Outdoors the still day was dying silently, like the gradual sinking from a comatose state, that is hardly life, to the death it simulates. How did the gathering darkness express itself in that void whiteness of the mists, still visibly white as ever! Night was sifting through them; the room was shadowy; yet still in the glow of the fire she beheld their pallid presence close against the window. And the red rose was shedding its petals!—down dropping, with the richness of summer spent in their fleeting beauty, their fragrance a memory, the place they had embellished, bereft. She did not reflect; she only felt. She saw the rose fade, the sad night steal on apace; the hour had passed, and she knew he would not come. She burst into sudden tears.
The old man, whether it was in curiosity or sympathy, had his questions justified by her self-betrayal, and his craft easily drew the story from her simplicity. He got up suddenly with an expression of keen interest. She followed his emotions dubiously, as he took from the mantelpiece a tallow dip in an old pewter candlestick, and with slow circumspection lighted the sputtering wick.
'I want ter look up a p'int o' law, D'rindy,' he said impressively. 'Ye jes' set thar an' I'll let ye know d'rec'ly how the law stands.'
It seemed to Dorinda a long time that he sat with his book before him on the table, his spectacles gleaming in the light of the tallow dip, close at hand, his lips moving as he slowly read beneath his breath, now and then clutching his big red handkerchief, and polishing off the top of his round head and his wrinkled brow. Twice he was about to close the book. Twice he renewed his search.
And now at last it was small comfort to Dorinda to know that the affidavit would not, in the justice's opinion, have been competent testimony. He called it an ex parte statement, and said that unless Rick Tyler's deposition were taken in the regular way, giving due notice to the attorney-general, it could not be admitted, and that in almost all criminal cases witnesses were compelled to testify vivâ voce. Small comfort to Dorinda to know that the effort was worthless from the beginning, and that on it she had staked and lost the dearest values of her life. As he read aloud the prosy, prolix sentences, they were annotated by her sobs.
'Dell-law! D'rindy, 'twarn't no good, nohow!' he exclaimed, presently, breaking off with an effort from his reading, for he relished the rotund verbiage—the large freedom of legal diction impressed him as a privilege, accustomed as he was only to the simple phrasings of his simple neighbours. He could not understand her disappointment. Surely Rick Tyler's defection could not matter, he argued, since the affidavit would have been worthless.
She did not tell him more. All the world was changed to her. Nothing—not her lover himself—could ever make her see it as once it was. She declined the invitation to stay and eat supper, and soon was once more out in the pallid mist and the contending dusk. The scene that she had left was still vivid in her mind, and she looked back once at the lucent yellow square of the lighted window gleaming through the white vapours. The rose-bush showed across the lower panes, and she remembered the melancholy fall of the flower.
Alas, the roses all were dead!