The Open Window: Tales of the Months

by Mabel Osgood Wright

To him Rosalind was still a child to whom his love was sufficient; as a woman she found him still all in all, but did he wish it to be so now that he realized? He was nearing sixty-five and soon to retire from the university, for though his mental vigour was unimpaired, he had oftentimes an unaccountable fatigue that made father tell him that one cannot expect the heart at threescore to stand the pressure it did at two. What would happen after him? It might then be too late. Had he been selfish all these years, selfish through blind contentment?

Father love is often the most unselfish of all affections and best able to act free from hope of reward, and less self-centred than the mother love, even as her body is centred and dependent upon her maternity. Yet he felt himself at that moment an egotist.

Though it cut the Professor to the quick, he did all that a tactful man might to throw Benton and Rosalind naturally together, until, though she showed no tell-tale eagerness or emotion, she looked for his coming as a matter of course.

At this juncture, the spring of his retiring came, and the Professor and Rosalind came back to Oaklands, where Catharine, now over forty, was living alone, Miss Hewlett having decided the fall before upon a year’s trip abroad; and it was toward the possible spectacle of the daughters as rivals and the father’s position between the two, that village attention was turned, for it would be very marked should two separate households be maintained for only three people.

Rosalind did not seem to care for the title or prerogative of “housekeeper” so long as she was her father’s companion. Together they had made a plan for a garden entirely encircling the house, where even the shady corners should be forced to yield bloom, but this scheme was laid away until another season, because the Professor seemed to feel an ever increasing weariness now that the harness had been laid aside and there was no real necessity for exertion. No, there was one thing more,—there was still a volume of critical essays, prepared for the work of the university, to go to press. Rosalind begged her father to wait for a while and rest, but when he still persevered, she, too, threw herself into the work, that was completed at midsummer.

Then came a month of golden days, yet through them ran a thrill as of coming harm that Rosalind felt, but could not formulate; her father clung to her more closely than ever, but when she glanced up at him, instead of meeting a quick response as of old, his eyes seemed fixed upon something in the far-away horizon.

One day when father dropped in for a friendly rather than a professional call, he found the Professor alone,—in itself quite an unusual happening,—his face drawn and white with pain, hand pressed to side, and then together they faced the inevitable as they had done twice before. It might be months hence or even a year or two, or it might be any day, such is angina’s subtle cruelty.

“Shall I tell Rosalind?” asked father; “it is best that she should know.”

“The time has come at last, then, when I can no longer stand between her and sorrow,” said the Professor, scanning father’s face with a piteous clinging to hope that was heartbreaking.

“No, John,” replied father, taking the hands that were fast becoming veined and transparent, between his own; “the time has come when you may no longer stand between her and either sorrow or love, for one is born of the other, and it is not in the plan of God or nature that she be spared; but if in her love for you she has learned to keep the windows open wide to the sun of things, you will not have failed in your hope.”