'Look at me,' he said; for though she had lifted her head she hadn't
lifted her eyes.
She looked at him. Tears were on his face. When she saw them her mouth
began to quiver and twitch. She couldn't bear that.
'Lucy----' he said again.
She shut her eyes. 'Yes'--she breathed, 'yes.' And with one hand she
felt along up his coat till she reached his face, and shakingly tried to
brush away its tears.
VI
After that, for the moment anyhow, it was all over with Lucy. She was
engulfed. Wemyss kissed her shut eyes, he kissed her parted lips, he
kissed her dear, delightful bobbed hair. His tears dried up; or rather,
wiped away by her little blind, shaking hand, there were no more of
them. Death for Wemyss was indeed at that moment swallowed up in
victory. Instantly he passed from one mood to the other, and when she
finally did open her eyes at his orders and look at him, she saw bending
over her a face she hardly recognised, for she had not yet seen him
happy. Happy! How could he be happy, as happy as that all in a moment?
She stared at him, and even through her confusion, her bewilderment, was
frankly amazed.
Then the thought crept into her mind that it was she who had done this,
it was she who had transformed him, and her stare softened into a gaze
almost of awe, with something of the look in it of a young mother when
she first sees her new-born baby. 'So that is what it is like,' the
young mother whispers to herself in a sort of holy surprise, 'and I have
made it, and it is mine'; and so, gazing at this new, effulgent Wemyss,
did Lucy say to herself with the same feeling of wonder, of awe at her
own handiwork, 'So that is what he is like.'
Wemyss's face was indeed one great beam. He simply at that moment
couldn't remember that he had ever been miserable. He seemed to have his
arms round Love itself; for never did any one look more like the very
embodiment of his idea of love than Lucy then as she gazed up at him, so
tender, so resistless. But there were even more wonderful moments after
dinner in the darkening garden, while Miss Entwhistle was upstairs
packing ready to start by the early train next morning, and they hadn't
got the gate between them, and Lucy of her own accord laid her cheek
against his coat, nestling her head into it as though there indeed she
knew that she was safe.
'My baby--my baby,' Wemyss murmured, in an ecstasy of passionate
protectiveness, in his turn flooded by maternal feeling. 'You shall
never cry again never, never.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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