Rose Hill

“ There was a sneer accompanying this question, which Dora felt keenly. Her little swelling heart was already full, and, with quivering lips and gushing tears, she answered, somewhat bitterly—
"I never expect to be anybody, or go any where;" then, as her services were no longer needed, she ran away to her humble room, where from her window she watched the many brilliant lights which shone from Rose Hill, and caught occasional glimpses of the airy forms which flitted before the open doors and windows. ”

“ From what has been said, it may be seen how impossible it was to detach a body of convicts to any distance, if there had been any necessity for it. The land at Rose-Hill is very good, and in every respect well calculated for arable and pasture ground, though it be loaded with timber, the removal of which requires great labour and time; but this is the case with the whole country, as far as had been seen, particular spots excepted. As the good land could not at present be cultivated by the colonists, it was reserved for the first settlers that should come out. ”

“ Clumps of wild roses sprang up at every turn, and over all the stone walls, as well as on every heap of rocks by the wayside, prickly blackberry vines ran and clambered and clung, yielding fruit and thorns impartially to the neighborhood children.
The pinkish speck that Stephen Waterman [Pg 8] had spied from his side of the river was Rose Wiley of the Brier Neighborhood on the Edgewood side. As there was another of her name on Brigadier Hill, the Edgewood minister called one of them the climbing Rose and the other the brier Rose, or sometimes Rose of the river. ”

“ The girl's lip curled. Then she laughed in a way that made Miss Hill think of her as older. But she kept silent.
"Rose, you're expelled until further notice." Miss Hill's voice trembled with disappointment and anger. "You may go now."
Rose gathered up her books and went into the cloakroom. The door in the outer hall opened and closed.
"Miss Hill, it wasn't fair!" exclaimed Bessy Bell, hotly. "It wasn't fair. Rose is no worse than the other girls. She's not as bad, for she isn't sly and deceitful. There were a dozen girls who lied when they went out. Helen lied. Ruth lied. Gail lied. ”

“ Several low-browed, roughly dressed men sat in a group on the grass playing cards. They were smoking, and one was tipping a black bottle to his lips just as the girls from Milton came near.
“Let’s hurry right by, Pearl!” begged Ruth.
Pearl, however, was not as observant as the Corner House girl. She failed to see danger in the situation, or in the looks the disturbed men cast upon the unprotected party of girls. As several of the fellows rose, Pearl called to them:
“Where’s your Pythoness? Where is the Queen of the Gypsies? We want our fortunes told.” ”

“ The wind rose higher, and was soon howling among the rigging with a fierceness entirely new to me. Wave after wave swept over, and the deck was continually washed with the agitated waters. Evening came and I had no appetite for supper.
Night came, darkness frowned on the furious sea, the wind increased in violence, and fairly screamed among the ropes, shrouds, masts, and yards; we were indeed in a gale.
The ship tumbled about so, that I got sick; but determined not to give way to it. I stood by the cabin door, leaned over the high sill, and contributed my dinner to the waters of the ocean. ”

“ I don't see you very often; but I know that you are here in Boston, and I guess that I have got the habit of leaning on you in my thoughts. You know I called you a tree, years and years ago."
"Yes, I remember, an 'oak,' wasn't it? I thought that you meant that I was tough," he laughed. "The idea of you leaning on any one is funny, Rose." Then he added, with some hesitancy, "I've been thinking ... Would you like to go over there, too, Rose? I could take you ... that is, I am quite sure that I could arrange for you to do so, not as a Red Cross nurse, of course, for they have to be graduates ”

“ She was a teacher in a school near by.
"What anybody should come to this town for I can't understand. I stay here because I'm obliged to. I'm just back from the country to my work."
"The country is all right for a vacation," quoted Rose.
Mary broke in, "That's what I say. I lived on a farm and I lived in Castle Rock. When I lived on the farm I wanted to get to Castle Rock. When I got to Castle Rock I wanted to get to Madison. Madison made me hone for Chicago, and when I had a chance to come, I just dropped my work at the University and put for the city, and here I am and glad of it." ”

“ The general impression one gets is that the Hope stood farthest to the west, then the Rose, and then the Globe; and that the Rose stood nearest to the river, then the Hope, and then the Globe. Nor is this inconsistent with documentary evidence, which in particular indicates that the parcel of land, on which the latest of the Bear Gardens was built, was contiguous on the west to that known as ‘the little Rose’. [1073] Bear Garden and Rose Alley, running side by side from the Bankside into Maid Lane or Park Street, are traceable in eighteenth-century maps and in the modern Ordnance map. ”

“ Rose was never one to ask for things “both ways.”
Eustace meanwhile was still in the Argentine, and it was three years before he returned to England. His work at Buenos Aires had led to various profitable ventures into which he had been glad to throw himself as he shrank more and more from the idea of resuming life in London. The house in Wilton Place being let furnished at a high rent, and Rose being safe with me, why should he return? The hymnist may ask, with an outraged wonderment in his voice, “Can a mother’s tender care cease towards the child she bare?” ”

“ But the Milton boys would not arrive until the next week.
On Monday afternoon the Corner House girls walked down to the railroad station to greet Rosa Wildwood. It had been a very hot day in town and it was really hot at Pleasant Cove, as well.
“Oh! you poor thing!” gasped Ruth, receiving Rosa in her strong arms as she stumbled off the car steps with her bag.
“I’m as thin as the last run of shad, am I not?” asked Rosa, laughing. “That train was awful! I am baked. It’s never like this down South. The air is so much dryer there; there isn’t this humidity. Oh!” ”

“ Here she found plenty to do, and did it with such sweet goodwill that she won her way like sunshine, making many a little heart dance over splendid dolls, gay picture books, and pots of flowers, as well as food, fire, and clothes for the small bodies pinched with want and pain.
As spring came new plans sprang up as naturally as dandelions. The poor children longed for the country; and, as the green fields could not come to them, Rose carried them to the green fields. Down on the Point stood an old farmhouse, often used by the Campbell tribe for summer holidays. ”

“ As to Rose, he is a fine fellow, certainly he is, and complains that he has no one, all through London, in whom he can confide. O that you were well enough to assist him in London! You are not fit to move of yourself, but you would act through Rose as spirit acts on external matter through a body. ”

“ Roseburg, originally Deer Creek, the present county-seat of Douglas, and named after its founder, Aaron Rose, has a population of two thousand five hundred. It is the gem of the Umpqua Yalley, resting upon the river Umpqua, where it is a fine large stream bounded by beautiful park-like oak openings. Nothing could be finer than the sweep of the river as i from the south, the railroad on one side, and teeming gardens and attractive houses on the other. A handsome bridge spans it in the centre of the town. Roseburg, like Drain, is to have a railroad to the sea. ”

“ It's all right for you to go up for a couple of months and lie about in a hammock, but you take a place like Castle Rock all the year round! It's worse than the farm. Gossip! They talk every rag of news to smithereens, don't they, Rose?"
Rose nodded.
"And then the people! They're the cullin's. All the bright boys and girls go to Madison and Chicago or Dakota, and then the rest marry and intermarry, and have idiot boys and freckle-faced girls!"
They all laughed. Mary was always extreme, no matter what her subject. ”

“ It was a double breaking up of tradition; for Hannah, after taking her to Paddington and putting her into the hands of Mrs. Stratton, who would convoy her to Victoria, where there were reserved compartments for the school, was to go on to her home at Lowestoft, alas! for ever. She had been growing more infirm and could no longer manage the stairs, and when Rose came back for the holidays there was to be a new maid for her, instead of our old friend. It was part of the new programme that Rose was to be generally more self-reliant.
More self-reliant! ”

“ These things tried her beyond reason with the sense of loneliness, of incapacity, of uncertainty. Then she had thought that, with very quiet black clothes, she could go anywhere, but her mother had discovered that she sometimes came back from the Girls' Club in Bermondsey as late as ten o'clock at night, and there had been a fuss. Rose had forgotten the fact that she was very fair and very good to look at; she found, half-consciously, that her beauty had its drawbacks. There did not seem to be any reason why she should spare her strength in any way. ”

“ She was the country girl in the city, and would be so until death. If she felt disposed, she chewed gum or ate an apple on the street like a boy, and she walked on the Lake Shore Sunday evening with Owen, unconscious (and uncaring) of the servant-girls and their lovers seated on every bench.
So Rose had grown away from her friend. She felt it dimly the first week. She felt it vividly on the morning after the concert, and it troubled her. Her life was too subtle, too complicated and too problematic for honest, freckle-faced, broad-cheeked Mary to analyze. ”

“ Except for the vacuum where the core and heart of it all ought to have been, Rose's life in New York during the year that put her on the high road to success as a designer of costumes for the theater, was a good life, broadening, stimulating, seasoning. It rested, to begin with, on a foundation of adequate material comfort which the unwonted physical privations of the six months that preceded it—the room on Clark Street, the nightmare tour on the road, and even the little back room in Miss Gibbons' apartment over the drug-store in Centropolis—made seem like positive luxury. ”

“ Rose smiled at him as if to thank him for being again a trifle sharp with her. "He wants me, as he said, to be kind to you."
"You mean he wants you to do that sort of thing?" His sharpness brought him step by step across the lawn and nearer to her. "Do you care so very much what he wants?"
Again she hesitated; then, with her pleased, patient smile, she tapped the empty place on the bench. "Come and sit down beside me, and I'll tell you how much I care." ”

“ At any rate, I couldn’t tell you for the life of me whether it is a man or a woman that comes to see the little old woman who lives in a shoe. Isn’t it odd, Ruth?”
“I should say it was,” admitted Ruth.
“But she treats me well,” sighed Rosa. “I wouldn’t do her any harm for the world. But I am awfully curious!”
It was this day, too—the day of Dot’s party—that the wooden-legged clam-digger came along through the Willowbend tent colony again. He always came to the tent of the Corner House girls when he appeared; Ruth was a regular customer, for she and her sisters were fond of shellfish. ”

“ She compresses her lips. “You bet I’m gonna be nice, big boy. Come on, Rosie,” and she opens the door of the car and steps out to the road. Rose hesitates, looking inquiringly at Bill. She reaches tentatively for the door-catch.
Ruthie stamps her foot. “Come ON, Rosie. You ain’t got any sense at all.” ”

“ The soft opening and closing of the hothouse door as he went out reached her like a sigh, a last sigh, a dying sigh, after which—nothing! Rosie expected nothing—but she waited. She waited as watchers wait round a death-bed for the possibility of one more breath; but none came. She stirred then and rose. She rose mechanically, brushing the earth from her clothing, and began again the interrupted task of picking the superfluous female flowers and letting them flutter downward. ”

“ Why should I live all my days in one spot? It is true that I was devoted to it; but ought one to be so local, so parochial? It was a not too admirable line of least resistance. Here was the great world open to me, and I had cowered all my days in one corner. Mrs. O’Gorman had twitted me about it; and she was a wise woman. How helpful she would be to-day! I had a few years left, I hoped—why should I not move to London or—or anywhere? Then Rose and I could be happy together, once more, and the other Rose could have a room always ready for her. How gay we might all yet be! ”

“ But Rose Dillon was not weeping in her room, nor did she hear her grandmother's voice when the carriage, that bore the bride to a new world, drove off. Rose ran down the garden, intending to keep the equipage in sight as long as it could be distinguished from an eminence that was called the Moat, and which commanded an extensive view of the high road. There was a good deal of brushwood creeping up the elevation, and at one side it was overshadowed by several tall trees; in itself it was a sweet, sequestered spot, a silent watching place. ”

“ Rose's profile stands out in relief against the dark velvet of the box. Her soft, fair hair parts into two waves that are like two streams of honey following the curve of her cheek. Her long neck is very white in the black gown that frames it; and her gloved hands rest near the fan that lies opened on her knees like a swan's wing. She is sitting straight up, with her eyes fixed in front of her. Her attitude is as dignified and cold as a circlet of brilliants on a beautiful forehead. ”