“There is something he wants,” Rossie said to Beatrice, who shared her vigils, “and if I could only guess what it was;” then, suddenly starting up, she hurried to his side, and taking the poor, palsied hand in hers rubbed and caressed it pityingly, and smoothing his thin hair, said to him, “Judge Forrest, you want something, and I can’t guess what it is, unless,—unless—;” she hesitated a moment, for as yet Everard’s name had not been mentioned in his hearing, and she did not know what the effect might be; but the eyes, fastened so eagerly upon her, seemed challenging her to go on, and at last she said,—“unless it is Mr. Everard. Has it anything to do with him?”
Oh, how hard the lips tried to articulate, but they only quivered convulsively and gave forth a little moaning sound, but in the lighting up of the eager eyes, which grew larger and brighter, Rossie thought she read the answer, and emboldened by it went on to say that they had telegraphed to Cincinnati and Louisville both, and had that morning dispatched a message to Memphis and New Orleans.
“We shall surely find him somewhere,” she continued, “and he will come at once. I do not think he was angry with you when he went away, he spoke so kindly of you.”
Again the lips tried to speak, but could not; only the eyes fastened themselves wistfully upon Rosamond, following her wherever she went, and as if by some subtle magnetism bringing her back to the bedside, where she stayed almost constantly. How those wide-open, never-sleeping eyes haunted and troubled her and made her at last almost afraid to stay alone with them, and meet their constant gaze! Beatrice had been taken sick, and was unable to come to the Forrest House, and the judge seemed so much more quiet when Rossie was sitting where he could look her straight in the face, that the man hired to nurse him staid mostly in the adjoining room, and Rossie kept her vigils alone, wearying herself with the constantly recurring question as to what it was the sick man wished to tell her. Something, sure, and something important, too,—for as the days went on, and there came no tidings of his son, the eyes grew larger, and seemed at times about to leap from their sockets, to escape the horror and remorse so plainly written in them. What was it he wished to say? What was it troubling the old man so, and forcing out the great drops of sweat about his lips and forehead, and making his face a wonder to look upon? Rosamond felt sometimes as if she should go mad herself sitting by him, with those wild eyes watching her so intently that if she moved away for a moment they called her back by their strange power, and compelled her not only to sit down again by them, but to look straight into their depths, where the unspeakable trouble lay struggling to free itself.
“Judge Forrest,” Rossie said to him the fifth day after his attack, “you wish to tell me something and you cannot, but perhaps I can guess by mentioning ever so many things. I’ll try, and if you mean no look straight at me as you are looking now; if you mean yes, turn your eyes to the window, or shut them, as you choose. Do you understand me?”
There was the shadow of a smile on the wan face, and the heavy eyelids closed, in token that he did comprehend. Rossie knew the judge was dying, that at the most only a few days more were his, and ought not some one to tell him? Was it right to let that fierce, turbulent spirit launch out upon the great sea of eternity unwarned?
“Oh, if I was only good, I might help him, perhaps,” she thought; “at any rate he ought to know, and maybe it would make him kinder toward Everard,” for it was of him she meant to speak, through this novel channel of communication between herself and the sick man.
She must have the father’s forgiveness with which to comfort the son, and with death staring him in the face he would not withhold it; so she said to him:
“You are very sick, Judge Forrest; you know that, don’t you?”
The eyes went slowly to the window and back again, while she continued in her plain, outspoken way: