The Side Of The Angels Part 40

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 ap.r.o.n--"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 sh.o.r.e. 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 pa.s.s. "Not yet!

Not yet!" something cried to the pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.ses whether we will or no; and whether we will or no, it softens--"

"Time can't pa.s.s 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 G.o.d."

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 G.o.d, don't you?"