Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880

Ruth pretty soon went out. She entered her room with her hand upon her heart, and sat down by the window without striking a light. In the course of half an hour the doctor and Miss Custer appeared in sight, walking slowly toward the house. They passed directly under her window, but their voices were so low that she could distinguish no word. By and by she heard the piano going. A moment after Mrs. Tascher tapped on her door, and, turning the knob, put her head in and called, "Ruth!"

Ruth got up and came forward.

"Come," said her visitor, "let us go down to the parlor."

"I cannot," said Ruth: "please don't ask me."

"Foolish child!" said Mrs. Tascher. "I am a thousand times sorry that I brought this thing to your notice."

"It was brought to my notice long ago," said Ruth brokenly; and Mrs. Tascher turned and went down stairs.

The doctor was leaning back in an easy-chair, completely absorbed in watching the exquisite figure at the piano and listening to the strains she evoked.

"One would think she had feeling," commented Mrs. Tascher mentally as she entered the room and swept across to the vacant seat beside the doctor, dispelling somehow, with her strong presence, the spirit of sentimentalism that pervaded the atmosphere. "Why, Doctor Ebling, are you here?" she asked: "I supposed you had gone to town. Where is Miss Stanley?"

"I—I don't know," said the doctor—honestly enough, to be sure.

"I thought you all went down to the croquet-ground?"

"Yes, we did. But she came back, and left Miss Custer and myself to finish our game."

"Oh, then I presume she is in her room.—Have you finished playing, Miss Custer?" with a smile of placid indifference as Miss Custer turned round on the piano-stool.

"Yes," said Miss Custer, getting up and taking a chair. "Doctor Ebling wished to hear the 'Last Hope.'"

"You haven't come to that in your experience yet, have you, doctor?" laughed Mrs. Tascher, though she was not in the habit of playing upon words.

"No," said the doctor. "It seems to me the 'last hope' is that we feel when we draw our last breath."

The three spent the evening together, and Mrs. Tascher brought into exercise the old charms and graces of manner and conversation that years ago had made her one of the most brilliant and fascinating women society could boast of. She was not old—not more than thirty-five—and when animated she was still beautiful: her face became illuminated and stars shone in her eyes. She so far outdid Miss Custer in the matter of pleasing and entertaining that when the doctor went away he hardly thought of the latter. He said to himself as he went down town, "What a remarkably brilliant woman Mrs. Tascher must have been in her day! And is yet, for that matter. Husband been dead six years: wonder why she never married again?"

Then he wondered with a slight feeling of uneasiness where Ruth had kept herself all the evening. "How affectionately and admiringly Mrs. Tascher always speaks of Ruth!" he said, and added, "Well, she is a noble girl."

There was an indefinable hardness in Ruth's manner the next morning. Her voice was hollow and her smile seemed ironical, though she was unusually gay. Mrs. Tascher, who observed her closely and with some uneasiness, thought her mockingly attentive to Miss Custer. Something was said at the dinner-table again about the doctor's promise to read to Miss Custer, and Ruth exclaimed, "By all means!—Miss Custer, make him stay at home and read you that poem."

The doctor of course fell readily in with the idea, and said he would not go down town this time to see if there were any orders: if anybody wanted him it was generally known that if he was not in his office he was at his boarding-place.

"Why did you do it?" said Mrs. Tascher, putting her handkerchief on her head and going down to the gate with Ruth.

"Because," said Ruth with drawn lips and heaving bosom, "I do not want to get him unfairly. If there is some one else who interests him more than I, he is still at liberty to choose."

"Ruth," said Mrs. Tascher, and her eyes flashed, "do you think she is getting him fairly? You have no conception of the scheming of that woman."

"Oh yes, indeed I believe I know it all," said Ruth, and hurried away.

In a few days school closed, and Ruth packed her trunk and went up to Merton, a little village about twenty miles distant, to visit her aunt. Almost as soon as she was gone Miss Custer was taken sick. Aunt Ruby insisted upon her occupying the spare bedroom, a cool, spacious apartment opening off the back sitting-room. The professional services of Doctor Ebling were of course engaged at once, and he proved himself very attentive at least.

To save appearances and for Ruth's sake, although she had little hope, Mrs. Tascher took up her position in the sick-room and compelled the doctor to give all his directions to her. He pronounced the malady a low fever brought on by the extreme heat of the season. Mrs. Tascher thought it was the result of exposure to night-dews, carelessness in regard to diet and lack of proper exercise.

Her presence, it must be allowed, put but little constraint upon the extraordinary intimacy of the pair. The doctor was all devotion, and Miss Custer all languor and dependence. She made a beautiful invalid, with her rare complexion and her white, lissome hands lying so restfully and helplessly on the counterpane. One day, after being freshly dressed in an embroidered gown of the finest texture, and instructing Mrs. Tascher how to wind her hair, which was long and abundant, around the top of her head in a coronet that was very becoming to her, she requested to have Mr. Bruce sent in when he came to his dinner. She had some affairs that must be looked into immediately by a legal eye.

"Had you not better just send him a message?" asked Mrs. Tascher.

"No: I prefer to attend to it myself," she returned coldly.

Bruce was therefore sent in, and Mrs. Tascher stepped out into the sitting-room. Miss Custer, who was certainly very white, raised her dusky eyelids, smiled faintly and held out her jewelled hand. Bruce, standing awkwardly enough by the bed-side, took it, but without apparent appreciation of its loveliness.

The invalid had chosen an inopportune moment: despite the subdued light of the chamber, it was high noon and the sun shone burningly outside, and Bruce, who had just eaten a hearty dinner, was utterly devoid of sentiment and indifferent to nice effects. There was a tumbler of dewy roses on a little table beside the bed, and he picked out one, and, sitting down, began eating the leaves one by one. "I hope," said he, thinking it a good plan to rally the sick a little, "you haven't got so discouraged by this indisposition—which the doctor tells me is not at all serious—that you wish to make your will?"

"No," she returned, hardly able to conceal her disgust at the unfeeling wretch: "I merely wish to send to my attorney for some money."

"Oh, is that it?" said Bruce, laughing. "Then the doctor was right. So long as a person takes a controlling interest in his affairs he is safe."

"A person!" thought Miss Custer, and really curled her lip. She gave him her lawyer's address, stated the sum she wanted and told him he might say that she was ill.

"And unable to write," added Bruce. "All right! I shall be as prompt in the execution of your commission as the exigences of the case appear to demand."

He took up his hat and went out cheerily, and Miss Custer turned her face to the wall and cried. For a day or two she was worse: then she grew better, and was finally able to sit up. At the expiration of two weeks Ruth came back. She was very pale and her face had a rigid look. Miss Custer met her sweetly, being still under the subduing influence of invalidism, and Ruth tried to feel kindly to her; which was a great vexation to Mrs. Tascher.

"Let me alone," said Ruth passionately one day. "Don't you see how I hate her? I could almost kill her! I am trying to fight down the demon in me."

The doctor, who had himself grown thin and haggard-looking, welcomed Ruth back with an air of constraint.

One day the young folks of the village got up a picnic and invited Aunt Ruby's boarders. The doctor at first hesitated about giving his permission for Miss Custer to go, but she coaxed, and he finally consented. The evening before the picnic Ruth requested an interview with the doctor, and they walked out into the grove. She told him she wished to release him from his engagement, and it was a painful satisfaction to her to see the agony that was in his face. He accused himself bitterly—said he had broken up her happiness and ruined her life, that he could never forgive himself, and ended by refusing to accept his release, and declaring that he should never avail himself of any of the advantages it offered.

The next morning he went to Bruce with white face and strained eyes, and begged him, for the love he bore him, to take Miss Custer to the picnic and to stay by her.

"So, my boy," said Bruce, not a little affected, "you have got into the ditch and want me to help you out? Well, I will do what I can.—Thank the Lord, his eyes are opened at last!" he muttered as Ebling went away.

The picnic-ground was a wooded hillside that sloped down into a grassy meadow a mile from town. The company all got together at the appointed hour—two in the afternoon—in the street below Aunt Ruby's, and waited for her boarders to come out. Ruth had persuaded Mrs. Tascher to go, and the doctor, with a painful attempt to appear natural, kept beside her and was scrupulously attentive to her comfort. Ruth playfully claimed Hugh as her escort. Bruce, true to agreement, monopolized Miss Custer in a masterly way, much to her surprise. She tried to snub him at first, but he ignored all her efforts in that direction with consummate stupidity, and in the end she submitted with a charming grace that was torture to the doctor.

Everybody seemed in fine spirits, but on the part of two or three members of the company we have reason to suppose that it was only seeming. And perhaps a little general knowledge of the affairs of mankind might justify us in the suspicion that there were others not so happy as their bright looks seemed to warrant. But, however that might be, every one threw in his or her contribution to the pleasure and amusement of the day. The doctor helped to lay out a croquet-ground and fixed the target for archery-practice; Hugh was active in putting up swings; some of the older and more dignified gentlemen, including Bruce, took upon themselves the lighter duty of entertaining the ladies; when lunch-time came some of the young fellows kindled a fire, and Ruth boiled the coffee. After that there was a good deal of pairing off and walking about, or sitting cozily upon old mossy, fallen trunks of trees.

Miss Custer, who had not yet risen from the grass-plot where she had sat to eat her dinner, looked away down across the green meadows with sleepy, half-shut eyes, and asked, "What is that pile of stones in the corner yonder?"

A youthful jeweller whom she remembered among her distant admirers answered, "It's an old well. This place here used to be a stock-farm, but it hasn't been used for that for a good many years; so the framework and buckets have been taken away."

Miss Custer, seized with a sudden impulse, sprang up and exclaimed, "I have a great mind to go down and take a look into it. Old wells have a peculiar fascination for me, and that one looks so lovely and romantic!"

She had a thought that Bruce might volunteer to accompany her, but that indolent barrister, sprawling upon the grass at her feet, hardly felt called upon by the nature of his agreement with Ebling to undergo quite so much as that. He reflected that it was his business to keep the charmer out of mischief for the day. "And if she meanders away to that fascinating well," he thought, "in her own solitary company, nobody will be damaged, so far as I can see."

But Miss Custer, seeing no other way and feeling the position a little awkward, appealed to Ruth, who got up and started with her. When they had clambered down the rather steep hill to the meadow's edge Miss Custer affectionately took her arm. "Don't you think picnics are stupid things?" she asked confidingly.

"Why," said Ruth, "we didn't think so this morning."

"Oh no, not when we were anticipating, but

One of the pleasures of having a routIs the pleasure of having it over.

I shall be glad when we get back home, though I suppose we shall not start till near sundown."

When they reached the well Miss Custer stepped upon the flat white stones with which it was walled up to the surface of the ground and gazed down into its dark depths. "What a queer feeling that is which one is almost sure to have standing upon the edge of danger!—a sort of reckless impulse to throw one's self forward. Did you ever feel it?" Ruth, standing just behind her as she leaned over, saw her hands involuntarily clutch her dress, as though the strange temptation were so great that she must hold herself forcibly back from it. "I have—a thousand times," she added; "and I feel it now."

"Take care!" cried Ruth, catching at her.

Miss Custer, in turning away her charmed gaze, lost her balance from sheer dizziness and plunged forward. Ruth, with a look and cry of horror, bent over and saw the fearful descent, so quick and so noiseless until the dull splash was heard and the black water opened and closed again. Then she threw up her hands and started to run toward the hill, calling loudly. But already they had seen and were coming. One—Doctor Ebling—was far ahead of the rest. Ruth met him and turned back with him.

"Ruth, you did it: I saw you push her," he found breath to say. But Ruth's sensibilities were too shocked to feel the accusation.

The doctor was halfway down the well before any one else reached the spot. Bruce had had the forethought to cut down a swing and bring the rope. In a very few minutes Miss Custer—or what was believed to be her lifeless body—was lying wet upon the grass and the doctor, also dripping, was making a hasty examination of her condition. "I think she will live," was his verdict, "but we must get her home with all speed."

A light wagon coming up the road was signalled to, and they got her into it and drove furiously to town. By the time the rest of the party reached home she was partially recovered, though very weak and terribly shaken.

As soon as it was said that she was out of danger and would probably suffer no serious consequences Ruth recalled the doctor's frightful words: "You did it: I saw you push her."

She rushed in search of him. He was in the parlor, walking back and forth with a troubled air. She went up to him: "Frank, you accused me of doing that dreadful thing. I have just remembered what you said—that you saw me push her. I did not: I put out my hand to save her."

"I hope to God you did!" said he, but his look was doubting and reproachful.

"Why, Frank," she said, with scarcely enough breath to speak the words, "if you do not believe me it will kill me!"

Just then some one came to the door and beckoned to him, and he went out. Ruth turned, with a breaking heart, to go up stairs. The youthful jeweller was talking to Mrs. Tascher in the hall. "Yes," he was saying, "I saw it all. She was standing leaning over the well, and was just turning to step back when she gave a sort of lurch as if she had got dizzy, and Miss Stanley reached out her hand and caught her by the shoulder. But she had got the start of her, and over she went in a twinkling. The whole thing was done in an instant."

"Oh, Mr. Omes, I wish you would explain all that to Doctor Ebling," said Ruth, coming up.

"Oh, he knows all about it: he saw it the same as I did," said the young man.

A suspicion crossed Ruth's mind that the doctor knew, but she could not believe him so base.

Miss Custer was doomed to have a serious time of it, after all. The great excitement brought on fever again, and for some days her recovery was thought doubtful. Everybody in the house did all that was in her or his power to do, and the doctor was more devoted than ever. It became a fixed idea that he would marry Miss Custer as soon as she was able to sit up. He and Ruth scarcely spoke to each other.

One day Mrs. Tascher told Ruth she must go away.

"Yes, I know," answered Ruth: "I am going."

She packed her trunk again—this time taking all her things—and went back to her aunt's. In less than a week Mrs. Tascher had a letter from her stating that she had started, under the escort of a friend of her guardian's, for Beirut.

It was so great a shock to Mrs. Tascher that she scarcely left her room for ten days after it, and indeed did not wholly recover until another letter came, dated from far-off Syria, with a curious commingling of the strange and the familiar in the well-known handwriting and the foreign post-mark, assuring her that her young friend was safely sheltered under the protection of her guardian and his estimable wife. Ruth dwelt entirely upon her new experience, and never mentioned the old. She had not so much to say about her journey, though it was interesting and delightful, as about her arrival and the meeting with her dear friends, whose loved faces were so sweetly familiar in that strange, strange land that she fell upon their necks and wept. She drew vivid pictures of the magnificent scenery that lay around her in her new home—the gardens, the orange-groves, the figs and olives, the terraced slope of Mount Lebanon, the glorious Mediterranean.

Mrs. Tascher was comforted, though the void made by Ruth's absence was almost like death, the wide space seemed so unspannable. She wrote back at once in all the fulness of her heart, and Ruth was not so absorbed in grief for the loss of her lover but that she appreciated and was deeply grateful for the tender, unfailing affection of her friend. Mrs. Tascher, who felt that the sharpest knife was the best to be used in a case of urgent surgical necessity, wrote briefly that the doctor and Miss Custer were married—that Miss Custer had begged for at least three months' preparation, but the doctor was impatient; and so, as soon as she was able to stand the journey to Boston, where her friends and property were, they had joined hands and started.

"The marriage took place in the parlor," Mrs. Tascher wrote, "and the household were invited to be present. I, however, had a bad headache and could not get down stairs; Bruce pleaded 'business;' and poor Hugh, whose boyish affections have been cruelly tampered with, had a fishing engagement. So there was nobody but Aunt Ruby and her 'help' to witness the touching ceremony except the minister and his wife. It was touching, I suppose: Miss Custer wept bitterly at being so 'neglected,' and Ebling is mortally offended with Bruce."

Three years went by; which space of time Mrs. Tascher spent chiefly in Florida and New York, going back and forth as the seasons changed in obedience to medical authority. At last she concluded to try a few weeks in Westbrook again. Aunt Ruby, who still kept boarders—all strangers, however—gave her the old rooms up stairs with their pleasant windows. Here she sat and wrote to Ruth a few days after her arrival.

Ruth had become quite contented, and even happy, under the warm Syrian sun, watching with earnest, loving eyes the development of barbarism and heathenism into civilization and Christianity, though it seemed very much to her sometimes as if she had lost her place and personality in the world. She was swallowed up in the great pagan East, and was nothing to the land that owned her—to the people that were her people. She was dead to the life and world to which she had been born.

The family of her guardian, together with some of their pupils, had removed to a little village up the side of the mount to spend a few of the hottest weeks, as was their custom. The mail was regularly brought up by a young Arab riding a mule. One evening, when Ruth had gone to sit alone on one of the grassy terraces overlooking the sea and the luxuriant foliage and vegetation below—a thing she liked, though it usually made her pensive and a little sad—a young Syrian girl ran down and gave her a letter. It was Mrs. Tascher's, and I will take the liberty to transcribe a part of it here:

"Aunt Ruby has furnished me with a good many surprising items in regard to the fortunes and actions of our old associates. Bruce (he was a splendid fellow—wasn't he?—solid, practical and all that), who, you remember, had a good deal of means, has built himself a house, something quite elegant. It stands on that little knoll on the other side of the town, overlooking the river. I mean to go over and take a look at it some day: it is said to be beautifully furnished, and is kept by an old maiden aunt of our friend. Bruce, by the way, is in Europe, though what took him there I cannot conjecture, unless he means to bring home a European exportation in the shape of a wife. I wish, my dear, you had taken a fancy to him: I always thought he admired you. You don't mind my probing an old wound—do you?—because I want to speak of some of the others. Miss Custer's fortune, as it turned out, was extremely limited. She had, I believe, enough to furnish a small rented house here, and she and the doctor immediately went to housekeeping. But time, which settles all things and places them in their true light and relations, has brought to the notice of this precious pair that they are very ill adapted to each other: it is even said that they quarrel. The coarser gossips affirm that Mrs. Ebling is lazy and shiftless, and that the doctor is disheartened and neglects his business. I have seen him once, and can judge something of his state by his bearing and looks. He is certainly not the sort of man I once thought he would make. Whether there is better stuff in him than what we see developed, or whether he owes what he is entirely to circumstances, is an unsolvable question. I am inclined to think that every person has the making of two individuals in him—one bad, the other good. What a pity that a man usually has only one chance! If he makes a mistake he is lost. My dear Ruth, in the whole course of my life I have kept my eyes upon the infallible law of cause and effect; and I know this, that wrong-doing inevitably brings its own retribution."

When Ruth took her eyes from this letter and fixed them upon the distant blue water-depths they were brimful of tears. "Yes, wrong-doing is followed by retribution," she thought, "but where is the reward for right-doing?"

Oh, she felt so lonely in that far-off heathen land, with the shadow of others' wrong-doing lying always across her path! Why must she suffer and be alone?

A step from behind startled her, and she sprang up and turned round. A pair of black eyes were smiling at her from a handsome, familiar face. "Oh, Mr. Bruce!" she cried, and flew up the steps, holding out both her hands.

"I have come such a long way to see you," said Bruce, "that my motive must be pretty conspicuous: I don't mean to try to conceal it. Perhaps you have never thought of me as a man you would be at all likely to marry. Still, I have made it my business to come and ask you, and I thought I might better let you know my errand at once, instead of leaving you to guess it from any clownish efforts of mine to do the agreeable to you."

He certainly broke it to her very well, smiling and holding her hands—so well that she laughed heartily and was at home with him in a moment.

One day it was rumored in Westbrook that Bruce had come home with a wife. The news had but just reached Aunt Ruby's premises when Bruce himself came rapidly up the path and asked for Mrs. Tascher. She came down at once. "I have come for you to go and call upon my wife," said he.

"Why, Mr. Bruce—" she began.

But he stopped her, and in spite of her demurring carried her off.

"You certainly have a lovely place, Mr. Bruce," she said, looking admiringly round as they mounted the front steps of his residence. The door flew open, and there, waiting to welcome her, stood the bride—Ruth.

Alice Ilgenfritz.

WHERE LIGHTNING STRIKES

The air has been growing hotter for many days, with "occasional counteracting influences" (as "Probabilities" says), until the sunshine-loving doves hide under shadowing gables and the robins and sparrows sit on the lower branches of the trees with little wings lifted from their palpitating sides. The multitudinous shrilling of the grasshoppers adds emphasis to the white heats of the air. Even the housefly seeks the shade and hums drowsily in complicated orbits about the upper part of the room, or, with too keen proboscis, destroys my last crumb of comfort, the post-prandial nap.