Jimmy Quixote Part 37

"You don't seem to understand, little Moira, what you've done for me--or what I am--through you. Years ago you wove fairy tales for me--peopled the great world for me with beings other than those my dull eyes could see. Had I but known it, all that was best in me came from you; only I did not understand. I love you, Moira----Can you hear me, dear woman, out in the darkness"--(he could not know how near to him she stood!)--"and will you love me a little, in pity for me?"

She drew away from the door, and covered her face with her hands; then bent again a moment later, to listen to the murmuring voice within.

"I want to make up to you for all the wrong I've done you, dear," he went on. "For it was I who did the deepest wrong of all, in that I drove you away from me; I can never atone for that. I asked you if there was no man in all the world you loved--shameful beast that I was!--and still did not understand, when you said there was. Don't let me lose you now; there is no life for me without you!"

She turned away and stole down the stairs. She could not trust herself yet to meet him; she wanted to be alone. For now that this thing had happened for which she had prayed and longed and hoped, she was fearful of it; more than that, she wanted to hold it from her for a time the better to grasp it afterwards. She sobbed and laughed like a mad thing as she went; whispered to herself, over and over again, all that he had said; saw, over and over again, that picture in the firelight of the man with the child in his arms.

She came, as it were unconsciously, to the place towards which her heart had yearned so often in the stony London streets--the grave of Old Paul.

To this everything had beautifully brought her; here, most of all to-night, she desired to be; because, most of all others, Old Paul would have understood. Old Paul had wondered what love would do to her in the world; and lo! love that had threatened to fling her, bruised and broken, to the mercy of the world, had but shown her, after all, that he jested a little roughly, and that all was well. Love had been kind--and Old Paul need not have feared. Before anything else she must tell Old Paul that.

Jimmy, coming presently almost as by an instinct to that spot, found her kneeling; and stood aloof for a time, watching her, and wondering what she would say. But when she raised her eyes at last, and got to her feet, she came towards him, smiling, with the glory of the autumn moon as it seemed about her; and she came like a maid that meets her lover shyly. And for a time they held hands, and looked into each other's eyes, as though they could never look away again.

"Jimmy!" she whispered at last, with a lingering note of tenderness on the name, "I was afraid before--but I heard all you said to the child.

You--you like the baby?"

In that most surprising love story, when she asked that most surprising question she was in his arms, and he held her close, and looked deep into her eyes. "She's mine--_my_ baby; you said so," he whispered, and kissed her.

So in the end it was only a man and a woman walking hand in hand through the darkness along a country lane; only an old woman peering out of a window on a scene which had been familiar years and years before, the while the tears dropped softly and yet happily on her withered hands.

Yet they were all satisfied.

Love had shown them the way, after all; love went before them now, through the darkness--and into the brighter promise of a new day.

THE END