A moment after he opened it again and stood on the threshold. She was in her chair, her head bowed upon her arms on the table. As he spoke she looked up, and she never forgot the expression of his face.
“I want to say, Ruth”—he had never before called her by her first name, and his accent thrilled her—“that I shall pray for you as I pray for myself, and though I may never see you again in this world, the greatest happiness that can come to me in this life will be to hear that you have learned to say Our Father which art in heaven.”
As she looked he was gone, and his last words remained a refrain in her mind that evening and afterwards—“Our Father which art in heaven”—a refrain recurring again and again in all her life, inseparable from the memory of the man she loved.
XXII
Along the Long Island coast lay the haze of early autumn. It was the time of lassitude. In the season of ripening and decay Nature seemed to have lost her spring, and lay in a sort of delicious languor. Sea and shore were in a kind of truce, and the ocean south wind brought cool refreshment but no incentive.
From the sea the old brown farmhouse seemed a snug haven of refuge; from the inland road it appeared, with its spreading, sloping roofs, like an ancient sea-craft come ashore, which had been covered in and then embowered by kindly Nature with foliage. In those days its golden-brown color was in harmony with the ripening orchards and gardens.
Surely, if anywhere in the world, peace was here. But to its owner this very peace and quietness was becoming intolerable. The waiting days were so long, the sleepless nights of uncertainty were so weary. When her work was done, and Edith sat with a book or some sewing under the arbor where the grape clusters hung, growing dark and transparent, and the boy played about near her, she had a view of the blue sea, and about her were the twitter of birds and the hum of the cicada. The very beauty made her heart ache. Seaward there was nothing—nothing but the leaping little waves and the sky. From the land side help might come at any hour, and at every roll of wheels along the road her heart beat faster and hope sprang up anew. But day after day nothing came.
Perhaps there is no greater bravery than this sort of waiting, doing the daily duty and waiting. Endurance is woman's bravery, and Edith was enduring, with an almost broken but still with a courageous heart. It was all so strange. Was it simply shame that kept him away, or had he ceased to love her? If the latter, there was no help for her. She had begged him to come, she had offered to leave the boy with her cousin companion and go to him. Perhaps it was pride only. In one of his short letters he had said, “Thank God, your little fortune is untouched.” If it were pride only, how could she overcome it? Of this she thought night and day. She thought, and she was restless, feverish, and growing thin in her abiding anxiety.
It was true that her own fortune was safe and in her control. But with the usual instinct of women who know they have an income not likely to be ever increased, she began to be economical. She thought not of herself; but of the boy. It was the boy's fortune now. She began to look sharply after expenses; she reduced her household; she took upon herself the care of the boy, and other household duties. This was all well for her, for it occupied her time, and to some extent diverted her thoughts.