At the moment when Claude was excusing himself further, begging to be
allowed to run away so as not to keep Billy Cheever waiting, Rosie Fay
was noticing with relief that her mother was asleep at last. Thor's
sedative had taken effect in what the girl considered the nick of time.
Having smoothed the pillow, adjusted the patchwork quilt, and placed the
small kerosene hand-lamp on a chair at the foot of the bed, so as to
shade it from the sleeper's eyes, she slipped down-stairs.
She wore a long, rough coat. Over her hair she had flung a scarf of some
gauzy green stuff that heightened her color. The lamplight, or some
inner flame of her own, drew opalescent gleams from her gray-greenish
eyes as she descended. She was no longer the desperate, petulant little
Rosie of the afternoon. Her face was aglow with an eager life. The
difference was that between a blossom wilting for lack of water and the
same flower fed by rain.
In the tiny living-room at the foot of the stairs her father was eating
the supper she had laid out for him. It was a humble supper, spread on
the end of a table covered with a cheap cotton cloth of a red and
sky-blue mixture. Jasper Fay, in his shirt-sleeves, munched his cold
meat and sipped his tea while he entertained himself with a book propped
against a loaf of bread. Another small kerosene hand-lamp threw its
light on the printed page and illumined his mild, clear-cut,
clean-shaven face.
"She's asleep," Rosie whispered from the doorway. "If she wakes while
I'm gone you must give her the second dose. I've left it on the
wash-stand."
The man lifted his starry blue eyes. "You going out?"
"I'm only going for a little while."
"Couldn't you have gone earlier?"
"How could I, when I had supper to get--and everything?"
He looked uneasy. "I don't like you to be running round these dark
roads, my dear. You've been doing it a good deal lately. Where is it you
go?"
"Why, father, what nonsense! Here I am cooped up all day--"
He sighed. "Very well, my dear. I know you haven't much pleasure. But
things will be different soon, I hope. The new night fireman seems a
good man, and I expect we'll do better now. He'll be here at ten. Were
you going far?"
She answered promptly. "Only to Polly Wilson's. She wants me to"--Rosie
turned over in her mind the various interests on which Polly Wilson
might desire to consult her--"she wants me to see her new dress."
"Very well, my dear, but I hope after this evening you'll be able to do
your errands in the daytime. You know how it was with Matt. If he hadn't
gone roaming the streets at night--"
Rosie came close to the table. Her face was resolute. "Father, I'm not
Matt. I know what I'm doing." She added, with increased determination,
"I'm acting for the best."
He was mildly surprised. "Acting for the best in going to see Polly
Wilson's new dress?"
She ignored this. "I'm twenty-three, father. I've got to follow my own
judgment. If I've a chance I must use it."
"What sort of a chance, my dear?"
"There's nothing to hope for here," she went on, cruelly, "except from
what I can do myself. Mother's no good; and Matt's worse than if he was
dead. I wish to God he would die--before he comes out. And you know what
you are, father."
"I do the best I can, my dear," he said, humbly.
"I know you do; but we can all see what that is. Everybody else is going
ahead but us."
"Oh no, they're not, my dear. There are lots that fall behind as bad as
we do--and worse."
She shook her head fiercely. "No, not worse. They couldn't. And
whatever's to be done, I've got to do it. If I don't--or if I
can't--well, we might as well give up. So you mustn't try to stop me,
father. I know what I'm doing. It's for your sake and everybody's sake
as much as for my own."
He dropped his eyes to his book, in seeming admission that he had no
tenable ground on which to meet her in a conflict of wills. "Very well,
my dear," he sighed. "If you're going to Polly Wilson's you'd better be
off. You'll be home by ten, won't you? I must go then to show the new
fireman his way about the place."
* * * * *
Outside it was a windy night, but not a cold one. Shreds of dark cloud
scudded across the face of a three-quarters moon, giving it the
appearance of traveling through the sky at an incredible rate of speed.
In the south wind there was the tang of ocean salt, mingled with the
sweeter scents of woodland and withered garden nearer home. There was a
crackling of boughs in the old apple-trees, and from the ridge behind
the house came the deep, soft, murmurous soughing of pines.
If Rosie lingered on the door-step it was not because she was afraid of
the night sounds or of the dark. She was restrained for a minute by a
sense of terror at what she was about to do. It was not a new terror.
She felt it on every occasion when she went forth to keep this tryst. As
she had already said to her father, she knew what she was doing. She was
neither so young nor so inexperienced as to be unaware of the element of
danger that waited on her steps. No one could have told her better than
she could have told herself that the voice of wise counsel would have
bidden her stay at home. But if she was not afraid of the night, neither
was she irresolute before the undertaking. Being forewarned, she was
forearmed. Being forearmed, she could run the risks. Running the risks,
she could enjoy the excitement and find solace in the romance.
For it was romance, romance of the sort she had dreamed of and planned
for and got herself ready to be equal to, if ever it should come.
Somehow, she had always known it would come. She could hardly go back to
the time when she did not have this premonition of a lover who would
appear like a prince in a fairy-tale and lift her out of her low estate.
And he had come. He had come late on an afternoon in the preceding
summer, when she was picking wild raspberries in the wood above Duck
Rock. It was a lonely spot in which she could reasonably have expected
to be undisturbed. She was picking the berries fast and deftly, because
the fruitman who passed in the morning would give her a dollar for her
harvest. Was it the dollar, or was it the sweet, wandering, summer air?
Was it the mingled perfumes of vine and fruit and soft loam loosened as
she crept among the brambles, or was it the shimmer of the waning
sunlight or the whir of the wings of birds or the note of a
hermit-thrush in some still depth of the woodland ever so far away? Or
was it only because she was young and invincibly happy at times, in
spite of a sore heart, that she sang to herself as her nimble fingers
secured the juicy, delicate red things and dropped them into the pan?
He came like Pan, or a faun, or any other woodland thing, with no sound
of his approach, not even that of oaten pipes. When she raised her eyes
he was standing in a patch of bracken. She had been stooping to gather
the fruit that clustered on a long, low, spiny stem. The words on her
lips had been:
At least be pity to me shown
If love it may na be--
but her voice trailed away faintly on the last syllable, for on looking
up he was before her. He wore white flannels, and a Panama hat of which
the brim was roguishly pulled down in front to shade his eyes.
He was smiling unabashed, and yet with a friendliness that made it
impossible for her to take offense. "Isn't it Rosie?" he asked, without
moving from where he stood in the patch of trampled bracken. "I'm
Claude. Don't you remember me?"
A Delphic nymph who had been addressed by Apollo, in the seclusion of
some sacred grove, could hardly have felt more joyous or more dumb.
Rosie Fay did not know in what kind of words to answer the glistening
being who had spoken to her with this fine familiarity. Later, in the
silence of the night, she blushed with shame to think of the figure she
must have cut, standing speechless before him, the pan of red
raspberries in her hands, her raspberry-red lips apart in amazement, and
her eyes gleaming and wide with awe.
She remained vague as to what she answered in the end. It was confusedly
to the effect that though she remembered him well enough, she supposed
that he had long ago forgotten one so insignificant as herself.
Presently he was beside her, dropping raspberries into her pan, while
they laughed together as in those early days when they had picked peas
by her father's permission in Grandpa Thorley's garden.
Their second meeting was accidental--if it was accidental that each had
come to the same spot, at the same hour, on the following day, in the
hope of finding the other. The third meeting was also on the same spot,
but by appointment, in secret, and at night! Claude had been careful to
impress on her the disaster that would ensue if their romance were
discovered.
But Rosie Fay knew what she was doing. She repeated that statement often
to herself. Had she really been a Delphic nymph, or even a young lady of
the best society, she might have given herself without reserve to the
rapture of her idyl; but her circumstances were peculiar. Rosie was
obliged to be practical, to look ahead. A fairy prince was not only a
romantic dream in her dreary life, but an agency to be utilized. The
least self-seeking of drowning maids might expect the hero on the bank
to pull her out of the water. The very fact that she recognized in
Claude a tendency to dally with her on the brink instead of landing her
in a place of safety compelled her to be the more astute.
But she was not so astute as to be inaccessible to the sense of terror
that assailed her every time she went to meet him. It was the fright of
one accustomed to walk on earth when seized and borne into the air.
Claude's voice over the telephone, as she had heard it that afternoon,
was like the call to adventures at once enthralling and appalling, in
which she found it hard to keep her head. She kept it only by saying to
herself: "I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. My father is
ruined; my brother is in jail. But I love this man and he loves me. If
he marries me--"
But Rosie's thoughts broke off abruptly there. They broke off because
they reached a point beyond which imagination would not carry her. If he
marries me! The supposition led her where all was blurred and roseate
and golden, like the mists around the Happy Isles. Rosie could not
forecast the conditions that would be hers as the wife of Claude
Masterman. She only knew that she would be transported into an
atmosphere of money, and money she had learned by sore experience to be
the sovereign palliative of care. Love was much to poor Rosie, but
relief from anxiety was more. It had to be so, since both love and light
are secondary blessings to the tired creature whose first need is rest.
It was for rest that Claude Masterman stood primarily in her mind. He
was a fairy prince, of course; he was a lover who might have satisfied
any girl's aspirations. But before everything else he was a hero and a
savior, a being in whose vast potentialities, both social and financial,
she could find refuge and lie down at last.
It needed but this bright thought to brace her. She clasped her hands to
her breast; she lifted her eyes to the swimming moon; she drew deep
breaths of the sweet, strong air; she appealed to all the supporting
forces she knew anything about. A minute later she was speeding through
the darkness.