Poor Ruth! She felt as though stuff that was bitter enough had been mixed and steeped, and held to her lips, and that she was being obliged to drink it to the very dregs. Did she need it? Was it possible that the Divine Physician saw her need of such bitter herbs as these which had fallen to her lot? She started, and even flushed a little over the sudden thought. She did not believe it. This was her father’s sin, not hers. It had only fallen upon her because of the old, solemn law: “The iniquities of the fathers shall be visited upon the children.” She hurried her thoughts away from it. It would not do to sit in that room, with that woman staring at her, and indulge in questionings like these.
“I came in to see if I could be of any assistance to you in the way of shopping. You will need something new, I suppose, before the gathering of friends which my father proposes to have.”
Ruth had decided to take it as a matter of course that new garments were to be bought, and thus forestall, if she could, haughty objections. She need not have been thus careful. Mrs. Erskine had stated truly that she was not one of the “haughty” sort. She had no objection to any number of new dresses, and to their being made as elaborately as possible.
“Now you speak of it, I dare say I do,” she said, leaning back complacently in her comfortable little rocker. “In fact, your pa spoke of that very thing this morning. He said like enough you would ’tend to it, and he filled my pocket-book up handsome. There ain’t a stingy streak about your pa. I knew that, years and years ago, when he was a young man. It was the very first thing that drawed me to him—the free kind of way in which he threw around his money. It seemed so noble-like, specially when I was drivin’ every nerve to keep soul and body together, and lived among folks that didn’t dare to say their bodies was their own, for fear they would have ’em seized on for debt, and took to jail. I tell you that was livin’! You don’t know nothing about it, and I hope to the land that you never will.”
What could Ruth do but groan inwardly, and wish that her father had been, in his youth, the veriest miser that ever walked the earth! Anything, so that this terrible woman would not have been “drawed” to him. She tried to hurry the question:
“What have you thought of getting?” she asked, nervously twisting and untwisting the tassels of the tidy against which she leaned, and feeling disagreeably conscious that a glow of color had mounted to her very temples in her efforts at self-control.
“Land alive, I don’t know. I’ve thought of a dozen different dresses since your pa told me this morning what he wanted. He wants things to be awful nice, I can see that; and why shouldn’t he? A man that’s got money and is free with it has a right to say what he will have, I’m sure. I think it ought to be something bright, like something—well, bridie, you know.”
This last with such a distressing little simper that it was almost more than Ruth could do to keep from rushing from that awful room, and declaring to her father that she would have no more to do with this thing. He should fight his dreadful battles alone. But outwardly she held still, and the shrill, uncultured little voice went on:
“You see I am almost like a bride, meeting your pa’s friends so for the first time, though land knows it is long enough ago that I planned what to wear when I should meet ’em. It took longer to get ready than I expected.”
There was not even a spice of bitterness in this sentence. If there had been—if there had been a suggestion that this woman felt somewhat of her own wrongs, Ruth thought that she could have borne it better. But the tone was simply contemplative, as of one who was astonished, in a mild way, over the tragedy that life had managed to get up for her.