The Complete Works of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Frances Hodgson Burnett

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: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in ‘eaven. Lor’, there’s no cold there, nor no ‘unger nor no cryin’ nor pain. That’s the way the will is done in ‘eaven. That’s wot I arst for all day long—for it to be done on earth as it is in ‘eaven.’ What could I say? Could I tell her that the will of the Deity on the earth he created was only the will to do evil—to give pain—to crush the creature made in His own image. What else do we mean when we say under all horror and agony that befalls, ‘It is God’s will—God’s will be done.’ Base unbeliever though I am, I could not speak the words. Oh, she has something we have not. Her poor, little misspent life has changed itself into a shining thing, though it shines and glows only in this hideous place. She herself does not know of its shining. But Drunken Bet would stagger up to her room and ask to be told what she called her ‘pantermine’ stories. I have seen her there sitting listening—listening with strange quiet on her and dull yearning in her sodden eyes. So would other and worse women go to her, and I, who had struggled with them, could see that she had reached some remote longing in their beings which I had never touched. In time the seed would have stirred to life—it is beginning to stir even now. During the months since she came back to the court—though they have laughed at her—both men and women have begun to see her as a creature weirdly set apart. Most of them feel something like awe of her; they half believe her prayers to be bewitchments, but they want them on their side. They have never wanted mine. That I have known—known. She believes that her Deity is in Apple Blossom Court—in the dire holes its people live in, on the broken stairway, in every nook and awful cranny of it—great Glory we will not see—only waiting to be called and to answer. Do I believe it—do you—do any of those anointed of us who preach each day so glibly ‘God is everywhere’? Who is the one who believes? If there were such a man he would go about as Moses did when ‘He wist not that his face shone.’”

      They had gone out together and were standing in the fog in the court. The curate removed his hat and passed his handkerchief over his damp forehead, his breath coming and going almost sobbingly, his eyes staring straight before him into the yellowness of the haze.

      “Who,” he said after a moment of singular silence, “who are you?”

      Antony Dart hesitated a few seconds, and at the end of his pause he put his hand into his overcoat pocket.

      “If you will come upstairs with me to the room where the girl Glad lives, I will tell you,” he said, “but before we go I want to hand something over to you.”

      The curate turned an amazed gaze upon him.

      “What is it?” he asked.

      Dart withdrew his hand from his pocket, and the pistol was in it.

      “I came out this morning to buy this,” he said. “I intended—never mind what I intended. A wrong turn taken in the fog brought me here. Take this thing from me and keep it.”

      The curate took the pistol and put it into his own pocket without comment. In the course of his labors he had seen desperate men and desperate things many times. He had even been—at moments—a desperate man thinking desperate things himself, though no human being had ever suspected the fact. This man had faced some tragedy, he could see. Had he been on the verge of a crime—had he looked murder in the eyes? What had made him pause? Was it possible that the dream of Jinny Montaubyn being in the air had reached his brain—his being?

      He looked almost appealingly at him, but he only said aloud:

      “Let us go upstairs, then.”

      So they went.

      As they passed the door of the room where the dead woman lay Dart went in and spoke to Miss Montaubyn, who was still there.

      “If there are things wanted here,” he said, “this will buy them.” And he put some money into her hand.

      She did not seem surprised at the incongruity of his shabbiness producing money.

      “Well, now,” she said, “I was wonderin’ an’ askin’. I’d like ‘er clean an’ nice, an’ there’s milk wanted bad for the biby.”

      In the room they mounted to Glad was trying to feed the child with bread softened in tea. Polly sat near her looking on with restless, eager eyes. She had never seen anything of her own baby but its limp newborn and dead body being carried away out of sight. She had not even dared to ask what was done with such poor little carrion. The tyranny of the law of life made her want to paw and touch this lately born thing, as her agony had given her no fruit of her own body to touch and paw and nuzzle and caress as mother creatures will whether they be women or tigresses or doves or female cats.

      “Let me hold her, Glad,” she half whimpered. “When she’s fed let me get her to sleep.”

      “All right,” Glad answered; “we could look after ‘er between us well enough.”

      The thief was still sitting on the hearth, but being full fed and comfortable for the first time in many a day, he had rested his head against the wall and fallen into profound sleep.

      “Wot’s up?” said Glad when the two men came in. “Is anythin’ ‘appenin’?”

      “I have come up here to tell you something,” Dart answered. “Let us sit down again round the fire. It will take a little time.”

      Glad with eager eyes on him handed the child to Polly and sat down without a moment’s hesitance, avid of what was to come. She nudged the thief with friendly elbow and he started up awake.

      “‘E’s got somethin’ to tell us,” she explained. “The curick’s come up to ‘ear it, too. Sit ‘ere, Polly,” with elbow jerk toward the bundle of sacks. “It’s got its stummick full an’ it’ll go to sleep fast enough.”

      So they sat again in the weird circle. Neither the strangeness of the group nor the squalor of the hearth were of a nature to be new things to the curate. His eyes fixed themselves on Dart’s face, as did the eyes of the thief, the beggar, and the young thing of the street. No one glanced away from him.

      His telling of his story was almost monotonous in its semi-reflective quietness of tone. The strangeness to himself—though it was a strangeness he accepted absolutely without protest—lay in his telling it at all, and in a sense of his knowledge that each of these creatures would understand and mysteriously know what depths he had touched this day.

      “Just before I left my lodgings this morning,” he said, “I found myself standing in the middle of my room and speaking to Something aloud. I did not know I was going to speak. I did not know what I was speaking to. I heard my own voice cry out in agony, ‘Lord, Lord, what shall I do to be saved?’”

      The curate made a sudden movement in his place and his