“Hush! hush!” cried Coombe. “Of all men he would most ardently implore you to hold yourself still—”
Donal made some strange effort. He lay still.
“Yes, he would! Yes—of all the souls in the other world he’d be strongest. He saved me—he saved Robin—he saved the child—you—all of us! Perhaps he’s here now! He said he’d come if he could. He believed he could.”
He lay quiet for a few seconds and then the Donal smile they had all adored lighted up his face.
“Jackson, old chap!” he said. “I can’t see you—but I’ll do what you want me to do—I’ll do it.”
He fainted the next minute and the doctors came to him.
The facts which came later still were that Jackson had developed consumption, and exposure and brutality had done their worst. And Donal had seen his heart wringing end.
“But he knew America would come in. I believed it too, because he did. Just at the right time. ‘All the rest have fought like mad till they’re tired—though they’ll die fighting,’ he said. ‘America’s not tired. She’s got everything and she sees red with frenzy at the bestiality. She’ll burst in—just at the right time!’ Jackson knew!”
“I must not go trembling to her,” Donal said on the morning when at last—long last, it seemed—he drove with Coombe up the moor road to Darreuch. “But,” bravely, “ what does it matter? I’m trembling because I’m going to her!”
He had been talking about her for weeks—for days he had been able to talk of nothing else—Coombe had listened as if he heard echoes from a past when he would have so talked and dared not utter a word. He had talked as a boy lover talks—as a young bridegroom might let himself pour his joy forth to his most sacredly trusted friend.
Her loveliness, the velvet of her lifting eyes—the wonder of her trusting soul—the wonder of her unearthly selfless sweetness!
“It was always the same kind of marvel every time you saw her,” he said boyishly. “You couldn’t believe there could be such sweetness on earth—until you saw her again. Even her eyes and her little mouth and her softness were like that. You had to tell yourself about them over and over again to make them real when she wasn’t there!”
He was still thin, but the ghastly hollows had filled and his smile scarcely left his face—and he had waited as long as he could.
“And to see her with a little child in her arms!” he had murmured. “Robin! Holding it—and being careful! And showing it to me!”
After he first caught sight of the small old towers of Darreuch he could not drag his eyes from them.
“She’s there! She’s there! They’re both there together!” he said over and over. Just before they left the carriage he wakened as it were and spoke to Coombe.
“She won’t be frightened,” he said. “I told her—last night.”
Coombe had asked himself if he must go to her. But, marvellously even to him, there was no need.
When they stood in the dark little hall—as she had come down the stone stairway on the morning when she bade him her sacred little good-bye, so she came down again—like a white blossom drifting down from its branch—like a white feather from a dove’s wing—But she held her baby in her arms and to Donal her cheeks and lips and eyes were as he had first seen them in the Gardens.
He trembled as he watched her and even found himself spellbound—waiting.
“Donal! Donal!”
And they were in his arms—the soft warm things—and he sat down upon the lowest step and held them—rocking—and trembling still more—but with the gates of peace open and earth and war shut out.
Copyright
First published in 1922 by Stokes
This edition published 2014 by Bello
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Copyright © Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1922
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Frances Hodgson Burnett, Robin
(Series: Robin # 2)
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