Mysteriously the clouds were clearing from the sodden face--mysteriously.
Miss Montaubyn watched them as they were swept away! A minute--two
minutes--and they were gone. Then she rose noiselessly and stood
looking down, speaking quite simply as if to herself.
"Ah," she breathed, "she DOES know now--fer sure an' certain."
Then Antony Dart, turning slightly, realized that a man who had entered
the house and been standing near him, breathing with light quickness,
since the moment Miss Montaubyn had knelt, was plainly the person Glad
had called the "curick," and that he had bowed his head and covered his
eyes with a hand which trembled.
IV
He was a young man with an eager soul, and his work in Apple Blossom
Court and places like it had torn him many ways. Religious conventions
established through centuries of custom had not prepared him for life
among the submerged. He had struggled and been appalled, he had wrestled
in prayer and felt himself unanswered, and in repentance of the feeling
had scourged himself with thorns. Miss Montaubyn, returning from the
hospital, had filled him at first with horror and protest.
"But who knows--who knows?" he said to Dart, as they stood and talked
together afterward, "Faith as a little child. That is literally hers.
And I was shocked by it--and tried to destroy it, until I suddenly saw
what I was doing. I was--in my cloddish egotism--trying to show her
that she was irreverent BECAUSE she could believe what in my soul I do
not, though I dare not admit so much even to myself. She took from some
strange passing visitor to her tortured bedside what was to her a
revelation. She heard it first as a child hears a story of magic. When
she came out of the hospital, she told it as if it was one. I--I--" he
bit his lips and moistened them, "argued with her and reproached her.
Christ the Merciful, forgive me! She sat in her squalid little room
with her magic--sometimes in the dark--sometimes without fire, and she
clung to it, and loved it and asked it to help her, as a child asks its
father for bread. When she was answered--and God forgive me again for
doubting that the simple good that came to her WAS an answer--when any
small help came to her, she was a radiant thing, and without a shadow of
doubt in her eyes told me of it as proof--proof that she had been heard.
When things went wrong for a day and the fire was out again and the room
dark, she said, 'I 'aven't kept near enough--I 'aven't trusted TRUE. It
will be gave me soon,' and when once at such a time I said to her, 'We
must learn to say, Thy will be done,' she smiled up at me like a happy
baby and answered:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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