CHAPTER VIII
“ROSE, I’ve got something to tell you!” cried Betty eagerly. “It’s something splendid, but I can’t do it here. Come out and take a walk, won’t you? You see I want to be sure to get it all over without your mother’s hearing. You can tell her afterwards.”
Rose’s eyes filled with tears.
“O, Betty, I couldn’t,” she protested, her voice dropping its listlessness. “I haven’t been out since—you know, except when papa takes me in the buggy.”
“Well, what of that?” demanded Betty. “All the more fun, if it’s the first time. It’s lovely to-day. Everything looks and smells so sweet. We won’t go far.”
“O, but I couldn’t! People would—see me!” cried Rose shrinkingly.
“Well, let ’em. Rose. And anyhow, they’d just love to, everybody would. And why shouldn’t they? You look just the same as you always did except that you’re awfully pale and your hair isn’t done so prettily. People that didn’t know would never dream you couldn’t see. Listen! wouldn’t it be fun to go along as if nothing had happened and when I see anyone coming I’ll tell you and you can say ‘hullo’ like you always did?”
Rose Harrow sat erect in her chair, clasping her hands almost wildly.
“Betty, is that true? Do you mean that, or are you just saying it like mama says things, because you pityme?” she demanded. “Do I look the same? You don’t mean—youcan’tmean that my eyes look—all right?”
“I do mean it,” asseverated Betty.
“Honest and true?” demanded Rose. Betty’s reputation for truthfulness was established, but Mrs. Harrow’s conduct indicated that another sort of ethics prevailed with the blind. Moreover this statement was too wonderful to be conceivable.
“Cross my heart and hope to die, they look exactly the same,” Betty declared solemnly. “Your eyes haven’t changed the least mite except that they look a little darker and sort of sober instead of sparkling. Tommy could hardly believe it, nor father, but it’s true. If you wouldn’t hang your head and would turn towards people when they spoke, why, nobody——”
Betty stopped, appalled. For Rose was sobbing wildly.
“Rose! darling Rose!” she cried, running to her and throwing her arms about her.
“O, Betty, why didn’t you say so before? Why didn’t somebody tell me?” the girl wailed. “I have suffered so. And everyone sounded as if—— O, I thought I looked frightful, so that——”
On a sudden she raised her head. As she smiled through her tears, Rose was almost her old self. She dried her eyes quickly.
“Sure, Betty, I’d love to go to walk!” she declared happily. “We’ll go as soon as mama gets home to put on my shoes and get my hat, and——”
“We can do that ourselves,” suggested Betty. “I know where your shoes are.” And she fetched them from a clothespress.
Rose shook off one slipper and held out her foot.
“Why don’t you try putting them on?” suggested Betty diplomatically.
“But I shouldn’t know which was which,” Rose faltered rather pitifully.
“Try one, and if that isn’t right, then the other,” Betty advised. “There’s only two chances, you know. It isn’t like you were a centipede.” And she put one shoe into Rose’s hand and the other on the floor. Rose had them on her feet and tied in a twinkling, but the curious sense of satisfaction following the simple act lingered.
“Now we’ll go up to your room and do your hair like you used to wear it.” Betty went on in a manner she strove hard to make matter-of-fact, though secretly she was wildly excited. “I’ll part it for you if you don’t get it straight. Do you know who you look just like now with it so slick and prim? Little Huldy Christiansen!”
Rose laughed out—for the first time since Christmas. She rose. Her face eager, her eyes sparkling, she stood perfectly still holding out her hand, ready to be guided. But Betty had not been thinking and planning for naught all through that week.
“Rose, don’t you remember how when I used to stay all night with you, you would come downstairs in the pitch-dark to get apples and things to eat in bed?” she asked. “I couldn’t come, too, you know, because I was so big the stairs would have creaked.”
“Sure I remember,” said Rose, and laughed again. But she did not make the application expected.
“You didn’t need anyone to lead you then,” Betty remindedher. “Why can’t you find your way to your own room just as well now as you could then?”
Rose’s face lighted up.
“Of course!” she cried. “I never thought. Perhaps I can.” And suddenly she started boldly.
She encountered the center table with some force, but laughed gaily. That gave her the direction and she went thence unerringly into the passage, caught the balustrade, and ran excitedly up the stair and into her own chamber. When Betty reached the room, Rose sat on the bed, half-laughing, half-crying.
“Come,” said Betty, who paused at the dresser. “We must get your hair done and your dress changed.” Rose slipped out of her dressing-gown, followed Betty’s voice to the dresser and released her long, abundant dark brown hair from the tight plait. When she had brushed it out, she tried parting it, and when the parting was pronounced straight, both girls laughed as if it were a game. And when it was braided and tied, there was so much of the old color in Rose’s cheeks that Betty cried out.
“O, Rose, you look so pretty and so natural!” she exclaimed, kissing her. “You look just like old times.”
Rose drew a long, sobbing breath.
“What dress do you want?” Betty asked quickly.
“My blue skirt and middy!” cried Rose eagerly.
“Help yourself!” said Betty in a funny voice, and they laughed again.
Rose found the skirt in the clothespress and the blouse in a drawer of the chest. When she was dressed, Betty declared the transformation was complete. Rose was feeling in the top drawer of the dresser for a scarlet tiewhen the girls were startled by an agonized wail from below.
“Rose! Rose! Rosy darling!” cried Mrs. Harrow beseechingly; and before the startled girls could find voice, “Betty Pogany! what has happened? Where is Rose?”
“Hoo-hoo! here we are, mama, up here in my chamber!” Rose sang out in a gay voice Mrs. Harrow had not heard in six months and never expected to hear again. Flying upstairs, she stood on the threshold of the chamber white and breathless.
She stared at that familiar, beloved figure standing adjusting a tie before the mirror as if she believed she was in a dream—her expression made it a nightmare. Then she turned questioningly to Betty. She couldn’t speak; but she looked as one might who has entrusted an infant to another and found him standing it on its feet and urging it to walk.
“Betty’s going to take me out for a little walk, mama,” said Rose demurely. She looked so sparkling and lively, so like the girl she had been before that terrible illness, that her mother felt as if her heart were breaking.
“My darling, I couldn’t let you do that,” she gasped. “And O, Rosy, do sit down.”
Going to the girl, she forced her gently into a padded rocker she had placed in her chamber since her illness.
“You’re not strong enough to walk,” she added, “and, O, something might happen! I should worry every second. Your papa’ll be here very soon now, and if you’ll both promise to be very quiet, I’ll get him to take Betty along, too.”
“But Betty doesn’t want to ride, and neither do I,” Rose rejoined. “I’m dead sick of it, so there!”
“It might help Rose to get stronger to walk a little, Mrs. Harrow,” Betty urged very gently. “We wouldn’t go but just a teeny way, and I’d be awfully careful. And what can happen now any more than when Rose used to be out with the girls?”
Mrs. Harrow almost glared at the girl. The poor woman was nearly distraught.
“It’s very different,” she retorted. “I should be frightened to death and Rose sha’n’t go one step. And I don’t know what you mean, anyhow, Betty Pogany, coming here looking like an overgrown Tomboy and putting crazy notions into Rosy’s head. I wish I hadn’t let you in. Something seemed to warn me not to. But I thought a great girl like you, a woman grown, might be trusted.”
Rose was leaning forward on the padded arm of the chair.
“What does she mean by your looking like a Tomboy, Betty?” she asked wonderingly.
Betty glanced deprecatingly at Mrs. Harrow.
“I have got on a short skirt and low-heeled shoes and don’t wear corsets any more,” she said in a low voice. “And I’ve got my hair down my back, too.”
Rose reached out and skilfully caught the thick bright braid and gave it a playful yank.
“O, Betty, I wish I——” she began, but stopped herself. She looked towards her mother.
“There’s no use in picking on Betty, mama,” she remarked. “I am going to walk. I haven’t been out of the house for six months except to be lifted into that old buggy like a sack of meal and to ride behind that pokey old horse. And I’m sick to death of sitting in thehouse from morning till night hearing reading, reading, reading, with all the parts I’d care anything about skipped. And I’m tired of being pitied. And you never told me that—that I don’t look hideous nor even blind, and——”
As the tears filled her eyes, she pressed her pocket handkerchief to them and would have risen. But her mother, who had ousted Betty from her place beside the chair, put out a gentle hand to restrain her. Mrs. Harrow began to feel that her daughter was in a fever and delirious.
Rose fixed her great, dark, hollow eyes upon her.
“If you don’t let me go out with Betty, this is what I shall do. Mama Harrow,” she threatened vehemently. “I shall lie on that bed and cry until I am sick, and then I’ll cry till I die. I might as well die, anyhow, if I’ve got to go back to—everything!”
“O, Rosy darling, you’ll break my heart!” protested her mother.
“I mean it,” said Rose firmly. Then suddenly she reached out and seized her mother’s hand.
“O, mama, I want to go just awfully! Iwantto, just as I used to want things, and—it will make me happy as I used to be happy,” she pleaded.
Mrs. Harrow yielded perforce. She fetched Rose’s hat and spring jacket, though with manifest reluctance, looking daggers at the naughty girl who had incited the mischief. Rose suffered her to put on the wraps as if she had been an invalid, but she broke free and, finding the stair, slid down the bannister.
At the door, she turned, hugged and kissed her mother and bade her cheer up. Mrs. Harrow patted hershoulder but frowned darkly at Betty. As the girls went down the flagged walk, however, arm-in-arm, the mother relented. For it seemed like a happy dream of Rose. Her hand loosely resting on Betty’s arm, the girl walked lightly and fearlessly beside her, only her pallor and a slight weakness differentiating her from the girl who had gone through that gate in just that manner so many times in that past which Mrs. Harrow had believed forever past. Rose was chattering, too, quite in the old way, and just as they turned the corner into the avenue, her laugh rang out,—the sweetest music in the world to the woman on the porch. As she entered the house, tears streamed down her face, but her heart was lighter than it had been in many a day. And presently she was trying to decide what Betty would like best for tea. For she meant to keep the girl and have a real feast to celebrate the wonderful occasion.