The One Woman (Dixon, 1903)/Chapter 16
The night before the day Gordon had fixed for their final parting Ruth slept but little. The task of gathering his things scattered about the house was harder than she had hoped.
Over each little trinket that spoke its message of the tender intimacy of married life she had lingered and cried. She wished to keep everything.
At last she placed the clothes in his trunk, his collars, cuffs, cravats and such odds and ends as he would need at once, and the rest she packed away carefully in bureau drawers and locked them up.
His slippers and dressing-gowns she knew he would want, but she made up her mind she would keep them. The slippers were an old-fashioned pattern with quaint Spanish embroidery worked around the edges. She had made the first pair before they were married, with her girl's heart fluttering with new-found happiness. She had allowed him no other kind since their marriage. This bit of sentiment she had guarded even in the darkest days of the past year's estrangement. She had worked each pair with her own hand.
His dressing-gowns, in which he often studied at home in her room late on Saturday nights, she had always made for him, changing their designs from time to time as her fancy had led her.
Around these two articles of his wardrobe her very heart-strings seemed woven.
She placed them in his trunk once, telling herself through her tears:
"He may think of me when he sees them."
Then the lightning flashed across the clouds in her eyes.
"She might touch them! Let her make them for him after her own devil's fancy!"
She took them out, kissed them and packed them away. His picture she took down carefully from the walls, his photographs from her mantel and bureau and dresser. The life-sized one she locked in a closet and packed the others with his belongings she meant to keep.
On a wedding certificate, set in a quaint old gold frame, she looked long and tenderly. She took it down from its place over her bureau, where it had hung for years, and brushed the dust from the back. On its broad white margins he had written a poem to her on the birth of their first baby. He had sent her yards of rhymes during their courtship, but this was a poem. Every line was wet with his tears, and every thought throbbed with the sweetest music of his soul wrought to its highest tension of feeling.
She read it over and over again and cried as though her heart would break as a thousand tender memories came stealing back from their early married life.
"Oh, dear God!" she sobbed. "How could he have felt that—and he did feel it—and now desert me!"
She sat for an hour with this framed emblem of her happiness and her sorrow in her hands, dreaming of their past.
She was a girl again in old Hampton, Virginia, her heart all a-quiver over a ball at the Hygeia, where she was to meet a guest, a distinguished young preacher resting for the summer just from his divinity course. He had seen her in the crowd at the hotel and begged a friend to introduce him. She was going to meet him in the parlours, dressed in the splendour of her ballroom dress that night, and conquer this handsome young giant. And from the moment they met, she was the conquered, and he the conqueror.
The incense of their honeymoon in a village of southern Indiana during his first pastorate, when the wonder of love made storm days bright with splendour and clothed in beauty the meanest clod of earth, stole over her soul—each memory added to her pain, and yet they were sweet. She hugged them to her heart.
"They are all mine at least!" she sighed. "And I am glad I have lived them."
At two o'clock she went into the nursery and looked at the sleeping children. She bent over the cradle of the boy. He was dreaming, and a smile was playing about the corners of his lips.
He was so like Gordon, with his little mouth twitching in dreamy laughter, she fell on her knees, and buried her face in her delicate tapering hands, crying:
"How can I bear it!"
She placed her arms on the rail of the cradle and gazed at him tenderly.
"Lord, keep him clean and pure, and whatever he may do in life, may he never break a woman's heart!" she softly prayed.
Into her first-born's face she looked long and in silence. How like her, and how like him, and how marvelous the miracle of this union of flesh and blood and spirit in a living soul! Lucy was growing more like her every day. She could see and hear herself in her ways and voice, until she would laugh aloud sometimes at the memory of her own childhood. And yet to see her very self growing into the startling image of her lover who was deserting her cut anew with stinging power.
Again she was softly praying: "Dear Lord, whatever shall come to her, poverty or riches, joy or pain, honour or shame, sunshine or shadow, save her from this. My feet will climb this Calvary, and my lips drink its gall, but may the cup pass from her!"
After a few hours of fitful sleep, she rose and looked out her window on another radiant November morning. So clear was the sky she could see the flag-staffs of the great downtown buildings and back of them in the distant bay the pennant masts of ships at anchor. The trees in Central Park seemed to glow with the splendour of the dying autumn's sun. The glory of the day mocked her sorrow.
"What does Nature care?" she sighed. "And yet who knows, it may be a token! I must bravely play my part and leave the rest with God."
Watching at the window she saw Gordon coming, his broad feet measuring a giant's stride, his wide shoulders and magnificent head high with unconscious strength.
She wondered if he would stop in the parlour as a visitor or come to her room as was his custom, and a sharp pain cut her with the thought of their changed relationship.
He stopped in the hall, asked the maid to send the children down at once, and stepped into the parlour.
He felt a strange embarrassment in his own home. This house he had bought for Ruth soon after their arrival in New York. It had just been built in the wide-open space of the cliffs on Washington Heights. The Pilgrim Church's members were long since scattered over every quarter of the city, and, by arranging his study in the church, he was able to have his home so far removed from the noise of the downtown district. He had thus fulfilled Ruth's passionate desire for a home of her own within their moderate means. He recalled now with tender melancholy how happy they had been decorating this little nest, and how far from his wildest dream had been such an ending of it all.
But he had come with important news, and he hoped her pain would be softened by its announcement.
The children entered with shouts of delight. First one would hug him, and then the other, and then both would try at the same time.
Lucy put her hands on his smooth ruddy cheeks and kissed his lips and eyes with the quaintest imitation of her mother's trick of gesture.
"Where have you been, Papa? We thought you were never coming? Mama said you were gone for a trip and would come to-day, but"—her voice sank—"she's been crying, and crying, and we don't know what's the matter. I'm so glad you've come."
"Well, you and brother run upstairs to play and tell her Papa wishes to see her."
The children left and Ruth came down at once.
As she entered the room, he was struck by the change in her face and manner. She seemed transfigured by a strange, spiritual elation. She was gracious, natural and friendly. The anxiety had passed from her face, and the storm in her dark eyes seemed stilled by a steady radiance from the soul.
"I'm glad to see you looking better, Ruth," he said, with feeling.
"Yes, I have a new standard now of measuring life, its pain and its joy. The soul can only pass once through such a moment as that I lived, prostrate on the floor at your feet last Monday. I have looked Death in the face. I am no longer afraid."
"I am very, very sorry to give you such pain. I did not think you cared so deeply," he said, gently.
"Yes, I know I have seemed indifferent and resentful for the past year. I thought you would come back to your old self by and by. In my poor proud soul I thought I was punishing you. How little, dear, I dreamed of this! The thought of really losing you never once entered my heart. It was unthinkable. I do not believe it yet. Such love as ours, such tenderness and devotion as you gave to me once, the delirium of love's joy that found itself in my motherhood and wrought itself in the forms of our babies—no, Frank, it cannot die, unless God dies! And I shall not lose you at last, unless God forgets me, and He will not."
Her face, even through her tears, was illumined by an assurance so strong, so prophetic, the man was startled.
"I need not tell you, Ruth, that I desire your happiness. And, strange as it may seem to you, Miss Ransom regards you with tenderness."
The dark eyes flashed a gleam of lightning from their depths.
"Thanks. I can live without her maudlin pity."
"You misjudge her," he cried, raising his hand.
"Perhaps; but I'll ask you, Frank, not to dishonour me, or this little home you were once good enough to give to me, by mentioning that woman's name within its doors again."
The sensitive mouth closed with an emphasis he could not mistake.
"But I am the bearer from her to-day of a token of her regard. She has determined to turn over to you as quickly as possible a half-million dollars of her remaining fortune."
Ruth sprang to her feet, her face scarlet, her breast heaving, her lithe figure erect and trembling.
"And you dare bring this message to me? This offer to sell my husband and my love!"
"Come, come, Ruth, a woman has no need to sacrifice a great fortune in New York for a husband. They are cheaper than that."
"They do seem cheap," she answered, bitterly.
"You should have common sense. The spirit of sacrifice in this great gift to you and the children is too deep and honest to be met with a sneer. It is my desire and hers that you shall be forever beyond want."
Ruth's face softened and a tender smile lit it once more.
"Frank, my darling, you cannot think me so base? You know there is not a drop of mean blood in me. Can gold pay for my heart's desire? The price for my beloved? Pile the earth with diamonds to the stars, I'd hold it trash for the touch of your hand!"
The man moved nervously.
"You must have some sense, Ruth. Surely, I'm not worth all this if I leave you so. You must take this money."
She moved closer to him and held up her delicate hands, with the sunlight gleaming through the red blood of her tapering fingers.
"You see these hands? They have only known the gentle tasks of love. Well, I'll scrub, sew and wash the clothes of working-men before one dollar of her gold shall stain them!"
"You cannot be so foolish," he protested, impatiently. "Besides, she has given me this money to give to you."
"Ah, my love," she went on, as though she had not heard his last words, "if you were frankly evil as other men, I might bear this shame with better grace. Others before me, as good as I, have borne its burden. But when I think that you are making your sin a religion, and that you are going to preach with the zeal of a prophet this gospel of the brute and call it freedom, how can I bear it?"
They were both silent for a moment.
"Let us change this disgusting subject, Frank," she said at length. "I wish you to leave with something kindlier to remember in my face than this shadow. You see, I have taken your pictures all down and locked them up. I have placed your clothes, all I could spare, in your trunk—for even these little things to me are heart treasures now. I could not let you take the slippers I have made for you with my own hands, or your dressing-gowns. That woman shall never touch them. The marriage certificate, with the little poem written to me on the birth of Lucy, I've packed up, too, with your pictures. I've put them away, because, just now, it would break my heart to look at them after this parting with you. When I come back from the South I will be stronger, and I will bring them out again. Your ring is mine until God's hand shall take it. I'll teach our babies always to love you."
Her voice broke, and he looked away.
"I will tell them that you have gone on a long journey into a strange country, and that you will come back again because you love them."
He stirred uneasily in his chair, crossed his legs and frowned.
"And I wish you to leave me to-day with the certainty—you can read it in my eyes, if you doubt my lips—that I will love you to the end, though you kill me. You can go on no journey so long, in no world so strange, that I shall not follow. My soul will envelop you. For better, for worse, through evil report and good report, I am yours."
Again a convulsive sob shook her, and she was silent.
Gordon felt an almost resistless impulse to take her in his arms and kiss and soothe her.
Through her tears she smiled at him.
"How beautiful you are, my dear! You will not forget that I love you? The spring, the summer, the autumn, the winter will only bring to me messages from our past. The way will be lonely, but the memory of the touch of your hand, our hours of perfect peace and trustfulness, the sweetness of your kisses on my lips, the living pictures of your face in our children, I will cherish."
He stooped to kiss her as he left, but she drew back trembling.
"No, Frank, not while your lips are warm with the touch of another and your flesh on fire with desire for her. It will be sweet to remember that you wished it—for I know, what you do not, that deep down in your soul of souls you love me. I will abide God's time."
He left her with a smile playing around her sensitive mouth and lighting the shadows of her great dark eyes.