Ruth wrote to her lover. Her
father’s keeping secret his receipt of Godfrey’s
letter until he had mailed its answer, could mean only
that the answer was for Godfrey to come home.
The General’s talk of being tired by the writing
of it was a purely expletive irony, for he had written
with the brevity of an old soldier to a young sailor;
but he had written that trouble was impending, that
its source was Arthur, and that the last hope of removing
it lay with him, Godfrey.
A line from Ruth, pursuing after this
message, would be one steamer behind it all the way,
but it would reach the far wanderer before any leave
would permit him to start homeward.
So, now, what should she write?
If her father had discerned so much more than he had
let any one know he had discerned, how about others?
How about the kind whose chief joy is ruthless guesswork?
That need of haste was one she had overlooked.
Wise father!
And yet-haste itself is
such a hazardous thing! Ah, if Arthur had come
in on that evening express, what to write were an easier
question. The minutes sped by; her pen overhung
the paper with the opening sentence unfinished, and
every moment the thought she kept putting away came
back: “Leonard!-Leonard!-Godfrey’s
summons should go to him from Leonard; and it should
flash under the seas, not crawl across them!”-Hark!
She rose and glided to the door through
which her brother had gone. There she was startled
by the sight of him speeding cautiously down the stair.
On entering his unlighted room Leonard
had moved across it to a front window, where, veiled
by the chamber’s dusk, he stood looking out into
a night dimly illumined by the overclouded moon.
The Winslow house widened palely among its surrounding
trees. The servants’ rooms were remote as
well as on the farther side, and on the nearer side
no lamplight shone. A short way down the street
a glow came from the Morris cottage. Evidently
Isabel was with her mother.
He stood and mused, unconsciously
lulled by the cool drip of myriad leaves, and with
his mind poised midway between emotion and thought.
To yield to emotion would have been to chafe against
the bands that knitted his life and hers to every
life about them. To yield to thought would have
been to think of her as no more to be drawn from these
surrounding ties than some animate rainbow-fringed
flower of the sea can be torn from its shell without
laceration and death. To give thought word would
have been to cry, “Oh, truest of womankind, where
would this unsuspected man, this Leonard Byington,
be if you were other than you are?” Yet the
suspense between avoided feeling and avoided thought
held him where he stood.
So standing, it drifted idly into
his mind that yonder arbor must be very wet to-night,
and the cinder sidewalk out here much drier. As
the thought moved him to draw one step back, the glow
from the cottage broadened. Its front door had
opened, and Mrs. Morris’s young maid came out
with a lantern, followed by Isabel saying last fond
words to her mother as the convalescent closed the
door.
“Good-night!” she called back.
In one great wave the young man’s
passion rolled over its bounds and brought him to
his knees with arms outstretched. “Oh, Isabel!”
he murmured. “Oh, my God! Oh, Isabel!
Isabel! if I had but lost you fairly!”
The two slight figures came daintily
along the wet path in single file, the maid throwing
the lantern’s beams hither and yon as she looked
back to answer Isabel’s kindly questions; Isabel
one moment half lost in the gloom of the trees, and
then so lighted up again from foot to brow that it
was easy to see the very lines of her winsome mouth,
ripe for compassion or fortitude, yet wishful as a
little child’s.
Her secret observer moaned as he stood
erect. The fury of his soul seemed to enhance
his stature. He did not speak again, but, “Oh,
Isabel! harder to strive against than all the world
beside!” was the unuttered cry that wrote itself
upon his tortured brow. “If your unfair
winner would only hold you by fair means! Yet
I too was to blame! I too was to blame, and you
alone were blameless!”
Opposite his window Isabel ceased
her light talk with the maid, halted, bent, and scanned
something just off the firm path, in the clean wet
sand.
The maid turned and flooded her with
the light of the lantern just as she impulsively lifted
an alarmed glance to Leonard’s window and as
quickly averted it. “Go on,” said
the mistress. “I can walk faster if you
can.”
The girl quickened her steps, but
had not taken a dozen when Isabel stopped again.
“Wait, Minnie. Now you can run back, thank
you.” She reached for the lantern.
“I-I thought I was
to go all the way, and-and bring the lantern
back.”
“No, I’ll keep the lantern;
but I’ll stay here and throw the light after
you till you get in. Run along.”
Minnie tripped away. As she came
where they had first halted, a purposely belated good-night
softly overtook her; and when she looked back, Isabel,
as if by inadvertency, sent the lantern’s beam
into her eyes. So too much light sent the maid
by the spot unenlightened.
Leonard drew aside lest the beam swing
next into his window. But the precaution was
wasted; the glare followed Minnie.
Isabel also followed, slowly, a few
paces, and then moved obliquely into the roadway and
toward the window. Only for a moment the ray swept
near her unseen observer, and, lighting up the rain-packed
sand close before herself, revealed a line of footprints
slanting toward her from Leonard’s own gate.
As the cottage door shut Minnie in,
Isabel, reassured by the brightness of the Byingtons’
lower windows, stopped for a furtive instant, and
holding in her hand the fellow of the slipper so lately
in Ruth’s fingers, exactly fitted it to one
of these footprints. Then, with the lantern on
her farther side, and every vein surging with fright
and shame, she made haste toward the open gateway
of the Winslow house.
A short space from it she recoiled
with a gesture of dismay and self-repression, and
her light shone full upon a man. He stepped from
the garden, his form tensely lifted, his face aflame
with anger.
But her small figure straightened
also, and swiftly muffling the lantern in a fold of
her skirt, she exclaimed, audibly only to him, though
in words clear-cut as musical notes, “Oh, Arthur
Winslow, has it come to this?”
She arrested his resentful answer
by the uplift of a hand, which left the lantern again
uncovered. “Inside! In the house!”
she softly cried, starting on. “Not here!
Look!-those upper windows!-we’re
in full view of them!”
Quickly she remuffled the lantern,
but not in time to hide his motion as he threw out
an arm and pushed her rudely back, while he exclaimed,
“In full view of them answer me one question!”
It was then that Leonard went hurriedly downstairs.