Chapter 4

The evening went quickly. When Leonard let down the window sashes and lowered the shades, Ruth, standing by the lamp as if to put out its light, said, "I'll not go up for a moment or two yet."

She sent him an ardent smile across the room and turned to a desk.

XI

HAS IT COME TO THIS?

Ruth wrote to her lover. Her father's keeping secret his receipt of Godfrey's letter until he had mailed its answer, could mean only that the answer was for Godfrey to come home. The General's talk of being tired by the writing of it was a purely expletive irony, for he had written with the brevity of an old soldier to a young sailor; but he had written that trouble was impending, that its source was Arthur, and that the last hope of removing it lay with him, Godfrey.

A line from Ruth, pursuing after this message, would be one steamer behind it all the way, but it would reach the far wanderer before any leave would permit him to start homeward.

So, now, what should she write? If her father had discerned so much more than he had let any one know he had discerned, how about others? How about the kind whose chief joy is ruthless guesswork? _That_ need of haste was one she had overlooked. Wise father!

And yet--haste itself is such a hazardous thing! Ah, if Arthur had come in on that evening express, what to write were an easier question. The minutes sped by; her pen overhung the paper with the opening sentence unfinished, and every moment the thought she kept putting away came back: "Leonard!--Leonard!--Godfrey's summons should go to him from Leonard; and it should flash under the seas, not crawl across them!"--Hark!

She rose and glided to the door through which her brother had gone. There she was startled by the sight of him speeding cautiously down the stair.

* * * * *

On entering his unlighted room Leonard had moved across it to a front window, where, veiled by the chamber's dusk, he stood looking out into a night dimly illumined by the overclouded moon. The Winslow house widened palely among its surrounding trees. The servants' rooms were remote as well as on the farther side, and on the nearer side no lamplight shone. A short way down the street a glow came from the Morris cottage. Evidently Isabel was with her mother.

He stood and mused, unconsciously lulled by the cool drip of myriad leaves, and with his mind poised midway between emotion and thought. To yield to emotion would have been to chafe against the bands that knitted his life and hers to every life about them. To yield to thought would have been to think of her as no more to be drawn from these surrounding ties than some animate rainbow-fringed flower of the sea can be torn from its shell without laceration and death. To give thought word would have been to cry, "Oh, truest of womankind, where would this unsuspected man, this Leonard Byington, be if you were other than you are?" Yet the suspense between avoided feeling and avoided thought held him where he stood.

So standing, it drifted idly into his mind that yonder arbor must be very wet to-night, and the cinder sidewalk out here much drier. As the thought moved him to draw one step back, the glow from the cottage broadened. Its front door had opened, and Mrs. Morris's young maid came out with a lantern, followed by Isabel saying last fond words to her mother as the convalescent closed the door.

"Good-night!" she called back.

In one great wave the young man's passion rolled over its bounds and brought him to his knees with arms outstretched. "Oh, Isabel!" he murmured. "Oh, my God! Oh, Isabel! Isabel! if I had but lost you fairly!"

The two slight figures came daintily along the wet path in single file, the maid throwing the lantern's beams hither and yon as she looked back to answer Isabel's kindly questions; Isabel one moment half lost in the gloom of the trees, and then so lighted up again from foot to brow that it was easy to see the very lines of her winsome mouth, ripe for compassion or fortitude, yet wishful as a little child's.

Her secret observer moaned as he stood erect. The fury of his soul seemed to enhance his stature. He did not speak again, but, "Oh, Isabel! harder to strive against than all the world beside!" was the unuttered cry that wrote itself upon his tortured brow. "If your unfair winner would only hold you by fair means! Yet I too was to blame! I too was to blame, and you alone were blameless!"

Opposite his window Isabel ceased her light talk with the maid, halted, bent, and scanned something just off the firm path, in the clean wet sand.

The maid turned and flooded her with the light of the lantern just as she impulsively lifted an alarmed glance to Leonard's window and as quickly averted it. "Go on," said the mistress. "I can walk faster if you can."

The girl quickened her steps, but had not taken a dozen when Isabel stopped again. "Wait, Minnie. Now you can run back, thank you." She reached for the lantern.

"I--I thought I was to go all the way, and--and bring the lantern back."

"No, I'll keep the lantern; but I'll stay here and throw the light after you till you get in. Run along."

Minnie tripped away. As she came where they had first halted, a purposely belated good-night softly overtook her; and when she looked back, Isabel, as if by inadvertency, sent the lantern's beam into her eyes. So too much light sent the maid by the spot unenlightened.

Leonard drew aside lest the beam swing next into his window. But the precaution was wasted; the glare followed Minnie.

Isabel also followed, slowly, a few paces, and then moved obliquely into the roadway and toward the window. Only for a moment the ray swept near her unseen observer, and, lighting up the rain-packed sand close before herself, revealed a line of footprints slanting toward her from Leonard's own gate.

As the cottage door shut Minnie in, Isabel, reassured by the brightness of the Byingtons' lower windows, stopped for a furtive instant, and holding in her hand the fellow of the slipper so lately in Ruth's fingers, exactly fitted it to one of these footprints. Then, with the lantern on her farther side, and every vein surging with fright and shame, she made haste toward the open gateway of the Winslow house.

A short space from it she recoiled with a gesture of dismay and self-repression, and her light shone full upon a man. He stepped from the garden, his form tensely lifted, his face aflame with anger.

But her small figure straightened also, and swiftly muffling the lantern in a fold of her skirt, she exclaimed, audibly only to him, though in words clear-cut as musical notes, "Oh, Arthur Winslow, has it come to this?"

She arrested his resentful answer by the uplift of a hand, which left the lantern again uncovered. "Inside! In the house!" she softly cried, starting on. "Not here! Look!--those upper windows!--we're in full view of them!"

Quickly she remuffled the lantern, but not in time to hide his motion as he threw out an arm and pushed her rudely back, while he exclaimed, "In full view of them answer me one question!"

It was then that Leonard went hurriedly downstairs.

XII

THE LANTERN QUENCHED

"I will answer you nothing!" murmured Isabel, still facing her husband as she moved round into the garden driveway. "Arthur Winslow, it is you who are on trial, not I!"

"I on trial! God, listen to that!"

He sprang after her, gripped her shoulders, and hung over her, snarling, "You two-faced runaway! what have I done but suffer?"

She kept the lantern hid. "What have you done? Oh, my husband, will you hear if I tell you? You have hung the fates of all of us, living or yet to live, on one thread,--please, dear, don't bear so heavily on me,--on one poor thread which the jar of another misstep will surely break. Oh, let us not make it! Come, Arthur,--my husband,--into the house; maybe we can yet save ourselves and our dear ones! Arthur, you're hurting me dreadfully. If you press me down that way, you'll force me to my knees."

Still she spoke in undertone, and still she muffled the light, while steadily the weight of his arms increased. Suddenly he crowded her to the earth. "Arthur," she murmured, "Arthur, what are you going to do? Don't kill me here and now, Arthur; wait till to-morrow. I have that to pass through to-night which may end my life peaceably in bed; and if it should, then there will be no infamy on any of us,--on you or our child, living, or on me, dead; and Godfrey, and Ruth, and mother, and all can be"--

"Give me that lantern!" He held her with one hand, snatched the light from cover, and thrust it into her face. "So this is what you signal him with, is it?"

"Oh no, no! Arthur, dear, no! Before God's throne, no!"

He lifted it as high as his arm would go, and with all his force swung it down, crashing and quenched, upon her head.

She gave a gentle sigh and rolled at his feet. Groaning with horror and fright, he lifted her in his arms and bore her to her room and bed.

There she presently opened her eyes to find him laving her face and head, moaning, covering them with kisses, and imploring her forgiveness in a thousand hysterical repetitions.

"Hush, dear," she whispered. "I see how it all happened. Does anybody know? Oh, God be thanked! don't let any one find out! It was all a misunderstanding. So many things crowded together to mislead you!"

"Oh yes, so many, many things at once, my treasure! Oh yes, yes!"

"Call Sarah, will you, dear?"

"Oh, beloved, why should I? You don't need Sarah for anything."

"Yes, I need her. I must send her for mother--and Ruth--I promised Ruth; and you must send Giles for the doctor; my hour is come."

* * * * *

In the Byington house Ruth and her brother met at the foot of the stairs.

"Leonard," she whispered, "what is it? Is father ill? Leonard! Oh, what have you seen?"

"Let me pass! quick!" He would have pressed her aside, but she laid hands on him.

"What has Arthur done?" she asked. "What is he doing?"

"Ruth! Ruth! he is putting her out of his own gate!" The brother extended both hands to turn the sister from his path, but she twined her arms on his.

"Leonard! Leonard! for the love of heaven, let him do it! She has only to go to her mother; let her go! It's the last hope. But she'd better be dead, and she'd a hundred times rather be dead, than that Leonard Byington should be her rescuer! Come in here a minute."

Slipping both hands into his she drew him into the lighted room, adding as they went, "In a few minutes I can make some errand to her and find how matters stand"--

They stumbled over a disordered rug. She fell into a chair; he sank to his knees, and with his face in her hands he moaned, "Oh, Ruth! Oh, Ruth! it's my fault after all! I should have gone away at the beginning!"

Ruth and Arthur met face to face in the Winslow garden. "I was just coming for you," he said, excitedly.

"For Isabel?"

"Yes, her mother is with her, and"--a sound of wheels--"here's Giles, now, off for the doctor."

The servant passed. "Yes, I got here by the sunset express. I couldn't stay away--with this impending."

"I didn't see you come."

"No, of course you didn't see me, for I didn't go to the station, and so I didn't pass anywhere near your house. I got off at the tank and came up the hill path."

"You must have got drenched; you _are_ drenched."

"Oh no! I got in before the rain began. Let myself in without seeing any one, and found Isabel was over at her mother's. So I waited here."

"Didn't let her know you were home?" asked Ruth, with a penetrating gaze.

"No, I haven't been off the place since I came, but I stepped out so many times into the garden to see if she was coming that I'm soaking wet."

They entered the lighted house, and he turned upon her a glance heavy and wavering with falsehood. His tongue ran like a terrified horse. "Oh--eh--before you go upstairs--Ruth--there's one thing I'm distressed about. I've told Mrs. Morris, and she's promised to see that the doctor understands it perfectly,--though I shall explain it to him myself the moment he comes. And still I wish you'd see that he understands, will you?"

"What is it?"

"Why, at last, as I was waiting for Isabel, and saw her coming, I went to meet her. Unfortunately she took me for a stranger, turned to run, and tripped and fell headlong! She somehow got her lantern between the base of a tree and the crown of her head, smashed the lantern, and cut and bruised her head pitifully!"

To hide her start of distress Ruth moved up the stair; but after a step or two she turned. "Arthur, why say anything about it, if nothing is asked?"

The husband stared at her and turned deadly pale.

"Th--that's tr--true!" he said, with an eager gesture. "I'll not mention it. And--Ruth!"--she was leaving him--"you might s--say the same to Mrs. Morris!"

She nodded, but would not trust her eyes to meet his. He was right; she had divined his deed.

He went loiteringly into the library and gently closed the door. Then he turned the light low, paced once up and down the room, and all at once slammed himself full length upon a lounge, and lay face up, face down, by turns, writhing and tearing his hair.

Soon again he was pacing the floor, and presently was prone once more, and then once more up.

Giles, his English man, brought the doctor, and Arthur heard him discoursing as the vehicle drew up.

"Yes, sir, quite so; quite so, sir. And yet I believe, sir, if h-all money and lands was 'eld in common, the 'ole 'uman ryce would be as 'appy as the gentlemen and lydies on Bylow 'Ill!"

The young husband met the physician cheerily, sent him up, and went back to his solitude.

An hour passed, and then Sarah Stebbens knocked and leaned in. "Mr. Arthur!"

"What, Sarah?"

"Oh! I didn't see you. All's well, and it's a daughter."

XIII

BABY

It was most pleasant, being asked by everyone, even by General Byington, how it felt to be a grandmother. "Oh! ho, ho!" Mrs. Morris's unutilized dimple kept itself busy to the point of positive fatigue.

Even more delightful was it, when the time came round for the totality of her sex--the only sex worth considering--to call and see the babe and mother, to hear them all proclaim it the prettiest infant ever seen, and covertly pronounce Isabel more beautiful than on her wedding day.

In a way she was; and particularly when they fondly rallied her upon her new accession of motherly practical manner, and she laughed with them, and ended with that merry, mellow sigh which still gave Ruth new pride in her and new hope. But another source of Ruth's new hope was that Arthur, who had written to the bishop and resigned his calling the day after Mrs. Morris's little namesake was born, had at length withdrawn his letter.

"It is to your brother we owe its withdrawal," said the bishop, privately, to Ruth.

She beamed gratefully, but did not tell him that, after the long, secret conference between her brother and the rector, Leonard had come to her and wept for Arthur the only tears he had ever shed in her presence. Now Leonard had found occasion to go West for a time, though he still held his office; and Arthur was filling the rectorate almost in the old first way. On some small parish matter the rustic vestryman with the spectacled daughter came to Arthur's library in better spirits than he had shown for months, and by and by asked conjecturally, "I--eh--guess you don't keep any babies here you're ashamed to show, do ye?" and held his mouth very wide open.

The infinitesimal was brought.

"Well, I vum! Why, Miz. Winslow, I don't believe th' ever was a pretty baby so puny, nor a puny baby so pretty! Now, if it's a fair question, I hope y' ain't tryin' to push in between this baby and the keaow, be ye?"

"No," laughed Isabel. "I'm not that conceited. I should only be in the way."

"Well," he said as they parted, shaking Arthur's hand to the end of his speech, "I like to see a baby resemble its father, and that's what this 'n 's a-tryin' to do, jest 's hard 's she can."

So went matters for a time, and then, while the babe began to fill out and lengthen out, Isabel showed herself daily more and more overspent. The physician reappeared, and spoke plainly:--

"And if your cousin down South is so determined to have you at her wedding, why, go! Leave your baby with your mother; she's older in the business than you are."

But the cousin's wedding was weeks away yet, and Isabel clung to her wee treasure, and temporized with the aunts and cousins in the South and with her mother and Ruth at home, until the doctor spoke again.

"Let's see," he said to Arthur. "This is November, baby's five months old. Send your wife away. Put her out! Something's killing her by inches, and I believe it's just care o' the nest. We must drive her off it, as I drove Leonard Byington off,--which, you remember, you, quietly, were the first to suggest to me to do.... Coming back, you say,--Byington? Yes, but only for a day or two,--election time."

It did not occur to the doctor that Arthur was secretly keeping his wife from going anywhere.

The night Leonard came home the old pond, for the first time in the season, froze over, and through Giles's activities it was arranged next day that Martin Kelly, Sarah Stebbens, Minnie, and he should go down there after supper and skate by the light of fagot fires made out on the ice. Giles piled the fagots; but at a late moment, to the disgust of Giles and Minnie, the older pair pitilessly changed their minds, and decided they were too old to make such nincompoops of themselves. Minnie would not go without Sarah, for Minnie was up to her pretty eyebrows in love with Giles, as well as immensely correct; and so there, as it seemed, was the end of that.

At tea Arthur told Isabel he was going for a long walk down through the town and across the meadows, and would not be home before bedtime. Isabel approved heartily, and said Sarah would stay near the sleeping babe, and she would spend the evening with her mother. She and Arthur went together as far as the cross-paths in the arbor, and there, in parting, he clasped and kissed her with a sudden frenzy that only added one more distressful misgiving to the many that now haunted her days.

She found her mother alone. They sat down, hand in hand, before an open fire, and had talked in sweet quietness but a short while, when a chance word and the knowledge that this time they would not be interrupted made it easy for Isabel to say things she had for weeks been trying to say.

XIV

THE TALKATIVE LEONARD

Across the street the father of Leonard and Ruth, already abed, lay thinking of their tribulation and casting about in his mind for some new move that might help to end it happily. Godfrey had not come. He had not looked for him to appear with a hop, skip, and a jump, "a man under authority" as he was; but here were five months gone.

"I can't clamor for him," thought he, and feared Ruth had written him that the emergency was past. And so she had, in those days of new hope and new suspense which had followed for a while Arthur's withdrawal of his resignation.

At the fireside below sat Leonard and Ruth, not hand in hand, like Isabel and her mother, yet conversing on the same theme as they.

Leonard had spent the day at the polls; his party had won an easy victory; and, though not on the ticket, he was now awaiting a telegraphic summons to the state capital. His fortunes were growing. Yet that was not a thing to be wordy about, and now, when the murmur of his voice continued so long and steadily that it found even the dulled ear of the aged father in the upper room, that father knew what the topic must be. On all other matters the son and brother had become more silent than ever,--was being nicknamed far and near, flatteringly and otherwise, for his reticence; but let Ruth sit down with him alone and barely draw near this theme,--this wound,--and his speech bled from him and would not be stanched.

"I can admit I have made the mistake of my life," he said, "but I cannot and will not, even now, give up and say there is nothing to be saved out of it. It's a mistake that has bound me to her, to you, to Godfrey, to him, to all, and demands of me, pinioned and blindfolded as I am, every effort I can make, every device I can contrive, to compel him to free her and you and all of us from this torture.

"He shall not go on eating out our lives. I have dawdled with him weakly, pitifully, but I did it in my hope to save him. I tried to save him for his own sake, Ruth, truly,--as truly as for her sake and ours; and I wanted to save his work with him,--his church, his and hers; so much of it is hers. Oh, Ruth, I love that little bird-box, spite of all its spunky beliefs and twittering complacencies. I wanted to save it and him; and over and over there has seemed such good ground of hope in him. It's been always so unbelievable that he should utterly fail us. Ruth, if you could have seen his contrition the night I tore up that shameful, servile resignation! I don't need to see Isabel to know he is wearing the soul out of her. You needn't have answered one of my questions,--which I honor you for answering so unwillingly; Mrs. Morris gave me their answer in five minutes, though we talked only of investments. And Mrs. Morris needn't have given it; to see Arthur himself is enough. All the genuineness has gone out of the man,--out of his words, out of his face, out of his voice. I wonder it hasn't gone from all of us, driven out by this smirking masquerade into which he has trapped us."

"Have you determined what to do?" asked the sister, gazing into the fire.

"Not yet. But I sha'n't go back West. Flight doesn't avail. And, Ruth"--

"Yes, brother; you've cabled?"

"I have. He'll come at once, this time." A step on the porch drew the speaker to the door.

The telegram from the capital had come. But until its bearer had gone again and was out of hearing down the street the young man lingered in the porch. His mind was wholly on that evening when Isabel had passed with the lantern. Would she pass now? From the idle query he turned to go in, when Ruth came out, and they stayed another moment together. Presently their ear caught a stir at the side of the Morris cottage.

"Hmm," murmured Ruth half consciously, and, with a playful shudder at the cold, whispered, "Come in, come in!"

But then quickly, lest this should carry a hint of distrust, she tripped in alone, closed the door, and glided to the bright hearth. There a moment of waiting changed her mind. She ran again to the door, and began to say as she threw it open, "My brother! you'll catch your"--

But no brother was there.

XV

THE THIN ICE BREAKS

Isabel, who had never confessed her trouble to her mother until now, had this evening told all there was to tell.

"No, no, my dear," she said as she moved to go, "I have no dread of his blows. I don't suppose he will ever strike me again. Ah, there's the worst of it; he's got away, away beyond blows. I wish sometimes he'd brain me, if only that would stop his secretly watching me.

"If he'd never gone beyond blows, I would have died before I would have told; not for meekness, dearie, nor even for love,--of you, or my child, or any one,--but just for pride and shame. But to know, every day and hour, that I'm watched, and that every path I tread is full of traps,--there's what's killing me. And I could let it kill me and never tell, if being killed were all. But I tell you because--Oh, my poor little mother dearie, do I wear you out, saying the same things over and over?

"This is all I ask you to remember: that my reason for telling you is to save the honor of my husband himself, and of you, dear heart, and of--of my child, you know. For, mother, every innocent thing I do is being woven into a net of criminating evidence. Sooner or later it's certain to catch me fast and give me over, you and me and--and baby, to public shame."