Canadian fiction; Maine -- Fiction; People with disabilities -- Fiction; Poor -- Fiction
"Yes!" he cried. "Yes; to make a home for you, to marry you if only you
love me still, to live in God's own sight and hold you as a sacred
gift--Helena! Helena!"--his arms went out to her again, and the yearning
in his soul was in his voice--to crush her to him, to hold her in his
arms, and hold her there where none should take her from him, to shield
and guard her through the years to come, to live with her a life that
seemed to break now in a vista of gladness, of glory, as the day-dawn
breaks with its golden rays of God-given promise--the new life, perfect
and pure and innocent--because he loved her. "Helena! Speak to me. Tell
me that it is not too late--tell me that you love me too."
And then her eyes were raised to his, and they were wet--but there was
love-light and a wondrous happiness shining through the tears.
"Helena!" he murmured brokenly--and swept her into his arms--and kissed
the eyelids, lowered now, the hair, the white brow, the lips--kissed
her, and held her there, her clinging arms about his neck, her face half
hidden on his shoulder.
And so for a space they stood there--and there were no words to say,
only the song in their hearts in deathless melody--but after a little
time he held her from him, and lifted up her face that he might look his
fill upon it.
"Helena," he said, "I cannot understand it all yet--it is as though it
were born out of the sin and the darkness and the blackness of what is
gone--as though here at this Shrine that we created in mockery and crime
it was meant that you and I should save each other for each other. And
yet this Shrine as we have made it is a thing of guilt, and it has
brought us all, you and I, and Harry, and the Flopper to a new life."
She lay still for a moment in his arms--then her hand crept up and
touched his forehead and smoothed back his hair.
"I do not quite know how to say it," she said a little timidly. "When
you went away this afternoon, the Patriarch took me back into his room,
and--and I knelt at his knees--and after a little while my mind seemed
very calm and quiet--do you know what I mean? And I tried to think
things out--and understand. And it seemed to come to me that there was a
shrine everywhere if we would only look for it--that God has put a
shrine in every heart, only we are so blind--that every one can make
their own surroundings beautiful and good and true, no matter where they
are, or how poor, or how rich--and if they live like that they must be
good and true themselves."
"Yes," he said slowly; then, after a moment: "And faith too is very much
like that."
"Only some need a sign," she said.
There was silence again, while her hand crept over his face and back to
his forehead to smooth his hair once more--and then very gently she
slipped out of his arms.
"What are we to do about--about everything here?" she asked soberly. "We
are forgetting that in our own happiness. How are we going to return the
money that we have taken?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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