Such a beautiful, quiet September night, with great, soft stars overhead, and the scent of fallen leaves in the air; the path beneath his feet was soft with them, and as he passed under the elms which by daylight were a blaze of sunny gold, some leaves dropped gently on his head.
'To-morrow,' he said, 'I will bring little Zoe home, and I will let her mother—I will let Edith know that the child is with me, and that if she likes'– It needed but a word, he felt sure, to bring the mother to the baby, the daughter to her father.
He stood for a moment by the church-yard gate, close to the spot where that bitter, cruel parting had been, and fancied what the meeting would be. After all, what was his feeling for little Zoe, and his imagination of what his little grandchild would be to him in the future, to the delight of having Edith's arms round his neck and holding her to his heart once more?
'Edith,' he whispered softly, as he turned away; 'Edith, come home!'
'I wonder,' he said to Jane Sands that night; 'I wonder if you could find out an address for me?'
She was folding up the tablecloth, and she stopped with a puzzled look.
'An address? Whose?'
'Well,' he said, without looking at her, 'I fancy there are still some of the Blakes, (the word came out with a certain effort) 'living at Bilton, and perhaps you could find out from them the address I want; or, perhaps,' he added quickly, for she understood now, and eager words were on her lips, 'perhaps you know. There! never mind now; if you know, you can tell me to-morrow.'
CHAPTER VIII
Preparation—The Room Furnished—Mrs Gray at Work—The Baby Gone—The Gypsy Mother—The Gypsy's Story—A Foolish Fancy—Something Has Happened—The Real Baby
Worning very often brings other counsels, but this was not the case with Mr Robins, for when he got up next day he was more than ever resolved to carry out his intention of bringing little Zoe home, and letting her mother know that a welcome awaited her in her old home.
He had not slept very much during the night, for his mind had been too full of the change that was coming in his life, and of the difference that the presence of Edith and little Zoe would make in the dull, old house. Sad and worn and altered, was she! Ah! that would soon pass away with kindness and care and happiness, and the cough that had sounded so hollow and ominous should be nursed away, and Edith should be a girl again, a girl as she ought to be yet by right of her years; and those five years of suffering and estrangement should be altogether forgotten as if they had never been.
He went into the bedroom next his, that had been Edith's—that was to be Edith's again—and, looking round it, noticed with satisfaction that Jane had kept it just as it had been in the old days; and he pushed the bed a little to one side to make room for a cot to stand beside it, a cot which he remembered in the night as having stood for years in the lumber-room up in the roof, and which he now with much difficulty dragged out from behind some heavy boxes, and fitted together, wishing there had been time to give it a coat of paint, and yet glad, with a tremulous sort of gladness, that there was not, seeing that it would be wanted that very night.
And just then Jane Sands came up to call him to breakfast, and stood looking from the cot to her master's dusty coat, with such a look of delighted comprehension on her face, that the organist felt that no words were needed to prepare her for what was going to happen.
'I thought,' he said, 'it had better be brought down.'
'Where shall it go?' she asked.
'In Miss–in the room next mine,' he said, 'and it will want a good airing.'
'Shall I make up the bed too?' she asked.
'Yes, you may as well.'
'Oh, master,' she said, the tears shaking in her voice and shining in her eyes; 'will they be wanted soon? Will they, maybe, be wanted to-night?'
His own voice felt suspiciously shaky; his own eyes could not see the old cot, nor Jane's beaming face quite plainly, so he only gave a gruff assent and turned away.
'What a good, kind creature she is!' he thought. 'What a welcome she will give Edith and Edith's little Zoe!'
During the morning he heard her up in the room sweeping and scrubbing, as if for these five years it had been left a prey to dust and dirt; and when he went out after dinner to give a lesson at Bilton, she was still at it with an energy worthy of a woman, half her age.
That stupid little girl at Bilton, who generally found her music-lesson such an intolerable weariness to the flesh, and was conscious that it was no less so to her teacher, found the half-hour to-day quite pleasant. Mr Robins had never been so kind and cheerful, quite amusing, laughing at her mistakes, and allowing her to play just the things she knew best, and to get up in the middle of the lesson to go to the window and see a long procession of gypsy vans going by to Smithurst fair.
It was such a very beautiful day; perhaps it was this that produced such a good effect on the organist's temper. There had been a frost that morning, but it was not enough to strip the trees, but only to turn the elms a richer gold, and the beeches a warmer red, and the oaks a ruddier brown; while in the hedges the purple dogwood, and hawthorn, and bramble leaves made a wonderful variety of rich tints in the full bright sunshine, which set the birds twittering with a momentary delusion that it might be spring.
He did not come back over the hill, and past the Grays' cottage, for he was going to fetch the child that evening; but he came home by the road, meeting many more of those gypsy vans which had distracted his pupil's attention, and looking with kindliness on the swarthy men and bronze dark-eyed women, for the sake of little Zoe, who had been so often called the gypsy baby.
When he reached home he found the room prepared with all the care Jane Sands could lavish. He had thought when he went in that morning that it was just as Edith had left it, and all in the most perfect order; but now the room was a bower of daintiness and cleanliness, and all Edith's old treasures had been set out in the very order she used to arrange them—why! even her brush and comb were laid ready on the dressing-table, and a pair of slippers by the bedside, and a small bunch of autumn anemones and Czar violets was placed in a little glass beside her books. He smiled, but with tears in his eyes, as he saw all these loving preparations.
'Edith can hardly be here to-night,' he said to himself, 'but Zoe will.' And he smoothed the pillow of the cot close to the bedside, and drew the curtain more closely over its head.
He found his tea set ready for him when he came down, but Jane Sands had gone out, and he was rather glad of it, as she had watched him that morning with an eager expectant eye, and he did not know what to say to her. It would be easier when he brought the baby and actually put it into her arms.
The sun had set when he had finished tea, a blaze of splendour settling down into dull purple and dead orange, leaving a stripe of pale-green sky over the horizon, flecked with a few soft brown clouds tinged with red.
But envious night hastened to cover up and deaden the colours of the sky, and the almost equally gorgeous tints of tree and hedge; and, by the time Mr Robins reached the Grays' cottage, darkness had settled down as deep as on that evening four months ago, when he carried the baby and left it there.
Now, as then, the cottage door was open, and Mrs Gray sat at work with the candle close to her elbow, every now and then giving a long sniff or a sigh, that made the tallow candle flicker and tremble. He had almost forgotten her husband's accident in his absorption in the baby; but these sniffs recalled it to his mind, and he thought he would give them a helping hand while Gray was in the hospital.
'She has been kind to my little Zoe,' he thought, 'and I will not forget it in a hurry. She shall come and see the child whenever she likes; and Edith will be good to her, for she has been like a mother to the baby all these months.'
Close by where Mrs Gray sat he could see the foot of the old cradle and the rocker within reach of the woman's foot; but Zoe must be asleep, for there was no rocking necessary, and Mrs Gray did not turn from her work to look at the child, though she stopped from time to time to wipe her eyes on her apron.
'She is taken up with her husband,' he said to himself; 'it is as well that I am going to take the child away, as she will have no thought to give her now.'
And then he went into the cottage, with a tap on the open door to announce his presence.
'Good evening, Mrs Gray,' he said in a subdued voice, so as not to wake the baby. But he might have spared himself this precaution, for the next glance showed him that the cradle was empty.
'Bless you, Mr Robins,' the woman said, 'you give me quite a start, coming in so quiet like. But, there! I 'm all of a tremble, the leastest thing do terrify me. You might knock me down with a feather. First one thing and then another! The master yesterday and the baby to-day!'
'What!' he said, so sharp and sudden, that it stopped the flow of words for a moment. 'What do you mean! Is the baby in bed up-stairs? What's the matter? It's not the scarlatina? Not'–
'Bless you!' she said, 'why I thought you'd a-knowed. It ain't the scarlatina; the baby was as well and bonnie as ever when she went. She 've agone! her mother come and fetch her this very day, and took her right off. Ay! but she were pleased to see how the little thing had got on, and she said as she 'd never forget my kindness, and how she'd bring her to see me whenever she come this way. But, there! I do miss her terrible. Why, it's 'most worse than the master himself.'
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 apron 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 nobody 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 apron.
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 passed 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 passage, 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.'