The Sick-a-Bed Lady/The Amateur Lover
WITH every night piercing her like a new wound, and every morning stinging her like salt in that wound, Ruth Dudley's broken engagement had dragged itself out for four long, hideous months. There s so much fever in a woman s sorrow.
At first, to be sure, there had been no special outward and visible sign of heartbreak except the thunderstorm shadows under the girl s blue eyes. Then, gradually, very gradually, those same plucky eyes had dulled and sickened as though every indi- vidual thought in her brain was festering. Later, an occasional loosened finger ring had clattered off into her untouched plate or her reeking strong cup of coffee. At the end of the fourth month the family doctor was quite busy attesting that she had no tubercular trouble of any sort. There never yet was any stethoscope invented that could successfully locate consumption of the affections.
It was about this time that Ruth's Big Brother, strolling smokily into her room one evening, jumped back in tragic dismay at the astonishing sight that met his eyes. There, like some fierce young sacri- ficial priestess, with a very modern smutty nose and scorched cheeks, Ruth knelt on the hearth-rug, slam- ming every conceivable object that she could reach into the blazing fire. The soft green walls of the room were utterly stripped and ravished. The floor in every direction lay cluttered deep with books and pictures and clothes and innumerable small bits of bric-a-brac. Already the brimming fireplace leaked forth across the carpet in little gray, gusty flakes of ash and cinder.
The Big Brother hooted right out loud."Why, Ruthy Dudley," he gasped. "What are you doing? You look like the devil"
Blissfully unconscious of smoke or smut, the girl pushed back the straggling blond hair from her eyes and grinned, with her white teeth shot like a bolt through her under lip to keep the grin in place.
"I m not a 'devil,' she explained." I m a god ! And what am I doing? I'm creating a new heaven and a new earth."
"You won't have much left to create it with," scoffed the Big Brother, kicking the tortured wreck of a straw hat farther back into the flames.
The girl reached up impatiently and smutted her other hand across her eyes. "Nothing left to create it with? "she mocked. "Why, if I had any- thing left to create it with, I'd be only a me chanic!"
Then, blackened like a coal-heaver and tousled like a Skye terrier, she picked up the scarlet bellows and commenced to pump a savage yellow flame into a writhing. half-charred bundle of letters.
Through all the sweet, calm hours of that warm June night the sacrifice progressed with amazing rapacity. By midnight she had just finished stirring the fire-tongs through the ghostly, lacelike ashes of her wedding gown. At two o clock her violin went groaning into the flames. At three her Big Brother, yawning sleepily back in his nightclothes, picked her up bodily and dumped her into her bed. He was very angry. "Little Sister," he scolded, "there's no man living worth the fuss you're making over Aleck Reese!" And the little sister sat up and rubbed her smutty, scorched cheek against his cool, blue-shaven face as she tilted the drifting ashes from the bedspread. "I'm not making any 'fuss,' "she protested. "I'm only just-burning my bridges." It was the first direct allusion that she had ever made to her trouble.
Twice after that-between three o'clock and breakfast time -the Big Brother woke from his sleep with a horrid sense that the house was on fire. Twice between three o'clock and breakfast time he met the Housekeeper scuttling along the halls on the same sniffy errand. Once with a flickering candle- light Ruth herself crept out to the doorway and laughed at them. "The house is n t on fire, you sillies," she cried. "Don t you know a burnt bridge when you smell it? " But the doctor had said quite distinctly :"You must watch that little girl. Sor- row in the tongue will talk itself cured, if you give it a chance; but sorrow in the eyes has a wicked, wicked way now and then of leaking into the brain."
It was the Housekeeper, though, whose eyes looked worried and tortured at breakfast time. It was the Big Brother's face that showed a bit sharp on the cheek-bones. Ruth herself, for the first time in a listless, uncollared, unbelted, unstarched month, came frisking down to the table as white and fresh and crisp as linen and starch and curls could make her.
"I'm going to town this morning," she an- nounced nonchalantly to her relieved and delighted hearers. The eyes that turned to her brother's were almost mischievous. "Could n t you meet me at twelve o'clock,"she suggested, " and take me off to the shore somewhere for lunch ? I'll be shopping on Main Street about that time, so suppose I meet you at Andrew Bernard's office."
Half an hour later she was stealing out of the creaky back door into the garden, along the gray, pebbly gravel walk between the tall tufts of crim son and purple phlox, to the little gay-faced plot of heart s-ease where the family doctor, symbolist and literalist, had bade her dig and delve every day in the good, hot, wholesome, freckly sunshine. Close by in the greensward an absurd pet lamb was tugging and bouncing at the end of its stingy tether. In a moment's time the girl had transferred the clumsy iron tether-stake to the midst of her posy bed. Then she started for the gate.
Pausing for just one repentant second with her hand on the gate latch, she turned and looked back to the ruthlessly trodden spot where the bland-eyed lamb stood eyeing her quizzically with his soft, woolly mouth fairly dripping with the tender, pre- cious blossoms. "Heart s-ease. B-a-a !" mocked the girl, with a flicker of real amusement. "Heart s-ease. B-a-a-!" scoffed the lamb, just because his stomach and his tongue happened to be made like that. Then with a quick dodge across the lane she ran to meet the electric car and started off triumphantly for the city, shutting her faint eyes resolutely away from all the roadside pools and ponds and gleams of river whose molten, ultimate peace possibilities had lured her sick mind so inces- santly for the past dozen weeks.
Two hours later, with a hectic spurt of energy, she was racing up three winding, dizzy flights of stairs in a ponderous, old-fashioned office build- ing.
Before a door marked " Andrew Bernard, Attor- ney at Law," she stopped and waited a frightened moment for breath and courage. As though the pounding of her heart had really sounded as loud as it felt, the door handle turned abruptly, and a very tall, broad-shouldered, grave-faced young man greeted her with attractive astonishment.
"Good morning, Drew," she began politely. "Why, I have n t seen you for a year." Then, with alarming vehemence, she finished: "Are you all alone? I want to talk with you."
Her breathlessness, her embarrassment, her fra- gile intensity sobered the young man instantly as he led her into his private office and stood for a moment staring inquiringly into her white face. Her mouth was just as he had last seen it a year ago, fresh and whimsical and virginal as a child's ; but her eyes were scorched and dazed like the eyes of a ship wreck survivor or any other person who has been forced unexpectedly to stare upon life's big emotions with the naked eye.
"I hear you'Ve been ill this spring," he began gently."If you wanted to talk with me, Ruthy, why did n t you let me come out to the house and see you? Would n t it have been easier?" She shook her head. "No," she protested, "I wanted to come here. What I've got to talk about is very awkward, and if things get too awkward why, an embarrassed guest has so much better chance to escape than an embarrassed host." She struggled desperately to smile, but her lips twittered instead into a frightened quiver. With narrowing eyes the young man drew out his big leather chair for her. Then he perched himself on the corner of his desk and waited for her to speak.
"Ruthy dear," he smiled,"what's the trouble? Come, tell your old chum all about it."
The girl scrunched her eyes up tight, like a per son who starts to jump and does n't care where he lands. Twice her lips opened and shut without a sound. Then suddenly she braced herself with an intense effort.
"Drew," she blurted out, "do you remember- three years ago you asked me to marry you?"
"Do I remember it ?" gasped Drew. The edgy sharpness of his tone made the girl open her eyes and stare at him. "Yes" he acknowledged, "I remember it."
The girl began to smooth her white skirts with excessive precision across her knees."What made you ask me?" she whispered.
"What made me ask you?" cried the man. "What made me ask you? Why, I asked you be- cause I love you."
The girl bent forward anxiously as though she were deaf. "You asked me because what? she quizzed him.
"Because I love you," he repeated.
She jumped up suddenly and ran across the room to him. "Because you love me?" she reiterated. " 'Love? Not Moved? Not past tense? Not all over and done with?"
There was no mistaking her meaning. But the man's face did not kindle, except with pain. Al most roughly he put his hands on her shoulders and searched down deep into her eyes. "Ruth," he probed, "what are you trying to do to me ? Open an old wound? You know I love you."
The girl's mouth smiled, but her eyes blurred wet with fright and tears.
"Would you care anything about marrying me now ?" she faltered.
Drew's face blanched utterly, and the change gave him such a horridly foreign, alien look that the girl drew away from his hands and scuttled back to the big chair, and began all over again to smooth and smooth the garish white skirt across her knees. "Oh, Drew, Drew," she pleaded, "please look like you. Please please don't look like anybody else." THE AMATEUR LOVER
But Drew did not smile at her. He just stood there and stared in a puzzled, tortured sort of way.
"What about Aleck Reese?" he began with fierce abruptness.
The girl met the question with unwonted flip pancy. "I've broken my engagement to Aleck Reese," she said coolly. " Broken it all to smash."
But the latent tremor in her voice did not satisfy the man. "Why did you break it?" he insisted. " Is n t Aleck Reese the man you want? "
Her eyes vavered and fell, and then rallied sud denly to Drew's utmost question.
"Yes, Drew," she answered ingenuously, "Aleck Reese is the man I want, but he s not the kind of man I want!" As the telltale sentence left her lips, every atom of strength wilted out of her, and she sank back into her chair all sick and faint and shud- dery.
The impulsive, bitter laugh died dumb on Drew s lips. Instantly he was at her side, gentle, patient, compassionate, the man whom she knew so well. "Do you mean," he stammered in a startled sort of way, "do you mean that love or no love I, I am the kind of man that you do want?"
Her hand stole shyly into his and she nodded her head. But her eyes were turned away from him.
For the fraction of a second he wondered just what the future would hold for him and her if he should snatch the situation into his arms and crush her sorrow out against his breast. Then in that second's hesitancy she shook her hair out of her eyes and looked up at him like a sick, wistful child.
"Oh, Drew," she pleaded, "you've never, never failed me yet all my hard lessons, all my Fourth- of-July accidents, all my broken sleds and lost skates. Could n t you help me now we're grown up? I'm so unhappy."
The grimness came back to Drew's face.
"Has Aleck Reese been mean to you?" he asked.
Her eyebrows lifted in denial. "Oh, no-not specially," she finished a trifle wearily. "I simply made up my mind at last that I did n t want to marry him."
Drew's frown relaxed. "Then what's the trou ble ?" he suggested.
Her eyebrows arched again. "What's the trou ble ?" she queried. "Why, I happen to love him. That's all.""
She took her hand away from Drew and began to smooth her skirt once more.
"Yes," she repeated slowly, "as long ago as last winter I made up my mind that I did n't want to marry him but I did n't make up my courage until Spring. My courage, I think, is just about six months slower than my mind. And then, too, my 'love-margin was n't quite used up, I suppose. A woman usually has a 'love-margin' you know, and, besides, there s always so much more impetus in a woman,s love. Even though she's hurt, even though she's heartbroken, even though, worst of all, she's a tiny bit bored, all her little, natural love courtesies go on just the same of their own mo- mentum, for a day or a week, or a month, or half a lifetime, till the love-flame kindles again or else goes out altogether. Love has to be like that. But if I were a man, Drew, I'd be awfully careful that that love-margin did n't ever get utterly exhausted. Aleck, though, does n't understand about such things. I smoothed his headaches just as well, and listened to his music just as well, so he shiftlessly took it for granted that I loved him just as well. What nonsense ! Love ?' " Her voice rose almost shrilly. " 'Love ? Bah ! What's love, anyway, but a wicked sort of hypnotism in the way that a mouth slants, or a cheek curves, or a lock of hair colors? Listen to me. If Aleck Reese were a woman and I were a man, I certainly would n't choose his type for a sweetheart irritable, undo- mestic, wild for excitement. How's that for a test? And if Aleck Reese and I were both women, I certainly should n't want him for my friend. Oughtn t that to decide it? Not a vital taste in common, not a vital interest, not a vital ideal !" She began to laugh hysterically. " And I can't sleep at night for remembering the droll little way that his hair curls over his forehead, or the hurt, sur- prised look in his eyes when he ever really did get sorry about anything. My God! Drew, look at me !" she cried, and rolled up her sleeves to her elbow. The flesh was gone from her as though a fever had wasted her.
The muscles in Drew's throat began to twitch un- pleasantly. "Was Aleck Reese mean to you?" he persisted doggedly.
A little faint, defiant smile flickered across her lips. "Never mind, Drew," she said, "whether Aleck Reese was mean to me or not. It really does n't matter. It does n't really matter at all just exactly what a man does or does n't do to a woman as long as, by one route or another, before her wedding day, he brings her to the place where she can honestly say in her heart, This man that I want is not the kind of man that I want. Honor, loyalty, strength, gentleness why, Drew, the man I marry has got to be the kind of man I want.
"I've tried to be fair to Aleck," she mused al most tenderly. "I've tried to remember always that men are different from women, and that Aleck perhaps is different from most men. I've tried to remember always that he is a musician a real, real musician with all the ghastly, agonizing extremes of temperament. I've tried to remember always that he did n't grow up here with us in our little town with all our fierce, little-town standards, but that he was educated abroad, that his whole moral, mental, and social ideals are different, that the admiration and adulation of new women is like the breath of life to him that he simply could n't live without it any more than I could live without the love of animals, or the friendship of children, or the wonderfulness of outdoors, all of which bore him to distraction.
"Oh, I've reasoned it all out, night after night after night, fought it out, torn it out, that he prob ably really and truly did love me quite a good deal in his own way when there was n't anything else to do. But how can it possibly content a woman to have a man love her as well as he knows how - if it is n't as well as she knows how? We won't talk about Aleck Reese's morals," she finished abruptly. "Fickleness, selfishness, neglect, even in fidelity itself, are such purely minor, incidental data of the one big, incurably rotten and distasteful fact that such and such a man is stupid in the affec tions.
With growing weakness she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.
For an anxious moment Drew sat and watched her. "Is that all?" he asked at last. She opened her eyes in surprise."Why, yes," she said, "that's all that is, it's all if you under stand. I'm not complaining because Aleck Reese did n't love me, but because, loving me, he was n't intelligent enough to be true to me. You do un- derstand, don't you? You understand that it was n't because he did n't pay his love bills, but be cause he did n't know enough to pay them. He took my loyalty without paying for it with his; he took my devotion, my tenderness, my patience, with out ever, ever making any adequate return. Any girl ought to be able to tell in six months whether her lover is using her affection rightly, whether he is taking her affection and investing it with his toward their mutual happiness and home. Aleck invested nothing. He just took all my love that he could grab and squandered it on himself al ways and forever on himself. A girl, I say, ought to be able to tell in six months. But I am very stupid. It has taken me three years."
"Well, what do you want me to do?" Drew asked a bit quizzically.
"I want you to advise me," she said.
"Advise you-what?" persisted Drew.
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 affec tions. You are heart-wise as well as head-wise. Why, even in the very littlest, silliest thing that could possibly matter, you would n't for instance remember George Washington's birthday and forget mine. And you would n't go away on a lark and leave me if I was sick, any more than you d blow out the gas. And you would n'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 shin ing 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 imita tion of Big Brother's precious, pompous impor tance. 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 de liberated, "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 would n'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 is n't a question of caring. You know I care. But don't you, don't you understand that a man does n't like to marry a woman who does n't love him?"
Her face brightened piteously. "But I will love you?" she protested. "I will love you. I prom ise. I promise you faithfully I will love you if you 11 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, Sep tember, 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 would n't re fuse to help me just because you could n'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 prom ise 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 is n'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 ac- cident that happened to you on your way to me?" She nodded her head. Weakness and tears were only too evidently overtaking her brave little the ories.
"And there's something else, too," she con fided tremulously. "My head is n 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 rail road 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 is n't right to be so bored with life. But I can't seem to help it. Nothing in all the world has any mean ing 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, com- bativeness, 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 does n't love you. You are quite right; of course I should n'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 heav ens !" he cried out, "my part would be easy, com fortable, 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 per son you love who does n 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 distaste fulness 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 swim mer'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 hag gard 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. "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 child ishly, 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 keep sakes, all my doll houses that ever grew up into dreams. So if you decide to marry me I shall be very expensive. You 11 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 have n'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 pro test 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 un conscious 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 him self 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 automo- bile 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, mid night building, when Drew's nervous fingers fum bled a second with his door-lock, without the slight est 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 vild, more agonized than any terror he had ever dreamed in his most hideous, sweating night mare. 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 recre - ant 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 would n'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 shoul der 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 imi- tation of a cave man bringing home his bride."
In another moment he had switched a blaze of electric light into his diminutive library, and de- posited 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! Are n'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 con- fronting 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 help less, 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 shoul- ders.
"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 in to explosive, husky mirth. "Play I am your Mother?" The teeniest grimace over his left shoul der 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 bodysnatcher, 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 dev- ilish, 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, un- caressingly, without passion and without playful ness, 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 them selves oh, so slowly into lazy, languid, bashful little smiles, and the lazy, languid, bashful little smiles droned off at last into nestling, con tented little sighs, and the nestling, contented little sighs blossomed all of a sudden into merciful, peace ful 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 is n't a very big little guest-room," he mused disconsolately, "but then, she is n't a very big little guest. It will hold her, I guess, as long as she s willing to stay."
"As long as she's willing to stay." The phrase puckered his lips. Again Aleck Reese's face flashed before him in all its amazing beauty and magical pathos, a face this time staring across a tiny, ornate cafe table into the jaded, world-wise eyes of some gorgeous woman of the theatrical demi-monde. At the vision Drew's shoulders squared suddenly as though for a fair fight to the finish, and then wilted down with equal abruptness as his eyes met acci dentally in the mirror his own plain, matter-of-fact reflection. The sight fairly mocked him. There was no beauty there. No magie. No brilliance. No talent. No compelling moodiness. No possible promise of " Love and Fame and Far Lands." Nothing. Just eyes and nose and mouth and hair and an ugly baseball scar on his left cheek. Merci- ful heavens! What had he to fight Aleck Reese with, except the only two virtues that a man may not brag of a decently clean life and an unstaled Love!
Grinning to rekindle his courage, he started tip toeing back along the hall to his bedroom and his kitchen, and rolled up his sleeves and began to clean house most furiously; for even if you are quite des perately in love, and a fairly good man besides, it is just a little bit crowded-feeling and disconcerting to have the lady walk unannounced right into your life and your neckties and your pictures, to say nothing of your last week s unwashed cream-jars.
Frantically struggling with his coffee-pot at seven o clock, he had almost forgotten his minor troubles when a little short, gaspy breath sound made him look up. Huddling her tired-out dress into the am ple folds of his dressing-gown, Ruth stood watching him bashfully.
" Hello ! " he said. "Who are you ?"
"I m Mrs. Andrew Bernard, attorney at law," she announced with stuttering nonchalance, and started off exploringly for the cupboard to find Drew's best green Canton china to deck the kitchen breakfast table. All through the tortuous little meal she sat in absolute tongue-tied gravity, carving her omelet into a hundred infinitesimal pieces and sip ping like a professional coffee-taster at Drew's over- rank concoction. Only once did her solemn face lighten with an inspirational flash that made Drew s heart jump. Then,"Oh, Drew," she exclaimed, " do you think you could go out to the house to-day and see if they fed the lamb?"
" No, I don't," said Drew bluntly, and poured himself out his fifth cup of coffee.
After breakfast, all the time that he was shav ing, she came and sat on the edge of a table and watched him with the same maddening gravity, and when he finally started off for his office she followed him down the whole length of his little hallway. "I like my cave !" she volunteered with sudden so ciability, and then with a great, pink-flushing wave of consciousness she lifted up her face to him and stammered, "Do I kiss you good-by?"
Drew shook his head and laughed. "No," he said, "you don't even have to do that; I'm not much of a kisser," and turned abruptly and grabbed at the handle of the door.
But before he had crossed the threshold she reached out and pulled him back for a moment, and he had to stoop down very far to hear what she wanted to tell him. " It's nothing much, Drew, she whispered. "It's nothing much at all. I just wanted to say that considering how strong they are, and how wild and strange I think men are very gentle creatures. Thank you." And in another instant she had gone back alone to face by crass daylight the tragedy that she had brought into three people's lives.
Certainly in all the days and weeks that followed, Drew never failed to qualify as a "gentle creature." Not a day passed at his office that he did not tele- phone home with the most casual-sounding pleas antry, Is everything all right? Any burnt-bridge smoke in the air?" Usually, clear as his own voice, and sometimes even with a little giggle tucked on at the end, the answer came,"Yes, everything's all right." But now and then over that telephone wire a minor note flashed with unmistakably trem ulous vibration : " N-o, Drew. Oh, could you come right home and take me somewhere?"
Drew's brown cheeks hollowed a bit, perhaps, as time went on, but always smilingly, always frankly and jocosely, he met the occasionally recurrent emergencies of his love-life. Underneath his smile and underneath his frankness his original purpose never flinched and never wavered. With growing mental intimacy and absolute emotional aloofness he forced day by day the image and the conscious ness of his personality upon the girl's plastic mind : his picture, for instance, as a matter of course for her locket; his favorite, rather odd, colors for her clothes; his sturdy, adventuresome, fleet-footed opinions to run ahead and break in all her strange new thought-grounds for her. More than this, in every possible way that showed to the world he stamped her definitely as the most carefully cher ished wife among all her young married mates.
At first the very novelty of the situation had fed his eyes with rapture and fired the girl's face with a feverish excitement almost as pink as happiness. The surprise and congratulations of their friends, the speech of the janitor, the floral offering of the elevator boy, the long procession of silver spoons and cut-glass dishes, had filled their days with in terest and laughter. Trig in her light muslin house gowns or her big gingham aprons, Ruth fluttered blissfully around her house like a new, brainy sort of butterfly. By some fine, instinctive delicacy, shrewder than many women's love, she divined and forestalled Drew's domestic tastes and preferences, and lined his simplest, homespun needs with all the quiver and sheen of silk. Resting his weariness, spurring his laziness; equally quick to divine the need of a sofa pillow or a joke; equally interested in his food and his politics; always ready to talk, always ready to keep still; cramping her free sub- urban ways into his hampered accommodations; missing her garden and her pets and her piazzas without ever acknowledging it she tried in every plausible way except loving to compensate Drew for the wrong she had done him.
Only once did Drew's smoldering self-control slip the short leash he had set for himself. Just once, round the glowing coziness of a rainy-night open fire, he had dropped his book slammingly on the floor and reached out his hand to her soft hair that brightened like bronze in the lamplight. "Are you happy?" he had probed before he could fairly bite the words back; and she had jumped up, and tossed her hair out of her eyes, and laughed as she started for the kitchen. "No, I'm not exactly happy" she had said. "But I'm awfully interested."
So June budded into July, and July bloomed into August, and August wilted into September, and September brittled and crisped and flamed at last into October. Tennis and boating and picnics and horseback riding filled up the edges of the days. Little by little the bright, wholesome red came back to live in Ruth's rounding cheeks. Little by little the good steady gleam of normal interests sup planted the wild will-o-the-wisp lights in her eyes. Little by little her accumulating possessions began to steel shyly out from her tiny room and make themselves boldly at home in the places where hith- erto they had ventured only as guests. Her workbasket crowded Drew's tobacco-jar deliberately from the table to the top of the bookcase. Her daring hands nonchalantly replaced a brutally clever cartoon with a soft-toned sketch of a little child. Once, indeed, an ostentatiously freshly laundered dress, all lace and posies and ruffles, went and hung itself brazenly in Drew's roomy closet right next to his fishing clothes.
And then, just as Drew thought that at last he saw Happiness stop and turn and look at him a bit whimsically, Aleck Reese came back to town Aleck Reese, not as Fate should have had him, drunken with flattery, riotous with revelry, chasing madly some new infatuation, but Aleck Reese sobered, dazed, temporarily purified by the shock of his loss, if not by the loss itself.
For a week, blissfully unconscious of any cause, Drew had watched with growing perplexity and anxiety the sudden, abrupt flag in the girl's health and spirits and general friendliness. Flowers, fruit, candy, books, excursion plans had all succes sively, one by one, failed to rouse either her interest or her ordinary civility. And then one night, drag ging home extra late from a worried, wearisome day at the office, faint for his dinner, sick for his sleep, he found the apartment perfectly dark and cheerless, the fire unlighted, the table unset, and Ruth herself, lying in a paroxysm of grief on the floor under his stumbling feet. With his dizzy head reeling blindly, and his hands shaking like an aspen, he picked her up and tried to carry her to the couch; but she wrenched herself away from him, and walked over to the window and halfway back again before she spoke.
"Aleck Reese has come home," she announced dully, and reached up unthinkingly and turned a blast of electric light full on her ghastly face.
Drew clutched at the back of the nearest chair. "Have you seen him?" he almost whispered.
The girl nodded. "Yes. He's been here a week. I've seen him twice. Once all day at the tennis club and this afternoon I met him on the street, and he came home with me to get a book."
"Why did n't you tell me before that he was here?"
She shrugged her shoulders wearily. "I thought his coming was n't going to matter," she faltered,
"But what?" said Drew.
Her arms fell limply down to her sides and her chin began to quiver.
"He kissed me this afternoon," she stammered. "and I kissed him. And, worse than that, we were both glad."
Trying to brush the fog away from his eyes, Drew almost sprang across the room at her, and she gave a queer little cry and fled, not away from him, but right into his arms, as though there was her only haven. "Would you be apt to hurt me?" she gasped with a funny-sad sort of inquisitiveness. Then she backed away and held out her hand like a man's to Drew s shaking fingers. " I'm very much ashamed," she said, "about this afternoon. Oh, very, very, very much ashamed. I have n't ever been a really good wife to you, you know, but I never have cheated before until to-day. I promise you faithfully that it sha n't happen again. But, Drew "- her face flushed utterly crimson " but, Drew I honestly think that it had to happen to day."
Drew's tortured eyes watched her keenly for a second and then his look softened. "Will you please tell Aleck," he suggested, "that you told me all about it and that I laughed?"
It was not till some time in December, however, after a nervous, evasive, speechless sort of week, that Ruth appeared abruptly one day at Drew's of fice, looking for all the world like the frightened child who had sought him out there the June be fore.
"Drew, you re five years older than I am, are n't you?" she began disconnectedly. "And you ve always been older than I am, and stronger than I am, and wiser than I am. And you ve always gone ahead in school and play and everything, and learned what you wanted to and then come back—and gotten me. And it always made everything—oh, so much easier for me—and I thought it was a magic scheme that simply couldn’t fail to work. But I’m afraid I’m not quite as smart as I used to be—I can’t seem to catch up with you this time.”
“What do you mean?” said Drew.
She began to fidget with her gloves. “Do you know what month it is?” she asked abruptly.
Why, yes, said Drew, just a bit drearily. It s December. What of it?
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, Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/263 until she had reached the street floor. Then, drop ping 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 wait ing and watching for her. Two or three of her hus band'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 sting ing, shuddering memory of Drew's crumpled shoul ders, 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 must n't be. It must n't be it must n't! There's got to
be some way out!" Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/265 Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/266 Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/267 Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/268 Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/269 Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/270 
"Hello, all you animals," she cried
over again. Play that I am your wife! "she de- manded 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!"