Crimson Roses (13 page)

The hall was filling up now, and she found great pleasure in using her opera glasses, watching all the people who came in, noting their beautiful gowns and wraps, or trying to think out the stories of them all in their relation one to the other. But all the time there was the breath of the rose and the pleasant consciousness that it was beside her. She never doubted that its owner would return and perhaps through some mistake try to claim her seat as well as the rose. But until he or she came she would enjoy the luxury of the presence of the flower.

She was absorbed in watching the musicians come to their seats with their instruments, when suddenly the owner of the next chair appeared beside her. She stood haughtily in the aisle, a large woman with a wide sweep of a cloak trimmed with imitation fur. Marion, suddenly aware of her presence, dropped her opera glasses into her lap and shrank into insignificance; but the large lady still waited.

“Please remove your flowers from my chair,” she demanded icily; and Marion, feeling that the rose was a friend she must guard till it came to its own, quickly lifted the lovely flower and laid it on her own lap, while the ponderous person settled herself to her own satisfaction and ignored her.

No one came to claim the rose, and Marion felt that the concert had been a double pleasure because of having it. But she waited after others had gone out and looked about in a troubled way. What should she do with it? Surely the owner must have discovered its loss by this time. She went shyly, hesitantly, toward one of the guards in the hall and told him someone had left the flower on her chair. He looked at the stately flower and at the plain young woman who held it and smiled indulgently.

“I guess it’s yours, lady,” he said. “Nobody would come back after them kind of things. Whoever dropped it has plenty more where that came from.”

“Oh, do you think so?” sighed Marion, and she sped away with her treasure out into the darkness.

Up in the little top-floor room, the rose glorified everything. She put it in a slim glass vase that had belonged to her father’s mother; it was one that Jennie had always called old-fashioned. The dusky velvet warmth of the rose seemed to be at home. The girl hovered around it, taking little whiffs of its intoxicating sweetness; she had laid her cheek softly against its wonderful petals and was happy. She went to sleep making up stories of how it got into her chair, but never by any chance did she happen on the right explanation.

The next day she wore the rose to the store. It must stay with her while it lasted. She could not let it waste its sweetness all alone. That day everyone came to smell her rose and ask her where she got it, and when she said, “I found it,” they thought she was joking and rallied her upon her friend, the giver, wondering why she was not willing to confess and speculating on who it could be.

There are some people whose physical make-up is so constructed that a flower cannot live long near them, but seems to be burned up, smothered, choked, just by lying on their chests. But that rose seemed to love to lie near Marion and to gain extended life from contact with hers. She kept the rose in her washbowl under a wet newspaper that night, and the next day it was almost as fresh as ever. Again she wore it, making all the girls marvel and declare it was another flower. The third day she still wore its crimson softness, no longer stiff and fresh, yet beautiful in its fading limpness. The fourth day she gathered its dropped petals wistfully and laid them in a drawer with her handkerchiefs. She would keep their fragrance after their beauty had departed.

The rose was still a pleasant memory on the night of the next symphony concert, and as she came down the velvet stairs to her seat, she was smiling at the thought of it and wondering again how it came there.

Then suddenly she paused beside her seat and drew a quick breath, passing her hand over her eyes. Did she see correctly? It was there again! The great, dark, burning rose. Every curl of the petals seemed the same. Was she dreaming, or was this a hallucination?

As before, there was no one near who seemed to have any connection whatsoever with the flower, and finally she managed to gather it up softly and sit down in a little limp heap with the flower lying against her chest where her lips could just touch it and its breath steal up into her face. If anyone were watching, he must have thought it a lovely picture. It was as if the first flower had been human and beloved and had come back to its own from the dust of the grave. This time the girl took the flower to herself, and without trying to fathom its secret, delighted in the thought that it was hers. It seemed to her now that it had a personality of its own and that it had come to her there of its own will.

When the music began, she rested her head against the high back of the seat and closed her eyes. It seemed the voice of the rose speaking to her inmost soul, telling of wonders she had never known, great secrets of the earth: the grave of the seed and the resurrection of the leaf and flower; the code of the wind’s message; the words of a brook; the meaning of the birds’ twitter; the beating of the heart of the woods; the whisper of the moss as it creeps; and the sound of flying clouds on a summer’s day. All this and more the rose told her through the music, until her heart was stirred deeply and her face spoke eloquently of how her whole being throbbed in tune to the sound.

The girls in the store exclaimed with laughter and jokes over the second rose; but it seemed too sacred to talk about, and Marion said little, letting them think what they pleased. For herself she tried not to think how the rose came to be in her chair. Since she had looked into the handkerchief box and found the dead rose petals still lying sweet and withered—and two days later when she laid the second rose in its lovely death beside the first—she resolutely refused to think how it came to be hers. She did not want to think that perhaps they had been meant for another and someone was missing what had made her so happy.

The night of the fourth concert her heart beat excitedly. She had told herself a hundred times that of course there would be no rose this time, that whatever happening had given her the two roses could not of course in reason continue; yet she knew that she was expecting another rose, and her limbs trembled so that she could hardly climb the stairs to the gallery.

It was later than she had ever come before. She had felt that she must give some other one a chance to claim the flower if it were really there. There were people sitting all around the middle aisle. The large lady with a fur wrap lying across her lap was there, bulging over into Marion’s seat. Marion tried not to look at her own chair until she was close beside it; and she walked down the steps slowly, taking long, deep breaths to calm her tripping heart. But every breath she imagined heavy with rose perfume, and before she had quite reached her place she saw the chair was down, and a great green stem stuck out into the aisle three inches!

There it lay in all its dusky majesty. Her rose! As like the other two as roses could be. It nestled to her heart as if it knew where it belonged, and no one seemed to think it strange that she had taken it as her own.

Marion wore tonight her last winter’s black felt hat with a new black grosgrain ribbon put on in tailored fashion by her own skillful fingers. She was learning rapidly how to look like other people—nice people, without spending much money for it. The severe little hat was most attractive on her.

More than one music lover turned to look again at the fresh, sweet face of the girl with the great dark rose against her cheek. Her lips moved softly on the petals as if caressing them, and her eyes glowed dark and beautiful.

That night there grew in her the consciousness that there was intention in this flower, and behind it someone. Who?

The thought made her tremble with fear and delight. Who in all the wide world could care enough for her to put a flower in her chair every night? She was half frightened over it. It seemed not quite proper, yet what was wrong about it? And how could she possibly help it? Throw the flower on the floor? Crush it? Leave it where she found it? Impossible. The flower appealed to every longing of her nature, and she could not more resist the gift of the rose than the rose itself could resist the rays of the sun and turn away from shadow.

Surely the most scrupulous could not find anything wrong in her accepting this anonymous gift of a single wonderful blossom, so long as no further attempt at acquaintance was made. It might be some girl like herself, who liked to do a kind act; or some dear old lady who had seen the loneliness in her face; or some— well, it didn’t matter who. There never seemed to be anyone seated around her who was not nice and refined and respectable looking and utterly beyond any such thing as flirting with a shabby little person like herself. She would just take the flower as a part of her concert and be happy over it, letting it sing to her again, during the days that it lasted, the melodies that lifted her soul beyond earthly disappointments and trials.

She looked around again as she went slowly out with the others, this time holding her rose boldly close to her face and taking deep breaths of its sweetness. She wanted to make sure to herself that there was no one around her from whom she would not like to have taken the rose.

As she looked up, her eyes met those of a young man just ahead of her in the throng. He was good looking enough to be noticeable even in such a crowd. There was something about him that gave instant impression of refinement and culture. Though his eyes met hers, it was but for an instant, with a pleasant, unintimate glance, as one regards the casual stranger who for the time has been a partner in some pleasure.

Yet somehow in that glance she sensed the fact that he was of another world, a world where roses and music and friendships belonged by right, and where education and culture were a natural part of one’s birthright like air and food and sunshine. It was a world where she could only steal in by sufferance for an hour, and that at the price of her little savings and much self-denial. Yet it was a world that she could have enjoyed to the utmost. She sighed softly and touched her rose gently once more with her lips as if to assure herself that so much of that world was really hers, at least for tonight.

That night she slept with the rose on a chair beside her, and she dreamed that a voice she had never heard before whispered softly to wonderful music, “Dear, I love you.” She could not see who spoke, because the air was gloomed with dark rose leaves falling and shutting out the light; only amid that soft, velvety fall she could hear the echo, “Dear, I love you.” It was very foolish, the whole thing, she told herself the next morning with glowing cheeks. She positively must stop thinking about who put the flowers in her chair and just enjoy them while they lasted. Very likely there wouldn’t be any more, anyway. She must expect that, of course. If anyone was doing it for fun, it would not last much longer.

She went humming down the stairs toward her work that day, with the rose on her chest and a happy light in her eyes in spite of all her philosophy. Somehow those roses made her little top floor seem more like home and drove the loneliness from her heart.

The roses did not stop; they kept coming, one every symphony night. The good-looking stranger was usually in his place, but their eyes never met. She glanced back once or twice shyly, just to see who was near her, and always he seemed in his cultured aloofness to be a type of the world of refinement. But he never looked her way. He did not even know she was there, of course. His was another world.

She felt quite safe to glance at him occasionally, as one glances at an ideal. It could do him no harm, and it was good to know there were such men in the world. It made one feel safer and happier about living, just as it was good to know there was a great symphony orchestra to which she might listen occasionally.

One night it rained, but not until after the concert had begun. The sky had been clear at eight o’clock, with the stars shining and no hint of a coming storm. When the concert was out, and the stream of people had reached the great marble entrance where the cream of society lingered in delicate attire awaiting their automobiles, the rain was pouring down in sheets and the heavens were rent with vivid flashes of lightning and crashing thunder.