Though she lost the best of her faculties, Mrs. Ray did not succumb to
the paralytic seizure occasioned by the twofold shock which she had
experienced. On the morning after Ralph's departure from Wythburn she
seemed to awake from the torpor in which she had lain throughout the
two preceding days. She opened her eyes and looked up into the faces
that were bent above her.
There were evidences of intelligence surviving the wreck of physical
strength. Speech had gone, but her eyes remained full of meaning. When
they spoke to her she seemed to hear. At some moments she, appeared to
struggle with the impulse to answer, but the momentary effort subsided
into an inarticulate gurgle, and then it was noticed that for an
instant the tears stood in her eyes.
“She wants to say, 'God bless you,'” said Rotha when she observed
these impotent manifestations, and at such times the girl would stoop
and put her lips to the forehead of the poor dear soul.
There grew to be a kind of commerce in kind between these two,
destitute as the one was of nearly every channel of communication. The
hundred tricks of dumb show, the glance, the lifted brow, the touch of
the hand, the smile, the kiss,--all these acquired their several
meanings, and somehow they seemed to speak to the silent sufferer in a
language as definite as words. It came to be realized that this was a
condition in which Mrs. Ray might live for years.
After a week, or less, they made a bed for her in a room adjoining the
kitchen, and once a day they put her in a great arm-chair and wheeled
her into her place by the neuk window.
“It will be more heartsome for her,” said Rotha when she suggested the
change; “she'll like for us to talk to her all the same that she can't
answer us, poor soul.”
So it came about that every morning the invalid spent an hour or two
in her familiar seat by the great ingle, the chair she had sat in day
after day in the bygone times, before these terrible disasters had
come like the breath of a plague-wind and bereft her of her powers.
“I wonder if she remembers what happened,” said Willy; “do you think
she has missed them--father and Ralph?”
“Why, surely,” said Rotha. “But her ears are better than her eyes.
Don't you mark how quick her breath comes sometimes when she has heard
your voice outside, and how bright her eyes are, and how she tries to
say, 'God bless you!' as you come up to her?”
“Yes, I think I've marked it,” said Willy, “and I've seen that light
in her eyes die away into a blank stare or puzzled look, as if she
wanted to ask some question while she lifted them to my face.”
“And Laddie there, when he barks down the lonnin--haven't you seen her
then--her breast heaving, the fingers of that hand of hers twitching,
and the mumble of her poor lost voice, as though she'd say, 'Come,
Rotha, my lass, be quick with the supper--he's here, my lass, he's
back?'”
“I think you must be right in that, Rotha--that she misses Ralph,”
said Willy.
“She's nobbut a laal bit quieter, that's all,” said Matthew
Branthwaite one morning when he turned in at Shoulthwaite. “The dame
nivver were much of a talker--not to say a _talker_, thoo knows; but
mark me, she loves a crack all the same.”
Matthew acted pretty fully upon his own diagnosis of his old
neighbor's seizure. He came to see her frequently, stayed long,
rehearsed for her benefit all the gossip of the village, fired off his
sapient proverbs, and generally conducted himself in his intercourse
with the invalid precisely as he had done before. In answer to any
inquiries put to him at the Red Lion he invariably contented himself
with his single explanation of Mrs. Ray's condition, “She's nobbut a
laal bit quieter, and the dame nivver were much of a talker, thoo
knows.”
Rotha Stagg remained at Shoulthwaite in accordance with her promise
given to Ralph. It was well for the household that she did so. Young
as the girl was, she alone seemed to possess either the self-command
or the requisite energy and foresight to keep the affairs of the home
and of the farm in motion. It was not until many days after the
disasters that had befallen the family that Willy Ray recovered enough
self-possession to engage once more in his ordinary occupations. He
had spent the first few days in the room with his stricken mother,
almost as unconscious as herself of what was going on about him; and
indeed his nature had experienced a shock only less serious.
Meantime, Rotha undertook the management of the home-stead. None ever
disputed her authority. The tailor's daughter had stepped into her
place as head of the household at the Moss, and ruled it by that force
of will which inferior natures usually obey without question, and
almost without consciousness of servitude. She alone knew rightly what
had to be done.
As for the tailor himself, he had also submitted--at least
partially--to his daughter's passive government. A day or two after
Ralph Ray's departure, Rotha had gone in search of her father, and had
brought him back with her. She had given him his work to do, and had
tried to interest him in his occupations. But a sense of dependence
seemed to cling to him, and at times he had the look of some wild
creature of the hills which had been captured indeed, but was watching
his opportunity of escape.
Sim rose at daybreak, and, wet or dry, he first went up on to the
hills. In an hour or two he was back again. Rotha understood his
purpose, but no word of explanation passed between them. She looked
into his face inquiringly day' after day, but nothing she saw there
gave hint of hope. The mare was lost. She would never be recovered.
Sometimes a fit of peculiar despondency would come upon Sim. At such
times he would go off without warning, and be seen no more for days.
Rotha knew that he had gone to his old haunts on the hill, for nothing
induced him to return to his cottage at Fornside. No one went in
pursuit of him. In a day or two he would come back and take up his
occupation as if he had never been away. Walking leisurely into the
court-yard, he would lift a besom and sweep, or step into the stable
and set to work at stitching up a rent in the old harness.
Willy Ray can hardly be said to have avoided Sim; he ignored him.
There was a more potent relation between these two than any of which
Willy had an idea. Satisfied as he had professed himself to be that
Sim was an innocent man, he was nevertheless unable to shake off an
uneasy sentiment of repulsion experienced in his presence. He
struggled to hold this in check, for Rotha's sake. But there was only
one way in which to avoid the palpable manifestation of his distrust,
and that was to conduct himself in such a manner as to appear
unconscious of Sim's presence in the house.
“The girl is not to blame,” he said to himself again and again. “Rotha
is innocent, whoever may be guilty.”
He put the case to himself so frequently in this way, he tried so hard
to explain to his own mind that Rotha at least was free of all taint,
that the very effort made him conscious of a latent suspicion
respecting Sim.
As to Sim's bearing towards Willy, it was the same as he had adopted
towards almost the whole of the little world in which he lived; he
took up the position of the guilty man, the man to be shunned, the man
from whose contaminating touch all other men might fairly shrink. It
never occurred to Sim that there lay buried at his own heart a secret
that could change the relations in which he stood towards this younger
and more self-righteous son of Angus Ray.
Perhaps, if it had once been borne in upon him that another than
himself was involved in the suspicion which had settled upon his
name--if he had even come to realize that Rotha might suffer the
stigma of a fatal reproach for no worse offence than that she was her
father's daughter--perhaps, if he had once felt this as a possible
contingency, he would have shaken off the black cloud that seemed to
justify the odium in which he was held by those about him, and lifted
up his head for her sake if not for his own.
But Sim lacked virile strength. The disease of melancholy had long
kept its seat at his heart, and that any shadow of doubt could rest on
Rotha as a result of a misdeed, or supposed misdeed, of his had never
yet occurred to Sim's mind.
And truly Rotha was above the blight of withering doubt. Rude daughter
of a rude age, in a rude country and without the refinements of
education, still how pure and sweet she was; how strong, and yet how
tender; how unconscious in her instinct of self-sacrifice; how devoted
in her loyalty; how absolute in her trust!
But deep and rich as was Rotha's simple nature, it was yet incomplete.
She herself was made aware that a great change was even now coming to
pass. She understood the transformation little, if at all; but it
seemed as though, somehow, a new sense were taking hold of her. And,
indeed, a new light had floated into her little orbit. Was it too
bright as yet for her to see it for what it was? It flooded everything
about her, and bathed the world in other hues than the old time.
Disaster had followed on disaster in the days that had just gone by,
but nevertheless--she knew not how--it was not all gloom in her heart.
In the waking hours of the night there was more than the memory of the
late events in her mind; her dreams were not all nightmares; and in
the morning, when the swift recoil of sad thoughts rushed in at her
first awakening, a sentiment of indefinite solace came close behind
it. What was it that was coming to pass?
It was love that was now dawning upon her, though still vague and
indeterminate; it hardly knew its object.
Willy Ray took note of this change in the girl, and thought he
understood it. He accepted it as the one remaining gleam of hope and
happiness for both of them amid the prevailing gloom. Rotha avoided
the searching light of his glances. When the work of the household was
in hand she shook off the glamour of the new-found emotion.
In the morning when the men came down for breakfast, and again in the
evening when they came in for supper, the girl busied herself in her
duties with the ardor of one having no thought behind them and no
feeling in which they did not share. But when the quieter hours of the
day left her free for other thoughts, she would stand and look long
into the face of the poor invalid to whom she had become nurse and
foster-child in one; or walk, without knowing why, to the window neuk,
and put her hand on the old wheel, that now rested quiet and unused
beneath it, while she looked towards the south through eyes that saw
nothing that was there.
She was standing so one morning a fortnight or more after Ralph's
departure from Wythburn, when Willy came into the kitchen, and, before
she was conscious of his presence, sat in the seat of the little
alcove within which she stood.
He took the hand that lay disengaged by her side and told her in a
word or two of his love. He had loved her long in silence. He had
loved her before she became the blessing she now was to him and to
his; to-day he loved her more than ever before.
It was a simple story, and it came with the accent of sincerity in
every word.
He thought perhaps she loved him in return--he had sometimes thought
so--was he wrong?
There was a pause between them. Regaining some momentary composure,
the girl turned her eyes once more aside and looked through the neuk
window towards the south. She felt the color mounting to her cheeks,
and knew that the young man had risen to his feet beside her. He, on
his part, saw only the fair face before him, and felt only the little
hand that lay passively in his own.
“It's a sad sort of home to bring you to. It would be idle to ask if
you have been happy here--it would be a mockery; but--but--”
“I _have_ been happy; that is, happy to do as Ralph wished me.”
“And as _I_ wished?”
“As you wished too, Willy.”
“You've been a blessing to us, Rotha. I sometimes think, though, that
it was hardly fair to bring you into the middle of this trouble.”
“He did it for the best,” said Rotha.
“Who?”
There was a little start of recovering consciousness.
“Ralph,” she answered, and dropped her head.
“True--he did it for the best,” repeated Willy, and relapsed into
silence.
“Besides, I had no home then, you know.”
How steadfastly the girl's eyes were fixed oh the distant south!
“You had your father's home, Rotha.”
“Ah, no! When it ceased to be poor father's home, how could it be mine
any longer? No, I was homeless.”
There was another pause.
“Then let me ask you to make this house your home forever. Can you not
do so?”
“I think so--I can scarcely tell--he said it might be best--”
Willy let loose her hand. Had he dreamed? Was it a wild
hallucination--the bright gleam of happiness that had penetrated the
darkness that lay about him at every step?
How yearningly the girl's eyes still inclined to yonder distant south.
“Let us say no more about it now, Rotha,” he said huskily. “If you
wish it, we'll talk again on this matter--that is, I say, if you
_wish_ it; if not, no matter.”
The young man was turning away. Without moving the fixed determination
of her gaze, Rotha said quietly,--
“Willy, I think perhaps I _do_ love you--perhaps--I don't know. I
remember he said that our hearts lay open before each other--”
“Who said so, Rotha?”
There was another start of recovering consciousness. Then the wide
eyes looked full into his, and the tongue that would have spoken
refused that instant to speak. The name that trembled in a
half-articulate whisper on the parted lips came upwards from the
heart.
But the girl was ignorant of her own secret even yet.
“We'll say no more about it now, Rotha,” repeated Willy in a broken
voice. “If you wish it, we'll talk again; give me a sign, and perhaps
we'll talk on this matter again.”
In another moment the young man was gone.