Her face thanked him. “Uncle A. would have been glad, too.”
“I think he would,” said the doctor. “He told me some time ago to go in and win, only he didn’t put it that way.”
“I suppose he made it sound as if it had come bang out of the middle of the Bible. He always did. He was very good to me, really, and I was very fond of him. Besides, he gave mother a home.”
The doctor was silent, realizing the inevitable memories that would always throng the faithful heart of Rose, and in which he could never share. As though she had guessed at the faint pang that the thought brought with it, her next words allayed it.
“I wish you’d known her. It’s so difficult to realize that there was ever a time when you weren’t there. Ceylon, and my life with Jim, is the only part that doesn’t seem real to me—not counting Ces, of course. But sometimes, sitting sewing, or anything like that, I’ve thought myself back into those old days over the shop, with mother, when we shared the top bedroom. Sometimes I can hardly believe we’re not there still. It’s funny.”
He listened, as she spoke her thoughts aloud, as Rose had always done.
“I’m glad you’ve got some work for me, and that it’s what you said—helping you to help people who are like him.”
“You see, you’ll understand,” he said. “It’s not only that you won’t condemn, as so many do. You’ll understand. And because you understand, you’ll hope, and you’ll make them hope, too, believe that somehow, somewhere, there’s light ahead. So that there’ll be some, my Rose, who’ll no more ‘push stumbling on without a star.’ Will you make that your work, till Cecil comes home again?”
“Till....” Rose Aviolet paused, and into her brown eyes came the sweetest, strangest look that Lucian had ever seen there; a deep, divided look, that told of inextinguishable love, of enduring grief, of eternal, illimitable hope.
“If Cecil comes home again,” she said, courageous.