Out of sheer compassion they left her alone.
Seven o’clock. It was time for the signal. She found the lantern and made her way, unseen, to the roof. Azalea’s light shone at her from the gray air, far, far up the ridge. Carin’s light flashed from the roof of the mansion. All was well with them. They were laughing—Annie Laurie knew they were laughing. And she—she waved her lantern up and down and up and down with a kind of passion. She must make them know how deep was the sorrow that had befallen her. And they seemed to know. It was as if she could feel the streams of their sympathy rolling toward her. Yes, they understood. That queer fluttering of their lanterns assured her of it. Annie Laurie left her roof and descending into the attic, sank on an old settle there. She dragged a horse blanket over her and at last the storm of her anguish broke, and she wept and wept.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MYSTERY
Was it a long time—weary hours and hours—before Annie Laurie found her way down the stairs? She never could be sure. A man, whom she did not at first recognize, was leaving her father’s room. For a second she felt like rushing at him to tell him that he, a stranger, should not be in there—in that sacred chamber where her father lay dead and defenseless. Then she saw that it was Mr. Disbrow, the undertaker, and realized what his task had been. He had been making her father ready for his last resting place.
But surely the man was not ashamed of his task! He shot one glance at Annie Laurie, and then without speaking, hastened down the stairs and out of the front door. Was he sorry for her and at a loss to say how sorry, and so had run away? Annie Laurie could understand that. She would have felt much the same way herself. Yet it was, she decided, an odd way for a man to feel who was so often in the house of mourning as an undertaker naturally would be. However, it mattered little. She was glad he hadn’t spoken to her. And yet, when she thought of him as Sam’s father, it was curious that he hadn’t. Of course it might be that he knew nothing of the good friendship which existed between Sam and herself, and he might not approve of it anyway. The Disbrows were great for keeping to themselves. So were the Paces, but the Paces were busy folk; they liked their neighbors even if they didn’t see much of them. But one always had the feeling that the Disbrows shut themselves away from society because they had something against it—nobody quite knew what. Only Sam—Sam was different. He was made to live in the world and to enjoy it.
A vision of him, wide-shouldered, brown-haired—his hair would have curled a trifle if he had not continually discouraged it—brown-eyed, smiling, frank, energetic, arose before Annie Laurie. He had a ringing laugh, and the neighbors said he dared to laugh even in that silent shut-up house where his mother lay on her sofa, with mouse-like, cross-eyed Hannah watching beside her. It came over Annie Laurie that she had disliked them for things that were none of their fault. Mrs. Disbrow couldn’t help being ill; Hannah couldn’t help being cross-eyed; and it was beautiful of her to be always beside her mother.
Yet, as she paced the floor of her bedroom thinking about her father, with her tortured thoughts leaping this way and that as if they were struggling to escape from sorrow, a conviction came over her that sickness often was the fault of the person who suffered from it. She knew that an atmosphere of gloom hung over Sam’s house; that if he opened up the windows Hannah was told to close them; if he brought in flowers they had to be thrown out because they gave his mother a cold; if he built a fire in the fireplace for cheerfulness, it was considered unsafe, owing to a defect in the chimney. The stove was sufficient—and indeed more than sufficient, since the temperature of the room was at least eighty the winter through. Poor Sam! Annie Laurie knew that he had suggested that the chimney be mended so that they might sometimes sit by the open fire, letting the raging stove subside; he had urged Hannah to have an operation that would set her eyes straight, but the family had been too fearful of the results. So they sat in gloom and hideousness within their power to remedy. At least that was how it looked to Sam’s impatient, energetic nature, and Annie Laurie took the same view.
Miss Zillah came in after a time, with arms and words of comfort for her girl.
“Carin called up about seven o’clock,” she said, after a time when Annie Laurie had wept out her grief on her good aunt’s shoulder. “She seemed to know you were in trouble, though I don’t understand how she could have found out.”
Annie Laurie told her of the signalling.