Edith that night; every day now things were being given for her. She must not go to them. How could she go? It would be absurd to expect that of herself. She would have to tell Edith that she could not be her bridesmaid. What a terrible thing Edith would think that was! She would have to give a reason--a big reason. What would she tell her?--that she had been called away?--but where? Should she tell her the truth? Could she? Edith would find it almost unbelievable. It was almost unbelievable to herself that her life could be permeated by a thing Edith knew nothing about. It was another of the things she would have said, had she known her story only through hearing it, would not be possible. But it was with Edith as it was with her own family--simply that such a thing would never occur to her. She winced in thinking of it that way. A number of times she had been right on the edge of a thing it seemed would surely be disclosing, but it strangely happened she had never quite gone over that edge. For one thing, Edith had been away from Freeport a good deal in those three years. Mrs.

Lawrence had opposed Edith's marrying so young, and had taken her to Europe for one year, and in the last year they had spent part of the time in California. In the last couple of months, since Edith's return from the West, she had spoken of Ruth's not seeming like herself, of fearing she was not well. She had several times hurt Edith's feelings by refusing, for no apparent reason, to do things with her. But she had always been able to make that up afterwards and in these plans for the wedding she and Edith had been drawn close again.

When she went over to the Lawrences' late that afternoon she had decided that she would tell Edith. It seemed she must. She could not hope to tell it in a way that would make Edith sympathize. There was not time for that, and she dared not open herself to it. She would just say it briefly, without any attempts at justifying it. Something like: "Edith, there's been something you haven't known. I'm not like you. I'm not what you think I am. I love Stuart Williams. We've loved each other for a long time. He's sick. He's got to go away--and I'm going with him.

Good-bye, Edith,--and I hope the wedding goes just beautifully."

But that last got through--got down to the feeling she had been trying to keep closed, the feeling that had seemed to seal itself over the moment she saw that she must go with Stuart. "I hope the wedding goes just beautifully!" Somehow the stiff little phrase seemed to mean all the old things. There was a moment when she _knew_: knew that she was walking those familiar streets, that she would not be walking them any more; knew that she was going over to Edith's--that all her life she had been going over to Edith's--that she would not be going there any more; knew that she was going away from home, that she loved her father and mother--Ted--her grandfather--and Terror, her dog. Realization broke through and flooded her. She had to walk around a number of blocks before she dared go to Edith's.

Miss Edith was up in her room, Emma, the maid, said, taking it for granted that Ruth would go right up. Yes, she always did go right up, she was thinking. She had always been absolutely at home at the Lawrences'. They always wanted her; there were times of not wanting to see anyone else, but it seemed both Edith and her mother always wanted her. She paused an instant on the stairs, not able to push past that thought, not able to stay the loving rush of gratefulness that broke out of the thought of having always been wanted.

She had a confused sense of Edith as barricaded by her trousseau. She sat behind a great pile of white things; she had had them all out of her chest for showing to some of her mother's friends, she said, and her mother had not yet put them back. Ruth stood there fingering a wonderfully soft chemise. It had come to her that she was not provided with things like these. What would Edith think of her, going away without the things it seemed one should have? It seemed to mark the setting of her apart from Edith, though there was a wave of tenderness--she tried to hold it back but could not--for dear Edith because she did have so many things like this.

Edith was too deep in the occupation of getting married to mark an unusual absorption in her friend. She was full of talk about what her mother's friends had said of her things, the presents that were coming in, her dress for the party that night, the flowers for the wedding.

It made Edith seem very young to her. And in her negligee, her hair down, she looked childish. Her pleasure in the plans for her wedding seemed like a child's pleasure. It seemed that hurting her in it would be horribly like spoiling a child's party. Edith's flushed face, her sparkling eyes, her little excited, happy laugh made it impossible for Ruth to speak the words she had come to say.

For three days it went on like that: going ahead with the festivities, constantly thinking she would tell Edith as soon as they got home from this place or that, waiting until this or that person had gone, then dumb before the childish quality of Edith's excitement, deciding to wait until the next morning because Edith was either too happy or too tired to talk to her that night. That ingenuousness of her friend's pleasure in her wedding made Ruth feel, not only older, but removed from her by experience. Those days of her own frozen misery were days of tenderness for Edith, that tenderness which one well along the road of living feels for the one just setting feet upon the path.

She was never able to understand how she did get through those days. It was an almost unbelievable thing that, knowing, she was able, up to the very last, to go right on with the old things, was able to talk to people as if nothing were different, to laugh, to dance. There were times when something seemed frozen in her heart and she could go on doing the usual things mechanically, just because she knew so well how to do them; then there were other times when every smallest thing was stabbed through and through with the consciousness that she would not be doing it again. And yet even then, she could go on, could appear the same. They were days of a terrible power for bearing pain. When the people of the town looked back to it, recalling everything they could about Ruth Holland in those days, some of them, remembering a tenderness in her manner with Edith, talked of what a hypocrite she was, while others satisfied themselves of her utter heartlessness in remembering her gaiety.

It was two days before the wedding when she saw that she was not going to be able to tell Edith and got the idea of telling Edith's mother.

Refusing to let herself consider what she would say when she began upon it, she went over there early that morning--Edith would not be up.

Mrs. Lawrence was at breakfast alone. Ruth kept herself hard against the welcoming smile, but it seemed she was surely going to cry when, with a look of concern, Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed: "Why, Ruth dear, how pale you are!"

She was telling Emma to bring Ruth a cup of coffee, talking of how absurd it was the way the girls were wearing themselves out, how, for that reason, she would be glad when it was all over. She spoke with anxiety of how nervous Edith had grown in the past week, how tired she was as a result of all the gaiety. "We'll have to be very careful of her, Ruth," she said. "Don't go to Edith with any worries, will you?

Come to me. The slightest thing would upset Edith now."

Ruth only nodded; she did not know what to say to that; certainly, after that, she did not know how to say the things she had come to tell. For what in the world could upset Edith so much as to have her maid-of-honor, her life-long friend, the girl she cared for most, refuse, two days before her wedding, to take her part in it?