And now she was rid of Deane! She had shaken them all off; for that little time she was free! She hurried toward the narrow street that trailed off into the country. Stuart would be waiting for her there. Her joy in that, her eagerness, rushed past the dangers all around her, the thing that possessed her avoiding thought of the disastrous possibilities around her as a man in a boat on a narrow rushing river would keep clear of rocks jutting out on either side. Sometimes the feeling that swept her on did graze the risks so close about her and she shivered a little. Suppose Harriett were at the Bennetts' when Deane got there! Suppose Deane said something when they got home; suppose Ted said something that wouldn't fit in with what Deane said; suppose Deane got to Harriett's too soon—though she had told him not to be there till after half past nine. Hadn't Deane looked queer at the last? Wouldn't he suspect? Wouldn't everybody suspect, with her acting like this? And once there was the slightest suspecting....
But she was hurrying on; none of those worries, fears, had power to lay any real hold on the thing that possessed her; faster and faster she hurried; she had turned into the little street, had passed the last house, turned the bend in the road, and yes! there was Stuart, waiting for her, coming to her. Everything else fell away. Nothing else in the world mattered.
CHAPTER TEN
Ten o'clock found Ruth sitting on the porch at home with her mother and father, her brother Cyrus and Deane. Her father was talking with Deane about the operation that had been performed on the book-keeper in Mr. Holland's bank; Cyrus talked of somebody's new touring car, the number of new machines there were in town that year; her mother wondered where some of the people who had them got the money for them. The talk moved placidly from one thing to another, Mr. Holland saying at intervals that he must be going to bed, his wife slapping at the mosquitoes and talking about going inside—both delaying, comfortably stupid.
Ruth was sitting on the top step leaning back against the porch pillar. She said little, she was very tired now. Something in this dragging talk soothed her. It seemed safe just because it was so commonplace; it was relaxing. She was glad to be back to it—to the world of it; in returning safely to it she felt a curiously tender feeling for it, a perhaps absurd sense of having come through something for it. She could rest in it while within herself she continued to live back in that hour with Stuart, that hour which struggle and fear and the passionate determination to have in spite of everything had made terribly intense. They had closed themselves in with that little while of love, holding it apart from everything else, and yet every minute of it was charged with the consciousness of what was all around them. They had clung to that hour with a desperate passion, the joy of the moment that was there always stabbed with pain for a moment passing. At the last they had clung to each other as if time too—time, over which they had no control—was going to beat them apart. So much had been hard that in returning she had a warm feeling of gratitude to all of them for not making it harder for her, not questioning, exposing her; relief was so great that they were all newly dear for thus letting her alone. She had managed all right with Deane, the clumsy arrangement she had been forced into appeared to have just that haphazardness which characterizes most of the arrangements of life. Her mother had merely asked what the Lawrence's had for dinner; her father joked about the way she had trained the roses in the back yard. Strangely enough instead of feeling she had outraged them, been unworthy this easy, affectionate intercourse, she had a sense, now that she had again come through a precarious thing safely, of having saved them from something they knew not of, a strange lifted-up feeling of bearing something for them. Certainly that would not seem the feeling she should be having, but there was the odd part of it: the feelings she had were so seldom those she would expect herself to have.
Her mother and father had gone indoors; Cyrus sat out there with her and Deane for a time. Ruth did not love Cyrus as she loved Ted; he had always had too superior a manner with her for her feeling to be more than the perfunctory thing which sometimes passes for personal affection in families. It was simply that she had never admitted, even to herself, that she did not love him. He belonged to the set just older than Ruth's, though she and Deane and their friends were arriving now at the time of ceasing to be a separate entity as the young crowd and were being merged in the group just above them. That contributed to Cyrus's condescension, he being tempered for condescension.
When she and Deane were alone the talk lagged, Ruth sitting there at the head of the steps leaning against the pillar, he a few steps below her, sprawled out in awkward boyish fashion, looking up at her from time to time as she said something. Her silence did not make him feel cut off from her; the things she said were gently said; her tired smile was sweet. He spoke several times of going, but lingered. He was held by something in Ruth; it stirred something in him, not knowing that he was drawn by what another man had brought into life. He drew himself up and stole timid glances at Ruth as she looked out into the night, feeling something new in her tonight, something that touched the feeling that had all the time been there in him, growing as he grew, of itself waiting for the future as simply and naturally as all maturing things wait for the future. Ruth was the girl he had all the time cared for; he was shy about emotional things—awkward; he had had almost no emotional life; he had all the time been diffident about what she made him feel and so they had just gone along for a little time longer than was usual as boy and girl. But something sweet, mysterious, exhaling from her tonight liberated the growing, waiting feeling in him. It took him as he had not been taken before; he watched Ruth and was stilled, moved, drawn.
Finally, as if suddenly conscious of a long silence, she turned to him with something about the plans for Cora Albright's wedding—she was to be a bridesmaid and he an usher. She went on talking of the man Cora was to marry, a man she met away from home and had fallen desperately in love with. He associated the light of her face, the sweetness of her voice, with the things of romance of which she talked. All in a moment his feeling for her, what her strange, softened mood touched in him, leaped up, surging through him, not to be stayed. He moved nearer her. "You know, Ruth," he said, in queer, jerky voice, "I love you."
She gave a start, drew a little back and looked at him with a certain startled fixity as if he had stopped all else in her. For the moment she just looked at him like that, startled, fixed.