There was a choking little cry from Ted. Ruth murmured something, her face all compassion for him. But after a moment she left her brother and stood alone beside her father. In that moment of seeing her face, before turning away because it seemed he should turn away, Deane got one of the strangest impressions of his life. It was as if she was following her father—reaching him; as if there was a fullness of feeling, a rising passionate intensity that could fairly overflow from life. Then she turned back to Ted.
Cyrus and Harriett had entered. There was a moment when the four children were there together. Cyrus did not come up to the bed until Ruth had left. Deane watched his face as—perfunctorily subdued, decorous, he stood where Ruth had stood a moment before. Then Cyrus turned to him and together they walked from the room, Cyrus asking why they had not been telephoned in time.
Deane lingered for a little while, hating to go without again seeing Ruth and Ted. He tapped at Ruth's door; he was not answered, but the unlatched door had swung a little open at his touch. He saw that the brother and sister were out on the little porch opening off Ruth's room. He went out and stood beside them, knowing that he would be wanted. The sun was just rising, touching the dew on the grass. The birds were singing for joy in another day. The three who had just seen death stood there together in silence.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The two days when the natural course of life was arrested by death had passed. Their father had been buried that afternoon, and in the early evening Ted and Ruth were sitting on the little upper porch, very quiet in the new poignant emptiness of the house. Many people had been coming and going in those last few days; now that was over and there was a pause before the routine of life was to be resumed. The fact that the nurse had gone seemed to turn the page.
Ruth had just asked how long Cyrus was going to stay and Ted replied that he wanted to stay on a week or perhaps more, attending to some business. She knew how crowded it must be for them at Harriett's, knew that if she went away Cyrus would come home. There seemed nothing more to keep her; she would like to be with Ted awhile, but it seemed she could not do that without continuing a hard condition for them all. They could settle into a more natural order of things with her not there. It was time for her to go.
It was hard to have to think that. She would love to have stayed a little while. She had been away so long—wanting home for so long. She knew now, facing the going away, how much she had secretly hoped might result from this trip back home.
She had seen a number of people in the past few days—relatives, old friends of the family, friends of Ted. She had done better in meeting them than, just a little while before, she would have thought possible. Something remained with her from that hour at her mother's grave, that strange hour when she had seemed to see life from outside, beyond it. That had summoned something within herself that no personal hurt could scatter, as if taking her in to something from which no circumstance could drive her out. She had felt an inner quiet, a steadiness within; there was power in it, and consolation. It took her out of that feeling of having no place—no right to a place, the feeling that had made her wretched and powerless. She was of life; her sure inner sense of the reality and beauty of that seemed a thing not to be broken down from without. It was hers, her own. It sustained her; it gave her poise. The embarrassment of other people gave way before her simple steadiness. She had had but the one point of contact with them—that of her father's death; it made her want more, made going away hard. It was hard to leave all the old things after even this slight touch with them again.
And that new quiet, that new force within was beginning to make for new thinking. She had thought much about what she had lived through—she could not help doing that, but she was thinking now with new questionings. She had not questioned much; she had accepted. What was gathering within her now was a feeling that a thing so real, so of life as her love had been should not be a thing to set her apart, should not be a thing to blight the lives that touched hers. This was not something called up in vindication, a mere escape from hard thinking, her own way out from things she could not bear; it was deeper than that, far less facile. It came from that inner quiet—from that strange new assurance—this feeling that her love should not have devastated, that it was too purely of life for that; that it was a thing to build up life, to give to it; this wondering, at once timid and bold, if there was not something wrong with an order that could give it no place, that made it life's enemy.