Blue Aloes Part 28

"Hush, my child--hush!" he gently urged. But she would not be hushed.

"I hate you," she said pa.s.sionately. "I curse the day I entered this shop, an innocent girl, and was beguiled by you and your son and my mad pa.s.sion for diamonds into becoming your tool and accomplice. Oh, how I hate you! I can never betray you because of my oath, but I curse you both, and I pray I may never see or hear of you again."

"That's all right, my child," he said soothingly. She threw him one glance of loathing and contempt and walked from the place.

Rosanne had taken to her bed again, and this time when they brought the doctor she was too ill to object, too ill to do anything but lie staring in a sort of mental and physical coma at the ceiling above her.

"Let her be," said the old-fashioned family doctor, who had known her from babyhood. "She has a splendid const.i.tution and will pull through.

But let her have no worries of any kind."

So they left her alone, except in the matter of ministering occasional nourishment, which she took with the mechanical obedience of a child.

For two days Rosanne lay there, silent and strange. The third day her sickness took an acute form. She tossed and moaned and called out in her pain, her face twisted with torture. Her mind appeared to remain clear.

"Mother, I believe I am dying," she said, after one such spell, during the afternoon. "I feel as if something is tearing itself loose from my very being. Does it hurt like this when the soul is trying to escape from the body?"

"I have sent for the doctor again, darling."

"It is nothing he can cure. It is _here_, and _here_ that I suffer."

She touched her head and her heart. "But, oh, my body, too, is tortured!"

She lay still a little while, moaning softly to herself while her mother stood by, sick with distress; then she said:

"Send for Denis Harlenden, mother. I must see him before I die."

Mrs. Ozanne asked no question. Her woman's instinct told her much that Rosanne had left unsaid. Within half an hour, Harlenden was being shown into the drawing-room, where she awaited him. He came in with no sign upon his face of the anxiety in his heart. This was the fourth day since he had seen Rosanne, and she had sent him no word.

"Sir Denis, my daughter is very ill. I don't know why she should be calling out for you----" She faltered. Marks of the last few days'

anxiety were writ large upon her, but she was not wanting in a certain patient dignity.

Harlenden strode over and took her hands in his as he would have taken the hands of his own mother.

"It is because we love each other," he said gently, "and because, as soon as she will let me, I am going to marry her."

A ray of thankfulness shone across her features.

"Marriage! I don't know, Sir Denis; but, if you love her I can tell you something that will help you to understand her better, and perhaps you can help her."

Briefly, and in broken words, she related to him the strange incident of Rosanne's babyhood, its seeming effect upon her character, and the Malay's extraordinary words of two days before. She did not disguise from him that she believed Rosanne guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously, of many dark things, but she pleaded for her child the certainty that she had been in the clutches of forces stronger than herself.

"About the diamonds," she finished, at last, "I know nothing, and I am afraid to think. Did you read of that awful case of suicide in yesterday's paper--that man, Syke Ravenal, who has been robbing De Beers? I am tormented with the thought that she may have known something of him--yet how could she?"

"You must put such a thought out of your mind for ever and never mention it to a soul," said Harlenden firmly. "That man committed suicide because his only son had been killed by accident in Amsterdam.

He left a vast fortune and a number of jewels which had been taken from their settings to De Beers, by way of conscience-money for several thousand pounds' worth of diamonds in the rough which he had stolen from them. There is absolutely no evidence to connect any other person with his crime, except a letter asking the company to deal lightly with a native boy called Hiangeli, who had been a tool of his."

"Then you think it could have nothing possibly to do with my poor child?"

"Certainly not," said Denis Harlenden, without flinching.

"Not that I think that she would have done it in her right senses, but, oh, Sir Denis, she has been under a spell all her life, an evil spell, which, please G.o.d, will be broken when that woman dies! You do not think me mad, I hope?"

"I do not," he answered gravely. "I am as sure of what you say as you yourself. What you do not know, Mrs. Ozanne, is that love has already broken that spell. Rosanne is already free from it."

She looked at him questioningly, longingly.

"I cannot tell you more," he said gently. "But, believe me, it is true. May I go to her now?"

The mother led the way. Rosanne, who had just pa.s.sed through another terrible crisis of anguish, lay on her bed, still and white as a lily.

A crimson-silk wrapper swathed about her shoulders, and the clouds of night-black hair, flung in a tangled ma.s.s above her pillows, threw into violent contrast the deadly pallor of her face. Her eyes, dark and wide with suffering, looked unseeingly at Harlenden at first, but gradually a ray of recognition dawned in them and she put out her hand with a faint cry.

"Denis!"

He took her hand and held it safe, while, with all the strength in him, he willed peace and calmness into her troubled mind.

"Denis, I think I am going to die."

"Dearest, I know you are going to live--for me."

"No, no; I am not worthy of life--or of you. I have been too wicked!"

"I want you to rest now," he said.

"I cannot rest till I have told you everything. I wanted to tell you the other night, you know, but I was too exhausted. Denis, I am a criminal--a thief! I have stolen diamonds under cover of the friendship of another woman. I have received them from another thief in the mines, and taken them to a man, whose son, a merchant in Amsterdam, sent me my share of the robbery in cut stones set as jewels.

The rough stolen stones meant nothing to me, but the finished ones dazzled and maddened me. I cannot describe to you what they did to my senses, but I was mad at the sight and touch of them. They had power to benumb every decent feeling in me. For them, I forgot duty. My poor mother, how she has suffered! I betrayed friendship; I debased love! Yes, Denis, I debased our love! I meant just to take the joy of it for a little while, then cast it away when it came to choosing between you and the stones."

"But you did not."

"No, thank G.o.d, I could not! It was stronger than my base pa.s.sion, stronger than myself. Oh, Denis, I thank you for your love! It has saved me from a h.e.l.l in life, and a h.e.l.l hereafter, for I think G.o.d will not further punish one so deeply repentant as I."

"You are not going to die, Rosanne," he repeated firmly.

"Do you think I would live and let you link your clean, upright life with my dark one?" she said sadly. "You do not even know all the darkness of it yet. Listen: I found I had a power through which I could hurt others by just wishing them ill--and I used it freely. Ah, I have hurt many people! It tortures me to think of how many. I have been lying here for two days and nights trying to undo all the harm I have done, Denis--willing against the evil I have wished for, praying for happiness to be given back to every one of them." Her voice grew faint and far-off. "I have even tried to undo the harm I wished would come to the two people who tempted me into stealing, Denis. But, somehow, I feel that it is too late for them. That _something_ in here"--she touched her heart--"which hurts me so much, tells me I cannot help those two wretched ones."

Her voice broke off; she was shaken like a reed with a terrible spasm of suffering. It was as though she were in the clutches of some brutal giant.

"Denis," she cried faintly, "I feel I am being rent asunder! Part of me is being torn away. Surely, even death cannot be so terrible!"

A clock on the table struck eight. Instantly she raised herself in bed, fell back again, gave a deep sigh, and lay still.

A few hours later, she woke with a gentle flush in her cheeks and a wonderful harmony in all her features. Her first glance fell upon her mother leaning over the foot of the bed, and she gave a happy smile.

"Oh, mother, I have had such a lovely dream! I dreamed d.i.c.k was well and coming back soon to Rosalie."

"And so he is, my darling. She has had a wire to say that Doctor Raymond has discovered that the throat trouble is not malignant but quite curable. He will be well in a few weeks."

"Then it _may_ come true, my dream," she said softly and shyly. "My dream that she and I were being married on the same day, she to d.i.c.k, and I to--oh, Denis, how strange that you should be here when I was dreaming of you! What brought you here? Have you come to tell mother that we love each other?"