XVIII
THAT very day Judge Temple violated his usual custom and did not come home promptly after court adjourned. The hour came and passed and he had not appeared.
Rose was waiting for him in the library and she began to glance uneasily at the clock. His habits were as fixed as the laws of the Medes and Persians; any deviation indicated something out of the common. These spring evenings it was his custom to walk in the garden before dinner. Rose had accordingly opened the long French window on the piazza and the tendrils of the jasmine vine, not yet budding, swung across it; the air was sweet, redolent with the perfume of the wistaria which hung in festoons on the arbor. The sweet full note of a catbird broke the stillness.
Rose walked to and fro, trying to distract her mind; if she relaxed a moment she heard Fox’s voice, saw his strong pale face. It was pathetically significant that Allestree, and Allestree’s pain at her finality had dropped from her mind. Loveand youth are absolutely selfish, they ignore the universe.
When she came home that day and was alone in her room, she had shed some passionate tears; her young strong heart had rebelled utterly; she wanted happiness too, wanted it as bitterly as Margaret did, but Margaret had robbed her of it! She gave way then to the passion and the rage of her grief, she forgot all Christian maxims, and in her heart stormed against Margaret again, not against Margaret’s lover. But the fury of her mood passed, leaving her pale and wan, exhausted by it, but still unsubmissive. It was no longer an unusual thing to wash away the stains of tears and go down stairs with a smile. It occurred to her as she smoothed her rumpled hair and made her toilet for the evening that she had learned the alphabet of deceit too easily, she was a veritable whited sepulchre. Nevertheless she went down bravely to meet her father and take up her life just where she had broken off for those few hours of mad grief and restlessness. But the delay fretted her nerves; it was one thing to be ready, another to keep that smile, that brave air of comfort for an hour, two hours, three! She grew uneasy, too, for the judge,—could he be ill? Could anything have happened? A dim foreboding creptthrough the preoccupation of her mood. She ran to the front window and looked down the long street and saw her father coming slowly toward the house, his head slightly bowed and his tall thin figure showing more than usually the student’s stoop of the shoulders. The last rays of sunlight slanting down the street fell on the whiteness of his beard and hair.
A swift, pained perception of his age, his feebleness, gave Rose a sudden sharp pang of grief, of foreshadowed loss; the revelation that comes suddenly—like the opening of a window in the soul—of the mortality of those we love, of life’s awful uncertainty.
She opened the door with a pale face. “Father!” she exclaimed, “you’re so late, I was getting anxious.”
He looked up without a smile, his eyes dull and weary. “I was delayed—by business matters,” he said simply.
He followed her into the library, and putting down a bundle of papers he carried sank wearily into his great chair and hid his face in his hands without another word.
Rose looked at him keenly, her heart throbbing with a new dismay, and seeing that the fingers which pressed his temples slightly trembled shewent to the dining-room and pouring out a glass of wine brought it to him. “You are very tired,” she said gently; “try to take this, father, I think you need it.”
He looked up blankly, took the glass and tasting the wine set it aside. His face had aged ten years.
In her distress Rose only thought of cheering him. She averted her eyes; it seemed almost an indelicacy to inquire too closely into such apparent distress. “The roses I ordered came to-day,” she said, with a forced lightness of tone which jarred; “I thought, perhaps, we could decide this evening where to set them out. Do you think they’d do best by the south wall, father?”
He passed his hand over his eyes like a man whose sight was failing. “The roses?” he repeated absently; “I do not know. My child,” he added in a heavy tone, “something has happened to-day; I’m practically a ruined man.”
She caught her breath, frightened for the moment and taken unawares; in the assured comfort and peace of her life it seemed impossible. “Oh, father!” she exclaimed, “not really?”
He nodded, speech was difficult; the full force and horror of the calamity still hung over him.
A hundred conjectures darted through hermind, but intuitively she knew the actual fact, his trust had been betrayed. “It’s that man—the note you endorsed?” she said.
“Yes,” he replied simply, “that and the unfortunate investments I made in New York. They turned out badly two months ago; I did not tell you, Rose, but I was swindled. This morning the note came due and Erkhardt has disappeared.”
“Oh, the villain!” Rose exclaimed hotly, “and you so kind. Father, can’t it be delayed—warded off? Surely something can be done—must you lose all that too?”
He roused himself with an effort from the cloud which seemed to be enfolding him, shutting down on his stupefied senses. “I shall have to pay the whole obligation; it can’t be honorably delayed,” he said; “it will sweep away my whole principal, Rose, and leave me nothing but my salary.”
“But we can live on that,” she exclaimed eagerly, her face brightening, “we can easily live on that, father; you’ll see how famously I can manage!”
The judge looked at her with a pitiful tightening of the lines about his mouth, his eyes filled with unshed tears; her ignorance seemed to him the sweetest, the most helpless thing in the world. “But when I die, Rose,” he said hoarsely, “andI may die soon—” he rose and walked to and fro before the open window where the soft twilight was falling. He was suddenly bowed with years, shrunken, haggard. “My God, child, there will be nothing for you!” he broke out at last.
She went to him then, throwing her young arms around his neck and staying him in his walk. He looked at her, bewildered, and she laid her soft cheek against his in a mute caress. “It doesn’t matter, father!” she whispered; “don’t think of me, don’t add that to your burden.”
The old man groaned. “My child,” he exclaimed, his voice quavering with grief, “my poor child, I can never forgive myself!”
Tears of sympathy filled her eyes, but she smiled bravely. “Why, father, we have so much—here is the house, the—”
“It’s mortgaged,” he said, and sank heavily into his chair.
For an instant Rose stood appalled. Unconsciously she glanced about her; in the gathering gloom the dear familiar room, the book-lined walls, the littered table, the old clock, seemed suddenly changed. Between yesterday and to-day, between this morning and to-night was a great gulf fixed. She shivered, a horrible sensation of loss, of unreality, of despair, swept over her young soul andbared it to misery, the poignant, unreasoning misery of youth. Then she saw the bowed white head, the bent shoulders which had borne the heat and burden of the day, and forgot herself. She knelt by his chair and slipped her arms around his neck. “Nothing matters, dear daddy, while we have each other,” she whispered, a little sob in her voice.
He put his shaking hand on her head. “My poor child,” he repeated.
She raised her head, a soft light in her eyes. “Father, you’ll let me sing now,” she said, “you’ll let me sing—I know I can make a fortune for us both. Mancini told me that with a year in Paris I could be ready. He believes in my voice, father, and you know he has trained two great sopranos.”
The judge shook his head sadly. “Child, child, you know how I feel about your singing in public!”
“But now, daddy,” she pleaded, “now when it will save me from poverty, and I love it, oh, I love it! May I go, just for six months?”
Again the judge shook his head, his lips almost formed “no,” but Rose’s arms tightened around his neck.
“Don’t say it, daddy!” she cried, “don’t say it, for then you will not unsay it! Truly, trulyI must sing, it is my greatest desire, my happiness, the talent that was given me—surely I mustn’t be the one to fold it in a napkin! Daddy, daddy, say yes.”
He sat looking out of the window with unseeing eyes, his lips compressed. The demand struck at his dearest prejudices, his firmest convictions, yet to leave her helpless and poor!
In the still room the ticking of the clock sounded with monotonous distinctness; it seemed to jar the silence. Twilight fell fast, the corners were dark, the two faces in the foreground showed white and tense.
At last the judge sighed heavily. “I must give in,” he said, with slow reluctance, “in my folly I have wrecked us both; I’m no longer fit to command. You may sing, child, but I hope it will only be in concerts.”
Rose’s face fell but hope kindled, one step was gained, and like every wedge it makes the other easier. “But I must go abroad to be finished for any really great success,” she said; “father, can’t you go with me?”
The judge looked at her strangely. “Child, I never thought,” he said harshly; “I haven’t the money to send you yet,—you’ll have to wait until we can save it; it’s another denial for you, Rose.You know I sent a large check to Allestree the other day, and there is little left now.”
A wild hope leaped in her heart, she knew the check would come back, but dared she tell him? Would he take it if it came? Her lips trembled, she was glad of the darkness. “Father, I shall sing,” she said bravely, “perhaps,—who knows,—I shall sing so well that you’ll be proud of me and sit and applaud and send me bouquets.”
He wiped away the gathering moisture in his eyes. “I’ve always been proud of you, Rose!” he said sadly, “but that a child of mine should have to sing for a living! The Lord’s hand is heavy upon me in my old age,” he added pitifully, completely broken down.
The girl’s arms were closer about his neck; her own sorrow, her thoughts of Fox were lost in her love for the old man in his distress. “Who knows?” she cried with new sweet courage, almost gay in her bravery, “perhaps I shall be as lucky as Patti and we’ll have a great fortune and a palace to live in! Oh, daddy, I shall be so happy to sing!”
But he sat motionless, his chin upon his breast and his dull eyes fixed on the open space beyond the window where the lilac bush stood like a ghost amidst the gathering night.