Zoe Part 6

The organist hardly listened to what she was saying after the fact of the mother having come and fetched her away. Edith had come for her baby! How had she known? Why had she done it to-day? Could Jane have let her know? And had she come so quickly to take the child herself to her old home? His first impulse was to turn and hasten home; perhaps Edith and Zoe were there already, and would find him absent. But he could not go without a word to Mrs Gray, who was wiping her eyes in her ap.r.o.n and unconsciously rocking the empty cradle.

'You will often see her,' he said consolingly; 'she will not be very far away.'

'Oh, I don't know about that; them gypsies go all over the place, up and down the country, and they don't always come back for the fairs; though she says as they don't often miss Smithurst.'

'Gypsies?' he said puzzled.

'Ay, the mother 's a gypsy sure enough, and I've said it all along, and the child's the very image of her; there wasn't no doubt, when one saw the two together, as they was mother and child.'

'Are you sure she was a gypsy?' He had often said in fun that Edith was a regular little gypsy, but he would never have thought that any one could really mistake her for one; and besides, Mrs Gray must have known Edith well enough at any rate by sight in the old days; and changed as she was, it was not beyond all recognition.

'Oh, there wasn't no mistaking, and the van as she belonged to waited just outside the village, for I went down along with her and seed it, painted yeller with red wheels. I knowed Zoe was gypsy born, for she'd one of them charms round her neck as I didn't meddle with, for they do say as there's a deal of power in them things, and that gypsies can't be drownded or ketch fevers and things as long as they keeps 'em.'

Mr Robins sat down in the chair opposite Mrs Gray; an odd, cold sort of apprehension was stealing over him, and the pleasant dream of home and Edith and Zoe, in which he had been living through the day, was fading away with every word the woman said.

'The funny part of it were that she vowed and declared as she put the child at your door, and never came this way at all; leastways, from what she said it must abeen your house, for she said it was hard by the church and had a thick hedge, and that there was a kind sorter body as she see there in the morning, as must abeen Mrs Sands, and n.o.body else from her account. She said she was in a heap of trouble just then, her husband ill and a deal more, and she was pretty nigh at her wits' end, and that, without thinking twice what she were about, she wropt the baby up and laid it close agin the door of the house where she'd seen the kind-looking body. She would have it as it was there, say what I would; but, maybe, poor soul, she were mazed, and hardly knew where she were.

'She went to your house to-day, and Mrs Sands were quite put out with her, being busy too, and expecting company, and thought it were just her impidence; but there! I knows what trouble is, and how it just mazes a body, for I could no more tell where I went nor what I did yesterday than that table there. And another queer thing is as she didn't know nothing about the name, and neither she nor her husband can't read or write noways, so she couldn't have wrote it down, and she 'd never heard tell of such a name as Zoe, and didn't like it neither.

She'd always ameant it to be Rachel, as had been her mother's name before her, and her grandmother's too.'

'Are you quite certain she was the mother?'

'Certain? Why, you 'd only to see the two together to be sure of it.

I'd not have let her go, not were it ever so, if it hadn't been as clear as daylight; and just now too, when I seems to want her for a bit of comfort.' And here Mrs Gray relapsed into her ap.r.o.n.

Mr Robins sat for a minute looking at her in silence, and then got up, and without a word went out into the dark night, mechanically taking the way to his house, and then turning on to the high-road to Smithurst, tramping along through the mud and dead leaves with a dull, heavy persistence.

Anything was better than going back to the empty silence of his house and Jane Sands' expectant face, and the pretty, white-curtained room with the cot all ready for little Zoe, who was already miles away along that dark road before him, sleeping, perhaps, in some dirty gypsy van put up on some bit of waste land by the roadside, or, perhaps, surrounded by the noise and glare of the fair with its shows and roundabouts. His little Zoe! he could not possibly have been so utterly deceived all through; the baby who had lain on his bed, whose little face he had felt as he carried her up to the Grays' cottage in the dark, whom he had seen day after day, and never failed to notice the likeness, growing stronger with the child's growth. Was it all a delusion? all the foolish fancy of a fond, old man? He tried hard to believe that it was impossible that he could have been so deceived, and yet from the very first he felt that it was so, and that the love that had been growing in his heart all these months had been lavished on a gypsy baby whose face most likely he should never see again.

And all his plans for the future, his dreams of reparation, of tender reconciliation with Edith, and of happy, peaceful days that would obliterate the memory of past trouble and alienation, they had all vanished with the gypsy baby; life was as empty as the cradle by Mrs Gray's side.

Where was he to find his daughter? Where had she wandered that night when the pitiless rain fell and the sullen wind moaned? Was that the last he should ever see of her, with the white, wan, pleading face under the yew-tree? And would that despairing voice, saying 'Father!'

haunt his ears till his dying day? And would the wailing cry that followed him as he went to his house that night be the only thing he should ever know of his grandchild, the real little Zoe whom he had rejected?

He was several miles away along the Smithurst road when he first realised what he was doing, brought to the consciousness, perhaps, by the fact of being weary and footsore and wet through from a fine rain that had begun falling soon after he left the village. It must be getting late too; many of the cottages he pa.s.sed showed no light from the windows, the inmates most likely being in bed.

Painfully and wearily he toiled back to Downside; he seemed to have no spirit left to contend against even such trifling things as mud and inequalities in the road, and when a bramble straying from the hedge caught his coat and tore it, he could almost have cried in feeble vexation of spirit. Downside street was all dark and quiet, but from the organist's house a light shone out from the open door and down the garden path, making a patch of light on the wet road.

Some one stood peering out into the darkness, and, at the sound of his dragging, stumbling footsteps, Jane Sands ran down to the gate. The long waiting had made her anxious, for she was breathless and trembling with excitement.

'Where have you been?' she said; 'we got so frightened. Why are you so late? Oh, dearie me!' as she caught sight of his face. 'You 're ill!

Something has happened! There, come in, doee, now; you look fit to drop!'

He pushed by her almost roughly into the house, and dropped down wearily into the arm-chair. He was too worn out and exhausted to notice anything, even the warmth and comfort of the bright fire and the supper ready on the table. He tossed his soaked hat on the ground, and leaning his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, sat bowed down with the feeling of utter wretchedness.

Day after day, night after night, till his life's end, plenty and comfort and neatness and respectability and warmth in dull monotony; while outside somewhere in the cold and rain, in poverty and want and wretchedness, wandered Edith with the wailing baby in her arms.

'You can go to bed,' he said to Jane Sands; 'I don't want any supper.'

She drew back and went softly out of the room, but some one else was standing there, looking down at the bowed white head with eyes fuller even of pity and tears than Jane's had been; and then she, too, left the room, and with a raised finger to Jane, who was waiting in the pa.s.sage, she went up-stairs and, as if the way were well known to her, to the little room which had been got ready so uselessly for the organist's daughter.

There, sheltered by the bed-curtain, was the cot where Zoe was to have lain, and there, wonderful to relate, a child's dark head might be seen, deep in the soft pillow, deeper in soft sleep.

And then this strangely presuming intruder in the organist's house softly took up the sleeping child, and wrapping a shawl round it, carried it, still sleeping, downstairs, the dark lashes resting on the round cheek flushed with sleep and of a fairer tint than gypsy Zoe's, and the rosy mouth half-open.

The organist still sat with his head in his hands, and did not stir as she entered, not even when she came and knelt down on the hearth in front of him.

Jane Sands was unusually tiresome to-night, he thought; why could she not leave him alone?

And then against his cold hands clasped over his face was laid something soft and warm and tender, surely a little child's hand! and a voice (a voice he had never thought to hear again till maybe it sounded as his accuser before the throne of grace) said: 'Father, for Zoe's sake.'

THE END.

Edinburgh; Printed by W & R. Chambers, Limited.

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LITTLE MARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . L. T. Meade.

SQUIRE'S LITTLE GIRL . . . . . . . . . . . . L. T. Meade.

THE GREEN CASKET . . . . . . . . . . . . Mrs Molesworth.

BEWITCHED LAMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mrs Molesworth.

THEIR HAPPIEST XMAS . . . . . . . . . . . . Edna Lyall.

La.s.sIE . . . . . . . . . . . . By the Author of _Laddie_.

BABY JOHN . . . . . . . . . . By the Author of _Laddie_.

ZOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . By the Author of _Laddie_.

WILFRID CLIFFORD . . . . . . . . . . . . Edith C. Kenyon.

ERNEST'S GOLDEN THREAD . . . . . . . . . Edith C. Kenyon.

THE LITTLE KNIGHT . . . . . . . . . . . Edith C. Kenyon.

A FAIRY GRANDMOTHER . . . . . . . . . . L. E. Tiddeman.

HUMBLE HEROINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . L. E. Tiddeman.

STEADFAST GABRIEL . . . . . . . . . . . Mary Howitt.

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