One night she dreamed that he would never come again, and woke to find tears streaming across her cheeks. She lay awake for a long time, eyes wide and staring, wondering if she loved him.
During this interval of Darrin’s absence there manifested itself in Evered a curious wistful desire to placate Ruth; to win her good will.
She noticed it first one day when the man had been very still, sitting all day in the kitchen with his eyes before him, brooding over unguessed matters. It was a day of blustering, blowing rain, a day when the wind lashed about the house and there was little that could be done out of doors. Ruth, busy about the room, watched Evered covertly; her eyes strayed toward him now and again.
She had not fully realized till that day how much the man was aging. The change had come gradually, but it had been marked. His hair, that had been black as coal six months before, was iron gray now; it showed glints that were snow white, here and there. The skin of his cheeks had lost its bronze luster; it seemed to have grown loose, as though the man were shrinking inside. It hung in little folds about his mouth and jaw.
His head, too, was bowing forward; his head that had always been so erect, so firm, so hard and sternly poised. His neck seemed to be weakening beneath the load it bore; and his shoulders were less square. They hung forward, as though the man were cold and were guarding his chest with his arms.
The fullness of the change came to Ruth with something of a shock, came when she was thinking it strange that Evered should be content to remain all day indoors. He was by nature an active man, of overflowing bodily energy; he was used to go out in all weathers to his tasks. She had seen him come in, dripping, in the past; his cheeks ruddy from the wet and cold, his eyes glowing with the fire of health, his chest heaving to great deep breaths of air. More and more often of late, she remembered, he had stayed near the stove and the fire, as though it comforted him.
Ruth had not John’s sympathetic understanding of the heart of Evered; nevertheless, she knew, as John did, that the man had—in his harsh fashion—loved his dead wife well. She had always known this, even though she had never been able to understand how a man might hurt the woman he loved. If she had not known, she would not have blamed Evered so bitterly for all the bitter past. It was one of the counts of her indictment of him that he had indeed loved Mary; and that even so he had made the dead woman unhappy through so many years.
Watching him this day Ruth thought that sorrow was breaking him; and the thought somewhat modified, without her knowing it, the strength of her condemnation of the man. When in mid afternoon he took from her the shovel and broom with which she was preparing to clean out the ashes of the stove, and did the task himself, she was amazed and angry with herself to find in her heart a spark of pity for him.
“Let me do that, Ruthie,” he had said. “It’s hard for you.”
He had never been a man given to small chores about the house; he was awkward at it. His very awkwardness, the earnestness of his clumsy efforts—warmed the girl’s heart; she found her eyes wet as she watched him, and took recourse in an abrupt protest.