The Ragged Edge by Harold MacGrath (best beach reads .TXT) 📖

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Their heads touched again, their arms tightened. Gazing into each other's eyes with new-found rapture, neither observed the sudden appearance in the doorway of an elderly woman in travel-stained linen.

There was granite in her face and agate in her eyes. The lips were straight and pale, the chin aggressive, the nose indomitable. She was, by certain signs, charged with anger, but she saw upon the faces of these two young fools the look of angels and an ineffable kindness breathed upon her withered heart.

"So, you young fool, I have found you!" she said, harshly.

Ruth and Spurlock separated, the one embarrassed, the other utterly dumfounded.

"Auntie?" he cried.

"Yes, Auntie! And to date you have cost me precisely sixteen thousand dollars-hard earned, every one of them."

Spurlock wondered if something hadn't suddenly gone awry in his head. He had just passed through a terrific physical test. Surely he was imagining this picture. His aunt, here at McClintock's? It was unbelievable. He righted a chair and sat in it, his face in his hands. But when he looked again, there she was!

"I don't understand," he said, finally.

"You will before I'm done with you. I have come to take you home; and hereafter my word will be the law. You will obey me out of common decency. You can scribble if you want to, but after you've given your eight hours daily to the mills. Sixteen thousand! Mark me, young man, you'll pay it back through the nose, every dollar of it!"

"I owe you nothing." Pain was stabbing him, now here, now there; pain was real enough; but he could not establish as a fact in his throbbing brain the presence of his aunt in the doorway. "I owe you nothing," he repeated, dully.

"Hoity-toity! You owe me sixteen thousand dollars. They were very nice about it, in memory of your father. They telephoned that you had absconded with ten thousand, and that if I would make good the loss within twenty-four hours, they would not prosecute. I sent my check for ten thousand; and it has cost me six thousand to find you. I should say that you owed me considerable."

Still his brain refused to assimilate the news or to deduce the tremendous importance of it.

"You are Ruth?"

"Yes," said Ruth, stirred by anger and bitterness and astonishment. This, then, was the woman from whom Hoddy would not have accepted a cup of water.

"Come here," said the petticoated tyrant. Ruth obeyed, not willingly, but because there was something hypnotic in the authoritative tone. "Put your arms about me." Ruth did so, but without any particular fervour. "Kiss me." Ruth slightly brushed the withered cheek. The aunt laughed. "Love me, love my dog! Because I've scolded him and told him a few truths, you are ice to me. Not afraid of me, either."

"No," said Ruth, pulling back.

But the aunt seized her in her arms and rocked with her. "A miserly old woman. Well, I've had to be. All my life I've had to fight human wolves to hold what I have. So I've grown hard-outside. What's all this about, anyhow? You. Far away there was the one woman for this boy of mine-some human being who would understand the dear fool better than all the rest of the world. But God did not put you next door. He decided that Hoddy should pay a colossal price for the Dawn Pearl-shame, loneliness, torment, for only through these agencies would he learn your worth. The fibre of his soul had to be tested, queerly, to make him worthy of you. Through fire and water, through penury and pestilence, your hand will always be on his shoulder. McClintock wrote me about you; but all I needed was the sight of your face as it was a moment gone."

Gently she thrust Ruth aside. Ruth's eyes were wet, but she saw light everywhere: the room was filled with celestial aura.

The aunt rushed over to her nephew, knelt and wrapped him in her arms. "My little Hoddy! You used to love me; and I have always loved you. The thought of you, wandering from pillar to post, believing yourself hunted-it tore my old heart to pieces! For I knew you. You would suffer the torments of the damned for what you had done. So I set out to find you, even if it cost ten times sixteen thousand. My poor Hoddy! I had to talk harshly, or break down and have hysterics. I've come to take you back home. Don't you understand? Back among your own again, and only a few of us the wiser. Have you suffered?"

"Dear God!... every hour since!"

"The Spurlock conscience. That is why Wall Street broke your father; he was honest."

"Ah, my father! The way you treated him...!"

"Good money after bad. You haven't heard my side if it, Hoddy. To shore up a business that never had any foundation, he wanted me to lend him a hundred thousand; and for his sake as well as for mine I had to refuse. He wasn't satisfied with an assured income from the paper-mills your grandfather left us. He wanted to become a millionaire. So I had to buy out his interest, and it pinched me dreadfully to do it. In the end he broke his own heart along with your mother's. I even offered him back the half interest he had sold to me. You sent back my Christmas checks."

"I had to. I couldn't accept anything from you."

"You might have added 'then'," said Miss Spurlock, drily.

"I'm an ungrateful dog!"

"You will be if you don't instantly kiss me the way you used to. But your face! What happened here just before I came?"

"Perhaps God wasn't quite sure that I could hold what I had, and wanted to try me out."

"And you whipped the beast? I passed him."

"At any rate, I won, for he went away. But, Auntie, however in this world did you find this island?"

She told him. "The chief of the detective agency informed me that it would be best not to let Mr. O'Higgins know the truth; he wouldn't be reckless with the funds, then. For a time I didn't know we'd ever find you. Then came the cable that you were in Canton, ill, but not dangerously so. Mr. O'Higgins was to keep track of you until I believed you had had enough punishment. Then he was to arrest you and bring you home to me. When I learned you were married, I changed my plans. I did not know what God had in mind then. Mr. O'Higgins and I landed at Copeley's yesterday; and Mr. McClintock sent his yacht over for us this morning. Hoddy, what made you do it? Whatever made you do it?"

"God knows! Something said to me: Take it! Take it! And ... I took it. After I took the bills it was too late to turn back. I drew out what I had saved and boarded the first ship out. Wait!"

He released himself from his aunt's embrace, ran to the trunk and fetched the old coat. With the aid of a penknife he ripped the shoulder seams and drew out the ten one-thousand dollar bills. Gravely he placed them in his aunt's hand.

"You didn't spend it?"

"I never intended to spend it-any more than I really intended to steal it. That's the sort of fool your nephew is!"

"Not even a good time!" said the aunt, whimsically, as she stuffed the bills into her reticule. "Not a single whooper-upter! Nothing but torment and remorse ... and Ruth! Children, put your arms around me. In a little while-to-morrow-all these tender, beautiful emotions will pass away, and I'll become what I was yesterday, a cynical, miserly old spinster. I'll be wanting my sixteen thousand."

"Six," he corrected.

"Why, so it is," she said, in mock astonishment. "Think of me forgetting ten thousand so quickly!"

"Go to, you old fraud! You'll never fool me again. God bless you, Auntie! I'll go into the mills and make pulp with my bare hands, if you want me to. Home!-which I never hoped to see again. To dream and to labour: to you, my labour; to Ruth, my dreams. And if sometimes I grow heady-and it's in the blood-remind me of this day when you took me out of hell-a thief."

"Hoddy!" said Ruth. "You mustn't!"

"Nothing can change that, Dawn Pearl. Auntie has taken the nails out of my palms, but the scars will always be there."

There fell upon the three the silence of perfect understanding; and in this silence each saw a vision. To Ruth came that of the great world, her lawful lover at her side; and there would be glorious books into each of which he would unconsciously put a little of her soul along with his own, needing her always. The spinster saw herself growing warm again in the morning sunshine of youth-a flaring ember before the hearth grew cold. Spurlock's vision was oddly of the past. He saw Enschede, making the empty sea, alone, alone, forever alone.

"Children," said the aunt, first to awake, "be young fools as long as God will permit you. And don't worry about the six thousand, Hoddy. I'll call it my wedding gift. There's nothing so sad in this world as an old fool," she added.

The three of them laughed joyously.

And Rollo, who had been waiting for some encouraging sound, presented himself at the doorway. He was caked with dried muck. He was a bad dog; he knew it perfectly; but where there was laughter, there was hope. With his tongue lolling and his flea-bitten stump wagging apologetically, he glanced from face to face to see if there was any forgiveness visible. There was.


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Publication Date: 05-21-2008

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