Part 11

The first real flicker of comedy flamed in the girl's face. Her white cheeks pinked and dimpled. "Why, advise me to--marry _you_!" she announced. "WELL, WHY NOT?" She fairly hurled the three-word bridge across the sudden, awful chasm of silence that yawned before her.

Drew's addled mind caught the phrase dully and turned it over and over without attempting to cross on it. "Well, why not? Well, why not?" he kept repeating. His discomfiture filled the girl with hysterical delight, and she came and perched herself opposite him on the farther end of his desk and smiled at him.

"It seems to me perfectly simple," she argued. "Without any doubt or question you certainly are the kind of man whom I should like to marry. You are true and loyal and generous and rugged about things. And you like the things that I like. And I like the people that you like. And, most of anything in the world, you are _clever in the affections_. You are heart-wise as well as head-wise. Why, even in the very littlest, silliest thing that could possibly matter, you wouldn't--for instance--remember George Washington's birthday and forget mine. And you wouldn't go away on a lark and leave me if I was sick, any more than you'd blow out the gas. And you wouldn't--hurt me about--other women--any more than you'd eat with your knife." Impulsively she reached over and patted his hand with the tips of her fingers. "As far as I can see," she teased, "there's absolutely no fault in you that matters to me except that I don't happen to love you."

Quick as her laugh the tears came scalding back to her eyes.

"Why, Drew," she hurried on desperately, "people seem to think it's a dreadful thing to marry a man whom you don't love; but nobody questions your marrying _any_ kind of a man if you do love him. As far as I can make out, then, it's the love that matters, not the man. Then why not love the right man?" She began to smile again. "So here and now, sir, I deliberately choose to love _you_."

But Drew's fingers did not even tighten over hers.

"I want to be a happy woman," she pleaded. "Why, I'm only twenty-two. I can't let my life be ruined now. There's _got_ to be some way out. And I'm going to find that way out if I have to crawl on my hands and knees for a hundred years. I'm luckier than some girls. I've got such a shining light to aim for."

Almost roughly Drew pulled his hand away, the color surging angrily into his cheeks. "I'm no shining light," he protested hotly, "and you shall never, never come crawling on your hands and knees to me."

"Yes, I shall," whispered the girl. "I shall come creeping very humbly, if you want me. And you do want me, don't you? Oh, please advise me. Oh, please play you are my Father or my Big Brother and advise me to--marry _you_."

Drew laughed in spite of himself. "Play I was your Father or your Big Brother?" Mimicry was his one talent. "Play I was your Father or your Big Brother and advise you to marry me?"

Instantly his fine, straight brows came beetling down across his eyes in a fierce paternal scrutiny. Then, quick as a wink, he had rumpled his hair and stuck out his chest in a really startling imitation of Big Brother's precious, pompous importance. But before Ruth could clap her hands his face flashed back again into its usual keen, sad gravity, and he shook his head. "Yes," he deliberated, "perhaps if I truly were your Father or your Brother, I really should advise you to marry--me--not because I amount to anything and am worth it, but because I honestly believe that I should be good to you--and I know that Aleck Reese wouldn't be. But if I'm to advise you in my own personal capacity--no, Ruthy, I don't want to marry you!"

"What? What?" Staggering from the desk, she turned and faced him, white as her dress, blanched to her quivering lips.

But Drew's big shoulders blocked her frenzied effort to escape.

"Don't go away like that, Little Girl," he said. "You don't understand. It isn't a question of caring. You know I care. But don't you, don't you understand that a man doesn't like to marry a woman who doesn't love him?"

Her face brightened piteously. "But I _will_ love you?" she protested. "I _will_ love you. I promise. I promise you faithfully--I will love you--if you'll only give me just a little time." The old flicker of mischief came back to her eyes, and she began to count on her fingers. "Let me see," she said. "It's June now--June, July, August, September, October, November--six months. I promise you that I will love you by November."

"I don't believe it." Drew fairly slashed the words into the air.

Instantly the hurt, frightened look came back to her eyes. "Why, Drew," she whispered, "if it were money that I wanted, if I were starving, or sick, or any all-alone anything, you wouldn't refuse to help me just because you couldn't possibly see ahead just how I was ever going to pay you. Drew, I'm very unhappy and frightened and lost-feeling. I just want to borrow your love. I promise you I will pay it back to you. You won't be sorry. You won't. You won't!"

Drew's hand reached up and smothered the words on her lips. "You can't borrow my love," he said sternly. "It's yours, always, every bit of it. But I won't marry you unless you love me. I tell you it isn't fair to you."

Impulsively she took his hand and led him back to the big chair and pushed him gently into it, and perched herself like a little child on a pile of bulky law books at his feet. The eyes that looked up to his were very hopeful.

"Don't you think, Drew," she argued, "that just being willing to marry you is love enough?"

He scanned her face anxiously for some inner, hidden meaning to her words, some precious, latent confession; but her eyes were only blue, and just a little bit shy.

She stooped forward suddenly, and took Drew's hand and brushed it across her cheek to the edge of her lips. "I feel so safe with you, Drew," she whispered, "so safe, and comforted always. Oh, I'm sure I can teach you how to make me love you--and you're the only man in the world that I'm willing to teach." Her chin stiffened suddenly with renewed stubbornness. "_You_ are the Harbor that was meant for me, and Aleck Reese is nothing but a--Storm. If you know it, and I know it, what's the use of dallying?"

Drew's solemn eyes brightened. "Do you truly think," he said, "that Aleck Reese is only an accident that happened to you on your way to me?"

She nodded her head. Weakness and tears were only too evidently overtaking her brave little theories.

"And there's something else, too," she confided tremulously. "My head isn't right. I have such hideous dreams when I do get to sleep. I dream of drowning myself, and it feels good; and I dream of jumping off high buildings, and it feels good; and I dream of throwing myself under railroad trains, and it feels good. And I see the garish announcement in the morning papers, and I picture how Uncle Terry would look when he got the news, and I cry and cry and cry, and it feels good. Oh, Drew, I'm so bored with life! It isn't right to be so bored with life. But I can't seem to help it. Nothing in all the world has any meaning any more. Flowers, sunshine, moonlight--everything I loved has gone stale. There's no taste left to anything; there's no fragrance, there's no rhyme. Drew, I could stand the sorrow part of it, but I simply can't stand the emptiness. I tell you I _can't_ stand it. I wish I were dead; and, Drew, there are so many, many easy ways all the time to make oneself dead. I'm not safe. Oh, please take me and make me safe. Oh, please take me and make me want to live!"

Driven almost distracted by this final appeal to all the chivalrous love in his nature, Drew jumped up and paced the floor. Perplexity, combativeness, and ultimate defeat flared already in his haggard face.

The girl sensed instantly the advantage that she had gained. "Of course," she persisted, "of course I see now, all of a sudden, that I'm not offering you very much in offering you a wife who doesn't love you. You are quite right; of course I shouldn't make you a very good wife at first--maybe not for quite a long, long time. Probably it would all be too hard and miserable for you--"

Drew interrupted her fiercely. "Great heavens!" he cried out, "my part would be easy, comfortable, serene, interesting, compared to yours. Don't you know it's nothing except _sad_ to be shut up in the same house, in the same life, with a person you love who doesn't love you? Nothing but sad, I tell you; and there's no special nervous strain about being sad. But to be shut up day and night--as long as life lasts--with a person who takes the impudent liberty of loving you against your wish to be loved--oh, the spiritual distastefulness of it, and the physical enmity, and the ghastly, ghastly ennui! That's your part of it. Flower or book or jewel or caress, no agonizing, heart-breaking, utterly wholesome effort to please, but just one hideously chronic, mawkishly conscientious effort to _be_ pleased, to act pleased--though it blast your eyes and sear your lips--to _look_ pleased. I tell you I won't have it!"

"I understand all that," said Ruth gravely. "I understand it quite perfectly. But underneath it all--I would rather--you had taken me in your arms--as though I were a little, little hurt girl--and comforted me--"

But before Drew's choking throat-cry had reached his lips she had sprung from her seat and was facing him defiantly. Across her face flared suddenly for the first time the full, dark flush of one of Life's big tides, and the fear in her hands reached up and clutched at Drew's shoulders. The gesture tipped her head back like a fagged swimmer's struggling in the water.

"I am pleading for my life, Drew," she gasped, "for my body, for my soul, for my health, for my happiness, for home, for safety!"

He snatched her suddenly into his arms. "My God! Ruth," he cried, "what do you want me to do?"

Triumph came like a holiday laugh to her haggard face.

"What do I want you to do?" she dimpled. "Why, I want you to come with me now and get a license. I want to be married right away this afternoon."

"What!" Drew hurled the word at her like a bomb, but it did not seem to explode.

Laughingly, flushingly, almost delightedly, she stood and watched the anger rekindle in his face.

"Do you think I am going to take advantage of you like this?" he asked hotly. "You would probably change your mind to-morrow and be very, very sorry--"

She tossed her head. It was a familiar little gesture. "I fully and confidently expect to be sorry to-morrow," she affirmed cheerfully. "That's why I want to be married to-day, this afternoon, this minute, if possible, before I have had any chance to change my mind."

Then, with unexpected abruptness, she shook her recklessness aside and walked back to him childishly, pulling a long, loose wisp of hair across her face. "See," she said. "Smell the smoke in my hair. It's the smoke from my burned bridges. I sat up nearly all night and burned everything I owned, everything that could remind me of Aleck Reese, all my dresses, all my books, all my keepsakes, all my doll houses that ever grew up into dreams. So if you decide to marry me I shall be very expensive. You'll have to take me just as I am--quite a little bit crumpled, not an extra collar, not an extra hairpin, not anything. Aleck Reese either loved or hated everything I owned. I haven't left a single bridge on which one of my thoughts could even crawl back to him again--"

Half quizzically, half caressingly, Drew stooped down and brushed his lips across the lock of hair. Fragrant as violets, soft as the ghost of a kiss, the little curl wafted its dearness into his senses. But ranker than violets, harsher than kisses, lurked the blunt, unmistakable odor of ashes.

He laughed. And the laugh was bitter as gall. "Burning your bridges," he mused. "It's a good theory. But if I take your life into my bungling hands and sweat my heart out trying to make you love me, and come home every night to find you crying with fear and heartbreak, will you still protest that the sting in your eyes is nothing in the world except the _smudge_ from those burnt bridges? Will you promise?"

With desperate literalness she clutched at the phrase. Everything else in the room began to whirl round and round like prickly stars. "I promise, I promise," she gasped. Then sight--not air, but just sight--seemed to be smothered right out of her, and her brain reeled, and she wilted down unconscious on the floor.

Cursing himself for a brute, Drew snatched her up in a little, white, crumpled heap and started for the window. Halfway there, the office door opened abruptly and Ruth's Big Brother stood on the threshold. Surprise, anxiety, ultimate relief chased flashingly across the newcomer's face, and in an instant both men were working together over the limp little body.

"Well, old man," said the Big Brother, "I'm glad she was here safe with you when she fainted." His spare arm clapped down affectionately across Drew's shoulders and jarred Drew's fingers brownly against the death-like pallor of the girl's throat. The Big Brother gave an ugly gasp. "Damn Aleck Reese," he said.

Drew's eyes shut perfectly tight as though he was smitten by some unbearable agony. Then suddenly, without an instant's warning, he pulled himself together and burst out laughing uproariously like a schoolboy.

"Oh, what's the use of damning Aleck Reese?" he cried. "Aleck Reese is as stale an issue as yesterday morning's paper. If you've no particular objection to me as a brother-in-law as well as a tennis chum, Ruth and I were planning to marry each other this afternoon. Maybe I was just a little bit too vehement about it."

* * * * *

Three hours later, in a dusty, musty, mid-week church vestry, an extraordinarily white and extraordinarily vivacious girl was quite busy assuring a credulous minister and a credulous sexton and a credulous Big Brother that she would love till death hushed her the perfectly incredulous bridegroom who stood staring down upon her like a very tall man in a very short dream.

And then, because neither groom nor bride could think of anything specially married to say to each other, they kidnapped Big Brother and bore him away in an automobile to a nervous, rollicking, wonderfully entertaining "shore dinner," where they sat at an open window round a green-tiled table in a marvelously glowering, ice-cool, artificial grotto, and ate bright scarlet lobsters while the great, hot, blowzy yellow moon came wallowing up out of the night-shadowed sea, and the thrilly, thumpy brass band played "I Love You So"; and the only, only light in the whole vague, noisy room seemed to be Big Brother's beaming, ecstatic face gleaming like some glad phosphorescent thing through the clouds of murky tobacco smoke.

Not till the wines and dines and roses and posies and chatter and clatter were all over, and the automobile had carried Big Brother off to his railroad station and whisked the bride and groom back to the wobbly city pavements, did Drew begin to realize that the frolicking, jesting, crisp-tongued figure beside him had wilted down into a piteous little hunch of fear. Stooping to push her slippery new suit case closer under her feet, he caught the sharp, shuddering tremor of her knees, and as the automobile swayed finally into the street that led to his apartment, her lungs seemed to crumple up in a paroxysm of coughing. Under the garish lights that marked his apartment-house doorway her slight figure drooped like a tired flower, and the footsteps that tinkled behind him along the stone corridor rang in his ears with a dear, shy, girlish reluctance. The elevator had stopped running. One flight, two flights, three, four, five they toiled up the harsh, cool, metallic stairway. Four times Ruth stopped to get her breath, and twice to tie her shoe. Drew laughed to himself at the delicious subterfuge of it.

Then at the very top of the strange, gloomy, midnight building, when Drew's nervous fingers fumbled a second with his door-lock, without the slightest possible warning she reached out suddenly with one mad, frenzied impulse and struck the key from his hand. To his startled eyes she turned a face more wild, more agonized than any terror he had ever dreamed in his most hideous, sweating nightmare. Instantly her hands went clutching out to him.

"Oh, Drew, for God's sake take me home!" she gasped. "What have I done? What have I done? What have I done? Oh, ALECK!"

Wrenching himself free from her hands, Drew dropped down on the floor and began to hunt around for the key. The blood surged into his head like a hot tide, and he felt all gritty-lunged and smothered, as though he were crawling under water. After a minute he stumbled to his feet and slipped the recreant key smoothly into the lock, and swung his door wide open, and turned back to Ruth. She stood facing him defiantly, her eyes blazing, her poor hands twisting.

Drew nodded toward the door, and shoved the suit case with his foot across the threshold. His face was very stern and set.

"You want me to take you 'home'?" he said. "_This_ is home. What do you mean? Take you back to your Brother's house? You can't go back to your Brother's house on your wedding day. It wouldn't be fair to me. And I won't help you do an unfair thing _even_ to me. You've _got_ to give me a chance!"

He nodded again toward the open door, but the girl did not budge. His face brightened suddenly, and he stepped back to where she was standing, and lifted her up in his arms and swung her to his shoulder and stumbled through the pitch-black doorway. "Do you remember," he cried, "the day at your grammar-school picnic when I carried you over the railroad trestle because the locomotive that was swooping down upon us round the curve had scared all the starch out of your legs? Look out for your head now, honey, and I'll give you a very good imitation of a cave man bringing home his bride."

In another moment he had switched a blaze of electric light into his diminutive library, and deposited his sobbing burden none too formally in the big easy chair that blocked almost all the open space between his desk and his bookcases. "What! Aren't you laughing, too?" he cried in mock alarm. But the crumpled little figure in the big chair did not answer to his raillery.

Until it seemed as though he would totter from his wavering foothold, Drew stood and watched her dumbly. Then a voice that sounded strange even to himself spoke out of his lips.

"Ruth--come here," he said.

She raised her rumpled head in astonishment, gaged for a throbbing instant the new authoritative glint in his eyes, and then slipped cautiously out of her chair and came to him, reeking with despair. For a second they just stood and stared at each other, white face to white face, a map of anger confronting a map of fear.

"You understand," said Drew, "that to-day, by every moral, legal, religious right and rite, you have delivered your life over utterly into my hands?" His voice was like ice.

"Yes, I understand," she answered feebly, with the fresh tears gushing suddenly into her eyes.

Drew's mouth relaxed. "You understand?" he repeated. "Well--forget it! And never, never, never, as long as you and I are together, never, I say, understand anything but this: you can cry about Aleck Reese all you want to, but you sha'n't cry about me. You can count on that anyway." He started to smile, but his mouth twitched instead with a wince of pain. "And I thought I could really bring you heart's-ease," he scoffed. "Heart's-ease? Bah!"

"Heart's-ease. Bah!" The familiar phrase exploded Ruth's inflammable nerves into hysterical laughter. "Why, that's what the lamb said," she cried, "when I fed him on my pansy posies. 'Heart's-ease. B-a-h!'" And her sudden burst of even unnatural delight cleared her face for the moment of all its haggard tragedy, and left her once more just a very fragile, very plaintive, very helpless, tear-stained child. "You _b-a-a_ exactly like the lamb," she suggested with timid, snuffling pleasantry; and at the very first suspicion of a reluctant twinkle at the corner of Drew's eyes she reached up her trembling little hands to his shoulders and held him like a vise with a touch so light, so faint, so timorous that it could hardly have detained the shadow of a humming-bird.

For a moment she stared exploringly round the unfamiliar, bright little room crowded so horribly, cruelly close with herself, her mistake, and the life-long friend loomed so suddenly and undesirably into a man. Then with a quick, shuddery blink her eyes came flashing back wetly and wistfully to the unsolved, inscrutable face before her. Her fingers dug themselves frantically into his cheviot shoulders.

"Oh, Drew, Drew," she blurted out, "I am so very--very--very--frightened! Won't you please take me and play you are my--Mother?"

"Play I am your Mother? _Play I am your Mother!_" The phrase ripped out of Drew's lips like an oath, and twitched itself just in time into explosive, husky mirth. "Play I am your Mother?" The teeniest grimace over his left shoulder outlined the soft silken swish and tug of a lady's train. A most casual tap at his belt seemed to achieve instantly the fashionable hour-glass outline of feminine curves. "Play I am your Mother!" He smiled and, stooping down, took Ruth's scared white face between his hands, and his smile was as bright--and just about as pleasant--as a zigzag of lightning from a storm-black sky.

"Ruthy dear," he said, "I don't feel very much like your Mother. Now if it was a cannibal that you wanted, or a pirate, or a kidnapper, or a body-snatcher, or a general all-round robber of widows and orphans, why, here I am, all dressed and trained and labeled for the part. But a _Mother_--" The smile went zigzagging again across his face just as a big, wet, scalding tear came trickling down the girl's cheek into his fingers. The feeling of that tear made his heart cramp unpleasantly. "Oh, hang it all," he finished abruptly, "what does a Mother do, anyway?"

The little white face in his hands flooded instantly with a great desolation. "I don't know," she moaned wearily. "I _never_ knew."

For some inexplainable reason Aleck Reese's devilish, insolent beauty flaunted itself suddenly before Drew's vision, and he gave a bitter gasp, and turned away fiercely, and brushed his arm potently across his forehead as though Sex, after all, were nothing but a trivial mask that fastened loosely to the ears.

When he turned round again, his conquered face had that strange, soft, shining, translucent wonder-look in it which no woman all her life long may reap twice from a man's face. Tenderly, serenely, uncaressingly, without passion and without playfulness, he picked up his sad little bride and carried her back to the big, roomy, restful chair, and snuggled her down in his long arms, with her smoke-scented hair across his cheek, and told her funny, giggly little stories, and crooned her funny, sleepy little songs, till her shuddering sobs soothed themselves--oh, so slowly--into lazy, languid, bashful little smiles, and the lazy, languid, bashful little smiles droned off at last into nestling, contented little sighs, and the nestling, contented little sighs blossomed all of a sudden into merciful, peaceful slumber.

Then, when the warm, gray June dawn was just beginning to flush across the roofs of the city, he put her softly down and slipped away, and took his smallest military brushes, and his smallest dressing-gown, and his smallest slippers, and carried them out to his diminutive guest-room. "It isn't a very big little guest-room," he mused disconsolately, "but then, she isn't a very big little guest. It will hold her, I guess, as long as she's willing to stay."