She had gone nominally to see Rosie, but really to verify for herself Jim Breen's report of the collapse of Jasper Fay's little industry. She found it hard to believe that after Claude's conduct toward Rosie her father-in-law could have the heart to bring further woe upon a family that had already had enough. Nothing but seeing for herself could coerce her incredulity.
She had seen for herself. Over the little place which had always been neat even when it was forlorn there was now the stamp of desolation. The beds which had been seeded or planted a month before, and which should now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown. In the cucumber-house the vines had become rusty and limp, sagging from the twines on which they climbed in debauched indifference to sightliness. The roof of the hothouse that had contained the flowers had a deep gash in the glass which it was no longer worth while to mend. There was no yellow-brown plume from the furnace chimney, and the very windows of the old house with the mansard roof had in their stare the glazed, unseeing expression of eyes in which there is death. Inside, Mrs. Fay was packing up. Battered old trunks that had long been stored in some moldy hiding-place stood agape; a packing-case held the place of honor in a forbidding "best room" into which Lois had never looked before. Mrs. Fay had little to say. Tears welled into her cold eyes with the attempt to say anything. Outside, Fay himself had nothing to say at all. Lois had accosted him, and though he had ceased to regard her as an enemy, he stood grimly silent as his only response to her words of consolation.
"I know things will come all right again, Mr. Fay. They must. They look dark now; but haven't you often noticed that after the worst times in our lives we're able to look back and see that the very thing that seemed most cruel was the turning-point at which a change for the better began? You must surely have noticed that—a man with so much experience as you."
He looked vaguely about him, standing in patience till she had said her say, but giving no indication that her words had anything to do with him. The change in his appearance shocked her. Everything in his face had taken on what was to her a terrible significance. The starry mysticism had vanished from the eyes to be replaced by a look that was at once hunted and searching, vindictive and yet woebegone. The mouth was sunken as the mouths of old men become from the loss of teeth, and the thin lips which used to be kindly and vacillating were drawn with a hard, unflinching tightness. The skin that had long been gray was now ghostly, with the shadowy, not quite earthly, hue of things about to disappear.
She had talked to him for some minutes before he woke to animation. At sight of two young men—surveyor's clerks, perhaps—who had set up in the roadway what might have been a camera on a tripod, or more probably a theodolite, through which they were squinting over the buildings and the slope of the land, he left her abruptly. With a hoe in his hand he crept forward, taking his place behind a clump of syringa that grew near the gate, ready to strike if either of the lads ventured to put foot on his property. It was the situation at which, according to light-hearted Jim Breen, you would have died laughing; but Lois had difficulty in keeping back her tears.
She found Rosie in the hothouse, of which the interior corresponded to the gash in the roof. All the smaller plants had been removed, disclosing the empty, ugly, earth-stained, water-stained wooden stagings. Only some half-dozen fern-trees remained of all the former beauty.
But even here Rosie was at work, sitting at the old desk, which, deprived of its sheltering greenery, was shabbier than ever, making out bills. There was still money owing to her father, and it was important that it should be collected. Over and over again she wrote her neat "Acct. rendered," while she added as a postscript in every case: "Please remit. Going out of business."
And yet, if there was anything on the dilapidated premises that could cheer or encourage it was Rosie. With the enforced rest and seclusion following on her fruitless dash to escape, her prettiness had become more delicate, less worn. Shame at her folly had put into her greenish eyes a pleading timidity which became a quivering, babyish tremble when it reached the lips. The contrast which the girl thus presented to her parents, as well as something that was visibly developing within her, enabled Lois to affirm that which hitherto she had only hoped or suspected, that the wild leap into the pond had worked some mysterious good.
Like her father and mother, Rosie had little to say. The meeting was embarrassing. There were too many unuttered and unutterable thoughts on both sides to make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory, good will for what they lacked in the way of spontaneity.