Fidelity Part 32

She thought of her last talk with Deane, of their walk together that day, almost a year before, when he came to see her at Annie's, the very day she was starting back West. She had felt anything but locked in that day. There was that triumphant sense of openness to life, the joy of new interest in it, of zest for it. And then she came back West, to Stuart, and somehow the radiance went, courage ebbed, it came to seem that life was all fixed, almost as if life, in the real sense, was over. That sense of having failed, having been inadequate to her own feeling, struck her down to a wretched powerlessness. And so routine, hard work, bitter cold, loneliness, that sense of the cruelty of life which the sternness of the country gave--those things had been able to take her; it was because something had gone dead in her.

She thought of that spiritual hinterland Deane talked about. She thought of her and Stuart. She grew very sad in the thinking. She wondered if it was her fault. However it was, it was true they no longer found the live things in one another. She had not been able to communicate to him the feeling with which she came back from Annie's. It was a lesser thing for trying to talk of it to him. She did not reach him; she knew that he only thought her a little absurd. After that she did not try to talk to him of what she felt. Life lessened; things were as they were; they too were as they were. It came to seem just a matter of following out what had been begun. And then that news of the divorce had come to mock her.

But she must do something for Deane. Deane must not go like that. She had brought pencil and writing tablet with her, thinking that perhaps out of doors, away from the house where she had seemed locked in all winter, she could write to him. She thought of things to say, things that should be said, but she did not seem to have any power to charge them with life. How could the dead rouse the dead? She sat there thinking of her and Deane, of how they had always been able to reach one another. And finally she began:

"Dear Deane,

"You must find your way back to life."

She did not go on. She sat staring at what she had written. She read it over; she said it aloud. It surged in upon her, into shut places. She sat looking at it, frightened at what it was doing. Sat looking at it after it was all blurred by tears--looking down at the words she herself had written--"You must find your way back to life."

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Ruth was very quiet through the next week. Stuart was preoccupied with the plans he was making for going to Montana; when he talked with her it was of that, of arrangements to be made for it, and his own absorption apparently kept him from taking note of her being more quiet than usual, or different. It was all working out very well. He had found a renter for the ranch, the prospects for the venture in Montana were good. They were to move within a month. And one night in late April when he came home from town he handed Ruth a long envelope, with a laughing, "Better late than never." Then he was soon deep in some papers.

Ruth was sorting a box of things; there were many things to be gone through preparatory to moving. She had put the paper announcing his divorce aside without comment; but she loitered over what she was doing.

She was watching Stuart, thinking about him.

She was thinking with satisfaction that he looked well. He had thrown off the trouble that had brought about their departure from Freeport twelve years before. He was growing rather stout; his fair hair had gone somewhat gray and his face was lined, he had not the look of a young man. But he looked strong, alert. His new hopes had given him vigor, a new buoyancy. She sat there thinking of the years she had lived with him, of the wonder and the happiness she had known through him, of the hard things they had faced together. Her voice was gentle as she replied to his inquiry about what day of the month it was.

"I think," he said, "that we can get off by the fifteenth, don't you, Ruth?"

"Perhaps." Her voice shook a little, but he was following his own thoughts and did not notice. After a little he came and sat across the table from her. "And, Ruth, about this getting married business--" He broke off with a laugh. "Seems absurd, doesn't it?"

She nodded, fumbling with the things in the box, her head bent over them.

"Well, I was thinking we'd better stop somewhere along the way and attend to it. Can't do it here--don't want to there."

She lifted her hands from the box and laid them on the table that was between him and her. She looked over at him and said, quietly, in a voice that shook only a little: "I do not want to get married, Stuart."

He was filling his pipe and stopped abruptly, spilling the tobacco on the table. "What did you say?" he asked in the voice of one sure he must have heard wrong.

"I said," she repeated, "that I did not want to get married."

He stared at her, his face screwed up. Then it relaxed a little. "Oh, yes--yes, I know how you feel. It seems so absurd--after all this time--after all there has been. But we must attend to it, Ruth. It's right that we should--now that we can. G.o.d knows we wanted to bad enough--long ago. And it will make us feel better about going into a new place. We can face people better." He gathered up the tobacco he had spilled and put it in his pipe.

For a moment she did not speak. Then, "That wasn't what I meant, Stuart," she said, falteringly.

"Well, then, what in the world _do_ you mean?" he asked impatiently.

She did not at once say what she meant. Her eyes held him, they were so strangely steady. "Just why would we be getting married, Stuart?" she asked simply.

At first he could only stare at her, appeared to be waiting for her to throw light on what she had asked. When she did not do that he moved impatiently, as if resentful of being quizzed this way. "Why--why, because we can now. Because it's the thing to do. Because it will be expected of us," he concluded, with gathering impatience for this unnecessary explanation.

A faint smile traced itself about Ruth's mouth. It made her face very sad as she said: "I do not seem to be anxious to marry for any of those reasons, Stuart."

"Ruth, what are you driving at?" he demanded, thoroughly vexed at the way she had bewildered him.

"This is what I am driving at, Stuart," she began, a little more spiritedly. But then she stopped, as if dumb before it. She looked over at him as if hoping her eyes would tell it for her. But as he continued in that look of waiting, impatient bewilderment she sighed and turned a little away. "Don't you think, Stuart," she asked, her voice low, "that the future is rather too important a thing to be given up to ratifying the past?"

He pushed his chair back in impatience that was mounting to anger. "Just what do you mean?" he asked, stiffly.

She picked up the long envelope lying on the table between them. She held it in her hand a moment without speaking. For as she touched it she had a sense of what it would have meant to have held it in her hand twelve years before, over on the other side of their life together, a new sense of the irony and the pity of not having had it then--and having it now. She laid it down between them. "To me," she said, "this sets me free.

"Free to choose," she went on, as he only stared at her. There was a moment of looking at him out of eyes so full of feeling that they held back the feeling that had flushed his face. "And my choice," she said, with a strange steadiness, "is that I now go my way alone."

He spoke then; but it was only to stammer: "Why,--_Ruth!_" Helplessly he repeated: "_Ruth!_"

"But you see? You do see?" she cried. "If it had _not_ been so much--so beautiful! Just because it _was_ what it was--" She choked and could not go on.

He came around and sat down beside her. The seriousness of his face, something she had touched in him, made it finer than it had been in those last years of routine. It was more as it used to be. His voice too seemed out of old days as he said: "Ruth, I don't know yet what you mean--why you're saying this?"

"I think you do, Stuart," she said simply. "Or I think you will, if you'll let yourself. It's simply that this--" she touched the envelope on the table before her--"that this finds us over on the other side of marriage. And this is what I mean!" she flamed. "I mean that the marriage between us was too real to go through the mockery this would make possible now!" She turned away because she was close to tears.

He sat there in silence. Then, "Have I done anything, Ruth?" he asked in the hesitating way of one at sea.

She shook her head without turning back to him.

"You apparently have got the impression," he went on, a faint touch of resentment creeping into his voice at having to make the declaration, "that I don't care any more. That--that isn't so," he said awkwardly and with a little rise of resentment.

Ruth had turned a little more toward him, but was looking down at her hands, working with them as if struggling for better control. "I have no--complaint on that score," she said very low.

"Things change," he went on, with a more open manner of defence. "The first kind of love doesn't last forever. It doesn't with anyone," he finished, rather sullenly.

"I know that, Stuart," she said quietly. "I know enough to know that.

But I know this as well. I know that sometimes that first kind of love leaves a living thing to live by. I know that it does--sometimes. And I know that with us--it hasn't."

As if stung by that he got up and began walking angrily about the room.

"You're talking nonsense! Why wouldn't we get married, I'd like to know, after all this time together? We _will_ get married--that's all there is to it! A nice spectacle we would make of ourselves if we didn't! Have you thought of that?" he demanded. "Have you thought of what people would say?"

Again her lips traced that faint smile that showed the sadness of her face. "There was a time, Stuart," she said wearily, "when we were not governed by what people would say."

He frowned, but went on more mildly: "You've got the thing all twisted up, Ruth. You do that sometimes. You often have a queer way of looking at a thing; not the usual way--a--well, a sort of twisted way."

She got up. One hand was at her throat as if feeling some impediment there; the knuckles of her clenched hand were tapping the table. "A queer way of looking at things," she said in quick, sharp voice that was like the tapping of her knuckles. "Not the usual way. A--sort of twisted way. Perhaps. Perhaps that's true. Perhaps that was the way I had of looking at things twelve years ago--when I left them all behind and went with you. Perhaps that was what made me do it--that queer, twisted way of looking at things! But this much is true, Stuart, and this you have got to know is true. I went with you because I was as I was. I'm going my way alone now because I am as I am. And what you don't see is this,--that the thing that made me go with you then is the thing that makes me go my way alone now."

For a moment they stood there facing each other, her eyes forcing home what she had said. But she was trembling and suddenly, weakly, she sat down.

"Well, I simply can't understand it!" he cried petulantly and flung open the door and stood looking out.

"Look here, Ruth," he turned sharply to her after a little, "have you thought of the position this puts _me_ in? Have you thought of the position you would put _me_ in?" he contended hotly. "Do you know what people would say about me? You ought to know what they'd say! They'd say _I_ was the one!--they'd say _I_ didn't want to do it!"

There was a little catch something like a laugh as she replied: "Of course. They'll say men don't marry women of that sort, won't they?"

"Oh, you can't do this, Ruth," he went on quickly. "You see, it can't be done. I tell you it wouldn't be right! It just wouldn't be _right_--in any sense. Why can't you see that? Can't you see that we've got to vindicate the whole thing? That we've got to show them that it _does_ last! That's the vindication for it," he finished stoutly, "that it's the kind of a love that doesn't die!