Chapter VIII: Book II: I (2)

The young woman looked up startled, but only for an instant, the next the dull misery of her look closed over her face like a mask, though her lip trembled. “He’s offered me fifteen dollars,” she faltered; “I--I suppose I’ll have to take it.”

Margaret quietly put out her hand. “Will you sell it to me?” she said; “I will give more and you will not have to give your name.”

The girl’s cheek crimsoned; she hesitated and gathered the necklace into her hands; the gesture was pathetic, it bespoke the actual pang of parting with an old keepsake.

Margaret saw it. “Come, come with me,” she said and led her back through the door to the studio entrance; she no longer feared to meet Allestree; a new impulse stirred her heart.

Under the light there she opened her purse and hastily counted her money, she had a little over a hundred dollars in small bills. Hurriedly thrusting a dollar or two back into her pocketbook, she pressed the remainder into her companion’s hands, saying at the same time: “Keep your necklace, I do not want it; I only wished to help you save it.”

The young stranger looked at her in dull amazement, stunned by the incomprehensible sympathy and generosity when she had long since ceased to look for either. She drew a long shuddering breath. “Oh, I can’t take so much!” she gasped out, “you--you must keep the necklace!”

Margaret regarded her sadly. “Child,” she replied, “I’m more unhappy than you are; I do not want either the money or the necklace; keep them both!”

“Do you really mean it?” the girl whispered, her eyes fastened on the face opposite in absolute wonder and doubt; “you really mean to give me all this--and you want nothing?”

Margaret smiled with stiff lips. “Nothing!”

The pinched, childlike features of the stranger quivered; it seemed as if the frozen sensibilities were melting under this touch of common humanity. Suddenly she burst into an agony of tears, slipping down upon the stairs, her slender shabby figure racked with sobs. “He heard me!” she cried, “there is a God!”

Margaret looked at her strangely. “Do you think so?” she asked vaguely, with parched lips, “do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” the girl cried, clasping her hands, “I prayed--oh, God, how I prayed! It seemed as if He didn’t hear me, no help came and I couldn’t pay; I couldn’t pay, and they didn’t believe me any more because I’d failed--you don’t know, you’ve never failed like that! I thought God didn’t care, that He had forgotten--but now--” she rose from her knees, her face still wet with tears but singularly changed, “I shan’t have to do it!” she cried, “here’s enough to begin all over again, I can go on, I’m saved! He heard! Don’t you believe it? Don’t you see it must be so?” she persisted, unconsciously catching at Margaret’s draperies and her thin toil-worn hand closing on their richness.

“For you, yes,” the older woman replied slowly; “good heavens, I never knew how much money meant before!” she murmured, passing her hand over her eyes again, “and you think--God heard you--_God?_”

“He sent you!” the girl cried, exultantly, wildly happy; “oh, yes, I’m sure of it--oh, God bless you!”

A strange expression passed over Margaret’s face. She leaned back against the wall, pressing her hand to her heart. Then, as the girl still sobbed softly, she touched her shoulder. “Open the door,” she said quietly, “I--I must go, can you help me? I’m a little dizzy.”

The young woman sprang to her and put out her arm eagerly. “Let me help you; oh, I’d do anything for you!”

Margaret smiled, a wan little smile that made her haggard brilliant face weirdly sad. “It is nothing. There, the air from the outside makes me well again, this place is choking!”

The stranger walked with her to the corner, eager to help her, to call a cab, to put her on the cars, but as Margaret’s faintness passed she refused, putting aside her protests with firm dismissal. “No, no, I can go home,” she said bravely; “good-bye, I’m glad I could help you.”

“Oh, let me go with you, let me do something!” the girl appealed to her eagerly.

But Margaret dismissed her and they parted, the young stranger hurrying away down a narrow by-street while her benefactress walked slowly toward the nearest avenue. But she had gone only a few steps when she turned and looked after the shabby figure, which was only a short distance from her. A vivid recollection of that cry that God had heard her prayer, the absolute conviction of it, swept over the stricken woman, and moved by an impulse which she did not pause to question, Margaret ran after the girl through the gathering mist and overtook her, breathless. She turned with a frightened look, full of dread, no doubt, that she must yet give up the miraculously acquired wealth, and she started when Margaret laid a thin, ungloved hand on her arm.

“I wanted to ask you,” she began,--and then changed the sentence swiftly into a command,--“pray for me to-night! You believe there is a God--perhaps He’ll hear you again!”

“Indeed I will!” the girl cried, bewildered; “oh, I wish--”

But the unfinished speech was lost; Margaret had turned and swiftly disappeared again into the folds of the mist; like a shadow the girl saw her vanishing into deeper shadows; something uncanny and marvellous seemed to lurk in the very thought of her beautiful haggard face, the wildness of her smile, and the young woman hurried away, hugging her treasure close, almost persuaded that she had talked face to face with a being from another world.

VI

AVOIDING the crowded thoroughfares, and no longer remembering her physical weariness or that she had walked for hours without food or drink, Margaret hurried on.

She had thought of death, and the means to attain it most swiftly and easily, but as she passed the brilliantly lighted chemist’s window, with its arch hung with bright red Christmas bells, she put away the thought; it was too cheap and sensational and, after all, if there really were a God could she take that swift, shuddering plunge through the blackness of death to meet Him? _The wages of sin is death!_ It thundered in her ears, making God the avenging Deity of the Old Testament, for how little do those who preach sometimes divine the pictures which they frame of Him who was lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that all men might be saved!

A strange new light began to come into Margaret’s soul, and against it her thoughts took on dark and sharply outlined forms like the shadows thrown on a white screen by the stereopticon; she began to understand. Happiness, after all, was a dream, an imagination, a word; it came not from any visible cause, but lay hidden in every man’s heart like hope imprisoned in Pandora’s box. The secret of it came to her at last,--life moved in an orbit; the past held the future, the future the past, the present was but the connecting link in the inexorable circle, it could not be broken while memory existed, while a reckoning was required. She could no more break the links with her past than she could destroy her immortal soul.

In her heart a new, secret thought, born of the strange girl’s gratitude, moved her out of herself. She remembered Mrs. Allestree’s words, and her love for Fox suddenly purged itself of its passionate agony, its jealousy, its pain. Like a woman in a dream she found her way at last to the hotel and climbed the stairs. Her face bore too terrible signs of anguish, and she shrank from the elevator and the curious stare of the servants. It was the dinner hour and the corridors were deserted. She went quietly to her own room and did not ring for her maid. She noticed that her evening gown had been put out and the fire tended. Gerty was not there, she would scarcely be there before nine o’clock, and Margaret went to her desk and sat down and began to write in feverish haste; if she delayed, if she stopped to think she might never do it and she was determined. She bent to her task, white lipped and haggard, writing page after page to Rose Temple. She poured out her heart; in righting Fox she scarcely thought of herself, except that she should never see him again, that Rose must and should marry him! For abruptly the divine impulse of self-immolation had been born in the midst of the tumult of her soul; a woman’s heart, like a eucalyptus tree, trembles with the remembrance of anguish and the eternal sacrifice of love.

As she finished it the clock struck and she looked up startled; it was eight o’clock; she had been out more than four hours. She sealed her letter, stamped it and rose. For a moment her strength failed her and she stood irresolute, but she was unwilling to trust another hand, and she opened the door and took Rose’s letter down to the post herself, avoiding the elevator again. After she had dropped it in the letter-box in the lower hall, she climbed the long flight wearily to her room. The fearful energy of the last few hours dropped from her like a cloak, the effort was too much and she felt an overpowering weakness, a sinking sensation; she had had such moments before and the doctor had furnished her with some restoratives with a grim injunction to avoid tiring herself. A vision of his grave face flashed across her now and warned her. With the sudden ineffable sinking and yielding, which came over her like a cloud and seemed to drop her slowly, softly into space, was born a keen desire to live; Estelle’s voice pierced her memory like a knife; she seemed to hear that plaintive cry--“Mamma, mamma, come home!”

She made one more supreme effort to reach the medicines and was, indeed, but a few yards from the cabinet which held them when her strength yielded to that awful dark cloud which seemed to be pressing down upon her, pushing her lower and lower into the depths of silence. She slipped like water to the floor, her head upon her outstretched arms, a faint shudder ran through her; she was dimly conscious of sinking down, down into a black, fathomless abyss. Again Estelle’s voice quivered through the clouds and mists and reached her heart; she tried to struggle back, up through vague distances, to answer it, but the mists grew thicker; she heard it once again, no more! The soft, ineffable clouds pressed closer, enfolded her; she sank lower, floated off over the edge of space and lost even thought itself.

VII

FOR three days Fox had been under an almost unbearable strain. Before and after speaking to Margaret of their marriage he had plunged in the same agonizing struggle with himself. What diabolical power had been at work to ruin his life, to frustrate his ambitions? The strong egotism of his nature was aroused in all its absorbing passion. On every hand he saw disaster; he had builded well in all respects but one; in that he had miserably failed, and behold the inevitable result! Like Margaret herself, he saw clearly at last; if he had kept away from her, if he had broken from the spell of her fascination and remained out of reach, this would never have been; he had no one to thank but himself. It is usually so; when we get down to the fundamental principles we have ourselves to blame for the fall of the Tower of Siloam.

As he faced the immediate prospect of marriage with another woman, he realized the strength and hopelessness of his love for Rose. To think of her even in the same moment with Margaret was abhorrent to him; he did poor Margaret scant justice at such times, and the vivid realities of her newspaper celebrity was a scourge to his sensitive pride. For these things he must give up all, he must pay the price. He who crossed his path when this mood was on him was unfortunate,--Fox was not a man to spare. His cruel irony, his poignant wit had never been more feared on the floor of the House than they were in those few days before Christmas.

The day after his decisive interview with Margaret he was late at the Capitol, lingering in his committee-room after the others had left. On his way home he dined at the club and was detained there by some out-of-town friends until nearly eleven o’clock. When he finally left the building he started home on foot, and even stopped at a news-stand to buy some papers and magazines. It was twelve o’clock when he went up to his rooms, and he was startled as he walked down the corridor to see his door open and the vestibule lighted. Sandy came to meet him with the air a dog wears who knows that a friend is waiting for his master.

Allestree was sitting by the table in the study, and as Fox entered he rose with a sober face, “I’ve been waiting for you for an hour,” he said; “I have bad news.”

Fox stopped abruptly, his thoughts leaping instantly to Rose. “Bad news?” he repeated in a strange voice.

Allestree met his eye, perhaps read his thoughts. “Yes, the worst,” he replied; “Margaret is dead.”

“Margaret?” Fox dropped the papers he held, on the table, and looked at him, bewildered; “impossible!”

“I wish it were so,” Allestree said quietly, hurrying on with his disagreeable task; “it seems that she was out to-day for a long time alone; no one apparently knows much about it except the elevator boy and he says she was away from the hotel four hours or more. As nearly as we know she was on foot and in the streets most of that time. I know she was in my studio while I was out;” he colored as he spoke; he had found his mother’s letter on the floor and piecing the facts together had divined much. “She came home alone, went to her rooms and was found there later, unconscious, on the floor.”

“Good God, where was Gerty?” Fox exclaimed, with a gesture of horror.

“Margaret had sent her to Mrs. White with Estelle; there was some painful scene in the street with the child--” Allestree stopped an instant and then meeting his cousin’s eye he hurried on--“when Gerty finally got to the hotel and found her it was too late; the doctors say that if help had been at hand she might have been saved. As it was she never regained consciousness. Gerty telephoned to my mother, but she will not be back until to-morrow morning; when I got there Margaret was gone.”

Fox sank into a chair by the table, and propping his head on his hands stared blankly at a sheet of paper before him. “Why was I not told?” he demanded hoarsely.

“Gerty tried to get you, both at the Capitol and here, but we could not find you.”

“I was at the club,” Fox exclaimed and then: “Merciful heaven, Allestree, how terrible, how harrowing! How impossible to realize!”

Allestree looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you think so?” he said, “it has seemed to me for more than a year that I saw death in her face; she had, poor girl, a face of tragedy.”

Fox groaned, covering his own face with his hands. His anger against her of a moment before smote him with horrible reproach. Living, he had ceased to love her, dead, she seemed suddenly to fill his life to the exclusion of all else; she came to him again in the guise of her thoughtless, happy, inconsequent youth which had forged the links between them. He rose and began to walk the floor, his pale face distorted with passion. “My God!” he cried suddenly; “I--Allestree, is it possible that she divined the truth? That she knew me for what I was, a sham, a mockery, a whited sepulchre?”

Knowing him and the unhappy woman, whose love for him had wrecked her life, Allestree knew too much to speak; he was silent.

The storm of his cousin’s passion rose and beat itself against the inevitable refusal of death. Poor Margaret! a few hours ago she had held the power to ruin his career, now she had slipped quietly away from him into the great Silence; the mute appeal of her unhappy love touched his very soul as it had never touched it in life; the impossibility of laying the blame for life’s miseries on the dead came to him with overwhelming force, and she, who a moment before had been guilty, in his thoughts, of embarrassing his future and blighting his life, became suddenly the victim of his vanity, his idle pleasure seeking which she had mistaken for love. He remembered, with sudden horror and self loathing, his coldness, his bitterness toward her, and the manner in which she had received his proposal of marriage. A swift electrifying realization of the scene tore away his selfish absorption; his manner of asking her had been almost an insult to her high spirited pride, to her love, which had humiliated itself by the first confession on that night in the deserted ballroom where she had poured out the wretchedness of her soul. She had come to him wounded, homeless, and he had all but cast her off in his passionate selfishness, his hatred of the loveless marriage which his honor had bound him to make.

If he had only loved her, if he had but dissembled and seemed to love her! Overwhelmed with grief he searched his mind for one reassuring recollection, for one instance which should acquit him of complicity in the tragic agony of her death, but he found none. He had neglected her, denied her, tried to evade that final moment when he must ask her to be his wife, and through all she had borne with him with a sweetness unusual in her stormy nature; she had loved him well enough to make allowances, to forgive, to overlook! And now passing away from him without a word, she had left only her final kiss of forgiveness on his cheek, the wild rush of her tears at their last parting. Henceforth he should never speak to her again, never hear her voice, never know how deeply she had suffered, never ask her forgiveness. The fact that the sequence of events was inevitable, that a woman no sooner seeks a man’s love than she loses it, gave him no relief. In his own eyes he had been little short of a monster of cruelty to a dying woman because, forsooth, he loved another--younger and more beautiful!

Memory, too, tormented him with the thought of Margaret, young, sweet, confiding as she had been when he had first known her and loved her; he thought less of the moment when she broke faith and married White; her fault was less now than his; the error of a beautiful, wilful girl seemed but a little thing before the awful fact of her wrecked life, her tragic death. Through all she had really loved him, that one thing seemed certain; her spirit in all its wild sweet waywardness had held to this one tie, her love for him, and when she had turned to him at last in her wretchedness seeking happiness, asking it, pleading for it like a child, she had received not bread but a stone! He knew now that no living woman could have misunderstood his coldness, his tardiness, his indifference, and in his cousin’s pale and averted face he read an accusing understanding.

He threw himself into a chair again and sat staring gloomily at the floor. “What madness!” he exclaimed at last, with sudden fury; “how dared Gerty neglect her so? She was ill, weak, unprotected!”

“Gerty was no more to blame than others,” Allestree observed quietly.

Fox threw back his head haughtily, and their eyes met. “I was willing to give her my life,” he said bitterly, “I had no more to give!”

Allestree rose. “It is over,” he replied gravely; “we cannot bring her back; come, you will go there, she would wish it, I know,” he added, “and there is no one else!”

The awful finality of those words and the reproach they carried was indisputable. Fox rose with a deep groan and went out with him, without a word, to face the greatest trial of all.

VIII

IN a little _pension_ on the rue Neuve des Petits Champs, Rose Temple had been working patiently at her music for six months and more, studying under one of the great Italian teachers, a man who had trained more than one prima donna and was, therefore, chary of his encouragement. The enthusiasm which she had brought to her task having been gradually dispelled by sharp disappointments, she had struggled on, determined to succeed at last.

The first test of her voice before the maestro and his French critics had been a failure, a failure so complete that she came home to weep her heart out on the faithful shoulder of the elderly cousin who was her chaperon and comforter. The weakness of a voice, beautiful but not yet fully trained, her trepidation at singing before the maestro and his assembled judges, together with the long strain of preparation, had united in her undoing. She came back to the _pension_ without a word of encouragement, feeling at heart that she would never sing a note again.

She sat down, laying her head on the little writing-table, amid a wild confusion of Miss Emily Carter’s pens and papers, and gave way to her despair. “I shall never sing again!” she said, “never--I’m a miserable failure; I haven’t any more voice than a sparrow, and there’s all that money wasted, thrown away!”

Miss Emily eyed her quietly. She had the intense family pride which is nurtured in the State of Virginia; she did not need to be told, she knew that Rose had the loveliest voice in the world. As for these nasty, little, fat, insinuating Frenchmen! She took off her spectacles and smoothed her hair back from her temples; it was done as they did hair forty years ago; it matched her immaculate turn-over lace collar and hair brooch. “You’ll blot my letter, Rose,” she said calmly, with a little drawl that was inimitable; “I don’t see what you’re crying about, it will make your nose red; as for these horrid little Parisians, they know about as much about you as they do about heaven--which isn’t enough to get there!”

In spite of herself Rose laughed feebly. “You’re the most prejudiced person I know, Cousin Emily!”

“Prejudiced?” Miss Carter’s nostrils quivered scornfully, “I wasn’t raised within forty miles of Richmond for nothing, Rose Temple! Don’t you suppose I know a gentleman when I see one? What in the world can you expect from that person if he is a singing master? He wears a solitaire ring on his little finger and a red necktie. I reckon I’ve got eyes if I do wear spectacles.”

“But he’s trained half the great singers of the world, Cousin Emily, and at first he was so kind about my voice--to-day--” Rose winked back the hot tears--“to-day he never said a word!”

“Pig!” ejaculated Miss Carter unmoved.

Rose laughed hysterically. “I shall never sing; I’d better take to washing and ironing for a living!”

“You’d make a fortune,” retorted Miss Carter ironically; “while you were mooning you’d scorch all the shirt bosoms and smash the collars.”

“You’re not a bit encouraging; no one is!” Rose said helplessly, leaning back in her chair; “it makes my heart ache to think of wasting poor father’s money so!”

“And I reckon he’d give the whole of it to keep your little finger from hurting; he thinks you’re a chip of the moon. And how in the world do you know you’ve wasted it yet?” continued her cousin, calmly indignant; “perhaps you didn’t sing well to-day; is that any reason you won’t to-morrow?”

Rose looked at the angular figure opposite, and the color came again slowly to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. “I’m so glad you came, Cousin Emily!” she exclaimed; “without you I should have just given up, they looked so--so indifferent, those men with their eye-glasses and their notebooks and their stare.”

“Stare? I should think so!” replied Miss Carter severely; “I’ll put a Frenchman against anything for staring. I believe myself that Paris is a Sodom and Gomorrah boiled into one, let me tell you! How any nice sweet girl can marry one of them-- Rose, if anything should ever induce me at any time to think of marrying one, clap me into an insane asylum, you hear?”

And Rose, burying her face in her hands, laughed until she cried.

But without Miss Carter and Aunt Hannah her courage would have failed her often in the months which followed. She was put back at the alphabet of music and worked with the beginners. More than one night she secretly cried herself to sleep without daring to tell Cousin Emily of her weakness. Homesickness, too, pinched her and took the color from her cheeks, but she worked bravely on. She had reached Paris in June and she had failed at her trial in September. The months which followed were crowded to the brim, and she tried to shut her heart and her ears to news from home, except that which concerned her father. The judge’s letters were purposely cheerful and optimistic, he said so little about financial difficulties that it seemed like a troubled dream to Rose; she never quite realized all it meant to her future.

At last, after many months, her instructor told her one morning that he should bring some competent judges to hear her again and, if she succeeded at this second test, he should try to give her a great opportunity to win her place in the world as a singer. Rose’s heart thrilled. The great man said little, but at last she perceived that he believed in her in spite of her failure, that her voice had finally won his confidence. A word from him was more than a volume from another; it meant success or failure. The girl, full of her dreams of singing and redeeming all with her voice, trembled all over and turned pale. There was a great excitement at the little _pension_ that night; confident though she was, Miss Carter secretly wiped away a tear, and they both worked late to give some fresh touches to the girl’s white gown which brought it up to date; it was a year old, and not made in Paris! They began to see such differences, to recognize the enchanting creations in the show-windows and out walking on the fashionable women on the boulevards.

However, Cousin Emily had her opinion about its owner’s appearance in that same old white frock, and she stole out and bought a single rose for the young singer to wear the next afternoon. Aunt Hannah helped dress her; it was a great occasion; the little flat looked as though a whirlwind had struck it, and at last the two went out in great trepidation to keep the appointment. Secretly Miss Emily longed to give those Frenchmen a piece of her mind about criticizing the voice of a sweet young girl, but she only retired discreetly to a corner and looked on with a peculiar moisture on her spectacles which required the constant use of her handkerchief.

* * * * *

As Rose ceased singing and the last clear notes of her voice floated into the distances of the great empty concert-hall, the thrill of its sweetness, its purity, its young confident power, seemed to fill the very atmosphere of the place with exquisite music; it could not quite pass away into silence, it remained at last, if not in the ears, in the souls of the listeners, a little group to the right of the stage who had gathered there to hear the wonderful pupil, his youthful prima donna, the great gift which, he believed, the new world had for the old.

In the midst of her song she had forgotten herself, her audience, her first failure, even the world itself, while her young ardent soul poured out its joy and its grief in those splendid notes. Love, that great interpreter of the heart, had unlocked hers to sorrow, she sang with the heart of the sorrowful; she was, first of all, as Allestree felt, an impersonation of youth, and she sang with the soul of youth which hopes forever; she loved, purely, unselfishly, gently, and she sang with the love of the world on her lips, and singing thus was supremely lovely; what matter if the old white dress was a little out of fashion? She was a figure as symbolic of youth with its splendid hopes, its faith, its untried strength, as she was the very personification of beautiful womanhood.

No one spoke, no one applauded, but not an eye was dry.

But to Rose, whose ears were not filled with her own music, the silence which followed it came with a shock of terrible revulsion. She waited a moment in keen suspense, but no one spoke, no one moved; the wave of silence that followed the wave of sound engulfed her hopes, she remembered that first disappointment. Bitter dismay swept over her, she turned away to hide her emotion, but the maestro crossed the stage at that instant and held out his hand; he could not praise her but there was actually a tear in his eye.

Rose looked up, and reading his face burst into tears of joy, her hopes suddenly fulfilled.

Then the party of judges broke out with a round of applause and one little Frenchman, with a polished pink bald head and mustaches, shouted: “Brava!”

In the end they crowded around her and overwhelmed her with compliments; they were eager to invite her to a supper and drink her health in champagne, but the staid Virginia cousin, in the old-fashioned black bonnet and the old black alpaca gown, which outraged Paris without hiding the good heart beneath it, frowned on this hilarity; her deep-seated suspicion of the Parisian in general had not been dissipated by this burst of applause. She insisted that Rose, who was trembling with excitement and the strain of the long hours of training, should go straight back to their little apartment to rest. A decision too full of wisdom for even Rose, eager though she was for the sweet meed of praise, to resist it.

They drove back in a fiacre, a wild extravagance which they ventured in view of the great success and the immediate prospects of a fortune; the cousin felt that they were immediate.

“You all were always talented,” she said to Rose, as they drove down the rue de Rivoli; “your mother could do anything; we always said so. Cousin Sally Carter, too, is going to be an artist, and no one ever made preserves like Cousin Anna’s! I reckon it’s in the family, Rose.”

“Oh, Cousin Emily!” Rose sighed, and hid her face on the alpaca shoulder, “oh, if I can only, only sing so well that there shall be no more terrible trouble for father!”

“Now, don’t you worry about the judge, child,” Cousin Emily replied soothingly; “it will all come out right and, anyway, the best families haven’t money now-a-days!” she added with ineffable disdain, “it’s very vulgar.”

“I think I’d risk having it, though!” Rose said, with a sigh.

She was really in a dream. The softness of spring was in the atmosphere as they drove through the gay streets, and all the trees in the garden of the Tuileries were delicately fringed with green; the voices of children, the sounds of laughter, now and then a snatch of song, reminded them that it was a holiday. Rose thought of home; the Persian lilac must be budding, the tulip trees, of course, were in flower; a pang of homesickness seized her, a longing to see the old house again--ah, there was the sorrow of it, could they keep the old house much longer? With these thoughts came others, deeply perturbed, which she tried to thrust away. She knew of Margaret’s sudden death, but she had heard but little of it, of Fox nothing. Her father’s letters excluded the whole matter; Mrs. Allestree’s were chary in mention of it, and from Robert there was no word on the subject. Gerty English, strangely enough, had not written since Margaret’s death, and Rose could only piece together the dim outlines of a tragedy which touched her to the soul. There had been moments when she had been bitter against poor Margaret, had held her responsible, now she thought of her with pity.

As these things floated before her, in a confused dream of sorrow and regret, she was scarcely conscious of Cousin Emily’s chatter, or of the streets through which they passed, but presently they were set down at their own door and she paid the cabman; Cousin Emily’s French was excellent but it belonged exclusively to the classroom and the phrase-book, and no one in Paris understood it, a fact which bewildered her more than any of her other experiences.

They found the _pension_ disturbed by a fire in an adjoining house, and Aunt Hannah was sitting on top of Rose’s trunk with her bonnet on, waiting to be assured that the flames could not reach her.

“It’s all out, Aunt Hannah,” Rose assured her, laughing; “the concierge says it was out half an hour ago.”

“He don’ know nuthin’ about it, Miss Rose; he ain’t sure dat he’s a liar, an’ I knows he is, bekase I’se caught him at it,” the old woman replied firmly; “de place might be afire sure nuff. It was one ob dem ’lection wires dat set de odder house off, an’ dis place is full ob dem; I don’ tole him ter cut ’em loose, an’ he keep on jabberin’ like a monkey; I ain’t got no manner ob use fo’ dese French people no-ways!”

“Nor has Cousin Emily!” laughed Rose, taking off her hat and tossing it to Aunt Hannah, while she passed her hand over her bright hair with a light, deft touch which seemed to bring every ripple into a lovelier disorder; “the poor concierge is a good soul, and he does make us comfortable here.”

“Mebbe he is, an’ mebbe he ain’t!” said Aunt Hannah grudgingly; “dese men folks allus waits on a pretty girl, honey, but I ’lows he’d cheat yo’ jest de same; I’se got my eye on him sure!”

“I wish you’d take off your bonnet and get my trunk open,” retorted Rose good naturedly; “then we’ll see if we can put the concierge in it--if he misbehaves!”

“My sakes, honey, I done clean forgot ter gib yo’ dis letter; it’s a telegram, I reckon; it come jest befo’ de fire broke out, an’ I’se been settin’ on it ter keep it safe.”

It was a cablegram, and Rose stretched out an eager hand for it, with a thrill of anticipation; it seemed as if her father must be reaching out to her across the seas, that he already knew and rejoiced with her for, surely, all his prejudices would dissolve at the assurance of her success.

She opened it with trembling fingers, a smile on her lips. It fluttered and fell to the floor; it was a cablegram to summon her home, the judge was very ill.

IX

AFTERWARDS Rose never quite knew how she endured the voyage home. Her love for her father was so deep, so tender, they were so bound together by a hundred ties not only of affection but of sympathy and tastes and interests, that the very thought of losing him almost broke her down. It took both Cousin Emily Carter and old black Aunt Hannah to comfort and sustain her during those ten days.

But when she reached Washington Allestree met her at the station with good tidings; the judge was out of danger. He had been very near death and came back slowly from the Valley of the Shadow. However, he had come back and Rose knelt beside his bed and cried her heart out with joy to feel his arm around her. How pale and thin and wasted he looked. He had aged so much; poor Rose, she saw it and forced a smile to disguise it even to herself. But he was unaware of the shock which the sight of him gave her, and he forgot his illness in his eager interest in her account of Paris and her final success. She told him very little of those long months of struggle and depression, of the thousand little pinches and trials that they had been through to keep from asking an extra penny from him.

After Rose came the judge began to mend more rapidly; old Mrs. Allestree said he had only been pining away for the child, but she knew better, being a wise old woman. She knew that the judge had been struggling all the year to stave off the foreclosure of the mortgage on the old house which he and Rose loved so well. She knew, too, that he had almost failed when that mysterious arrangement was made for him by an unknown party; the message came that the mortgage had been taken up, and he could have all the time he wanted and at a lower rate of interest.

This news, so amazing and so unprecedented, had been synchronous with the judge’s breakdown and had, Mrs. Allestree believed, contributed to it. The sudden relief had snapped the strain on his nerves, and he slipped down into a state of coma. However, she did not tell Rose this, nor her suspicions, which were fast becoming certainties, about the mortgage; she only kissed her affectionately and made her sing to her the song which had won such an ovation from the French critics, and which Cousin Emily Carter had described with enthusiasm before she departed to the Tidewater region, where she hoped to cut her own asparagus bed and set out her flowers undisturbed by Parisian manners and customs.

Allestree welcomed Rose with even greater relief than his mother and the judge, but wisdom had taught him to rejoice in silence, and he did so, being careful, however, to send promptly for her portrait which, according to the agreement between Mrs. Allestree and the judge, could not be loaned during Rose’s presence in the house, but only as a consolation in her absence. But the judge sighed deeply when they told him it had been returned to the studio again.

It was during the first days of her father’s convalescence that Rose found Margaret’s letter to her among his papers; not knowing Rose’s address in Paris, Margaret had sent it in the judge’s care and he had overlooked it when he forwarded the letters, as he did, once a week. By a strange accident it had slipped under some pamphlets in the basket on his library table and lay there until Rose, rearranging his papers one morning, came upon it and recognizing the writing broke the seal with some trepidation, for Margaret had never been an intimate correspondent, and Rose divined some serious reason for this long closely written letter. She was alone when she found it, and she went to the open window and stood there reading it.

Margaret, moved by the deep sorrow and passion which had swept over her poor troubled soul in those last days of her life, had poured out her heart. She told Rose all; that she had come between her and Fox; in her wild and covetous jealousy she had thought to wrest happiness from despair; to keep his love she had been willing to lose all, and she had lost! She concealed nothing, the last pitiful words of the letter, a remarkable letter of passion and grief and self-sacrifice, told Rose that she was going to give up her life to her children and try to live down her desertion of them.

Rose read it through to the end, and then covered her face with her hands, trying to shut out the terrifying picture that it had unconsciously drawn of a woman, desolate, shipwrecked, without hope in earth or heaven. The terrors which had possessed Margaret’s soul swept over hers. All that Mrs. Allestree had told her, and that Gerty, poor, voluble, good-hearted Gerty, had enlarged upon, filled out the scene. The lonely walk, the visit to the studio, the unfriended and miserable death; she did not know of those other scenes in the church and the curiosity-shop where Margaret had found her heart, but she did know of a strange girl who had brought a single white lily to lay in Margaret’s dead hand and gone away weeping bitterly.

She had blamed poor Margaret, judged her; Rose felt it at that moment and accused herself of heartlessness; of Fox she dared not think. In the new light which this letter shed on the situation, she began to understand how cruelly he had been placed, and there, too, she had judged!

Poor Rose,--her father had inculcated stern and simple lessons and she had tried, before all things, to be just; but to be judicious and calm and in love at the same time was an impossible combination. She dashed the tears from her eyes, and thrust Margaret’s letter into her pocket and went about her duties with the air of a soldier on guard, but her lip would quiver at intervals and she could not sing a note when the judge asked for one of the old ballads that he had loved as a boy, and Rose had learned, to please him.

It was about this time that she began to wonder if the old house must go, or if her father had been able to meet all the payments due upon it. She dared not ask him, and he said nothing, but she noticed that now that he was able to be moved into the library every day and sometimes into the garden in the warm spring sunshine, that he sat for hours at a time in a brown study with a deep furrow between his brows, and constantly pushing back his hair from his forehead, as he did in moments of perplexity. She was afraid to speak, lest any mention of the trouble which had so beset him would bring back the fever and a relapse, so she had to content herself with hope and waited for some sign on his part.

The old house had never seemed so dear; the mantling vines were full out in new foliage, birds were nested on the southern wall toward the garden, and the old garden-plot itself, so sheltered and secluded by the house and the high brick wall which shut out the street, was just coming into bloom. The roses she had set out the spring before were in bud, and the peonies were blooming. Rose looked about her with a sigh and forgot that she would, perhaps, be one day a great prima donna with the world at her feet. Such things do not always fill a woman’s heart.

Meanwhile the judge had written and despatched a letter with great secrecy, and one morning, after he was wheeled into his library, he told Rose that she might take her sewing into the garden for he expected a gentleman on business and he might be there half an hour. She obeyed him with a stifling sensation of anxiety; she knew it was that mortgage, that terrible mortgage, and his reticence convinced her that he was concealing bad news from her. She took her sewing out to the little arbor in the corner, where the library windows were out of sight, and she tried to sew, but her fingers trembled so that she lost her needle and, having neglected to provide herself with another, she sat and watched the robin on the lawn and wished money grew up like grass out of the well tilled earth and was of as little consequence. Yet, all the while, it was not of herself she thought but of her father, broken in health, old and careworn, facing those inexorable obligations without even her help.

The judge alone in the library watched the clock with an anxious eye, and thought of Rose and all it would mean to her if he could save the property. When he lay near death the one overwhelming horror of his heart had been to leave her at the mercy of the world. The old man glanced about him with the same fond recognition of familiar objects; it is strange how dear these inanimate things, which were here before we came and will be here when we are gone, become so valuable to us. To the judge they had associations. The picture over the mantel had been bought by his grandfather, those books dated still farther back in the family; the clock had belonged to his mother’s great grandfather, the old secretary of polished mahogany, with secret drawers and brass mountings, was an heirloom,--it had held a will which had nearly disrupted the family two generations back. Small matters, but to an old man inexpressibly interesting and sacred. Of the house he did not like to think; that was full of memories of his wife, and he could not now explain the madness which had led him to mortgage it to pay off more pressing claims which had followed his first heavy losses.

X

ROSE had been ten minutes in the garden, and the judge was beginning to fidget in his chair when he heard the front door open and shut and at last steps came toward the library. A moment later William Fox entered the room. As he came into the mellow light from the open window the judge was struck by the change in his strong pale face. The old smile which had come so easily to his lips, and which, at times, had almost the sweetness of a woman’s, was gone; the brow and chin had a new resolution. The man was changed. Judge Temple saw it and held out his hand with a sudden impulse of warmer sympathy than he had felt before. After all, Fox had met it like a man and paid the cost.

On his side, Fox was as strongly affected by the broken appearance of the old man in his invalid chair with his white head and his sunken eyes. “My dear judge,” he said, “I hope you’re feeling better? I was glad to obey your summons, though I’m not sure that I understand the reference in your note.”

The judge looked at him a moment in silence, then drawing a letter from his pocket, opened it and handed it to him. Fox took it with evident reluctance; as he read it he colored a little and folding it hastily, handed it back without a word.

“I did not know until yesterday, sir, to whom I was indebted,” Judge Temple said slowly, his lip trembling slightly from weakness and profound emotion.

Fox stirred uneasily in his chair, his color deepening. “I didn’t intend you to know it at all, judge,” he said, almost with an air of diffidence; “I presume I owe my betrayal to Berkman. However, I want to assure you--since it is known--that you can have all the time you desire; I consider it a good investment!”

The judge’s spectacles grew misty and he took them off hurriedly and wiped them, his thin hands shaking as he did it. “I thank you for your confidence,” he said quietly, when he could speak; “you’ll get it--every cent.”

“I know it. I tell you I consider it a good investment, the best I ever made,” Fox retorted smiling; “I’m not usually so judicious in my ventures.”

The old man tried to force an answering smile but he failed, his head sank on his breast and his hands, lying on the carved arms of his great chair, still trembled. Fox looked at him in some anxiety, half afraid that the excitement and relief had been too much, and bitterly indignant that his secret had been betrayed. It had been a difficult matter for him to take up the mortgage, for he was by no means a rich man, but he had vowed in his heart to save Rose her home, the home that he knew she loved so well, and half the joy of doing it had been to do it without her knowledge; but it seemed impossible to keep a secret which, from its very nature, must be shared with others.

The change in the old face opposite was alarmingly sharp.

“My dear judge, you are too indisposed for business; let me ring for assistance,” Fox exclaimed, with real concern.

But the judge protested. “Sir, I’m better to-day than I have been for a year,” he said, a slight break in his voice; “I see my way clear, I’ll be able to save this property, I--” he broke off and passed his handkerchief over his eyes; there was a moment’s painful silence, then he held out his hand. “God bless you, Fox!” he broke out suddenly, “it was killing me to lose it--”

They shook hands. Fox had risen and his face was colorless. “Don’t tell her, judge,” he said abruptly.

The old man started and was about to speak but, meeting the other’s eye, refrained. Many things came into his mind, among them a memory of Rose’s face at Mrs. O’Neal’s ball. It was a bitter moment; no man was good enough for her, and this man had been too much talked about! Yet the child’s happiness was near his heart.

With a certain reluctance Fox turned at last to go, and as he did so his glance passed through the open window into the garden. “I can reach the gate by this path, can I not?” he asked, moving toward it.

The judge started uneasily, with an involuntary gesture as if to detain him, to keep him back at any cost, but Fox did not see it and the old man sank back in his chair quiescent. His lips moved but he said nothing; after all, had he a right to interfere? Unconsciously the younger man went out of the window and down the two short steps to the gravel path.

The judge watched him disappear behind the Persian lilac with a fascinated eye. Then he took out his handkerchief again, and passing it swiftly across his brow pushed back his scant white hair until it seemed to rise up in active protest. The glare of the May sunshine suddenly hurt his gaze and he shook out his handkerchief and threw it over his head, closing his eyes.

Aunt Hannah, opening the door a moment later, with a pleasant jingle of ice in the mint-julep glass on her tray, peeped in, thought him asleep and cautiously and discreetly closed the door again. “Fo’ de Lord,” she murmured, “ef it ain’t de fust time dat he didn’t kinder sense dat de julep was comin’; I reckon he’s right po’ly!”

* * * * *

Fox turned the corner by the lilac, walking slowly, holding his hat behind his back, his bare head bowed. His face was gloomy with thought, and he almost passed the arbor. At the turn a glint of white caught his eye and he looked up quickly and saw Rose industriously sewing without a needle, her head down over her work and the sunshine filtering through a trellis of vines on her soft bright hair and her white gown.