He could hear her voice speaking to the dogs: “Ah, my friends, ah, my dears! I know you every one. Jo Portugais is here. I know your bark, you, Harpy, and you, Lazybones, and you, Cloud and London! I know you every one. I heard you as I came from Mass, beauty dears. Ah, you know me, sweethearts? Ah, God bless you for coming! You have come to bring us home; you have come to fetch us home—father and me.” The paws of one of the dogs was on her shoulder, and his nose was in her hair.
Charley heard her words, for the window was open, and he listened and watched now with an infinite relief in his look. Her face was half turned towards him. It was pale-very pale and sad. It was Rosalie as of old—thank God, as of old!—but more beautiful in the touching sadness, the far-off longing, of her look.
“I must go and see your master,” she said to the dogs. “Down—down, Lazybones!”
There was no time to lose—he must not meet her ere. He went into the outer hall hastily. The servant was passing through. “If any one asks for Jo Portugais,” he said, “say that I’ll be back to-morrow morning—I’m going across the river to-day.”
“Certainly, M’sieu’,” said the girl, and smiled because of the piece of silver he put in her hand.
As he heard the side door open he stepped through the front doorway into the street, and disappeared round a corner.
CHAPTER XLVII. ONE WAS TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT
Rosalie carried to the hospital that afternoon a lighter heart than she had known for many a day. The sight of Jo Portugais’ dogs had roused her out of the apathy which had been growing on her in this patient but hopeless watching beside her father. She had always a smile and a cheerful word for the poor man. A settled sorrow hung upon her face, however, taking away its colour, but giving it a sweet gravity which made her slave more than one young doctor of the hospital, for whom, however, she showed no more than a friendly frankness, free from self-consciousness. For hours she would sit in reverie beside her sleeping father, her heart “over the water to Charley.” As in a trance, she could see him sitting at his bench, bent over his work, now and again lifting up his head to look across to the post-office, where another hand than hers sorted letters now.
Day by day her father weakened and faded away. All that was possible to medical skill had been done. As the money left by her mother dwindled, she had no anxiety, for she knew that the life she so tenderly cherished would not outlast the gold which lengthened out the tenuous chain of being. This last illness of her father’s had been the salvation of her mind, the saving of her health. Maybe it had been the saving of her soul; for at times a curious contempt of life came upon her—she who had loved it so eagerly and fully. There descended on her then the bitter conviction that never again would she see the man she loved. Then not even Mrs. Flynn could call back “the fun o’ the world” to her step and her tongue and her eye. At first there had been a timid shrinking, but soon her father and herself were brighter and better for the old Irishwoman’s presence, and she began to take comfort in Mrs. Flynn.