"Why did you do it?" she demanded. "Is nothing sacred to you; am I to be shamed and degraded by such a creature as you? You have sheltered here--you have eaten our bread, and slept secure under our roof; yet you rob me of what was mine--steal the very soul of me!"

"But you addressed them to him," pleaded Ditchburn.

"Yes--for my own comfort--to cheat myself," she cried pa.s.sionately. "And now--now he has read them"--she beat her hands together, and suddenly and surprisingly burst into tears. "I cannot see him again--cannot meet him; and I that hoped some day to climb as high as his heart!"

Anthony Ditchburn had begun again a halting explanation; but she checked him fiercely. She flung open the door, and pointed outside imperiously.

"Go!" she cried, "for I am in that mood when I might do you harm.

Go--and never let me see you again!"

"I'm a poor old man--and it's raining," he whimpered; but she thrust him out of the house and shut the door upon him.

The money he had carried him, half crazily, back to London and to Jimmy.

To Jimmy he told his woes; told of this strange madness that had come upon the woman he desired to help. And to his surprise and disgust Jimmy seemed to have caught this new fever too; for he also turned him roughly from the place, cursing him for a fool.

And here we may take our leave of Anthony Ditchburn; may see him, in imagination, going on for years yet, borrowing innumerable coins, and prating of his woes and of the treatment he had received from the world.

And dying at last obscurely, and still railing, to any who may hear him, of the ingrat.i.tude of friends.

Meanwhile Jimmy made all speed to find Moira. All speed for him, that is; for, hesitating as ever, he must needs sit down to think about her, and to dream of how beautifully he was to bring her back into his life.

So that when, in sudden and desperate haste, he started from London for the cottage where he had seen her under such different circ.u.mstances not so long before, a fear began to creep into his heart that Anthony Ditchburn might have spoiled the business after all. Which proved to be true.

He found Patience at the cottage; she shook her head even as he hurried through the garden towards her. Moira was gone, the old woman said; had left within an hour of Ditchburn's visit. She had implored Patience to look after the child; when the old woman had clung to her, and begged to know when she would return, she had said with tears: "Never!" But the old woman was wiser than Jimmy; she smiled and shook her head, and whispered what only a woman could whisper with perfect understanding of another:

"She will come back to the child," she said.

Jimmy looked at her sharply; seemed to understand a little what she meant. He caught the hand of Patience and wrung it; laughed like a boy at what he read in her eyes.

"Then--if I took the child----"

"Oh--Mr. Jimmy," said Patience with a sob, "she'll come back to the child!"

CHAPTER VI

THE SPIRIT OF OLD PAUL

THE thought that was growing in Jimmy's mind, and which had started from what Patience had said, bore fruit upon the morrow. Jimmy slept that night at the cottage--having in his mind perhaps the hope that Moira might come back. Yet morning dawned and she had not been seen.

With the dawn he roused himself from his uneasy slumbers on a couch, and went to find Patience, to seek the news of the night. He found her with the baby; the baby a dark-eyed mite, scarcely dressed, and giving the old woman a bad time in matters of hair pulling and general infantile wickedness; yet Patience seemed to like it. Jimmy stood just within the door, looking at the child shyly and awkwardly; Patience whispered what she had to say over the child's head, much as though that small mortal might have understood.

"No news, Mr. Jimmy; no word of her."

"You seemed so sure that she would come back," said Jimmy.

"Dear man--shouldn't I know her by this time!" exclaimed Patience very impatiently. "What has she to live for but this baby? If only you would understand--if only you would see that she has left the way clear for you! Come in; the child won't eat you."

Jimmy came in, and introduced himself to the baby; she seemed to approve of him; in the lonely heart of the man there was a curious stirring as the soft fingers of the child closed on his. "She's a pretty baby," he said with a smile.

"Not another like her in the world--and lots that'll tell her so as she grows up. Girl babies growing up every day--and boy babies to match 'em, and none of 'em knowing what's in store for 'em. It's just a big puzzle they'll have to unravel for themselves in the years to come." Thus Patience, wagging the head of experience over the baby.

"I've made up my mind what to do; I've been thinking about it all night," said Jimmy presently. "She'll come back to the child, you said; and I believe you're right. I want her, Patience; I seem to have grown up years and years in the last day or two. I dare not lose her now; I need her, as I never needed anyone in all my life."

"I wonder if that's true," said the old woman, bending over the child.

"Men are so sure of things one minute--and not at all sure the next. For the love of G.o.d, Mr. Jimmy, be very sure before you meet her; she deserves something better than any man has given her yet."

"I'm sure now, Patience," whispered Jimmy humbly. "I'm going to take the child--_my_ child, she called it--and I'm going to trust to her to follow. You must help me, Patience; I'll leave a message for her that shall bring her--not to me, because I don't deserve it--but to the baby.

I didn't understand before; I've been a blind fool--groping in the dark."

"You seem to understand yourself pretty well, Mr. Jimmy," replied the old woman; and Jimmy laughed.

Behold, then, Jimmy in a hurry; see him writing a note (not literary this time, but something from the old Jimmy to the old Moira) and leaving it for her. See also Patience, keenly alive to what was in his mind and eager to help him, and hear the baby crowing through it all!

This is the note he left:

"I have taken the child; she is the prettiest baby I have ever seen, and you were right to say so. She belongs to me, and I shall keep her. She is a child, as we once were; she is going to teach me what is best and brightest in the world that once was good to us. I am taking her back to the beginning of things--I want to show her how her mother was once a child who loved the sun and the fields and the woods.

"JIMMY."

In the strangest fashion this new Jimmy and the conspiring Patience took the child and went away; the note was left in a familiar place, where, as the old woman a.s.sured him, Moira must be certain to discover it. They travelled up to London, and later in the day started for Daisley Cross; Patience marvelling, but trusting all things to this man who seemed at last to have grasped the situation. Indeed when she looked at him in surprise at his suggestion that they should go down there, he had answered, as it seemed with perfect understanding: "I can speak to her there as I cannot speak in any other place."

The old place, when he walked through it on the first night of their arrival, seemed very familiar and yet very strange; it had not grown up with him. More than that, people he met turned to stare after him as after a stranger. He walked through the places he remembered so well, with something of the thought in his mind of what he had lost--something of a perception of what he had forgotten and thrown away. Almost it seemed that he saw her swinging down the road before him, a slim girl in short skirts, and with eyes that looked back at him with a friendly smile. Eyes, he remembered now, always for him!

He had taken rooms for Patience and himself at the little old-fashioned inn in the town; the landlord, whom he had seen standing at his door many, many times on former sunny days, but who did not in the least recognise him, seemed to wonder a little at the coming of this young man and the old woman and the child; murmured about it, with lifted eyebrows, to his spouse. For Jimmy, going in and out of the place, and asking always if anyone had inquired for him, was a mystery in himself.

He went back to the old house they had known in their childhood; stood looking over a low part of the wall he remembered into the grounds, seeing alien lights in the windows of the rooms that once had been his and Moira's. From there he dived down into the woods, to find the happy places they had known as children; only to find them grown over and changed. Yet he stood in one spot under the light of the moon and the stars, and called her name softly, as though it might be possible that she could come out of the shadows of the past, and look into his eyes again, and touch his hand, as she had done when a child. Those eyes, he remembered again with a pang, that had been always for him!

He wandered about miserably the next day; told Patience at intervals that she had been wrong, and that Moira would not come back. More than that, in his restlessness he rushed back to London, and from London down to the cottage. Going to the place where the note had been secreted he found it gone, and went back to Daisley Cross with renewed hope.

There Patience met him with great news. Patience, with the hope of renewing some memories of her past life in the place, had entrusted the child to a plump and sympathetic daughter of the landlady, and had gone out to Daisley Place. The rest she told in whispers.

"I saw her, Mr. Jimmy--saw her like a ghost this late afternoon, creeping round the old place. G.o.d knows what was in my mind that kept me still; but I couldn't call to her then; she didn't seem to belong to me any longer. I watched her flit away again, taking the road that leads away from the town, and I lost her in the darkness. But she's here, Mr.

Jimmy--she's come back again!"

His fear was lest he might frighten her--lest he might send her flying from him again, shamed and hurt and indignant. Patience had said that the child would draw her surely, and Patience should know. He would have given much to know if the child had drawn her, or if she had come in the hope to see him; but in this later time Jimmy was learning patience--learning, with a new humility, to understand the woman he had never understood before.

He tramped for miles that evening, in the hope of finding her; came back at last to the sleepy little inn, and went up to the sitting-room. A fire had been lighted, for the autumn evening was chill; Patience, seated beside it, looked up at him quickly, and then turned away her eyes. Jimmy seated himself beside the fire, and took the child into his arms; already they were quite friendly, and she nestled to him now naturally enough. So he sat for a long time, with his arm about her, looking into the fire, and thinking of the woman who was her mother, wandering forlorn and frightened outside. So, as the shadows fell and the fire died down, and old Patience, worn out with the excitements and fatigue of the day, slumbered heavily in her chair, Jimmy, as in a dream, talked half to himself and half to the child in his arms.

"Little Moira--in the days when you were a child I loved you--was jealous for you--fought for you. You didn't understand that--did you? We had not learnt our lesson then; the world was so busy with us that we had not had time to learn the better lesson of love. I wonder if we understand it now?"

Someone was listening. From the shadows of the house another shadow had emerged, and had crept up the stairs; it stood now at the door, listening. For Moira had travelled far that day, and now had come to the point when, as it seemed, she could not go back, and yet dared not remain where she was. She had seen the familiar figure of Patience in the streets of Daisley Cross for a minute that afternoon, and so had discovered where the three were to be found. More than once she had ventured to the very doors of the inn, only to turn away again; for in a strange fashion she was afraid of this man who knew her secret.

The pa.s.sionate starved heart of her demanded him fully, or not at all.

Once in pity he had given her his name; once in charity he had offered to take her and her child, and to give them the protection that was their right; but she would not have that. Her tragedy was that she was bound to the man whom she loved with all her heart and soul; but she must know that what he might say to her, in this better time, was not a matter of mere words, but a thing of the heart, before ever she stretched out glad hands to meet his. She must be certain of that--absolutely certain.

Again--the child. She yearned for that; pa.s.sionately wanted her baby.

Almost she hated the man for a moment, in a laughing, whimsical way, because he had tried to reach her like this; yet was glad to think now, as she peered in through the doorway, that the child was so naturally in the arms of the man. So she listened with her starved heart beating for them both.