There was only one counter-thought to this that brought with it a momentary balm. She would send Sally to him to beg, beseech, implore him not to repeat his headstrong error of the old years, to swear to him that if only he could know all he would forgive—nay, more, that if he could know quite all—the very whole of the sad story—not only would he forgive, but rather seek forgiveness for himself for the too harsh judgment he so rashly formed.
What should she say to Sally? how should she instruct her to plead for her? Never mind that now. All she wanted in her lonely, nervous delirium was the ease the thought gave her, the mere thought of the force of Sally's fixed, immovable belief—that she was certain of—that whatsoever her mother had done was right. Never mind the exact amount of revelation she would have to make to Sally. She might surely indulge the idea, just to get at peace somehow, till—as pray Heaven it might turn out—she should know that Gerry's mind was still unconscious of its past. The chances were, so she thought mechanically to herself, that all her alarms were groundless.
And at the first—strange as it is to tell—Sally's identity was only that of the daughter she had now, that filled her life, and gave her the heart to live. She was the Sally space was full of for her. What she was, and why she was, merged, as it usually did, in the broad fact of her existence. But there was always the chance that this what and why—two bewildering imps—should flaunt their unsolved conundrum through her mother's baffled mind. There they were, sure enough in the end, enjoying her inability to answer, dragging all she prayed daily to be better able to forget out into the light of the memory they had kindled. There they were, chuckling over her misery, and hiding—so Rosalind feared—a worse question than any, keeping it back for a
final stroke to bring her mental fever to its height—how could Sally be the daughter of a devil and her soul be free from the taint of his damnation?
If Rosalind had only been well read in the mediæval classics, and had known that story of Merlin's birth—the Nativity that was to rewrite the Galilean story in letters of Hell, and give mankind for ever to be the thrall of the fallen angel his father! And now the babe at its birth was snatched away to the waters of baptism, and poor Satan—alas!—obliged to cast about for some new plan of campaign; which, to say truth, he must have found, and practised with some success. But Rosalind had never read this story. Had she done so she might have felt, as we do, that the tears of an absolutely blameless mother might serve to cleanse the inherited sin from a babe unborn as surely as the sacramental fount itself.
And it may be that some such thought had woven itself into the story Fenwick's imagination framed for Rosalind the evening before—that time that she said of Sally, "She is not a devil!" The exact truth, the ever-present record that was in her mind as she said this, must remain unknown to us.
But to return to her as she is now, racked by a twofold mental fever, an apprehension of a return of Fenwick's memory, and a stimulated recrudescence of her own; with the pain of all the scars burnt in twenty years ago revived now by her talk with him of a few hours since. She could bear it no longer, there alone in the darkness of the night. She must get at Sally, if only to look at her. Why, that child never could be got to wake unless shaken when she was wanted. Ten to one she wouldn't this time. And it would make all the difference just to see her there, alive and leagues away in dreamland. If her sleep lasted through the crackle of a match to light her candle, heard through the open door between their rooms, the light of the candle itself wouldn't wake her. Rosalind remembered as she lit the candle and found her dressing-gown—for the night air struck cold—how once, when a ten-year-old, Sally had locked herself in, and no noise or knocking would rouse her; how she herself, alarmed for the child, had thereon summoned help, and the door was broken open, but only to be greeted by the sleeper, after explanation, with, "Why didn't you knock?"
She was right in her forecast, and perhaps it was as well the girl did not wake. She would only have had a needless fright, to see her mother, haggard with self-torment, by her bedside at that hour. So Rosalind got her full look at the rich coils of black hair that framed up the unconscious face, that for all its unconsciousness had on it the contentment of an amused dreamer, at the white ivory skin it set off so well, at the one visible ear that heard nothing, or if it did, translated it into dream, and the faint rhythmic movement that vouched for soundless breath. She looked as long as she dared, then moved away. But she had barely got her head back on her pillow when "Was that you, mother?" came from the next room. Her mother always said of Sally that nothing was certain but the imprévu, and ascribed to her a monstrous perversity. It was this that caused her to sleep profoundly through that most awakening of incidents, a person determined not to disturb you, and then to wake up short into that person's self-congratulations on success.
"Of course it was, darling. Who else could it have been?"