England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- England -- Fiction
Dowie watched faithfully. She did not speak of the dream, but as she
went about doing kindly and curiously wise things she never lost sight
of any mood or expression of Robin's and they were all changed ones. On
the night after she had "come alive" they talked together in the Tower
room somewhat as they had talked on the night of their arrival.
A wind was blowing on the moor and making strange sounds as it whirled
round the towers and seemed to cry at the narrow windows. By the fire
there was drawn a broad low couch heaped with large cushions, and Robin
lay upon them looking into the red hollow of coal.
"You told me I had something to think of," she said. "I am thinking now.
I shall always be thinking."
"That's right, my dear," Dowie answered her with sane kindliness.
"I will do everything you tell me, Dowie. I will not cry any more and I
will eat what you ask me to eat. I will sleep as much as I can and I
will walk every day. Then I shall get strong."
"That's the way to look at things. It's a brave way," Dowie answered.
"What we want most is strength and good spirits, my dear."
"That was one of the things Donal said," Robin went on quite naturally
and simply. "He told me I need not be ill. He said a rose was not ill
when a new bud was blooming on it. That was one of the lovely things he
told me. There were so many."
"It was a beautiful thing, to be sure," said Dowie.
To her wholly untranscendental mind, long trained by patent facts and
duties, any suggestion of the occult was vaguely ominous. She had spent
her early years among people who regarded such things with terror. In
the stories of her youth those who saw visions usually died or met with
calamity. That their visions were, as a rule, gruesome and included pale
and ghastly faces and voices hollow with portent was now a supporting
recollection. "He was not dead. He was not an angel. He was Donal,"
Robin had said in her undoubting voice. And she had stood the test--that
real test of earthly egg and buttered toast. Dowie was a sensible and
experienced creature and had been prepared before the doctor's
suggestion to lose no advantage. If the child began to sleep and eat her
food, and the fits of crying could be controlled, why should she not be
allowed to believe what supported her? When her baby came she'd forget
less natural things. Dowie knew how her eyes would look as she bent over
it--how they would melt and glow and brood and how her childish mouth
would quiver with wonder and love. Who knew but that the Lord himself
had sent her that dream to comfort her because she had always been such
a loving, lonely little thing with nothing but tender goodness in her
whole body and soul? She had never had an untender thought of anybody
but for that queer dislike to his lordship-- And when you came to think
of what had been forced into her innocent mind about him, who
wondered?-- And she was beginning to see that differently too, in these
strange days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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