Amos remembered to put the tube up, to ring the bell. He walked out of the office into the parlor; he was not conscious that he walked on tiptoe or that he moved the arm-chair softly as if to avoid making a noise. He sank back into the great leather depths and stared dully about him. “They’ve called my bluff!” he whispered; “there isn’t anything left I can do.” He could not remember that he had ever been in a similar situation, because, although he had had many a buffet and some hard falls from life, never had he been at the end of his devices or his obstinate courage. But now there was nothing, nothing to be done.
“By-and-by I will go and tell Sol,” he thought, in a dull way. No; he would let him hope a little longer; the morning would be time enough.... He looked down at his own hands, and a shudder contracted the muscles of his neck, and his teeth met.
“Brace up, you coward!” he adjured himself; but the pith was gone out of his will. That which he had thought, looking at his hands, was that she would never want to touch them again. Amos’s love was very humble. He knew that Ruth did not love him. Why should she? Like all true lovers in the dawn of the New Day, he was absorbed in his gratitude to her for the power to love. There is nothing so beautiful, so exciting, so infinitely interesting, as to love. To be loved is a pale experience beside it, being, indeed, but the mirror to love, without which love may never find its beauty, yet holding, of its own right, neither beauty nor charm. Amos had accepted Ruth’s kindness, her sympathy, her goodness, as he accepted the way her little white teeth shone in her smile, and the lovely depths of her eyes, and the crisp melody of her voice—as windfalls of happiness, his by kind chance or her goodness, not for any merit of his own. He was grateful, and he did not presume; he had only come so far as to wonder whether he ever would dare—But now he only asked to be her friend and servant. But to have her shrink from him, to have his presence odious to her ... he did not know how to bear it! And there was no way out. Not only the State held him, the wish of the helpless, trusting creature that he had failed to save was stronger than any law of man. He thought of Mrs. Raker and her foolish schemes: that woman didn’t understand how a man felt. But all of a sudden he found himself getting up and going quickly to his father’s picture; and he was saying out loud to the painted soldier: “I know my duty! I know my duty!” Without, the snow was driving against the window-pane; that accursed Thing creaked and swayed under the flail of the wind, but kept its stature. Within, the tumult and combat in a human soul was so fierce that only at long intervals did the storm beat its way to his consciousness. Once, stopping his walk, he listened and heard sobs, and a gentle old voice that he knew in a solemn, familiar monotony of tone; and he was aware that the women were in the other room weeping and praying. And up-stairs Sol, who had never done a mean trick in his life, and been content with so little, and tried to share all he got, was waiting for the sweetheart who never could come, turning that pitiful smile of his to the door every time the wind rattled it, “trying to hope!”
He had not shed a tear for his own misery, but now he leaned his arm on the frame of his mother’s portrait and sobbed. He was standing thus when Ruth saw him, when she flashed up to him, cold and wet and radiant.
She was too breathless to speak; but she did not need to speak.
“You’ve got it, Ruth!” he cried. “O God, you’ve got the reprieve!”
“Yes, I have, Amos; here it is. I couldn’t telegraph because the wires were down, but the Governor and the railroad superintendent fixed it so we could come on an engine. I knew you were suffering. Elly is with Mother Smith and Mrs. Raker, but I—but I wanted to come to you.”
If he had thought once of himself he must have heard the new note in her voice. But he did not think once of himself; he could only think of Sol.
“But the Governor, didn’t he refuse to see you?” said he.
“No; he refused to see poor Mr. Dennison.” Ruth used the slighting pity of the successful. “We didn’t try to go to him; we went to his wife.”