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 assured 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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