Preparation--The Room Furnished--Mrs Gray at Work--The Baby Gone--The
Gypsy Mother--The Gypsy's Story--A Foolish Fancy--Something Has
Happened--The Real Baby
Morning very often brings other counsels, but this was not the case
with Mr Robins, for when he got up next day he was more than ever
resolved to carry out his intention of bringing little Zoe home, and
letting her mother know that a welcome awaited her in her old home.
He had not slept very much during the night, for his mind had been too
full of the change that was coming in his life, and of the difference
that the presence of Edith and little Zoe would make in the dull, old
house. Sad and worn and altered, was she! Ah! that would soon pass
away with kindness and care and happiness, and the cough that had
sounded so hollow and ominous should be nursed away, and Edith should
be a girl again, a girl as she ought to be yet by right of her years;
and those five years of suffering and estrangement should be altogether
forgotten as if they had never been.
He went into the bedroom next his, that had been Edith's--that was to
be Edith's again--and, looking round it, noticed with satisfaction that
Jane had kept it just as it had been in the old days; and he pushed the
bed a little to one side to make room for a cot to stand beside it, a
cot which he remembered in the night as having stood for years in the
lumber-room up in the roof, and which he now with much difficulty
dragged out from behind some heavy boxes, and fitted together, wishing
there had been time to give it a coat of paint, and yet glad, with a
tremulous sort of gladness, that there was not, seeing that it would be
wanted that very night.
And just then Jane Sands came up to call him to breakfast, and stood
looking from the cot to her master's dusty coat, with such a look of
delighted comprehension on her face, that the organist felt that no
words were needed to prepare her for what was going to happen.
'I thought,' he said, 'it had better be brought down.'
'Where shall it go?' she asked.
'In Miss----in the room next mine,' he said, 'and it will want a good
airing.'
'Shall I make up the bed too?' she asked.
'Yes, you may as well.'
'Oh, master,' she said, the tears shaking in her voice and shining in
her eyes; 'will they be wanted soon? Will they, maybe, be wanted
to-night?'
His own voice felt suspiciously shaky; his own eyes could not see the
old cot, nor Jane's beaming face quite plainly, so he only gave a gruff
assent and turned away.
'What a good, kind creature she is!' he thought. 'What a welcome she
will give Edith and Edith's little Zoe!'
During the morning he heard her up in the room sweeping and scrubbing,
as if for these five years it had been left a prey to dust and dirt;
and when he went out after dinner to give a lesson at Bilton, she was
still at it with an energy worthy of a woman, half her age.
That stupid little girl at Bilton, who generally found her music-lesson
such an intolerable weariness to the flesh, and was conscious that it
was no less so to her teacher, found the half-hour to-day quite
pleasant. Mr Robins had never been so kind and cheerful, quite
amusing, laughing at her mistakes, and allowing her to play just the
things she knew best, and to get up in the middle of the lesson to go
to the window and see a long procession of gypsy vans going by to
Smithurst fair.
It was such a very beautiful day; perhaps it was this that produced
such a good effect on the organist's temper. There had been a frost
that morning, but it was not enough to strip the trees, but only to
turn the elms a richer gold, and the beeches a warmer red, and the oaks
a ruddier brown; while in the hedges the purple dogwood, and hawthorn,
and bramble leaves made a wonderful variety of rich tints in the full
bright sunshine, which set the birds twittering with a momentary
delusion that it might be spring.
He did not come back over the hill, and past the Grays' cottage, for he
was going to fetch the child that evening; but he came home by the
road, meeting many more of those gypsy vans which had distracted his
pupil's attention, and looking with kindliness on the swarthy men and
bronze dark-eyed women, for the sake of little Zoe, who had been so
often called the gypsy baby.
When he reached home he found the room prepared with all the care Jane
Sands could lavish. He had thought when he went in that morning that
it was just as Edith had left it, and all in the most perfect order;
but now the room was a bower of daintiness and cleanliness, and all
Edith's old treasures had been set out in the very order she used to
arrange them--why! even her brush and comb were laid ready on the
dressing-table, and a pair of slippers by the bedside, and a small
bunch of autumn anemones and Czar violets was placed in a little glass
beside her books. He smiled, but with tears in his eyes, as he saw all
these loving preparations.
'Edith can hardly be here to-night,' he said to himself, 'but Zoe
will.' And he smoothed the pillow of the cot close to the bedside, and
drew the curtain more closely over its head.
He found his tea set ready for him when he came down, but Jane Sands
had gone out, and he was rather glad of it, as she had watched him that
morning with an eager expectant eye, and he did not know what to say to
her. It would be easier when he brought the baby and actually put it
into her arms.
The sun had set when he had finished tea, a blaze of splendour settling
down into dull purple and dead orange, leaving a stripe of pale-green
sky over the horizon, flecked with a few soft brown clouds tinged with
red.
But envious night hastened to cover up and deaden the colours of the
sky, and the almost equally gorgeous tints of tree and hedge; and, by
the time Mr Robins reached the Grays' cottage, darkness had settled
down as deep as on that evening four months ago, when he carried the
baby and left it there.
Now, as then, the cottage door was open, and Mrs Gray sat at work with
the candle close to her elbow, every now and then giving a long sniff
or a sigh, that made the tallow candle flicker and tremble. He had
almost forgotten her husband's accident in his absorption in the baby;
but these sniffs recalled it to his mind, and he thought he would give
them a helping hand while Gray was in the hospital.
'She has been kind to my little Zoe,' he thought, 'and I will not
forget it in a hurry. She shall come and see the child whenever she
likes; and Edith will be good to her, for she has been like a mother to
the baby all these months.'
Close by where Mrs Gray sat he could see the foot of the old cradle and
the rocker within reach of the woman's foot; but Zoe must be asleep,
for there was no rocking necessary, and Mrs Gray did not turn from her
work to look at the child, though she stopped from time to time to wipe
her eyes on her apron.
'She is taken up with her husband,' he said to himself; 'it is as well
that I am going to take the child away, as she will have no thought to
give her now.'
And then he went into the cottage, with a tap on the open door to
announce his presence.
'Good evening, Mrs Gray,' he said in a subdued voice, so as not to wake
the baby. But he might have spared himself this precaution, for the
next glance showed him that the cradle was empty.
'Bless you, Mr Robins,' the woman said, 'you give me quite a start,
coming in so quiet like. But, there! I 'm all of a tremble, the
leastest thing do terrify me. You might knock me down with a feather.
First one thing and then another! The master yesterday and the baby
to-day!'
'What!' he said, so sharp and sudden, that it stopped the flow of words
for a moment. 'What do you mean! Is the baby in bed up-stairs?
What's the matter? It's not the scarlatina? Not'----
'Bless you!' she said, 'why I thought you'd a-knowed. It ain't the
scarlatina; the baby was as well and bonnie as ever when she went. She
've agone! her mother come and fetch her this very day, and took her
right off. Ay! but she were pleased to see how the little thing had
got on, and she said as she 'd never forget my kindness, and how she'd
bring her to see me whenever she come this way. But, there! I do miss
her terrible. Why, it's 'most worse than the master himself.'
The organist hardly listened to what she was saying after the fact of
the mother having come and fetched her away. Edith had come for her
baby! How had she known? Why had she done it to-day? Could Jane have
let her know? And had she come so quickly to take the child herself to
her old home? His first impulse was to turn and hasten home; perhaps
Edith and Zoe were there already, and would find him absent. But he
could not go without a word to Mrs Gray, who was wiping her eyes in her
apron and unconsciously rocking the empty cradle.
'You will often see her,' he said consolingly; 'she will not be very
far away.'
'Oh, I don't know about that; them gypsies go all over the place, up
and down the country, and they don't always come back for the fairs;
though she says as they don't often miss Smithurst.'
'Gypsies?' he said puzzled.
'Ay, the mother 's a gypsy sure enough, and I've said it all along, and
the child's the very image of her; there wasn't no doubt, when one saw
the two together, as they was mother and child.'
'Are you sure she was a gypsy?' He had often said in fun that Edith
was a regular little gypsy, but he would never have thought that any
one could really mistake her for one; and besides, Mrs Gray must have
known Edith well enough at any rate by sight in the old days; and
changed as she was, it was not beyond all recognition.
'Oh, there wasn't no mistaking, and the van as she belonged to waited
just outside the village, for I went down along with her and seed it,
painted yeller with red wheels. I knowed Zoe was gypsy born, for she'd
one of them charms round her neck as I didn't meddle with, for they do
say as there's a deal of power in them things, and that gypsies can't
be drownded or ketch fevers and things as long as they keeps 'em.'
Mr Robins sat down in the chair opposite Mrs Gray; an odd, cold sort of
apprehension was stealing over him, and the pleasant dream of home and
Edith and Zoe, in which he had been living through the day, was fading
away with every word the woman said.
'The funny part of it were that she vowed and declared as she put the
child at your door, and never came this way at all; leastways, from
what she said it must abeen your house, for she said it was hard by the
church and had a thick hedge, and that there was a kind sorter body as
she see there in the morning, as must abeen Mrs Sands, and nobody else
from her account. She said she was in a heap of trouble just then, her
husband ill and a deal more, and she was pretty nigh at her wits' end,
and that, without thinking twice what she were about, she wropt the
baby up and laid it close agin the door of the house where she'd seen
the kind-looking body. She would have it as it was there, say what I
would; but, maybe, poor soul, she were mazed, and hardly knew where she
were.
'She went to your house to-day, and Mrs Sands were quite put out with
her, being busy too, and expecting company, and thought it were just
her impidence; but there! I knows what trouble is, and how it just
mazes a body, for I could no more tell where I went nor what I did
yesterday than that table there. And another queer thing is as she
didn't know nothing about the name, and neither she nor her husband
can't read or write noways, so she couldn't have wrote it down, and she
'd never heard tell of such a name as Zoe, and didn't like it neither.
She'd always ameant it to be Rachel, as had been her mother's name
before her, and her grandmother's too.'
'Are you quite certain she was the mother?'
'Certain? Why, you 'd only to see the two together to be sure of it.
I'd not have let her go, not were it ever so, if it hadn't been as
clear as daylight; and just now too, when I seems to want her for a bit
of comfort.' And here Mrs Gray relapsed into her apron.
Mr Robins sat for a minute looking at her in silence, and then got up,
and without a word went out into the dark night, mechanically taking
the way to his house, and then turning on to the high-road to
Smithurst, tramping along through the mud and dead leaves with a dull,
heavy persistence.
Anything was better than going back to the empty silence of his house
and Jane Sands' expectant face, and the pretty, white-curtained room
with the cot all ready for little Zoe, who was already miles away along
that dark road before him, sleeping, perhaps, in some dirty gypsy van
put up on some bit of waste land by the roadside, or, perhaps,
surrounded by the noise and glare of the fair with its shows and
roundabouts. His little Zoe! he could not possibly have been so
utterly deceived all through; the baby who had lain on his bed, whose
little face he had felt as he carried her up to the Grays' cottage in
the dark, whom he had seen day after day, and never failed to notice
the likeness, growing stronger with the child's growth. Was it all a
delusion? all the foolish fancy of a fond, old man? He tried hard to
believe that it was impossible that he could have been so deceived, and
yet from the very first he felt that it was so, and that the love that
had been growing in his heart all these months had been lavished on a
gypsy baby whose face most likely he should never see again.
And all his plans for the future, his dreams of reparation, of tender
reconciliation with Edith, and of happy, peaceful days that would
obliterate the memory of past trouble and alienation, they had all
vanished with the gypsy baby; life was as empty as the cradle by Mrs
Gray's side.
Where was he to find his daughter? Where had she wandered that night
when the pitiless rain fell and the sullen wind moaned? Was that the
last he should ever see of her, with the white, wan, pleading face
under the yew-tree? And would that despairing voice, saying 'Father!'
haunt his ears till his dying day? And would the wailing cry that
followed him as he went to his house that night be the only thing he
should ever know of his grandchild, the real little Zoe whom he had
rejected?
He was several miles away along the Smithurst road when he first
realised what he was doing, brought to the consciousness, perhaps, by
the fact of being weary and footsore and wet through from a fine rain
that had begun falling soon after he left the village. It must be
getting late too; many of the cottages he passed showed no light from
the windows, the inmates most likely being in bed.
Painfully and wearily he toiled back to Downside; he seemed to have no
spirit left to contend against even such trifling things as mud and
inequalities in the road, and when a bramble straying from the hedge
caught his coat and tore it, he could almost have cried in feeble
vexation of spirit. Downside street was all dark and quiet, but from
the organist's house a light shone out from the open door and down the
garden path, making a patch of light on the wet road.
Some one stood peering out into the darkness, and, at the sound of his
dragging, stumbling footsteps, Jane Sands ran down to the gate. The
long waiting had made her anxious, for she was breathless and trembling
with excitement.
'Where have you been?' she said; 'we got so frightened. Why are you so
late? Oh, dearie me!' as she caught sight of his face. 'You 're ill!
Something has happened! There, come in, doee, now; you look fit to
drop!'
He pushed by her almost roughly into the house, and dropped down
wearily into the arm-chair. He was too worn out and exhausted to
notice anything, even the warmth and comfort of the bright fire and the
supper ready on the table. He tossed his soaked hat on the ground, and
leaning his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, sat bowed
down with the feeling of utter wretchedness.
Day after day, night after night, till his life's end, plenty and
comfort and neatness and respectability and warmth in dull monotony;
while outside somewhere in the cold and rain, in poverty and want and
wretchedness, wandered Edith with the wailing baby in her arms.
'You can go to bed,' he said to Jane Sands; 'I don't want any supper.'
She drew back and went softly out of the room, but some one else was
standing there, looking down at the bowed white head with eyes fuller
even of pity and tears than Jane's had been; and then she, too, left
the room, and with a raised finger to Jane, who was waiting in the
passage, she went up-stairs and, as if the way were well known to her,
to the little room which had been got ready so uselessly for the
organist's daughter.
There, sheltered by the bed-curtain, was the cot where Zoe was to have
lain, and there, wonderful to relate, a child's dark head might be
seen, deep in the soft pillow, deeper in soft sleep.
And then this strangely presuming intruder in the organist's house
softly took up the sleeping child, and wrapping a shawl round it,
carried it, still sleeping, downstairs, the dark lashes resting on the
round cheek flushed with sleep and of a fairer tint than gypsy Zoe's,
and the rosy mouth half-open.
The organist still sat with his head in his hands, and did not stir as
she entered, not even when she came and knelt down on the hearth in
front of him.
Jane Sands was unusually tiresome to-night, he thought; why could she
not leave him alone?
And then against his cold hands clasped over his face was laid
something soft and warm and tender, surely a little child's hand! and a
voice (a voice he had never thought to hear again till maybe it sounded
as his accuser before the throne of grace) said: 'Father, for Zoe's
sake.'
THE END.
Edinburgh;
Printed by W & R. Chambers, Limited.
FOR YOUNGER BOYS AND GIRLS
1s. net.-
LITTLE MARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . L. T. Meade.
SQUIRE'S LITTLE GIRL . . . . . . . . . . . . L. T. Meade.
THE GREEN CASKET . . . . . . . . . . . . Mrs Molesworth.
BEWITCHED LAMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mrs Molesworth.
THEIR HAPPIEST XMAS . . . . . . . . . . . . Edna Lyall.
LASSIE . . . . . . . . . . . . By the Author of _Laddie_.
BABY JOHN . . . . . . . . . . By the Author of _Laddie_.
ZOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . By the Author of _Laddie_.
WILFRID CLIFFORD . . . . . . . . . . . . Edith C. Kenyon.
ERNEST'S GOLDEN THREAD . . . . . . . . . Edith C. Kenyon.
THE LITTLE KNIGHT . . . . . . . . . . . Edith C. Kenyon.
A FAIRY GRANDMOTHER . . . . . . . . . . L. E. Tiddeman.
HUMBLE HEROINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . L. E. Tiddeman.
STEADFAST GABRIEL . . . . . . . . . . . Mary Howitt.
UNCLE SAM'S MONEY-BOX . . . . . . . . . Mrs S. C. Hall.
SWAN'S EGG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mrs S. C. Hall.
GRAMDMAMA'S POCKETS . . . . . . . . . . Mrs S. C. Hall.
WONDERFUL STORIES . . . . . . . . . . . Hans C. Andersen.
W. & R. CHAMBERS, LIMITED, LONDON AND EDINBURGH.
Printed in Great Britain.
W. & R. CHAMBERS, LTD., LONDON and EDINBURGH.