Ruth shrank from the cowardly glitter of his eyes, and wondered at the sudden pallor. What had she said to daunt him so? Directly, the coward recovered himself.
"And what would you tell?" he said, with forced audacity. "Is it a terrible sin for a man to stop the la.s.s he is to wed, for a word wherever he chances to find her? What worse can you say of me than that?"
Ruth saw the dastardly anxiety in his face; but did not comprehend it.
He seemed almost afraid of her.
"Is it nothing that you force your company upon me, when it has become hateful to me? Is it nothing that you hara.s.s a sick man with complaints, and thrust him back with unwelcome visits, when he might otherwise get well? Is it manly to come here at all, when I have told you, again and again, that your presence is the most repulsive torment on earth to me?"
The man absolutely laughed again. He was once more at ease. Her words had meant nothing more than the old complaint. Still he stood in the girl"s path.
"Why will you torment me so?" she pleaded, with sudden tears. "What have I ever done that you should haunt me in my trouble?"
"I only give you trouble for hate, harsh acts for bitter words, insult for insult. You can stop them all with a word."
"A word I will never speak!" answered the girl, firmly. "Hear me once for all, Richard Storms. There was a time when you were dear to me as a playfellow, and might have been my life-long friend--"
"Friend!" repeated Storms, with a disdainful fling of the hand. "You might say that much of a hound."
"But now," continued Ruth, desperately, "there is not a thing which creeps the earth that I loath as I do the sight of you."
This was a rash speech, and the most bitter that had ever burned on those young lips. She felt that on the moment, for the man"s face turned gray, as if invisible ashes had swept over it. For a while he stood motionless, then his lips parted, and he said, in a deep, hoa.r.s.e voice, that made her shrink in every nerve, "There is one other sight that shall be yet more loathsome to you!"
Ruth attempted to speak, but her lips clove together. He saw a paleness like his own creeping over her face, and added, with ferocious cruelty, "Shall I tell you what it is? That of your lover--of the man who has stolen you from me--in a criminal"s box, with half the county looking on."
If the fiend had intended to say more, he was prevented, for the poor girl sank to the earth, turning a wild look on his face, like a deer that he had shot.
There might have been some relenting in the man"s heart, hard as it was, for he partly stooped, as if to lift his victim from the earth; but she shrunk from his touch, and fell into utter insensibility.
CHAPTER XLVII.
NIGHT ON THE BALCONY.
"I must see him. I will see him. No one will tell me the truth but himself. I must know it or die!"
Ruth stood alone under the shadow of the trees, white as a ghost, and rendered desperate by words that had smitten her into insensibility.
How long she had lain in that forest path the girl scarcely knew. When she came to herself, it was with a shudder of dread, lest that evil face should be looking down upon her; but all was silent. The birds were singing close by her, and there was a soft rustle of leaves, nothing more. She lifted her head, and with her hands searched for marks of the blow that seemed to have levelled her to the earth. A blow! She remembered now it was a word that she had sunk under--a coa.r.s.e, cruel word, that brought a horrid picture with it, from which every nerve in her body recoiled.
She was very feeble, now, and could scarcely walk. It seemed as if she never would get to the house; the distance appeared interminable. She could not keep in the narrow paths that coiled along the flower-beds, but wavered in her steps from weakness, as her enemy had done from wrath, until her feet were tangled in the creeping flowers and strawberry-vines.
Her father was lying with his eyes closed when she went in, and a smile was upon his mouth. Even in his feeble state, he had found strength to free his child from a hateful alliance, and the thought made him happy. Ruth stooped down, and kissed him with her cold lips.
The touch startled him. He opened his eyes, and saw how wan and tremulous she was.
"Do not fret!" he said, tenderly. "Why should you, darling? I have sent him away. I have told him that the child G.o.d gave to me shall never be his!"
At another time this news would have thrilled the girl with unutterable joy; but she scarcely felt it now. The fear that a marriage with Storms might be urged upon her seemed a small trouble, while the awful possibility he had fastened on her fears was so vivid and so strong.
"I thought it would please you," said the sick man, disappointed. "I did."
"And so it does, father; but we will not talk of it now. His coming has tired you, and I--I, too, am wanting a little rest. If you do not care, I will go away, while you sleep, and stay in my own room."
"There is wine on the table. Drink a little. I suppose it may be shadows from the ivy, but you look pale, Ruth."
"Yes, it is the shadows, but I will drink some wine."
She poured some wine into a gla.s.s, and drank it thirstily; but it brought no color into her cheeks, and none came there until she stood in the porch, after night-fall, and repeated to herself, "I must see him! I will see him! I must know the truth, or die!"
This resolve had made her stronger; perhaps the wine had helped, for she was not used to it, and so the effect was all the more powerful.
At any rate, she drew the hood over her face, wrapped a dark mantle about her, and went out across the garden, into the path of the wilderness, and on to the home of which she might some day, G.o.d willing, become the mistress. When she thought of this, the shadow of that other picture, which had taken away so much of her life in the path she had trod only a few hours before, came with it, and that which had been to her a proud hope was blotted out.
"I will believe it from no lips but his," she thought, looking out from the shadows at the vast gray building that held her heart in its chambers. "Oh, that I knew what was in my father"s letter!"
She left the shelter of the park, and walked cautiously across the lawn, concealing her progress as best she could among flowering thickets, or a great tree that spread its branches here and there in forest grandeur.
She entered the flower-thickets under that window, the only one she cared for in all that vast building. A faint light came through it, softened by falls of lace, tinted red by the glow of silken curtains, and broken into gleams by the ivy leaves outside. Her heart gave a wild leap as she saw that the shutters were unclosed; then a great fear seized upon her; some person might be within the chamber, or lingering in the grounds. Cautiously, and holding her breath, she crept toward the ma.s.ses of ivy that wound its thick foliage up to the balcony. If it stirred in the wind she shrunk back terrified. Where it cast deep shadows downward, she fancied that some man was crouching.
Still the girl crept forward, her anxiety half lost in womanly dread of being misunderstood, even by the beloved being she sought. But, for the great agony of doubt at her heart, she would have turned even then, so strong was the delicacy of her pride.
She was under the balcony now, behind the ivy, which covered her like a mantle. Up the narrow steps she crept, and crouching by the window, looked in. No one was moving. A night-lamp shed its soft moonlight on a marble console, on which some wine and fruit cast shadows. In the middle of the room stood the couch she had seen but once, shaded with rich silk and clouds of lace, snow-white and filmy, seeming to cool the air, it was so frost-like. These curtains were flung back at the pillows, and there she saw her husband in a sound sleep. She held her breath, she laid her face close to the window. Then, with impotent fingers, tried the sash. It was fastened on the inside.
What could she do? How arouse the sleeper? Impatiently she beat her hand on the gla.s.s. Still more recklessly she called her husband"s name.
"Walton! Walton!"
CHAPTER XLVIII.
WATCHING HER RIVAL.
On the same night that Ruth had taken a desperate resolve to see her husband, Richard Storms was waiting in the lake house for the coming of Judith Hart, who had promised to meet him there. The presence of this girl in the neighborhood had at first been a great annoyance to him; but now he both feared and hated her, so, coward-like, cajoled and deceived her by forced professions of love, while, with the same false tongue, he could not refrain from such hints of another as drove the poor creature half mad with jealous rage.
Though her presence was hateful to him, he dared not offend her beyond a certain point, and had no power to drive her back into her former isolated life; or in revenge she might, as she had often threatened, find out Ruth Jessup, and give both her and the father a good reason for forbidding him the house forever. He knew well enough, that in her reckless daring, she would not hesitate to accuse herself of any offence so long as the odium reached him also.
Thus shackled in his desire to free himself from the girl altogether, it mattered not to him how roughly, Storms waited for her at the lake house that night, lying at full length on the bench which ran along one end of the crazy old building.
Judith came in, at length, full of turbulent excitement. She had been walking rapidly, and swept through the long gra.s.s like a rush of wind.
"Ah, you are here!" she said, seating herself on one end of the bench as Storms swung his feet to the floor; "I thought you would be waiting, but it isn"t you that oftenest gets here first, but I have seen some one you"ll like to hear about."
"Seen some one? Of course, one of the gamekeepers."
"No. I have seen that girl, Ruth Jessup."