The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

At night when the house had settled into its bedtime quiet, Augusta stole into the little cot at the foot of her mother's bed, and waited.

After a little she heard her mother stir softly in the bed, and then heard her get stealthily out to the floor. She came straight to the little cot, and, as she knelt by it, Augusta could feel her warm breath upon her own tumbled hair. Then, satisfied, she stole softly back into bed and went sound asleep.

This was the first day of the new life for Augusta. And every day that followed through the fall and winter was exactly like it. It seemed that Rose Wilding lived through the day just waiting for the night to come, that she might steal from her bed to find her little girl. She never spoke to Augusta except to answer a direct question. She submitted in a gentle, kindly way to Augusta's every ministration. She smiled at Wardwell and always knew him. But when he would time and again, indicating Augusta, ask who this girl was, she always answered with a deprecating "Hush!" and a pitying glance at Augusta which said plainly that he should not ask, that he knew well enough where the girl had come from and he ought to know better than to hurt her feelings by bringing it up. He asked the question often in a good-hearted effort to make her realize that this was Augusta. But, one day, after he had asked it, he saw Augusta's face as she caught her mother's sidelong look. He did not ask the question again.

Gradually the three settled to an acceptance of the state of affairs as they existed in the mind of Rose Wilding. By day, Augusta was the girl that had followed Rose Wilding from "that place." At night, the little Augusta came from somewhere and slept in her place at the foot of her mother's bed.

The change that came over Rose Wilding was one that to the outer eye was wholly inexplicable. Though that there was a change was plain to the most casual look. Probably it was to the casual, unconcerned eye that the change was most startling.

One day, when Rose Wilding had been some weeks at home, a new boarder, a Mrs. Barron, a nervous, high-strung, over-worked woman, head of department in one of the great retail stores, came into the sitting room to speak to Augusta. She glanced accidentally into the bedroom and straight into the eyes of Rose Wilding whom she had never before seen.

Mrs. Barron fainted.

Augusta and Wardwell, accustomed to seeing Rose Wilding day by day, could not realize the extent of the change that had come over her. To them she was today practically as she had been yesterday. But to a stranger the picture of the large handsome woman, her face blanched now by hidden disease to a transparent pearl white, the skin smooth and unlined as a growing baby's, her pallor doubled by the white of the bed and the enamel that covered every object in the room, was in all a sight to arouse a nameless, creeping dread of something present but unseen.

Augusta had taken a few months of hospital training during the year past, and her care of her mother became not only a cult and a religion but almost a fanatical passion. She had turned the room into her ideal of a hospital room. She had painted and enamelled everything so that all could be scrubbed and washed down with disinfectants. She would have nothing in the room that was not a pure white. She dressed the bed and her mother in the snowiest things she could lay hand to.

The effect was not at all what she had had in mind. To herself, living as she did so close to her mother, the room was just the cheeriest and sweetest abode that could be made for a beloved sick one. But her mother's wondering, childlike eyes, as they looked out unseeing from under the circle of completely blanched hair above them upon the room that was now her world, did not have the look familiar to the sick room. They were eyes that looking, and seeing not, yet dealt with strange thing that showed through a curtain.