Rose A Charlitte Part 15

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 finishing 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 shining 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."

"And the contrast, what is it?"

"I am driving with a modern Evangeline, who is not the owner of the rough cart that I would have fancied her in, a few weeks ago, but of a trap that would be an ornament to Commonwealth Avenue."

"Am I the modern Evangeline?" said Agapit, in his breakneck fashion.

"To my mind she was embodied in the person of your cousin," and Vesper bowed in a sidewise fashion towards his landlady.

Rose crimsoned with pleasure. "But do you think I am like Evangeline,--she was so dark, so beautiful?"

"You are pa.s.sable, Rose, pa.s.sable," interjected Agapit, "but you lack the pa.s.sion, the fort.i.tude of the heroine of Mr. Nimmo's immortal countryman, whom all Acadiens venerate. Alas! only the poets and story-tellers have been true to Acadie. It is the historians who lie."

"Why do you think your cousin is lacking in pa.s.sion and fort.i.tude?"

asked Vesper, who had either lost his gloomy thoughts, or had completely subdued them, and had become unusually vivacious.

"She has never loved,--she cannot. Rose, did you love your husband as I did _la belle Marguerite_?"

"My husband was older,--he was as a father," stammered Rose. "Certainly I did not tear my hair, I did not beat my foot on the ground when he died, as you did when _la belle_ married the miller."

"Have you ever loved any man?" pursued Agapit, unmercifully.

"Oh, shut up, Agapit," muttered Vesper; "don't bully a woman."

Agapit turned to stare at him,--not angrily, but rather as if he had discovered something new and peculiar in the shape of young manhood.

"Hear what she always says when young men, and often old men, drive up and say, 'Rose a Charlitte, will you marry me?' She says, 'Love,--it is all nonsense. You make all that.' Is it not so, Rose?"

"Yes," she replied, almost inaudibly; "I have said it."

"You make all that," repeated Agapit, triumphantly. "They can rave and cry,--they can say, 'My heart is breaking;' and she responds, 'Love,--there is no such thing. You make all that.' And yet you call her an Evangeline, a martyr of love who laid her life on its holy altar."

Rose was goaded into a response, and turned a flushed and puzzled face to her cousin. "Agapit, I will explain that lately I do not care to say 'You make all that.' I comprehend--possibly because the blacksmith talks so much to me of his wish towards my sister--that one does not make love. It is something that grows slowly, in the breast, like a flower.

Therefore, do not say that I am of ice or stone."

"But you do not care to marry,--you just come from telling me so."

"Yes; I am not for marriage," she said, modestly, "yet do not say that I understand not. It is a beautiful thing to love."

"It is," said Agapit, "yet do not think of it, since thou dost not care for a husband. Let thy thoughts run on thy cooking. Thou wert born for that. I think that thou must have arrived in this world with a little stew-pan in thy hand, a tasting fork hanging at thy girdle. Do not wish to be an Evangeline or to read books. Figure to yourself, Mr.

Nimmo,"--and he turned his head to the back seat,--"that last night she came to my room, she begged me for an English book,--she who says often to Narcisse, 'I will shake thee, my little one, if thou usest English words.' She says now that she wishes to learn,--she finds herself forgetful of many things that she learned in the convent. I said, 'Go to bed, thou silly fool. Thy eyes are burning and have black rings around them the color of thy stove,' and she whimpered like a baby."

"Your cousin is an egotist, Mrs. Rose," said Vesper, over his shoulder.

"I will lend you some books."

"Agapit is as a brother," she replied, simply.

"I have been a good brother to thee," he said, "and I will never forget thee; not even when I go out into the world. Some day I will send for thee to live with me and my wife."