“Can I say nothing?” he replied with passion; “must I stand by like a mute and let my happiness, my love, my life slip away from me? Rose, you ask too much!”
“I’m so sorry!” she said simply, “now I must go and—and I hate to seem unkind, Robert!”
Their eyes met with the shock of natural feeling and his face blanched. “Of course I know it’s useless, Rose, I’ve always known it, but—well, I had to speak, and you’ll have to forgive me for it!”
She smiled faintly. “There’s nothing to forgive,” she said gently, “and I must go home to meet father anyway. Won’t you come with me, Robert?”
Without a word he laid down his brushes and the two went down the old stairs together, each miserable enough in different ways; the man bitterly rebellious, the girl resolutely enduring with a self repression that suggested her father in her.
XVIII
THAT very day Judge Temple violated his usual custom and did not come home promptly after court adjourned. The hour came and passed and he had not appeared.
Rose was waiting for him in the library and she began to glance uneasily at the clock. His habits were as fixed as the laws of the Medes and Persians; any deviation indicated something out of the common. These spring evenings it was his custom to walk in the garden before dinner. Rose had accordingly opened the long French window on the piazza and the tendrils of the jasmine vine, not yet budding, swung across it; the air was sweet, redolent with the perfume of the wistaria which hung in festoons on the arbor. The sweet full note of a catbird broke the stillness.
Rose walked to and fro, trying to distract her mind; if she relaxed a moment she heard Fox’s voice, saw his strong pale face. It was pathetically significant that Allestree, and Allestree’s pain at her finality had dropped from her mind. Love and youth are absolutely selfish, they ignore the universe.
When she came home that day and was alone in her room, she had shed some passionate tears; her young strong heart had rebelled utterly; she wanted happiness too, wanted it as bitterly as Margaret did, but Margaret had robbed her of it! She gave way then to the passion and the rage of her grief, she forgot all Christian maxims, and in her heart stormed against Margaret again, not against Margaret’s lover. But the fury of her mood passed, leaving her pale and wan, exhausted by it, but still unsubmissive. It was no longer an unusual thing to wash away the stains of tears and go down stairs with a smile. It occurred to her as she smoothed her rumpled hair and made her toilet for the evening that she had learned the alphabet of deceit too easily, she was a veritable whited sepulchre. Nevertheless she went down bravely to meet her father and take up her life just where she had broken off for those few hours of mad grief and restlessness. But the delay fretted her nerves; it was one thing to be ready, another to keep that smile, that brave air of comfort for an hour, two hours, three! She grew uneasy, too, for the judge,—could he be ill? Could anything have happened? A dim foreboding crept through the preoccupation of her mood. She ran to the front window and looked down the long street and saw her father coming slowly toward the house, his head slightly bowed and his tall thin figure showing more than usually the student’s stoop of the shoulders. The last rays of sunlight slanting down the street fell on the whiteness of his beard and hair.