Rose O'Paradise

by Grace Miller White

She shook as if attacked with ague as she came within sight of the gaunt farmhouse, and the broken windows and hanging doors gave her a sense of everlasting decay.

Below her in the valley lay the blue lake, a shining spread of water, quiet and silent, here and there upon it the shadow of a floating, fluffy cloud. She listened to the nagging chatter of the squirrels, mingled with the fluttering of the forest birds high above her head. As she 342 stood on the hill, the only human being in all the wilderness about, in fancy she seemed to be at the very top of the world.

She heard the old familiar voices of the mourning pines, and remembered their soothing magic, and a stinging reproach swept over her at the thought of her forgetfulness of them. They had been friends when no other friends were near. Along with the flood of memories came Matty’s ghastly ghost stories and her past belief that her mother’s spirit hovered near her.

She went through the lane leading to the house and paused under the trees. Presently she placed her violin box and suitcase on the grass and lay down beside them. In the eaves of the house a dove cooed his late afternoon love to his mate, and Jinnie, because she was very young and very much in love, brought Theodore before her with that lingering retrospection that takes possession in such sensuous moments. She could feel again the hot tremor of his hands as they clung to hers, and she bent her head in shame at the acute, electrifying sensations. He belonged to another woman; he no longer belonged to her. She must conquer her love for him, and at that moment every desire to study, every thought of work seemed insipid and useless. The whole majestic beauty of the scene, her sudden coming into a great deal of money, did not add to her happiness. She would gladly give it all up to be again with her loves of yesterday. But that could not be! The future lay in a hard, straight line before her. She was striving against a ceaseless, resisting force,—the force of her whole passionate nature.

With their usual reluctance, the things of night at length crept forth. Jinnie felt some of them as they touched her hands, her face, and moved on. One of the countless birds fluttered low, as if frightened at the advancing 343 dark, brushed her cheek, then winged on and up and was lost in the tree above her. Somewhere deep in the gloom shrouding the little graveyard came the ghostly flutter of an owl.

Jinnie was flat on her back, and how long she lay thus she could never afterward remember, but it was until the stars appeared and the moon formed queer fantastic pictures, like frost upon a window pane. In solemn review passed the days,—from that awful night when she had left her father dead upon the floor in the house nearby to the present moment. She glanced at the windows. They looked back at her like square, darkening eyes.

She wondered dully how that wee star away off there could blink so peacefully in its nightly course when just below it beat a heart that hurt like hers. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, long black fingers were drawing dark pictures across the sky. A drop of rain fell upon her face, but still she did not move. Then, like rows of soldiers, the low clouds drew slowly together, and the stars softly wept themselves out.

Suddenly, from the other side of the lake, the thunder rolled up, and with the distant boom came the thought of Lafe’s infinite faith, and the memory fell upon Jinnie like a benediction from God’s dark sky.

She arose from the grass, took the fiddle box and bag, and walked to the porch. She went in through the broken door. It was dark, too dark to see much, and from the leather case she took a box of matches and a candle. Memories crowded down upon her thick and fast. In the kitchen, which was bare, she could mark the place where Matty used to sit and where her own chair had been.

The long stairs that led from the basement to the upper floor yawned black in the gloom. Candle and fiddle in hand, Jinnie mounted them and halted before the unopened 344 door. Somehow it seemed as if she would find before the grate the long, thin body of her dead father, and she distinctly remembered the spindle fire-flames falling in golden yellow licks upon his face. In her imagination she could again see the flake-like ashes, thrown out from the smoldering fire, rise grey to the ceiling, then descend silently over him like a pale shroud.