The consciousness of something to be suppressed was with Lois when she
woke. "Not yet! Not yet!" was the warning of her subliminal self
whenever resentments and indignations endeavored to escape control.
With Thor she kept to subjects that had no personal bearing, clearly to
his relief. At breakfast they talked of the Mexican rising under Madero,
which was discussed in the papers of that morning. She knew that the
question in his mind was, "Does she really know?" but she betrayed
nothing that would help him to an answer.
When, after having kissed her with a timid, apologetic affection which
partly touched and partly angered her, he left for the office, she put
on a hat and, taking a parasol, went to see Dr. Hilary.
The First Parish Church, the oldest in the village, stands in a grassy
delta where two of the rambling village lanes enter the Square. The
white, barn-like nave, with its upper and lower rows of small, oblong
windows, retires discreetly within a grove of elms, while a tall, slim
spire grows slimmer through diminishing tiers of arches, balconies, and
lancet lights till it dwindles away into a high, graceful pinnacle.
Behind the church, in the widest section of the delta, the parsonage, a
white wooden box dating from the fifties supporting a smaller box by way
of cupola, looks across garden, shrubbery, and lawn to Schoolhouse Lane,
from which nothing but the simplest form of wooden rail protects the
inclosure.
It was the time for bulbs to be in flower, and the spring perennials.
Tulips in a wide, dense mass bordered the brick pavement that led from
the gate to the front door. Elsewhere could be seen daffodils, irises,
peonies just bursting into bloom, and long, drooping curves of
bleeding-heart hung with rose-and-white pendents. By a corner of the
house the ground was indigo-dark with a thick little patch of squills.
It was a relief to Lois to find the old man himself, bareheaded and in
an alpaca house-jacket, rooting out weeds on the lawn, his thin, gray
locks tossed in the breeze. On seeing her pause and look over the clump
of wiegelia, which at this point smothered the rail, he raised himself,
dusted the earth from his hands, and went forward. They talked at first
just as they stood, with the budding shrubs between them.
"Oh, Dr. Hilary, I'm so anxious about Rosie Fay."
"Are you now?" As neither age nor gravity could subdue the twinkle in
his eyes, so sympathy couldn't quench it. "Well, I am meself."
"I think if I could see her I might be able to help her. Or, rather,"
she went on, nervously, "I think I ought to see her, whether I can help
her or not. Have you seen her?"
"I have not," he declared, with Irish emphasis. "The puss takes very
good care that I sha'n't, so she does. She's only got to see me coming
in the gate to fly off to Duck Rock; and that, so her mother tells me,
is all they see of her till nightfall. It's three days now that she's
been struck with a fit of melancholy, or maybe four."
"Do you know what the trouble is?"
He evaded the question. "Do you?"
"I do--partly."
"Then you'll be the one to tackle her. As yet I haven't asked. I prefer
to know no more about people than what they tell me themselves."
She found it possible to secure his aid on the unexplained ground that
there had been a misunderstanding between her husband and herself, on
the one side, and Jasper Fay on the other. "I don't _know_ that I can
help her. I dare say I can't. But if I could only see her--"
"Well, then, you shall see her. Just wait a minute while I change me
coat and I'll go along with you."
On the way up the hill Lois questioned him about the Fays. "Did you know
much of the boy?"
"Enough to see that he wasn't a thief--not by nature, that is. He's what
might have been expected from his parents--the stuff out of which they
make revolutionists and anarchists. He came into the world with desires
thwarted, as you might say, and a detairmination to get even. He didn't
steal; he took money. He took money because they needed it at home, and
other people had it. He took it more in protest than in greed, if that's
any excuse for him."
"The mother is better, isn't she?"
"She's clothed and in her right mind, if she'll only stay that way. She
gets into one of her old tantrums every now and then; but I'm in hopes
that the daughter's trouble will end them."
This hope seemed to be partially fulfilled in the welcoming way in which
the door was opened to their knock. "I've brought you me friend, Mrs.
Thor Masterman," was the old gentleman's form of introduction. "She
wants to see Rosie. If Fay makes any trouble, tell him it's my wish."
"I've really only come to see Rosie, Mrs. Fay," Lois explained, not
without nervousness, when the two women were alone on the door-step.
"No, I won't go in, thank you, not if she's anywhere about the place.
I'm really very anxious to have a talk with her."
Having feared a hostile reception, she was relieved to be answered with
a certain fierce cordiality. "I'm sure I hope you'll get it. It's more'n
her father and I can do."
"Perhaps she'd talk to me. Girls often will talk to a--to a stranger,
when they won't to one of their own."
"Well, you can try." In spite of the coldness of the handsome features,
something in the nature of a new life, a new softening humanity, was
struggling to assert itself. "_We_ can't get a word out of her. She'll
neither speak, nor sleep, nor eat, nor do a hand's turn. It's the work
that bothers me most--not so much that it needs to be done as because
it'd be a relief to her." She added, with a shy wistfulness that
contrasted oddly with the hard glint in her eyes, "I've found that out
myself."
"Have you any idea where she is?"
She pointed toward Duck Rock. "Oh, I suppose she's over there. She was
to have picked the cucumbers this morning, but I see she hasn't done
it."
"Has Mr. Fay told you what the trouble is?"
"Well, he has. But then he's so romantic. Always was. Land's sake! I
don't pay any attention to young people's goings-on. Seen too much of it
in my own day. I don't say that the young fellow hasn't been
foolish--and I don't say--you'll excuse me!--that Rosie ain't just as
good as he is, even if he _is_ Archie Masterman's son--"
"Oh no, nor I," Lois hastened to interpose.
"But there's nothing wrong. I've asked her--and I _know_. I'm sure of
it."
Lois spoke eagerly. "Oh yes; so am I."
"So that there's that." She went on with a touch of her old haughtiness
of spirit: "And she's every mite as good as he is. It's all nonsense,
Fay's talking as if it was some young lord who'd jilted a girl beneath
him. Young lord, indeed! I'll young lord him, if he ever comes my way. I
tell Rosie not to demean herself to grieve for them that are no better
than herself. It's nothing but romantics," she explained further. "I've
no patience with Fay--talking as if some one ought to shoot some one or
commit murder. That's the way Matt began. Fay ought to know better at
his time of life. I declare he has no more sense than Rosie."
Lois had not expected to be called upon to defend Fay, but she said, "I
suppose he naturally feels indignant when he sees--"
"There's a desperate streak in Fay," the woman broke in, uneasily, "and
Rosie takes after him. For the matter of that, she takes after us
both--for I'm sure I've been gloomy enough. There's been something
lacking in us all, like cooking without salt. I see that now as plain as
plain, though I can't get Fay to believe me. You might as well talk to a
stone wall as talk to Fay when he's got his nose stuck into a book. I
hate the very name of that Carlyle; and that Darwin, he's another.
They're his Bible, I tell him, and he don't half understand what they
mean. It's Duck Rock," she went on, with a quiver of her fine lips,
while her hands worked nervously at the corner of her apron--"it's Duck
Rock that I'm most afraid of. It kind o' haunted me all the time I was
sick; and it kind o' haunts Rosie."
"Then I'll go and see if she's there," Lois said, as she turned away,
leaving the austere figure to stare after her with eyes that might have
been those of the woman delivered from the seven devils.
It was an easy matter for Lois to find her way among the old
apple-trees--of which one was showing an early blossom or two on the
sunny side--to the boulevard below, and thence to the wood running up
the bluff. Though she had not been here since the berry-picking days of
childhood, she knew the spot in which Rosie was likely to be found. As a
matter of fact, having climbed the path that ran beneath oaks and
through patches of brakes, spleenwort, and lady-ferns, she was
astonished to hear a faint, plaintive singing, and stopped to listen.
The voice was poignantly thin and sweet, with the frail, melancholy
sound she had heard from distant shepherds' pipes in Switzerland. Had
she not, after a few seconds, recognized the air, she would have been
unable to detect the words:
"Ah, dinna ye mind, Lord Gregory,
By bonnie Irvinside,
Where first I owned the virgin love
I long, long had denied?"
Though the singer was invisible, Lois knew she could not be far away,
since the voice was too weak to carry. She was about to go forward when
the faint melody began again:
"An exile from my father's ha'
And a' for loving thee;
At least be pity to me shown,
If love it may na' be."
Placing the voice now as near the great oak-tree circled by a seat, just
below the point where the ascending bluff broke fifty feet to the pond
beneath, Lois went rapidly up the last few yards of the ascent.
Rosie was seated with her back to the gnarled trunk, while she looked
out over the half-mile of dancing blue wavelets to where, on the other
side, the brown, wooden houses of the Thorley estate swept down to the
shore. She rose on seeing the visitor approach, showing a startled
disposition to run away. This she might have done had not Lois caught
her by the hand and detained her.
"I know all about everything, Rosie--about everything."
She meant that she understood the situation not only as regarding one
brother, but as regarding both. Rosie's response was without interest or
curiosity. "Do you?"
"Yes, Rosie; and I want to talk to you about it. Let us sit down."
Still holding the girl's hands in a manner that compelled her to reseat
herself, she examined the little face for the charm that had thrown such
a spell on Thor. With a pang she owned to herself that she found it. No
one could look at Thor with that expression of entreaty without reaching
all that was most tender in his soul.
For the moment, however, that point must be allowed to pass. "Not yet!
Not yet!" something cried to the passion that was trying to get control
of her. She went on earnestly, almost beseechingly: "I know just what
happened, Rosie dear, and how hard it's been for you; and I want you to
let me help you."
There was no light in Rosie's chrysoprase-colored eyes. Her voice was
listless. "What can you do?"
Put to her in that point-blank way, Lois found the question difficult.
She could only answer: "I can be with you, Rosie. We can be side by
side."
"There wouldn't be any good in that. I'd rather be left alone."
"Oh, but there would be good. We should strengthen each other. I--I need
help, too. I should find it partly, if I could do anything for you."
Rosie surveyed her friend, not coldly, but with dull detachment. "Do you
think Claude will come back to me?"
"What do you think, yourself?"
"I don't think he will." She added, with a catch in her breath like that
produced by a sudden, darting pain, "I know he won't."
"Would you be happy with him if he did?"
"I shouldn't care whether I was happy or not--if he'd come."
Lois thought it the part of wisdom to hold out no hope. "Then, since we
believe he won't come, isn't it better to face it with--"
"I don't see any use in facing it. You might as well ask a plant to face
it when it's pulled up by the roots and thrown out into the sun. There's
nothing left to face."
"But you're not pulled up by the roots, Rosie. Your roots are still in
the soil. You've people who need you--"
Rosie made a little gesture, with palms outward. "I've given them all I
had. I'm--I'm--empty."
"Yes, you feel so now. That's natural. We do feel empty of anything more
to give when there's been a great drain on us. But somehow it's the
people who've given most who always have the power to go on
giving--after a little while. With time--"
The girl interrupted, not impatiently, but with vacant indifference.
"What's the good of time--when it's going to be always the same?"
"The good of time is that it brings comfort--"
"I don't want comfort. I'd rather be as I am."
"That's perfectly natural--for now. But time passes whether we will or
no; and whether we will or no, it softens--"
"Time can't pass if you won't let it."
"Why--why, what do you mean?"
"I mean--just that."
Lois clasped the girl's hands desperately. "But, Rosie, you must _live_.
Life has a great deal in store for you still--perhaps a great deal of
happiness. They say that life never takes anything from us for which it
isn't prepared to give us compensation, if we'll only accept it in the
right way."
Rosie shook her head. "I don't want it."
Lois tried to reach the dulled spirit by another channel. "But we all
have disappointments and sorrows, Rosie. I have mine. I've great ones."
The aloofness in Rosie's gaze seemed to put miles between them. "That
doesn't make any difference to me. If you want me to be sorry for
them--I'm not. I can't be sorry for any one."
In her desire to touch the frozen springs of the girl's emotions, Lois
said what she would have supposed herself incapable of saying. "Not when
you know what they are?--when you know what one of them is, at any
rate!--when you know what one of them _must_ be! You're the only person
in the world except myself who can know."
Rosie's voice was as lifeless as before. "I can't be sorry. I don't know
why--but I can't be."
"Do you mean that you're glad I have to suffer?"
"N-no. I'm not glad--especially. I just--don't care."
Lois was baffled. The impenetrable iciness was more difficult to deal
with than active grief. She made her supreme appeal. "And then, Rosie,
then there's--there's God."
Rosie looked vaguely over the lake and said nothing. If she fixed her
eyes on anything, it was on the quivering balance of a kingfisher in the
air. When with a flash of silver and blue he swooped, and, without
seeming to have touched the water, went skimming away with a fish in his
bill, her eyes wandered slowly back in her companion's direction.
Lois made another attempt. "You believe in God, don't you?"
There was a second's hesitation. "I don't know as I do."
The older woman spoke with the pleading of distress. "But there _is_ a
God, Rosie."
There was the same brief hesitation. "I don't care whether there is or
not."
Though Lois could get no further, it hurt her to see the look of relief
in the little creature's face when she rose and said: "You'd rather I'd
go away, wouldn't you? Then I will go; but it won't be for long. I'm not
going to leave you to yourself. I'm coming back soon. I shall come back
again to-day. If you're not at home, I'll follow you up here."
She waited for some sign of protest, but Rosie sat silent and impassive.
Though courtesy kept her dumb, it couldn't conceal the air of resigned
impatience with which she awaited her visitor's departure.
Lois looked down at her helplessly. In sheer incapacity to affect the
larger issues, she took refuge in the smaller. "Isn't it near your
dinner-time? I'm going your way. We could go along together."
"I don't want any dinner. I'll go home--by and by."
Lois felt herself dismissed. "Very well, Rosie. I'll say good-by for
now. But it will only be for a little while. You understand that, don't
you? I'm not going to let you throw me off. I'm going to cling to you.
I've got the right to do it, because--because the very thing that makes
you unhappy--makes me."
In the eyes that Rosie lifted obliquely Lois read such unutterable
things that she turned away. She carried that look with her as she went
down the hill beneath the oaks and between the sunlit patches of brakes,
spleenwort, and lady-ferns. What scenes, what memories, had called it
up? What part in those scenes and memories had been played by Thor? What
had been the actual experience between this girl and him? Would she ever
know? Had she better know? What should she do if she were to know? Once
more the questions she had been trying to repress urged themselves for
answer; but once more she controlled herself through the counsel of the
inner voice: "Not yet! Not yet!"