"I have never been back since--since I was left alone. Sometimes I have thought my little house ought to have someone to look after it. A house gets lonely, too, with no one to care for it."
"I suppose so. Is Rose coming back?"
"I have often thought of the little Summer cottages, huddled together like frightened children, when the life and laughter had gone and Winter was swiftly approaching. How cold their walls must be and how empty the heart of a little house, when there is no fire there! So like a woman, when love has gone out of her life."
Allison sighed and began to sharpen his pencil. Madame observed that his hands were trembling.
"I see," he said. "I don"t deserve to know where she is, and Rose doesn"t want me chasing after her. Never mind--I had it coming to me, I guess. What a hopeless idiot I"ve been!"
"Yes," agreed Madame, cordially. "Carlyle says that "there is no other entirely fatal person.""
Something in her tone gave him courage for another question. "Once for all, Aunt Francesca, will you tell me where Rose is?"
"George Washington was a great man," Madame observed. "He never told a lie. If he had promised not to tell anything, he never told it." Then she added, with swift irrelevance, "this used to be a very pleasant time of the year at Holly Springs."
A great light broke in upon Allison. "Aunt Francesca!" he cried. He put his arms around her, lifted her from her chair, and nearly smothered her in a bear-like embrace. "G.o.d bless you!"
"He has," murmured Madame, disengaging herself. "My foster son has been a dunce, but his reason is now restored."
The two o"clock train to Holly Springs did not leave town until three, so Allison waited for an hour in the station, fuming with impatience.
Both Colonel Kent and the Doctor had offered to accompany him, individually or together, but he had brusquely put them aside.
"Don"t worry," he said. "My name and address are in my pocket and also inside my hat. I"ll check my grip and be tenderly considerate of my left hand. Good-bye."
When he had gone Colonel Kent anxiously turned to the doctor. "Where do you suppose--and why--"
"Cherchez la femme," returned the Doctor.
"What makes you think so? It"s not--"
"It"s about the only errand a man can go on, and not be willing to take another chap along. And I"ll bet anything I"ve got, except my girl and my buzz-cart, that it isn"t the fair, false one we met at the hour of her elopement."
"Must be Rose, then," said the Colonel, half to himself, "but I thought n.o.body knew where she was."
"Love will find a way," hummed Doctor Jack. "I suppose you don"t care to go for a ride this afternoon?"
"Not I," laughed the Colonel. "Why don"t you take Juliet?"
"All right, since you ask me to. I wonder," he continued to himself, as he went toward Madame Bernard"s at the highest rate of speed, "just how a fellow would go to work to find a woman who had left no address? Sixth sense, I suppose, or perhaps seventh or eighth."
Yet Allison was doing very well, with only the five senses of the normal human being to aid him in his search. He left the train at the sleepy little place known as "Holly Springs," and walked up the main road as though he knew the way.
"Half a mile," he said to himself, "and a little brown house in the woods with a brook singing in front of it. Ought to get to it pretty soon."
The prattling brook was half asleep in its narrow channel, but the gentle murmur was audible to one who stopped in the road to listen. It did not cross the road, but turned away, frightened, from the dusty highway of a modest civilisation, and went back into the woods, where it met another brook and travelled to the river in company.
The house, just back of the singing stream, was a little place, as Madame Bernard had said, but, though he rapped repeatedly, no one answered. So he lifted the latch and cautiously stepped in.
A grand piano, unblushingly new, and evidently of recent importation from the city, occupied most of the tiny living-room. The embers of a wood fire lay on the hearth and the room was faintly scented with the sweet smoke of hard pine. A well-known and well-worn sonata was on the music rack; a volume of Chopin had fallen to the floor. Allison picked it up, and put it in its place. On the piano was some of his own music, stamped with his Berlin address.
A familiar hat, trimmed with crushed roses, lay on the window seat. The faint, indefinable scent of attar of roses was dimly to be discerned as a sort of background for the fragrant smoke. An open book lay face downward on the table; a bit of dainty needlework was thrown carelessly across the chair. An envelope addressed to "Madame Francesca Bernard"
was on the old-fashioned writing desk, and a single page of rose-stamped paper lay near it, bearing, in a familiar hand: "My Dearest."
The two words filled Allison with panic. Not knowing how Rose was wont to address the little old lady they both loved, he conjured up the forbidding spectre of The Other Man, that had haunted him for weeks past.
Sighing, he sat down at the piano, and began to drum idly, with one hand. "Wonder if I could use the other," he thought. "Pretty stiff, I guess."
He began to play, from memory:
[Ill.u.s.tration: musical notation]
and outside a woman paused, almost at the threshold, with her hands upon her heart. In a sudden throb of pain, the old days came back. She saw herself at the piano, aching with love and longing, while just beyond, in an old moonlit garden, Allison made love to Isabel.
[Ill.u.s.tration: musical notation]
Was it a ghost, or was it--? No, she was only foolish. Aunt Francesca had promised not to tell, and she never broke her word. Besides, why should he seek her?
[Ill.u.s.tration: musical notation]
"It"s only someone who has stopped in pa.s.sing," Rose thought, "to ask the way to the next town, or to get a gla.s.s of water, or--I won"t be foolish! I"ll go in!"
So she crossed the threshold, into the house where Love lived.
At the sound of her step, the man turned quickly, the music ending in a broken chord.
"You!" she gasped. "Oh, how could you come!"
"By train," answered Allison, gently, "and then by walking. I"ve frightened you, Rose."
"No," she stammered sinking into a chair. "I"m--I"m surprised, of course. I"m glad you"re well enough to be about again. Did--is anything wrong with Aunt Francesca?" she asked, anxiously.
"Indeed there isn"t. She was blooming like a lilac bush in May, when I saw her last night."
"Did-did--she tell you?"
"She did not," he returned, concisely.
"Then how--how--?"
"I just came. What made you think you could get away from me?"
"I wasn"t--getting away," she returned with difficulty. "I was just tired--and I came here to--to rest--and to work," she concluded, lamely.
"You didn"t need me."
"Not need you," he cried, stretching his trembling hands toward her.
"Oh, Rose, I need you always!"
Slowly the colour ebbed from her face, leaving her white to the lips.
"Don"t," she said, pitifully.