“I could do no less. There was no other call for the money I earned in those first few years, while my aunt still lived. And I thought that perhaps—” He came towards her. “That perhaps—that perhaps it might help you in your career—my aunt corresponded with my poor mother’s friends in Cobequid Village—I knew how you were slaving and sending money to your folks.”
“God bless you, Ruth.”
“I hope it was a little help to you, Matt.” He thrilled under the name, spoken for the first time. “I have often liked to think it was—that I had a wee finger in the making of a great artist.”
Her words cut him to the heart. How could he tell her that her money had come too late? He was about to murmur something, but she stopped him.
“No, don’t answer me for fear you should dispel my illusion. It has been such a joy to me when I read about your rapid rise to say to myself: ‘Ah, perhaps we know something.’ But half the joy was in the secrecy; now you have found me out, don’t take away the relics of my pleasure.”
“But why should you bother to read things about me?” he murmured, only half sincerely, for another and more agitating suspicion was fast germinating in his breast.
She flashed a quick glance up at him as he stood over her, then looked down again indifferently, her sweet mouth quivering. “Oh, why should I not be proud of knowing, if only in boyhood, the only great man our township ever produced?”
But he had now been trained in woman’s looks. Rosina and Eleanor had taught him much, and the thought that was borne in upon him now—the conviction that Ruth, too, loved him, that she had always cherished her childish affection, though his own had been swamped by his craving for Art—was not the complacent conviction of a coxcomb. It was a chilling agony. It pierced his breast like a jagged icicle. He had an appalling sense as of responsibility for a ruined life. The image of “Aunt Clara” flashed suddenly before him—careworn, faded, broken-down, unlovely. Was that to be the end of Ruth—the sweet playmate, the great soul?
“And you, too, have done something in life,” he said, as if to reassure himself, trying to curve his trembling lips to a smile.
She looked up frankly at him. “In so far as I have been able to help Linda to help other girls.”