Part 15 (1/2)

Rose looked at the sky, and Vesper looked at her, and thought of a grieving Madonna. She had been so gay and cheerful lately. What had happened to call that expression of divine tenderness and sympathy to her face? He had never seen her so ethereal and so spiritually beautiful, not even when she was bending over his sick-bed. What a rest and a pleasure to weary eyes she was, in her black artistic garments, and how pure was the oval of her face, how becoming the touch of brownness on the fair skin. The silk handkerchief knotted under her chin and pulled hood-wise over the shock of flaxen hair combed up from the forehead, which two or three little curls caressed daintily, gave the finis.h.i.+ng touch of quaintness and out-of-the-worldness to her appearance.

”You are feeling slightly blue this evening, are you not?” he asked.

”Blue,--that means one's thoughts are black?” said Rose, bringing her glance back to him.

”Yes.”

”Then I am a very little blue,” she said, frankly. ”This inn is like the world to me. When those about me are sad, I, too, am sad. Sometimes I grieve when strangers go,--for days in advance I have a weight at heart.

When they leave, I shut myself in my room. For others I do not care.”

”And are you melancholy this evening because you are thinking that my mother and I must soon leave?”

Her eyes filled with tears. ”No; I did not think of that, but I do now.”

”Then what was wrong with you?”

”Nothing, since you are again cheerful,” she said, in tones so doleful that Vesper burst into one of his rare laughs, and Rose, laughing with him, brushed the tears from her face.

”There was something running in my mind that made me feel gloomy,” he said, after a short silence. ”It has been haunting me all day.”

Her eager glance was a prayer to him to share the cause of his unhappiness with her, and he recited, in a low, penetrating voice, the lines:

”Mon Dieu, pour fuir la mort n'est-il aucun moyen?

Quoi? Dans un jour peut-etre immobile et glace....

Aujourd'hui avenir, le monde, la pensee Et puis, demain, ... plus rien.”

Rose had never heard anything like this, and she was troubled, and turned her blue eyes to the sky, where a trailing white cloud was soaring above the dark cloud-bank below. ”It is like a soul going up to our Lord,” she murmured, reverently.

Vesper would not shock her further with his heterodoxy. ”Forget what I said,” he went on, lightly, ”and let me beg you never to put anything on your head but that handkerchief. You Acadien women wear it with such an air.”

”But it is because we know how to tie it. Look,--this is how the Italian women in Boston carry those colored ones,” and, pulling the piece of silk from her head, she arranged it in severe lines about her face.

”A decided difference,” Vesper was saying, when Agapit came around the corner of the house, driving Toochune, who was attached to a s.h.i.+ning dog-cart.

”Are you going with us?” he called out.

”I have not yet been asked.”

”Thou naughty Rose,” exclaimed Agapit; but she had already hurried up-stairs to invite Mrs. Nimmo to accompany them. ”Madame, your mother, prefers to read,” she said, when she came back, ”therefore Narcisse will come.”

”Mount beside me,” said Agapit to Vesper; ”Rose and Narcisse will sit in the background.”

”No,” said Vesper, and he calmly a.s.sisted Rose to the front seat, then extended a hand to swing Narcisse up beside her. The child, however, clung to him, and Vesper was obliged to take him in the back seat, where he sat nodding his head and looking like a big perfumed flower in his drooping hat and picturesque pink trousers.

”You smile,” said Agapit, who had suddenly twisted his head around.

”I always do,” said Vesper, ”for the s.p.a.ce of five minutes after getting into this cart.”

”But why?”

”Well--an amusing contrast presents itself to my mind.”