Rose O'Paradise.

by Grace Miller White.

CHAPTER I

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

On a hill, reared back from a northern lake, stood a weather-beaten farmhouse, creaking in a heavy winter blizzard. It was an old-fashioned, many-pillared structure. The earmarks of hard winters and the fierce suns of summer were upon it. From the main road it was scarcely discernible, settled, as it was, behind a row of pine trees, which in the night wind beat and tossed mournfully.

In the front room, which faced the porch, sat a man,--a tall, thin man, with straight, long jaws, and heavy overhanging brows. With moody eyes he was staring into the grate fire, a fearful expression upon his face.

He straightened his shoulders, got up, and paced the floor back and forth, stopping now and then to listen expectantly. Then again he seated himself to wait. Several times, pa.s.sionately insistent, he shook his head, and it was as if the refusal were being made to an invisible presence. Suddenly he lifted his face as the sound of a weird, wild wail was borne to him, mingling with the elf-like moaning of the wind. He leaned forward slightly, listening intently. From somewhere above him pleading notes from a violin were making the night even more mournful. A change came over the thin face.

"My G.o.d!" he exclaimed aloud. "Who's playing like that?"

He crossed the room and jerked the bell-rope roughly. In a few moments the head of a middle-aged colored woman appeared at the door.

"Did you tell my daughter I wanted to see her?" questioned the man.

"No, sah, I didn't. When you got here she wasn't in. Then she slid to the garret afore I saw 'er. Now she's got to finish her fiddlin' afore I tell 'er you're here. I never bother Miss Jinnie when she's fiddlin', sah." The old woman bowed obsequiously, as if pleading pardon.

The man made a threatening gesture.

"Go immediately and send her to me," said he.

For perhaps twenty minutes he sat there, his ears straining to catch, through the whistling wind, the sounds of that wild, unearthly tune,--a tune different from any he had ever heard. Then at length it stopped, and he sank back into his chair.

He turned expectantly toward the door. Footsteps, bounding with life, with strength, were bearing down upon him. Suddenly a girl's face,--a rosy, lovely face,--with rapturous eyes, was turned up to his. At the sight of her stern father, the girl stopped, bringing her feet together at the heels, and bowed. Then they two,--Thomas Singleton the second and Virginia, his daughter,--looked at each other squarely.

"Ah, come in!" said the man. "I want to talk with you. I believe you're called Virginia."

"Yes, sir; Jinnie, for short, sir," answered the girl, with a slight inclination of her head.

Awkwardly, and with almost an embarra.s.sed manner, she walked in front of the grate to the chair pointed out to her. The man glanced sharply at the strongly-knit young figure, vibrant with that vital thing called "life." He sighed and dropped back limply. There followed a lengthy silence, until at last Thomas Singleton shifted his feet and spoke slowly, with a grim setting of his teeth.

"I have much to say to you. Sit back farther in your chair and don't stare at me so."

His tones were fretful, like those of a man sick of living, yet trying to live. He dropped his chin into the palm of his hand and lapsed into a meditative gloom.

Virginia leaned back, but only in this did she obey, for her eyes were still centered on the man in silent attention. She had little awe of him within her buoyant young soul, but much curiosity lay under the level, penetrating glance she bent upon her father. Here was a man who, according to all the human laws of which Virginia had ever heard, belonged to her, and to her alone. There were no other children and no mother. Yet so little did she know of him that she wouldn't have recognized him had she met him in the road. Singleton's uneasy glance, seeking the yellow, licking flames in the grate, crossed hers.

"I told you not to stare at me so, child!" he repeated.

This time the violet eyes wavered just for an instant, then fastened their gaze once more upon the speaker.

"I don't remember how you look," she stammered, "and I'd like to know.

I can't tell if I don't look, can I?"

Her grave words, and possibly the steady, piercing gaze, brought a twitch to the father's lips. Surely his child had spoken the truth. He himself had almost forgotten he had a girl; that she was the only living creature who had a call upon the slender thread of his life.

Had he lived differently, the girl in front of him would have been watching him for some other reason than curiosity.

"That's why I'm looking at you, sir," she explained. "If any one on the hills'd say, 'How's your father looking, Jinnie?' if I hadn't looked at you sharp, sir, how'd I know?"

She sighed as her eyes roved the length of the man once more. The ashes in the grate were no grayer than his face.

"You're awful thin and white," she observed.

"I'm sick," replied Singleton in excuse.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" answered Virginia.

"You're quite grown up now," remarked the man presently, with a meditative air.

"Oh, yes, sir!" she agreed. "I'm a woman now. I'm fifteen years old."

"I see! Well, well, you _are_ quite grown up! I heard you playing just now. Where did you ever learn such music?"

Jinnie placed her hand on her heart. "I got it out of here, sir," she replied simply.

Involuntarily Singleton straightened his rounded shoulders, and a smile touched the corners of his mouth. Even his own desperate condition for the moment was erased from his mind in the pride he felt in his daughter. Then over him swept a great regret. He had missed more than he had gained in his travels abroad, in not living with and for the little creature before him.

Her eyes were filled with contemplation; then the lovely face, in its exquisite purity, saddened for a moment.

"Matty isn't going to take me across her knee never any more," she vouchsafed, a smile breaking like a ray of sunshine.

The blouse slipped away from her slender throat, and she made a picture, vivid and beautiful. The fatherhood within Thomas Singleton bounded in appreciation as he contemplated his daughter for a short s.p.a.ce, measuring accurately the worth within her. He caught the wonderful appeal in the violet eyes, and wished to live. G.o.d, how he wanted to live! He would! He would! It meant gathering his supremest strength, to be put forth in efforts of mere existing. Something out of an unknown somewhere, brought to him through the stormy, wonderful music he had heard, made the longing to live so vehement that it hurt.

Then the horror of Virginia's words drifted through his tortured brain.

"What?" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

"Now I'm fifteen," explained the girl, "I get a woman's beating with a strap, you see. A while ago I got one that near killed me, but I never cried a tear. Matty was almost scared to death; she thought I was dead. Matty can lick hard, Matty can."

Virginia sighed in recollection.

"You don't mean to say the n.i.g.g.e.r whipped you?"

The girl shook her curly head.

"Whipped me! No! Matty don't whip; she just licks with all her muscle.... Matty's muscle's as strong as a tree limb."

Mr. Singleton bowed his head. It had never occurred to him in all those absent years that the child was being abused. How simply she had told her tale of suffering!

"But I'm fifteen now," she repeated gladly, "so I stand up, spread my feet like this"--she rose and suited the action to the words--"and Matty lays her on d.a.m.n hard, too."

He covered his mouth with one thin hand, choked down a cough, and endeavored to change the subject.

"And school? Have you been to school?"