Morris King had ended a brilliant campaign for the Governorship of New York with victory. The entire ticket was elected by large pluralities.
The campaign had given scope to his ability, and he more than fulfilled the hopes of his friends. From the moment of his election, he became the leader of the party in the nation, and began at once the work of strengthening his position as a Presidential possibility.
Yet in the din and clash of this battle in which his personal fortunes, his future career, and perhaps the destiny of a great national party hung, he had not forgotten Ruth.
He made it a point every day, wherever he was, or whatever the task or excitement of the hour, to write her a love letter. Sometimes it was only a few lines hastily scrawled while on the train between stations where he addressed the crowds at each stop. Sometimes he sent a dainty box of flowers.
She never replied to his letters or little gifts. But it made no difference. He kept steadily on the course he had mapped out, dogged, purposeful, persistent.
The night of the election, when he received the first assurance of his success, before he spoke to any of his lieutenants or received a single congratulation, he closed his door, locked it, and called Ruth over his telephone, which he had connected with her house by special secret arrangement that afternoon.
He recognised her soft contralto voice, and his hand trembled with the joy of the triumph which he felt brought him nearer to his heart’s desire.
He was so excited he could not speak for a moment, and again the low soft voice called,
“What is it? Who is it?”
“This is Morris, Ruth. My door is locked, and this is a private wire connected with your house; I am alone with you and God. I am the Governor-elect of New York. I have spoken to no one until I tell you. One word from you I will prize more than all the shouts of the world with which the streets will ring in a moment.”
There was a movement of the phone at the other end.
“With all my heart I congratulate you, Morris. You are a great man. I can never tell you how deeply I feel the delicate honour you pay me.”
The man sighed and his voice was husky with emotion.
“Ah! Ruth, if you only meant that conventional phrase, ‘with all my heart,’ I’d be the happiest man in the world to-night. But I must go; the boys are trying to beat the door down. My success I lay at your feet, my love. When you hear the shouts of hosts and see the sky red to-night with illuminations, remember that it is all for you. I am yours.—Good-by.”
She sat at her window long past the hour of midnight and watched the blaze of rockets from end to end of Manhattan, over Brooklyn, and from the farthest sand-beaches of Coney Island, dreaming with open eyes, soft with tears, of the mystery of love and life.
The unterrified Democracy of the great city had gone mad with joy over their daring young leader’s success. She could hear the distant murmur of the tumult of thousands of shouting, screaming men packed around Tammany Hall, filling Fourteenth Street in solid mass, jamming Union Square and Madison Square and surging round the Madison Square Garden, where a jollification meeting of twenty thousand cheering, excited men was in progress. It sounded like the boom and roar of some far-off sea breaking on the rocks and echoing among the cliffs. All Harlem was ablaze with bonfires now, and the tumult of horns and shouting boys filled the streets on Washington Heights.
She sighed and rested her dimpled chin in her hand.
“Surely, I must be a foolish woman to cling to Frank and reject the glory and strength of this old sweetheart’s chivalrous love! I cannot help it. He is my husband. I love him. Perhaps he may need me some dark night in life. Who knows? If he calls, I will be ready.”
The year had proved a trying one to Ruth. The sensation of the completion of the Temple and the stir made by its dedication had increased Gordon’s fame, and the story of her sorrow had been repeated again and again. A hundred petty details, utterly false, had been added as the story had passed from paper to paper, until she was afraid to look in a public print lest she find her own name staring her in the face. From the Socialist point of view, she was attacked as a blatant scold who had made her husband’s life intolerable, until he had been rescued by the beautiful woman who was now his wife. By the conservative press, she was timidly defended, damned by faint praise and humiliated by pity.
The children, growing rapidly, were beginning to feel the mother’s position. In the public schools, the story of her life and desertion by her husband had tipped the tongues of the spiteful with poison, and Lucy had come home more than once trying to conceal from her mother the hurt of her sensitive child’s soul.
Morris King, now the distinguished Governor-elect, hastened to press his suit.
Her faithful knight, he was now laying lovingly at her feet the tribute of a powerful man’s life.
To every worldly view of her position and future his suit was a temptation well nigh resistless. His love had stood the test of years. He would worship her as his wife as he had worshiped her as his ideal. She knew this by an intuition as unerring as that by which she knew she could never love him as she loved Gordon. And yet she felt a singular dependence on him, and a tender gratitude for the protection he had given her life.
He knew his position was strong, and pressed it with quiet intensity. He was careful that his attentions should not become the subject of public comment, and the tongue of gossip cause her pain. Not for one moment did he doubt that he would win.
The Sunday before his inauguration he spent with her, and, much to his disgust, she insisted on going to the Pilgrim Church.
“Of all churches, Ruth, for heaven’s sake don’t go there,” he pleaded, with impatience.
“Yes,” she quietly answered. “I’ve tried the others. I don’t seem at home. I’ve ceased to mind what any one there thinks. The congregation has changed completely in the past two years, Deacon Van Meter tells me. He called to see us the other day to ask after the children and my financial welfare, offering to help me in any way his experience could serve me. He has aged very much lately, and the death of his wife seems to have completely broken the old man’s heart. He has withdrawn from business entirely. My sorrow seems to have touched him in a very tender spot. He begged me in such an earnest way to come back to the church and join in its work, I’ve made up my mind to go.”
King rubbed his hand over his head hopelessly.
“Well, if you’ve made up your mind, you will go. Ruth, you are the hardest-headed woman to have such a beautiful spirit I ever knew.”
The dark eyes smiled into his face.
“You may go with me, Morris.”
He took up his cane and coat.
“I’ll grudge the minutes I can’t talk, but I’ll sit and look at you. You are growing more beautiful every day, Ruth. I am grateful for the honour you are going to do me in attending the inauguration. I’ll agree to anything you say to-day.”
They slipped into a seat under the gallery unobserved. The new usher did not recognise either Ruth or her distinguished escort.
The services moved her with a strange power. In every hymn she heard the deep rich voice of Gordon as she had seen him so often stand in that pulpit. The swell of the organ’s full notes throbbed with his memory. The man she heard was no longer the new pastor, but her beloved, and she was living over again the sweet days of the past when he was her own and she had filled his life.
The preacher was reading the most beautiful psalm in the language of man: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”
A strange peace came over her as the music of these grand old sentences, throbbing with the passionate faith of centuries, swept her heart.
He was reading from the old Bible that rested on the same golden lectern pulpit Gordon had hurled behind him that awful day in their history. The same crimson cloth he had twisted into a shapeless mass and thrown aside once more hung from its front. She could see a ragged break in the gold of the cross where his enormous hand had crushed it that day.
The thought of God’s eternal life and unchanging purpose, binding all time within His mighty plan, soothed her spirit. Men might come and go behind that pulpit and from its pews, but the Church of God, symbol of the eternal, would go on forever. In the deep rhythm of the psalm to which she listened she felt the heart-beat of its continuous unbroken life stretching back to creation’s dawn and on until Time shall roll into the ocean of Eternity.
Suddenly the red blood leaped from her heart with a thought, “What God hath joined together man cannot put asunder!”
King’s face grew somber as he saw her elation.
He knew that some mysterious spirit had suddenly dropped a veil between them.
When they returned home she was very quiet and her dark eyes shone with unusual brilliance.
“Ruth, you are thinking of that man,” he said, with a scowl.
She nodded gently.
King trembled and his fists clenched.
“I could kill him, the great egotistical brute! How strange the madness that binds a woman to the man to whom she first surrenders! I sometimes think it is the most blind, pathetic and tragic instinct that ever shadowed the soul of a human being. It is degrading. You are a woman of character and intelligence. You must shake off this peasant’s mania.”
She shook her head with a yearning, mystic look.
“I believe God had a great purpose when He made a woman’s heart like that. I love him. My very soul and body have become in some mysterious way one with him.”
King’s eyes blazed.
“Yet he flaunts his love for another woman in your face.”
She flinched as from a blow, but answered tenderly.
“Yes; he is mad now. The flesh has mastered the spirit in its struggle for the moment. She holds his body”—a pause and a smile—“but his soul is mine. He may not know it now. He will some day. I know it, and I abide God’s time.”
“How long can you hold such a delusion, I wonder?” he asked, with angry amazement.
“Forever.” she softly whispered.
He drew himself up with grim force.
“I am going to win you, Ruth,” he said, slowly lingering with his lips over her name as though he could taste its sweetness.
He looked at her beautiful face and figure tenderly and with an intensity that gave to his eyes a strange glitter.
She turned from him with a sigh and gazed on Gordon’s portrait hanging over the mantel.
“No, Morris. I have made up my mind to play my part in harmony with Love’s eternal law. If the world is full of discord, I will still make the sweetest music my soul can sing. I will not try to drown the din, but in my own way sing in perfect time with the beat of God’s heart. Perhaps some soul beside me on life’s way will catch the note, and it will not be in vain. This may be a blind instinct, but it is not degrading. He who counts the beat of a sparrow’s wing, teaches the stork her appointed time, and whispers his call to the swallow in the autumn wind, will not lead me astray.”
The man shaded his eyes with his hand as though to hide their misery.
“You are throwing your sweet life away,” he said, reproachfully.
“But I shall find it again. When I see the fury of murder in your eyes, and gaze into the gulf of fierce passions into which Frank has descended, I cannot seek my own happiness. The sense of motherhood, the feeling of kinship to all women, brings to me again the certainty that I am right, that one great love unto death can alone give the soul peace and strength, and give to man and the world happiness.”
He bent forward quickly.
“But if he were dead you might love me?”
“Not as I love him.”
“He is dead a thousand times to you and your life,” he cried, bitterly. “He is your wilful murderer. You will see this by and by, and I will win you. I will be content with such love as you can give me. Mine will be so full, so tender, so warm it will be resistless.”
She shook his hand kindly and bade him good-by.
“I will send a carriage for you and the children to-morrow. You will go to the capital with me in my private car.”
“I’d rather not, Morris, but I have promised you, and it shall be so.”
The ceremony of the inauguration was the most elaborate seen at Albany in years.
Tammany came to the capital thirty thousand strong, and thirty thousand strong they marched through the streets, with their shining silk hats glistening in the sun and their lusty throats shouting for their leader. They had voted the ticket faithfully, and sometimes too often the same day, unkind critics had said, in the years of the past, but for the first time in generations they had placed a full-fledged Grand Sachem of their own Great Wigwam in the Governor’s chair, and they made the welkin ring. In the joy of their faces, the steady hoof-beat of their big feet on the pavement and the stalwart pride with which they marched, one saw the secret of their victory. They were in dead earnest. Politics was the breath they breathed and the blood that fed their hearts.
King felt the contagion of their loyalty and enthusiasm, and his inaugural address was inspired and inspiring.
He placed Ruth and the children in choice seats near the speaker’s stand, and in every movement of his body, every word and accent, from the moment he appeared till the last shout of his victorious henchmen died away, he was conscious of her presence.
She could feel the intensity of his powerful will pressing upon her in this triumph he was deliberately laying at her feet.
When the ceremonies were over, and his address was being flashed over a thousand wires, he sent the children for a drive, and showed Ruth over the stately executive mansion. He knew the hour was propitious, and he had planned to make a desperate attempt to win some sort of promise from her for their future.
“Now, Ruth,” he said, softly, “sit here on this sofa by the open fire. We will be alone for awhile. I’ve something to show you.”
His face was still aglow from the excitement of his triumph. He drew from his inner pocket an official envelope tied with a piece of ribbon.
She leaned over with interest, thinking he was going to read to her some scheme of legislation on which he had been at work.
Instead he drew out a package of her old letters and a lot of faded flowers—every scrap of paper and trinket she had ever given him in her life. He showed her each one, and gave the history of every flower, when she had given it to him, and what she had said.
Ruth buried her face in her hands, and he silently watched her.
“This one,” he cried, with a tremor in his voice and a tightening about his eyes, “you gave me the night I took you to that ball at the Hygeia. How soft and delicate your hand felt as you placed it in the lapel of my coat! I could see myself, as in a mirror, in your great dark laughing eyes. I never saw that picture again, Ruth, and the laughter went out of them forever. They were always full of storm and shadows for me after that night.”
Her lips were trembling as she turned these leaves from the story of the sunlit days of her girlhood.
The man went on steadily and passionately. “I could show you messages to-day from scores of national leaders offering me their support for the Presidency. This token I am going to show you now has no value to the world or at a bank, but there is not money enough on this earth to buy it.”
He drew from his pocketbook a little pink-covered tintype of a boy and girl.
The tapering fingers shook as she held it.
“This is the one priceless treasure I own—this little old tintype we had taken together in fun one day in the tent of the strolling photograph man. You remember he guessed we were sweethearts, and grouped us by the old rules he knew so well. You see, he placed me solemnly in his single chair, with my legs crossed, and made you stand close beside and put your beautiful hand with its slender fingers on my shoulder. You laughed and took it down. He scowled, and put it back, and told you to behave. It was your birthday. You were just seventeen. I was not half as proud to-day, when those thousands who love me shouted and hailed me as their chief, as I was that moment with your dear soft hand on my shoulder. I have felt it there every hour since. You see, I have kissed it until I’ve worn your face almost away, but the smile is still there.”
He took her hand gently.
“Ruth, dear, let me bring the smile back to your living face. These great rooms will be empty and lonely. I wish to hear the patter of your children’s feet in them, and the echo of your soft footsteps behind them. You are just thirty-five, in the full glory of perfect womanhood, far more beautiful than this girl of seventeen. Promise me that at the end of a year you will be mine, and let me make your life as glorious to the world as the beauty of your soul and body is to me—you, the forsaken, whom fools pity or blame.”
Looking away through her tears, she gently withdrew her hand, bent low and burst into sobs.
“No, no, no! I love him. He is my husband!”
Ruth had been deeply shaken by the events of the inauguration. She returned to New York in the Governor’s private car in a dazed stupor, from which she did not recover for several days.
Morris King’s appeal had stirred elements of her character she had long ignored or suppressed. The old pride of blood from races who had been the conquerors and rulers of the world began to beat its wings against the bars of love.
The special swept along the banks of the majestic Hudson, roaring through cities where she saw crowded express trains held on the side tracks for her to pass.
She drew herself up proudly, and a wave of fierce resentment against the man who had deserted her came like a blast of icy wind from the snow-tipped mountains beyond the western shore of the river.
The splendour of the stately mansion on the hill, the enthusiasm of the people for her old lover, his tenderness and deathless loyalty, and the memories that linked him to her in a cloudless girlhood, began to draw her with terrible fascination.
There was something so old-fashioned and chival-rous about King and his love, she felt a strange melting within her heart. This element of romance she knew he had inherited from her own medieval, home-loving South which she loved. It appealed to her now with a peculiar force—this old-fashioned people and their ways, and a sense of alienation and hostility to Gordon and his radicalism swept once more the storm-clouds across her dark eyes.
She began to question her position and the sanity of her course. She felt the stirrings of social instincts from the high-bred women of old Virginia, the Mother of Presidents and the home of the great constructive minds which had created the Republic. She knew instinctively that she could preside over the White House at Washington with the ease and distinction of the proudest woman who had ever graced it.
Her old lover seemed certain to be the nominee of his party, and his chance of election was one in two. Whatever the outcome, he was young and already a figure of national importance. He was sure to play a greater role in the future than he had ever played in the past.
The idea that she ruled his life and made him what he was, and might be, brought a smile to her lips and the red blood to her cheeks. His fame as a man of cold and selfish ambitions made her knowledge of the secret of his inner life the more sacred and charming.
For two months this battle of pride and blood with the one great passion silently raged in her soul, until she became afraid to hear the ring of her doorbell lest it should be the Governor.
She determined to go to Florida for two weeks on a visit to an old schoolmate in Tampa. There, amid the sunshine and the soft breezes from the gulf, she hoped to see her life and duty in clearer outline.
It was the first week in March which found her seated in the centre of a Pullman car of the Florida Limited of the Atlantic Coast Line.
The train had passed Richmond and was sweeping through the desolate broom-sedge fields still furrowed by those mortal trenches around Petersburg.
Her father had been killed in one of those trenches, a gallant colonel cheering a ragged handful of half-starved men in gray, unmindful of the order of retreat until engulfed by the grand army that swept over them like a tidal wave.
She took the children into the dining-car and found every table full except one, and two seats at that one already reserved. Lucy was placed next to the window, Frank next to the aisle, and the mother crowded between them with an arm encircling each.
She had given the order to the waiter, and was pointing out to Lucy the lines of the battle-field on which her father had died.
“There, dear, it is,” she said, with a tremor in her voice, pointing to an angle in the trench on the crest of a ridge. “There is where grandfather was killed.”
While Lucy looked and Frank climbed into her lap and was peering out the window, the conductor placed a beautiful woman and tall, distinguished-looking man in the reserved seats at the same table, opposite.
The boy turned, still on his knees, in his mother’s lap, and faced the newcomers, whom Ruth had not been able to see for the child’s movements.
He stared for a moment at the man with wide-dilated eyes, his body suddenly stiffened, and with a half sob, half cry, he sprang to the floor.
“Look! Mama, dear—look! It’s Papa!”
He threw himself on Gordon, and his little arms held his neck convulsively.
The man blushed like a girl as his great trembling fingers smoothed the boy’s hair.
Kate’s face was scarlet, Ruth turned pink and white, and Lucy, trembling and sobbing, began to scramble across her mother’s lap.
The boy’s hands tenderly framed his father’s crimson cheeks, he kissed him, and again and again his arms clung in passionate clasp about his neck.
“Oh, Papa, we’ve got you at last! Why didn’t you come? We’ve been praying, Lucy and me, every night for you, and we thought you’d never come back. Mama said you’d gone a long, long way—”
Ruth was choking with emotion, and yet she smiled through her tears. She knew those tiny hands were deep down in the man’s soul sweeping his heart-strings with wild, sweet music.
The brunette looked across the table into the trembling face of the fair one. The dark eyes were now tranquil, whatever the storm within. A faint sinile suffused her face with mantling blushes.
Lucy pulled the boy’s arms from around her father’s neck and slipped her own softer, slender ones there. She kissed him, and laid her brown curls on his breast. Her little hands patted his broad shoulder, and she murmured:
“Papa, dear, I love you!”
Kate attempted to rise, bit her lip, and fairly hissed in Gordon’s ear:
“End this scene! Find another table!”
Gordon drew Lucy’s arm from his neck and whispered:
“They are all filled, my dear.”
The blue eyes blazed with fury as she cried under her breath:
“Get up and let me out!”
Gordon gently drew the children’s arms away, placed them back in their seats, rose, still blushing, and accompanied Kate back into their car.
At first the boy was too astonished to speak or protest. When he found his voice he whispered in wonder:
“Mama, who is she?”
Ruth placed a finger on her trembling lips and shook her head.
“Will she let him come back?” he asked, anxiously.
“Hush, dear,” the mother said, softly.
The boy put his arms on the table and burst into tears.
Lucy sat very quiet, glancing into her mother’s face wistfully. And then she felt under the table, found one of her hands and began to stroke it gently.
When Gordon returned to his car, immediately behind the one in which Ruth was riding, Kate sat for half an hour in furious silence, refusing to speak or answer a question. He had never seen her so beside herself with anger.
She turned on him in a sudden flash and asked with frowning emphasis:
“I wonder why you dragged me off on this idiotic trip?”
“I was worn out and needed the rest,” he answered, quietly.
She looked at him with defiance.
“I don’t believe a word of it,” she said, indignantly. “You wish to get me out of New York. You were too much of a coward to tell Overman your suspicions that he was trying to win your wife.”
Gordon looked out of the window in silence.
“We will stop at the next station and go back. I don’t care for any more free vaudeville shows in the dining-car.”
“Don’t be absurd, my dear; you need not meet again.”
Gordon smiled in spite of himself.
Tears of vexation filled the violet eyes. “For all of your loud talk of freedom, I believe you still love that first wife of yours! And I am beginning to despise you.”
“Come, Kate, this is too absurd. How could I help the accident of such a meeting? I had not seen the children since our separation. She has always taught them to love me. How could I prevent it if I wished?”
“Yes; and you love her, too,” she insisted stubbornly, and the full red lips trembled and parted, and then softened into a—smile.
“But don’t flatter yourself I care, or am jealous, because this scene has humiliated and angered me. You’re not worth a moment’s jealousy, you great hulking baby!”
Gordon pressed the button and ordered a lunch served in their seat, and smilingly refused to continue the quarrel.
When the train crossed the North Carolina line it ran into the belt of the advancing spring rains from the South. At Wilson, it was pouring in torrents and had been raining steadily for two days. At Fayetteville, the train was an hour late, delayed by a washout.
Lucy had gone to sleep with her arm around her mother’s neck and one hand resting softly on her cheek. Ruth’s heart had been deeply touched by this gentle and silent sympathy of the dawning sex consciousness of her daughter’s soul. The quick little eyes had seen the tragedy, and a voice within whispered its soft words of new, mysterious kinship.
Soon after the train pulled out of Fayetteville it struck the long, straight run of the South Carolina low country. For thirty miles the track is as straight as an arrow, and before the gleaming headlight of the engine shows on the track the watchers at the stations can see the trembling light in the distant sky beyond the sixteen-mile line of the horizon.
The dark eyes were dozing in fitful sleep with the old spell of love once more enveloping the soul. She was dreaming of him, laughing at some boyish prank.
Over the straight track, down grade, the Limited was sweeping at full speed through the black storm.
Suddenly Ruth was awakened by a sickening crash as though the earth had collided with a star and been crushed as an egg-shell. The car seemed to leap a hundred feet into the air, plunge through space, and strike the ground with a dull smash that sent dust and splinters flying through every inch of space.
She instinctively seized the children, trembling and dazed, and hugged them close. Merciful God, would it never stop! Now the car was plowing through the earth—now falling end over end, straining, grinding, roaring, smashing into death and eternity!
At last—it had seemed an hour—it stopped with a shivering crash.
And then the blackness of night, the swash of gusts of rain overhead, and the moan of the wind. Not another sound. Not a groan or a cry or a human voice.
Was she dead or alive? Ruth felt she must scream this awful question or faint. The children began to sob and she gasped in gratitude:
“Thank God, they are not dead!”
She attempted to get out of her berth and found she must climb. The car was lying on its side. She looked out into the aisle through her curtains and everything was dark. The air choked her with dust, and she caught the odour of burning wool. Deep down below somewhere she could hear, in the lull of the wind, the roar of waters, and feel the car sway as though it were hanging on the edge of an embankment or trestle and about to topple into a torrent.
She pulled the children out into the aisle and tried to crawl toward the end of the car, only to find it crushed into a shapeless mass and the way piled with debris.
A light suddenly flashed up and the steady crackle of flames began. From the debris below came the scream of a woman for help.
She drew back her slender fist and tried to smash the double plate glass windows and only bruised her tapering fingers.
She found a step-ladder and broke the windows out.
Lifting herself on the seat, and peering through, she saw by the glare of the buring wreck the swirling waters of the river twenty feet below.
She rushed back to her berth, on the lower side, smashed the windows, and found the car resting on another sleeper. The blow had broken through both sets of windows.
She lightly sprang through and drew the children after her. A stifled groan, as from one straining the last muscle in some desperate effort, came from a berth. Rushing forward, still dragging the children, she found Kate pinned on her back, with the flames leaping closer each moment.
The violet eyes turned pitifully on Ruth, staring wide with the set agony of speechless fear and searched her face for the verdict of life.
A faint cry came from the full lips, white at the thought of death:
“Help me, for God’s sake; I’ll be burning in a moment!”
Did the dark eyes waver with an instant’s hesitation as she thought of her children imperiled by the delay and of the shame this woman’s life meant to her? If so, she who cried did not see it. Swiftly the lithe form sprang to the rescue. She ran her hands over Kate’s magnificent figure and tore her robe loose where it was pinioned between the timbers, loosed the wealth of auburn hair caught in the snap of the folding rack of the berth, and she was free.
She took Ruth’s hand and kissed it impulsively.
“Thank you. You are an angel.”
“Come, we will be burned to death if we don’t get out of here in a minute,” Ruth cried, excitedly.
She found the berth ladder she had thrown through the window and broke the windows out on the lower side of the car, and called:
“Is any one down there?”
Only the roar of the water and crackling flames answered.
She looked and saw a strip of ground on the bank of the river some eight feet below. They might slide down the trestle if no one could help.
The black eyes flashed into the blue for a moment and the little brunette face went white.
“Where is Frank?” she gasped.
Kate shivered and glanced at the flames.
“I don’t know. He was in the berth in front of mine. I hope he is gone for help.”
Ruth handed her the children and leaped back to the berth. It was smashed upward and a great hole torn through the roof.
She hurried back and again peered down through the broken window at the narrow strip of ground on the river’s brink lit by the rising flames.
And then she gave a cry of joy at the sound of a voice somewhere amid the mass beneath,
“Ruth! Ruth! Is that you and the children in that car?”
“Yes, Frank,” came back the steady answer.
“Are you hurt?” he cried, with breathless intensity.
“I think not,” she replied, cheerfully.
“Thank God!” she heard his deep voice burst out with trembling fervour.
“Have you seen Kate?” he called.
“Yes; she is here.”
“Come, get out of there quick. You will be burned to death!” he shouted. “Hand the children to me and then swing down—I can catch you, one at a time.”
She held the boy’s hands and dropped him in his father’s arms, then swung Lucy through and saw her clasp his neck and kiss him. She helped Kate hold and swing down into his arms. And when she felt him tremble at the touch of her own petite figure her arms tightened about his neck, she kissed him and whispered:
“My own dear love!”
They climbed up the river bank and walked around in the pouring rain, barefoot and treading on broken glass at every step.
Neither the conductor of the train or Pullman cars were anywhere to be seen. Only one porter appeared to have survived, and he sat moaning on a piece of debris.
The great engine, like a huge living monster that had seen with its single eye the abyss of the broken bridge in time, had leaped the chasm and gone plunging and faring over the ties and rails a half mile beyond the wreck, with the engineer and fireman clinging to it.
The lighter portion of the train had struck the embankment of the narrow river. The day cars were piled across the track beyond; the threes Pullmans, smashed and heaped on top of one another, hung on the edge of the broken bridge.
Gordon, with the two women and children, finally found a man who had some sense—a fat drummer seated on his sample-cases calmly putting on his shoes by the light of the burning cars.
He was talking to a younger drummer sitting near, who fidgeted and kept looking about nervously.
“Take it easy, sonny. Put on your shoes,” he said, soothingly.
“This is awful!” the young one sighed.
“Well, we’re all right, top side up, marked ‘with care.’ Don’t worry. Put on your shoes. You can’t walk in this glass barefoot.”
When he saw Gordon and his party he stopped tying his shoes and laughed.
“Well, partner, you look like a patriarch who’s lost his way. Ain’t none of your family got shoes?”
He looked at Gordon’s bleeding feet and at Kate and Ruth shivering behind him in the rain.
Gordon smiled and shook his head.
The fat man hastily pulled off his own shoes, snatched off those of the younger man beside him and offered them to the ladies.
“They won’t be what you might call a stylish fit, madam,” he said gallantly to Ruth, “but they’ll beat broken glass for comfort.”
Paying no attention to their protests, he made them sit down on the sample-cases and put them on.
Turning to Gordon and his companion, he called cheerfully:
“Come, men, that Pullman’s full of blankets; we must get them out for the women and children before it’s too late. It’s too dark to find our umbrellas. I believe that fool conductor’s got mine anyhow and gone home with it. I haven’t seen him anywhere.”
In a few minutes, he had blankets for all the passengers who had lost their clothes. By daybreak he had found the conductor, counted his tickets, and discovered that out of fifty passengers on the train twenty had been wounded, none fatally, and that thirty had escaped without a scratch. The train had dropped most of its passengers during the day and had only an average of ten people to a coach, and they were seated and sleeping near the centres of each car. By what seemed a miracle, none were killed.
Just as the sun rose, the drummer formed the passengers in line, with the conductor bringing up the rear, and marched them to a cabin where he saw smoke curling up from the edge of a field.
The relief train from Florence, four miles away, arrived at eight, just four hours from the time the accident occurred, bringing the surgeons and new officers to take charge, and the drummer resigned his command.
The new conductor took the name and address of each passenger as they sat in grim array swathed in blankets in the cabin.
Gordon gave the name of “Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gordon, New York,” for himself and Kate, who sat beside him. Ruth, not hearing him, with an absent look gave the address, “Mrs. Frank Gordon, New York.”
The conductor looked from one to the other, puzzled, and the drummer grinned.
“A Mormon Elder, by the Lord—and he lives in Gotham!” he whispered to the youngster he had in tow.
Lucy lay in her mother’s lap suffering from an ugly gash across her forehead. Gordon had bathed her forehead as soon as he had discovered it, and carried her to the cabin, with her soft arms clinging around his neck.
He was watching her lips twitch.
She had grown in the three years out of all resemblance to the child he had left. Her eyes now looked at him with the timid light of a maiden.
As she had clung to him while he carried her to the house, he had felt her lips soft and warm with the dawn of sex when she kissed him and murmured:
“Papa, dear, it’s so good to have you carry me. I love you.”
For the first time there came into his soul the sweet and terrible realisation that his own flesh and blood had become one with Ruth’s in the greatest miracle of earth, the heart of a woman—a woman who could live and suffer and whose heart could break even as her mother’s! Her eyes were all his, her hair a perfect mixture of the pigments with which theirs had been coloured. The strength of the man trembled with tender pride and wonder as he looked at her—his living marriage vow, written out before his eyes in a beautiful poem of flesh and blood. In the gentle beauty of her face he saw reflected himself blended with the young vision of Ruth as he had first met her a laughing girl—the little stranger a growing woman, himself and his first love dream in one. Her face held him fascinated.
Kate watched him furtively.
The doctor examined and dressed Lucy’s wound, and told Ruth it must be sewed up at once if the child were saved from an ugly scar that would disfigure her for life. He pronounced the heart action too weak from the shock to use an anesthetic.
“It can only be done, madam,” he gravely said to her, “if you can get her consent to endure the pain.”
“Will you bear it, dear?” the mother asked.
She raised herself up and beckoned to her father.
Gordon had heard the doctor’s remark, came at once and bent over her.
“I can if Papa will hold me in his arms and you take one hand and he the other,” she said, eagerly.
Gordon took her and told the surgeon to take the stitches without delay.
The first one she bore bravely. But when the steel needle cut the flesh the second time, and the sharp pain sent its chill to her heart, the little face went white and she gasped:
“Kiss me, Papa—Mama, quick—”
They both bent at once, and the blond locks of the man mingled with the dark hair of the woman as their lips touched her face.
The doctor paused, and Lucy smiled faintly.
“I’m better now. I can stand it.”
Gordon felt a strange thrill to the last depths of his soul as he sat there holding one of his daughter’s hands while Ruth held the other. A sense of mysterious unity with their life came over him.
The little woman saw his emotion and knew its meaning.
She bent close and, while a smile played around her eyes, whispered softly and triumphantly:
“Frank, I’d go through another wreck for this.”
And the man was silent.
At Florence, clothes were brought to the train, and those who had none were rigged out after a fashion for the return home.
Not a passenger on the train wished to continue his journey except the fat drummer. He went on to the next station where he had intended to stop, as though nothing worth talking about had happened, and sold a bill of goods before dinner.
Ruth and the children returned to New York on the first train, and Gordon and Kate followed on the next.
Kate had scarcely spoken a word since he had lifted her from the wreck. She was in a deep reverie, but from the occasional gleam of her eyes Gordon knew she was passing through some great crisis. He wondered what the effects of this hour face to face with death would be on her character.
He was amazed at the changes in Ruth since he had last seen her. She had blossomed into the perfect beauty of womanhood. Not a trace of anxiety was left on her face. Her great dark eyes were calm and soft. Her lips were fuller, and her complexion white and pink, wreathed in its raven hair. Her figure was now the perfection of the petite Spanish type, in full, voluptuous lines, yet erect, lithe, with small hands and feet and tiny wrists, her whole being breathing a spiritual charm. Grace, delicacy, and distinction were in every movement of her body, and over it all, an unconscious and winning dignity.
After several hours of silence, as they sped back toward New York, Kate looked at him curiously and laughed.
“You’re not quite so handsome, Frank, in those trousers that stop at the top of your shoes and that coat that pauses just below your elbow.”
He held up his long, powerful arms and said, meditatively:
“No. Gestures arrayed like that could hardly move an audience.”
The shadows fell across the blue eyes again and they swept him with a critical expression.
“I didn’t tell you that Ruth saved my life.”
Gordon turned suddenly.
“Yes, and it was a shock to me I’ll never get over. I don’t know whether I could have done as much for her under similar circumstances, with two children clinging to me and life depending on a moment’s time perhaps. But she did it, swiftly and beautifully. To tell you the truth, I’ve quite fallen in love with her. She is a wonderful little woman. I’ve been sitting here for hours wondering at the meanness of a man who could desert her. Those great soulful eyes of hers! When I looked up into them, crying like a poor coward for life—I, who had robbed her of what she held dearer than life—I saw only a tender mother’s soul looking down at me. Frank, I fear your spell over me is broken. You’re a poor piece of clay. The blaze in that car lit up some corners of my soul I never saw before. I think I’ll despise all men and love all women after to-day. What fools and puppets we are!”
The man made no reply. He only looked out the window at the flying landscape and saw the sweet face of a little girl.