Part 13

Her eyes blurred, but she kept them fixed steadily on her husband. "Why, don't you remember," she gasped, "that when we were married I promised you faithfully that I would love you within six months? The six months were up in November--but I find I'm not quite ready--yet. You'll have to give me a little more time," she pleaded. "You'll have to renew my love-loan. Will you?"

Drew slammed down his law books and forced his mouth into a grin. "I'd forgotten all about that arrangement," he said. "Of course I'll renew what you call your 'love-loan.' Really and truly I didn't expect you to love me before a full year was up. Heart-wounds don't ever even begin to heal until their first anniversaries are passed--all the Christmases and birthdays and Easters. And, really, I'd quite as soon anyway that you didn't love me till Spring," he added casually. "I'm so hideously busy and worried just now with business things."

She gave him an odd little look that barely grazed his face and settled flutteringly on the book in his hand. It was a ponderous-looking treatise on "The Annulment of Marriage." Her heart began to pound furiously. "Drew!" she blurted out, "I simply can't stand things any longer. I shall go mad. I've tried and tried and tried to be good, and it's no use. I must be stupid. I must be a fool. BUT I WANT TO GO HOME!"

"All right," said Drew very quietly, "you--can--go--home."

In another instant, without good-by or regret, she had flashed out of the office and was racing down the stairs. Halfway to the street she missed her handkerchief, and started reluctantly back to get it. The office door was locked, but she tiptoed round to a private side entrance and opened the door very cautiously and peeped in.

Prostrate across his great, cluttered desk, Drew, the serene, the laughing, the self-sufficient, lay sobbing like a woman.

Startled as though she had seen a ghost, the girl backed undetected out of the door, and closed it very softly behind her, nor did she stop tiptoeing until she had reached the street floor. Then, dropping down weak-kneed upon the last step, she sat staring out into the dingy patch of snow that flared now and then through the swinging doorway. Somewhere out in that vista Aleck Reese was waiting and watching for her. Two or three of her husband's business acquaintances paused and accosted her. "Anything the matter?" they probed.

"Oh, no," she answered brightly. "I'm just thinking."

After a while she jumped up abruptly and stole back through a box-cluttered hall to the rear door of the building, and slid out unnoticed into a side street, gathering her great fur coat--Drew's latest gift--closer and closer around her shivering body. The day was gray and bleak and scarily incomplete, like the work of some amateur creator who had slipped up on the one essential secret of how to make the sun shine. The jingliest sound of sleigh-bells, the reddest flare of holiday shop windows, could not cheer her thoughts away from the stinging, shuddering memory of Drew's crumpled shoulders, the gasping catch of his breath, the strange new flicker of gray at his temples. Over and over to herself she kept repeating dully: "I've hurt Drew just the way that Aleck hurt me. It mustn't be. It mustn't be--it mustn't! There's got to be some way out!"

Then most unexpectedly, at the first street corner she was gathered up joyously by a crowd of her young married chums who were starting off in an automobile for their sewing-club in Ruth's own old-home suburb fifteen miles away. It was a long time since she had played very freely with women, and the old associations caught her interest with a novel charm. Showered with candy, gay with questions, happy with laughter, the party whizzed up at last to the end of its journey, and tumbled out rosy with frost and mischief to join the women who had already arrived. From every individual corner of the warm, lazy sewing-room some one seemed to jump up and greet Ruth's return. "Oh, you pampered young bride!" they teased, and "Will you look at the wonderful fur coat and hat that have happened to Ruth!" Even the sad-faced, widowed little dressmaker who always officiated professionally at the club wriggled out of her seat and brought her small boy 'way across the room to stroke the girl's sumptuous mink-brown softness.

"Why, am I so very wonderful?" stammered Ruth, staring down with her hands in her pockets at the great fur length and breadth of her.

"Well, if I had a coat like that," scoffed a shrill voice from the sofa, "I should think that it was the most wonderful thing in life that could happen to me."

Standing there scorching herself in the fire-glow, Ruth looked up suddenly with a fierce sort of intentness. "You wise old married people," she cried, "tell me truly what really is the most wonderful thing in life that can happen to a woman?"

"Goodness, is it a new riddle?" shouted her hostess, and instantly a dozen noisy answers came rollicking into the contest. "Money!" cried the extravagant one. "A husband who goes to the club every night!" screamed the flirt. "Health!" "Curls!" "Dresden china!" "Single blessedness!" the suggestions came piling in. Only the dressmaker's haggard face whitened comprehendingly to the hunger underneath Ruth's laughing eyes. Staring scornfully at the heaping luxuries all around her, the shabby, widow-marked woman snatched up her child and cuddled it to her breast. "The most wonderful thing in life that can happen to a woman?" she quoted passionately. "I'll tell you what it is. It's being able to hope that your son will be _exactly_ like his father."

"Exactly like his father?" The shrewd sting and lash of the words ripped through Ruth's senses like the scorch of a red-hot fuse. Strength, tenderness, patience, love, loyalty flamed up before her with such dazzling brilliance that she could scarcely fathom the features behind them, and the room whirled dizzily with sudden excessive heat. "Exactly like his father." A dozen feminine voices caught up the phrase and dropped it blisteringly. The wife of the town's _bon vivant_ winced a trifle. The most radiant bride of the year jabbed her fingers accidentally with her scissors. Some one started to sigh and laughed instead. A satirical voice suggested, "Well, but of course there's got to be some improvement in every generation."

Smothering for air, Ruth reached up bunglingly and fastened her big fur collar and started for the door. "Oh, no," she protested to every one's detaining hands, "honestly I didn't intend to stay. I've got to hurry over to the house and get some things before dark," and, pleading several equally legitimate excuses, she bolted out into the snowy fields to take the quickest possible short cut to her Big Brother's house.

Every plowing step drove her heart pounding like an engine, and every lagging footfall started her scared thoughts throbbing louder than her heart. Hurry as fast as she could, stumbling over drift-hidden rocks or floundering headlong into some hollow, she could not seem to outdistance the startling, tumultuous memory of the little dressmaker's passion-glorified eyes staring scornfully down on the slowly sobering faces of the women around her. The vision stung itself home to the girl like sleet in her eyes.

"O-h!" she groaned. "What a wicked thing Life is--wasting a man like Drew on a girl--like me. 'To be able to hope that your son will be exactly like his father!'" Her heart jumped. Merciful heavens! If Happiness were really--only as simple a thing as that--just to look in your husband's eyes and find them good. Years and years hence, perhaps, she herself might have a son--with all his father's blessed, winsome virtues. Her eyes flooded suddenly with angry tears. "Oh, could Fate possibly, possibly be so tricky as to make a woman love her son because he _was_ like his father, and yet all, all the long years make that woman just miss loving the father himself?"

With a little frightened gasp she began to run. "If I only can get to the house," she reasoned, "then everything will be all right. And I'll never leave it again."

Half an hour later, panting and flushing, she twisted her latch-key through the familiar home door. No one was there to greet her. From attic to cellar the whole house was deserted. At first the emptiness and roominess seemed to ease and rest her, but after a little while she began to get lonesome, and started out to explore familiar corners, and found them unfamiliar. "What an ugly new wall-paper!" she fretted; "and what a silly way to set the table!" Her old room smote upon her with strange surprise--not cunningly, like one's funny little baby clothes, but distastefully, like a last year's outgrown coat. In the large, light pantry a fresh disappointment greeted her. "What an insipid salad!" she mourned. "It isn't half as nice as the salad Drew makes." Cookies, cakes, doughnuts failed her successively. "And I used to think they were the best I ever tasted," she puzzled. In the newly upholstered parlor a queer unrest sickened her. "Why, the house doesn't seem quite to--fit me any more," she acknowledged, and bundled herself into her coat again, and stuffed her pockets with apples, and started off more gladly for the barn.

As she pushed back the heavy sliding doors a horse whinnied, possibly for welcome, but probably for oats. Teased by the uncertainty, the girl threw back her head and laughed. "Hello, all you animals," she cried; "I have come home. Isn't it fine?"

Up from the floor of his pen the lamb rose clatteringly like a mechanical toy, and met the glad news with a peculiarly disdainful "B-a-a-a!" Back to the sheltering wood-pile her old friends the kittens--little cats now--fled from her with precipitous fear. The white-nosed cow reared back with staring eyes. The pet horse snapped at her fingers instead of the apple. The collie dog, to be sure, came jumping boisterously, but the jumpiness was unmistakably because he was "Carlo," and not because she was "Ruth." And yet only six months before every animal on the place had looked like her with that strange, absurd mimicry of human expression that characterizes the faces of all much-cherished birds or beasties. And now even the collie dog had reverted to the plain, blank-featured canine street type--and the pet horse looked like the hired man.

[Illustration: "Hello, all you animals," she cried]

The girl's forehead puckered up into a bewildered sort of frown. "I don't quite seem to belong anywhere," she concluded. The thought was unpleasant. Worst of all, the increasing, utterly unexplainable sob in her throat made her feel very reluctant to go back into the house and wait for her Brother and the Housekeeper and the inevitable questions. Dallying there on the edge of the wheelbarrow, munching her red-cheeked apples, it was almost eight o'clock before her mind quickened to a solution of her immediate difficulties. She would hide in the hay all night, there in the sweetness and softness of last summer's beautiful grass, and think out her problems and decide what to do.

Deep in the hay she burrowed out a nest, and lined it with the biggest buffalo robe and the thickest carriage rug. Then one by one she carried up the astonished kittens, and the heavy, fat lamb, and the scrambling collie dog to keep her company, and snuggled herself down, warm and content, to drowse and dream amidst the musty cobwebs, and the short, sharp snap of straws, and the soothing sighs of the sleepy cow, and the stamp, stamp of the horse, and all the extra, indefinite, scary, lonesome night noises that keep your nerves exploding intermittently like torpedoes and start your common sense scouring like a silver polish at all the tarnished values of your everyday life.

Midnight found her lying wide awake and starry-eyed, with her red lips twisted into an oddly inscrutable smile. Close in her left hand the collie dog nestled his grizzly nose. Under her right arm the woolly lamb slumbered. Over her quiet feet the little cats purred with fire-gleaming faces.

Attracted by the barking of his new bulldog, Big Brother came out in the early morning and discovered her in the hay.

"Well, for heaven's sake!" he began. "Where did you come from? Where does Drew think you are? He's been telephoning here all night trying to find you. I guess he's scared to death. Great Scott! what's the matter? What are you hiding out here for? Have you had any trouble with Drew?"

She slid down out of her nest with the jolliest sort of a laugh. "Of course I haven't had any trouble with Drew. I just wanted to come home. That's all. Drew buys me everything else," she dimpled, "but he simply won't buy me any hay--and I'm such a donkey."

Big Brother shrugged his shoulders. "You're just as foolish as ever," he began, and then finished abruptly with "What a perfectly absurd way to do your hair! It looks like fury."

An angry flush rose to her cheeks, and she reached up her hands defensively. "It suits Drew all right," she retorted.

Big Brother laughed. "Well, come along in the house and get your breakfast and telephone Drew."

The funniest sort of an impulse smote suddenly upon Ruth's mind. "I don't want any breakfast," she protested, "and I don't want any telephone. I'm going home this minute to surprise Drew. We were going to have broiled chicken, and a new dining-room table, and a pot of primroses as big as your head. Shall I have time to wash my face before the car comes?"

Ten minutes after that she was running like mad to the main street. An hour later the big, whizzing electric car that was speeding her back to the city crashed headlong at a curve into another brittling, splintering mass of screams and blood and broken glass and shivering woodwork.

When she came to her senses she was lying in her blood-stained furs on some one's piazza floor, and the horrid news of the accident must have traveled very quickly, for a great crowd of people was trampling round over the snowy lawn, and Big Brother and Aleck Reese and the old family doctor seemed to have dropped down right out of the snow-whirling sky. Just as she opened her eyes, Aleck Reese, haggard with fear and dissipation, was kneeling down trying to slip his arms under her.

With the mightiest possible effort she lifted her forefinger warningly.

"Don't you dare touch me," she threatened. "I promised Drew--"

The doctor looked up astonished into her wide-open eyes. "Now, Ruth," he begged, "don't you make any fuss. We've got to get you into a carriage. We'll try not to hurt you any more than is absolutely necessary."

Her shattered nerves failed her utterly. "What nonsense!" she sobbed. "You don't have to hurt me at all. My own man never hurts me at all. I tell you I want my own man."

"But we can't find Drew," protested the doctor.

Then the blood came gushing back into her eyes and some wicked brute took her bruised knees, and her wrenched back, and her broken collar bone, and her smashed head, and jarred them all up together like a bag of junk, and she gave one awful, blood-curdling yell--and a horse whinnied--and everything in the world stopped happening like a run-down clock.

When Time began to tick normally again, she found herself lying with an almost solid cotton face in a pleasant, puffy bed that seemed to rock, and roll, and tug against her straining arm that clutched its fingers like an anchor into somebody's perfectly firm, kind hand. As far away as a voice on a shore, tired, hoarse, desperately incessant, some one was signaling reassurance to her: "You're all right, honey, You're all right, honey."

After a long time her fingers twittered in the warm grasp. "Who are you?" she stammered perplexedly.

"Just your 'own man,'" whispered Drew.

The lips struggling out from the edge of the bandage quivered a little. "My 'own man'?" she repeated with surprise. "Who was the tattletale that told you?" She began to shiver suddenly in mental or physical agony. "Oh, I remember it all now," she gasped. "Was the little boy killed who sat in the corner seat?"

"Why, I don't know," said Drew, and his voice rasped unexpectedly with the sickening strain of the past few hours.

At the sound she gave a panic-stricken sob. "I believe I'm dead myself, Drew," she cried, "and you're trying to keep it from me. Where am I? Tell me instantly where I am."

Drew's laugh rang out before he could control it. "You're here in your own little room," he assured her.

"Prove it," she whimpered hysterically. "Tell me what's on my bureau."

He jumped up and walked across the room to make sure. "Why, there's a silver-backed mirror, and a box of violet powder, and a package of safety pins."

"Pshaw!" she said. "Those might be on any angel's bureau. What else do you see?"

He fumbled a minute among the glass and silver and gave a quick sigh of surprise. "Here's your wedding ring."

"Bring it to me," she pleaded, and took the tiny golden circlet blindly from his hand and slipped it experimentally once or twice up and down her finger. "Yes, that's it," she assented, and handed it back to him. "Hurry--quick--before anybody comes."

"What do you want?" faltered Drew.

She reached up wilfully and yanked the bandage away from the corner of one eye.

"Why, put the ring back on my finger where it belongs!" she said. "We're going to begin all over again. Play that I am your wife!" she demanded tremulously.

Drew winced like raw flesh. "You are my wife," he cried. "You are! You are! You are!"

With all the strength that was left to her she groped out and drew his face down to her lips.

"Oh, I've invented a lots better game than that," she whispered. "If we're going to play any game at all--let's--play--that--I--love--you!"

HEART OF THE CITY

THE dining-room was green, as green could be. Under the orange-colored candle-light, the walls, rugs, ceiling, draperies, ferns, glowed verdant, mysterious, intense, like night woods arching round a camp fire. Into this fervid, pastoral verdure the round white table, sparkling with silver, limpid with wine-lights, seemed to roll forth resplendent and incongruous as a huge, tinseled snowball.

Outside, like fire engines running on velvet wheels, the automobiles went humming along the pavement. Inside, the soft, narrow, ribbony voice of a violin came whimpering through the rose-scented air.

It was the midst of dinner-party time. In the oak-paneled hallway a shadowy, tall clock swallowed gutturally on the verge of striking nine.

The moment was distinctly nervous. The _entree_ course was late, and the Hostess, gesticulating tragically to her husband, had slipped one chalky white shoulder just a fraction of an inch too far out of its jeweled strap. The Host, conversing every second with exaggerated blandness about the squirrels in Central Park, was striving frantically all the while with a desperately surreptitious, itchy gesture to signal to his mate. Worse than this, a prominent Sociologist was audibly discussing the American penal system with a worried-looking lady whose brother was even then under indictment for some banking fraud. Some one, trying to kick the Sociologist's ankle bone, had snagged his own foot gashingly through the Woodland Girl's skirt ruffle, and the Woodland Girl, blush-blown yet with country breezes, clear-eyed as a trout pool, sweet-breathed as balsam, was staring panic-stricken around the table, trying to locate the particular man's face that could possibly connect boot-wise with such a horridly profane accident. The sudden, grotesque alertness of her expression attracted the laggard interest of the young Journalist at her left.

"What brought you to New York?" the Journalist asked abruptly. "You're the last victim in from the country, so you must give an account of yourself. Come 'fess up! What brought you to New York?"

The Journalist's smile was at least as conscientious as the smile of daylight down a city airshaft, and the Woodland Girl quickened to the brightening with almost melodramatic delight, for all previous conversational overtures from this neighbor had been about actors that she had never heard of, or operas that she could not even pronounce, and before the man's scrutinizing, puzzled amazement she had felt convicted not alone of mere rural ignorance, but of freckles on her nose.

"What brought me to New York?" she repeated with vehement new courage. "Do you really want to know? It's quite a speech. What brought me to New York? Why, I wanted to see the 'heart of the city.' I'm twenty years old, and I've never in all my life been away from home before. Always and always I've lived in a log bungalow, in a wild garden, in a pine forest, on a green island, in a blue lake. My father is an invalid, you know, one of those people who are a little bit short of lungs but inordinately long of brains. And I know Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and Hindoo History and Sunrises and Sunsets and Mountains and Moose, and such things. But I wanted to know People. I wanted to know Romance. I wanted to see for myself all this 'heart of the city' that you hear so much about--the great, blood-red, eager, gasping heart of the city. So I came down here last week to visit my uncle and aunt."

[Illustration: "The lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist"]

Her mouth tightened suddenly, and she lowered her voice with ominous intensity. "But there _isn't_ any heart to, your city--no!--there is no heart at all at the center of things--just a silly, pretty, very much decorated heart-shaped box filled with candy. If you shake it hard enough, it may rattle, but it won't throb. And I hate--hate--hate your old city. It's utterly, hopelessly, irremediably jejune, and I'm going home to-morrow!" As she leaned toward the Journalist, the gold locket on her prim, high-necked gown swung precipitously forth like a wall picture in a furious little earthquake.

The Journalist started to laugh, then changed his mind and narrowed his eyes speculatively toward something across the room. "No heart?" he queried. "No Romance?"

The Woodland Girl followed his exploring gaze. Between the plushy green _portieres_ a dull, cool, rose-colored vista opened forth refreshingly, with a fragment of bookcase, the edge of a stained glass window, the polished gleam of a grand piano, and then--lithe, sinuous, willowy, in the shaded lamplight--the lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist. In the amazing mellow glow that smote upon his face, the Woodland Girl noted with a crumple at her heart the tragic droop of the boy's dark head, the sluggish, velvet passion of his eyes, the tortured mouth, the small chin fairly worn and burrowed away against his vibrant instrument. And the music that burst suddenly forth was like scalding water poured on ice--seething with anguish, shuddering with ecstasy, flame at your heart, frost at your spine.

The Girl began to shiver. "Oh, yes, I know," she whispered. "He plays, of course, as though he knew all sorrows by their first names, but that's Genius, isn't it, not Romance? He's such a little lad. He can hardly have experienced much really truly emotion as yet beyond a--stomach ache--or the loss of a Henty book."