The reaping

by Mary Imlay Taylor

Poor Rose,—her father had inculcated stern and simple lessons and she had tried, before all things, to be just; but to be judicious and calm and in love at the same time was an impossible combination. She dashed the tears from her eyes, and thrust Margaret’s letter into her pocket and went about her duties with the air of a soldier on guard, but her lip would quiver at intervals and she could not sing a note when the judge asked for one of the old ballads that he had loved as a boy, and Rose had learned, to please him.

It was about this time that she began to wonder if the old house must go, or if her father had been able to meet all the payments due upon it. She dared not ask him, and he said nothing, but she noticed that now that he was able to be moved into the library every day and sometimes into the garden in the warm spring sunshine, that he sat for hours at a time in a brown study with a deep furrow between his brows, and constantly pushing back his hair from his forehead, as he did in moments of perplexity. She was afraid to speak, lest any mention of the trouble which had so beset him would bring back the fever and a relapse, so she had to content herself with hope and waited for some sign on his part.

The old house had never seemed so dear; the mantling vines were full out in new foliage, birds were nested on the southern wall toward the garden, and the old garden-plot itself, so sheltered and secluded by the house and the high brick wall which shut out the street, was just coming into bloom. The roses she had set out the spring before were in bud, and the peonies were blooming. Rose looked about her with a sigh and forgot that she would, perhaps, be one day a great prima donna with the world at her feet. Such things do not always fill a woman’s heart.

Meanwhile the judge had written and despatched a letter with great secrecy, and one morning, after he was wheeled into his library, he told Rose that she might take her sewing into the garden for he expected a gentleman on business and he might be there half an hour. She obeyed him with a stifling sensation of anxiety; she knew it was that mortgage, that terrible mortgage, and his reticence convinced her that he was concealing bad news from her. She took her sewing out to the little arbor in the corner, where the library windows were out of sight, and she tried to sew, but her fingers trembled so that she lost her needle and, having neglected to provide herself with another, she sat and watched the robin on the lawn and wished money grew up like grass out of the well tilled earth and was of as little consequence. Yet, all the while, it was not of herself she thought but of her father, broken in health, old and careworn, facing those inexorable obligations without even her help.

The judge alone in the library watched the clock with an anxious eye, and thought of Rose and all it would mean to her if he could save the property. When he lay near death the one overwhelming horror of his heart had been to leave her at the mercy of the world. The old man glanced about him with the same fond recognition of familiar objects; it is strange how dear these inanimate things, which were here before we came and will be here when we are gone, become so valuable to us. To the judge they had associations. The picture over the mantel had been bought by his grandfather, those books dated still farther back in the family; the clock had belonged to his mother’s great grandfather, the old secretary of polished mahogany, with secret drawers and brass mountings, was an heirloom,—it had held a will which had nearly disrupted the family two generations back. Small matters, but to an old man inexpressibly interesting and sacred. Of the house he did not like to think; that was full of memories of his wife, and he could not now explain the madness which had led him to mortgage it to pay off more pressing claims which had followed his first heavy losses.

X

ROSE had been ten minutes in the garden, and the judge was beginning to fidget in his chair when he heard the front door open and shut and at last steps came toward the library. A moment later William Fox entered the room. As he came into the mellow light from the open window the judge was struck by the change in his strong pale face. The old smile which had come so easily to his lips, and which, at times, had almost the sweetness of a woman’s, was gone; the brow and chin had a new resolution. The man was changed. Judge Temple saw it and held out his hand with a sudden impulse of warmer sympathy than he had felt before. After all, Fox had met it like a man and paid the cost.

On his side, Fox was as strongly affected by the broken appearance of the old man in his invalid chair with his white head and his sunken eyes. “My dear judge,” he said, “I hope you’re feeling better? I was glad to obey your summons, though I’m not sure that I understand the reference in your note.”

The judge looked at him a moment in silence, then drawing a letter from his pocket, opened it and handed it to him. Fox took it with evident reluctance; as he read it he colored a little and folding it hastily, handed it back without a word.

“I did not know until yesterday, sir, to whom I was indebted,” Judge Temple said slowly, his lip trembling slightly from weakness and profound emotion.