“And of course I shall consider you responsible for her safekeeping,” added Mr. Nathan. “She admits that she ran away once; she may do so again.”
“No, I won’t, you need not be afraid.” Rose’s voice was trembling, but she held it firm.
“For you understand,” with emphasis, “that I am not dropping the matter of the missing money, but only, at your request, passing it over for the present. I will repeat, however, that if Rose will confess and return the money, no one but ourselves shall ever know of it. If she does not I shall feel myself constrained, much as I may regret the necessity, to resort to more severe measures,” and he blew his nose with a great flourish of his red silk handkerchief by way of emphasis.
CHAPTER XVII
SUNSHINE AGAIN
So absorbed was Rose in her trouble that she took little or no interest in the attempt to discover her family, or the discussions that took place in the Blossom household as to its probable result. “I don’t believe I have any relatives,” she said indifferently, “or they would have looked after me when my mother and father died. And even if I have they wouldn’t want to own any one accused of stealing.”
That was the burden of all her thoughts; she woke in the morning to a sense of overwhelming calamity, and went to sleep at night with its pressure heavy on her heart. When Grandmother Sweet had mildly questioned if in the discovery of the marriage certificate she did not see the hand of Providence, she had replied, with the irritability of suffering, that she didn’t believe in Providence at all. “I might,” she had added, “if that money could be found; I sha’n’t till then.”
For to Rose the executioner’s sword had not been lifted, only stayed for the time. Visions of arrest and imprisonment were constantly before her, all the more terrifying that the vagueness of her knowledge as to their realities left ample room for her imagination. “How can I tell where the money is when I don’t know?” was the question she repeated over and over. “And you know what he said he would do if I didn’t tell?”
She refused to go to school for fear her schoolmates had heard of her disgrace. She cried till she was nearly blind, and fretted herself into a fever, till Mrs. Blossom, fearing she would make herself really sick, talked to her seriously on the selfishness as well as the harm of self-indulgence, even in grief, and the duty as well as the need of self-control.
Rose had never thought of her conduct in that light before, and left alone she lay for a long time, now thoroughly aroused from her morbid self-absorption, and looking herself, as it were, fully in the face. The fire crackled cheerily in the little stove, the sunshine came in at the window of the pleasant, low chamber, on the stand by her bed were a cup of sage tea Grandmother Sweet had made for her, a glass of aconite Mrs. Patience had prepared, and a dainty china bowl of lemon jelly Miss Silence had brought to tempt if possible her appetite. Mute evidence, each and all of kindly affection, that touched Rose and filled her with a sense of shame that she had made such poor return for all that had been done for her.
Rising with a sudden impulse, she went to the little glass, pushed back the tumbled hair from her tear-swollen face, and sternly took herself to task. “I’m ashamed of you, I am indeed, that after you have been taken into this home, and cared for, you should be so ungrateful as to make every one in it uncomfortable now, because you happen to be in trouble; and should have shown yourself as disagreeable, and selfish, and thoughtless as you have. Not one of them would have done so, you may be sure; and if you ever expect to grow into a woman that people will respect and love as they do Grandmother Sweet, or Mrs. Blossom, or Miss Silence, or Mrs. Patience, you must learn to control yourself. And now, to begin, you must brush your hair, bathe your eyes, go downstairs and do as you ought to do. I know it will be pretty hard, but you must do it.”