And then, as the spring came round, she heard vague, disquieting rumours of the little house being shut up. Her aunt was going to live with a married brother, whose wife had little in common with her, and she herself, Rosalie, was to be sent to a Home for the Deaf and Dumb and Blind, a large charitable institution, greatly enlarged and improved upon by the munificence of a dead millionaire, one Geoffrey Todbrook by name. Insufferable thought! To separate her from the only human being she had learnt to love, shutting them each within a dungeon of strangers! “O God! O Serpent!” What of the prayer of months, to give one atom in the multitude the powers of speech? Prayer of presumption! Its punishment the taking away of everything that makes some lives worth living, the precious gift of freedom.
And yet Rosalie set her lips hard, there was no drooping, and went once more, with faith supremely high, but heart all wrong and tortured, to kneel and pray to God within the temple.
The afternoon was cold and gloomy, and by the time Rosalie reached the temple the little light that ever came there had quite died away. There were no Americans in Lucifram, no English tourists either, consequently the sacred building from morn to eve was silent as the grave except for matins and for evensong. But evensong was held at seven, and now it was but four.
Rosalie’s heart was in that terrible state of aching which approaches physical pain. Speechless, she knew herself quite helpless.
For lack of speech she must be separated from one who had suddenly grown more helpless than herself, one whom she could not bear to part with, one who had grown accustomed to her great defect, and had never labelled on the door those words: “Home for the Blind—the Deaf—the Dumb—Incurables.”
“Once I get inside there I am dumb for ever,” she cried to herself, as she stumbled up the darkening aisle. “Oh, I cannot go—I cannot! I want to live like other people. To be free—free—free!”
And so she knelt down beside the altar railings, and buried her face in her hands against its golden bars.
“Oh, Serpent, let me speak! Give me a tongue like other people have. I cannot go to that asylum—I cannot really. I cannot live without my aunt. We are all in all to each other. What good am I if I remain a speechless log? I might as well be dead.”