Dil looked almost stupidly amazed.
“Bess was so much prittier,” she said simply. “Do you know ’bout him? He went away ever so far, crost the ’Lantic Oshun. But he said he’d come back in the spring.”
She lifted her grave, perplexed eyes to a face whose wavering tints were struggling with keen emotion.
“He couldn’t come back in the spring. He went abroad with a cousin who loved him very much, who was ill, and hoped to get well; but he grew worse and weaker, and died only a little while ago. And Mr. Travis came in on Monday, I think.”
Her voice trembled a little.
“Oh, I knew he would come!” The glad cry was electrifying.
And she, this little being, one among the waifs of a big city, had looked for him, had a right to look for him.
“He ain’t the kind to tell what he don’t mean. Bess was so sure. An’ I want to ast him so many things I can’t get straight by myself. I ain’t smart like Bess was, an’ we was goin’ to heaven when he come back; he said he’d go with us. An’ now Bess is dead.”
“My dear little girl,” Virginia held her close, and kissed the cool, waxen cheek, the pale lips, “will you tell me all the story, and about going to heaven?”
It was an easy confidence now. She told the plans so simply, with that wonderful directness one rarely finds outside of Bible narratives. Her own share in the small series of tragedies was related with no consciousness that it had been heroic. Virginia could see the Square on the Saturday afternoon, and Bess in her wagon, when she “ast Mr. Travis to go to heaven with them.” And the other time—the singing. Ah, she well knew the beauty and pathos of the voice. How they had hoped and planned—and that last sad night, with its remembrance of wild roses. Dil’s voice broke now and then, and she made little heart-touching pauses; but Virginia was crying softly, moved from the depths of her soul. And Dil’s wonderful faith that she could have brought Bess back to life bordered on the sublime.