Part 30 (1/2)

Dowie's face was almost frightened as she drew back to look. There was in her motherly soul the sudden sense of panic she had felt in the nursery so long ago.

”My blessed child!” she breathed. ”Not that one--after all that time!”

”Yes,” said Robin. ”Look, Dowie--look.”

She had taken a locket out of the silk bag and she opened it and Dowie looked.

Perhaps any woman would have felt what she felt when she saw the face which seemed to laugh rejoicing into hers, as if Life were such a supernal thing--as if it were literally the blessed gift of G.o.d as all the ages have preached to us even while they have railed at the burden of living and called it cruel nothingness. The radiance in the eyes'

clearness, the splendid strength and joy in being, could have built themselves into nothing less than such beauty as this.

Dowie looked at it in dead silence, her breast heaving fast.

”Oh! blessed G.o.d!” she broke out with a gasp. ”Did they kill--that!”

”Yes,” said Robin, her voice scarcely more than a breath, ”Donal.”

CHAPTER XXV

Dowie put her to bed as she had done when she was a child, feeling as if the days in the nursery had come back again. She saw gradually die out of the white face the unnatural restraint which she had grieved over. It had suggested the look of a girl who was not only desolate but afraid and she wondered how long she had worn it and what she had been most afraid of.

In the depths of her comfortable being there lay hidden a maternal pleasure in the nature of her responsibility. She had cared for young mothers before, and that she should be called to watch over Robin, whose child forlornness she had rescued, filled her heart with a glowing. As she moved about the room quietly preparing for the comfort of the night she knew that the soft dark of the lost eyes followed her and that it was not quite so lost as it had looked in the church and on their singularly silent journey.

When her work was done and she turned to the bed again Robin's arms were held out to her.

”I want to kiss you, Dowie--I want to kiss you,” she said with just the yearning dwelling on the one word, which had so moved the good soul long ago with its innocent suggestion of tender reverence for some sacred rite.

Dowie hurriedly knelt by the bedside.

”Never you be frightened, my lamb--because you're so young and don't know things,” she whispered, holding her as if she were a baby. ”Never you let yourself be frightened for a moment. Your own Dowie's here and always will be--and Dowie knows all about it.”

”Until you took me on your knee to-night,” very low and in broken phrases, ”I was so lonely. I was as lonely as I used to be in the old nursery before you and Mademoiselle came. Afterwards--” with a shudder, ”there were so many long, long nights. There--always--will be so many.

One after every day. I lie in my bed in the dark. And there is _Nothing_! Oh! Dowie, _let_ me tell you!” her voice was a sweet longing wail. ”When Donal came back all the world was full and s.h.i.+ning and warm!

It was full. There was no loneliness anywhere. We wanted nothing but each other. And when he was gone there was only emptiness! And I was not alive and I could not think. I can scarcely think now.”

”You'll begin to think soon, my lamb,” Dowie whispered. ”You've got something to think of. After a while the emptiness won't be so big and black.”

She ventured it very carefully. Her wise soul knew that the Emptiness must come first--the awful world-old Emptiness which for an endless-seeming time nothing can fill-- And all smug preachers of the claims of life and duty must be chary of approaching those who stand desolate gazing into it.

”I could only _remember_,” the broken heart-wringing voice went on. ”And it seemed as if the remembering was killing me over and over again-- It is like that now. But in the Wood Lord Coombe said something strange--which seemed to make me begin to think a little. Only it was like beginning to try to write with a broken arm. I can't go on--I can only think of Donal-- And be lonely--lonely--lonely.”

The very words--the mere sound of them in her own ears made her voice trail away into bitter helpless crying--which would not stop. It was the awful weeping of utter woe and weakness whose convulsive sobs go on and on until they almost cease to seem human sounds. Dowie's practical knowledge told her what she had to face. This was what she had guessed at when she had known that there had been crying in the night. Mere soothing of the tenderest would not check it.

”I had been lonely--always-- And then the loneliness was gone. And then--! If it had never gone--!”

”I know, my dear, I know,” said Dowie watching her with practised, anxious eye. And she went away for a few moments and came back with an un.o.btrusive calming draught and coaxed her into taking it and sat down and prayed as she held the little hands which unknowingly beat upon the pillow. Something of her steadiness and love flowed from her through her own warm restraining palms and something in her tender steady voice spoke for and helped her--though it seemed long and long before the cruelty of the storm had lessened and the shadow of a body under the bed-clothes lay deadly still and the heavy eyelids closed as if they would never lift again.