Part 8 (1/2)

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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 s.h.i.+ning 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.