The moment ceased to be so fanciful and curiously exalted when his hand
was grasped and a big, kind palm laid on his shoulder, though Tom's face
was full of emotion.
"I think I should have known it," he said. "Welcome to you. Yes," looking
at him with an affection touched with something like reverence. "Yes,
indeed--Delia Vanuxem!"
"I've come to you," the young fellow said, with fine simplicity, "because
I am the only De Willoughby left except yourself. I am young and I'm
lonely--and my mother always said you had the kindest heart she ever
knew. I want you to advise me."
"Come in to the porch," said Tom, "and let us sit down and talk it over."
He put his arm about Sheba and kept his hand on Rupert's shoulder, and
walked so, with one on either side, to the house. Between their youthful
slimness he moved like a protecting giant.
"Where did you come from?" he asked when they sat down.
"From Delisleville," Rupert answered. "I did not think of coming here so
late to-night, but it seems I must have missed my road. I was going to
ask for lodgings at a place called Willet's Farm. I suppose I took the
wrong turning; and when I saw this house before me, I knew it must be
yours from what I had heard of it. It seemed as if Fate had brought me
here. And when I came up the path I saw Sheba. She was standing on the
little verandah in the moonlight with the roses all around her; and she
looked so white that I stopped to look up at her."
"Uncle Tom," said Sheba, "we--we knew each other."
"Did you?" said Tom. "That's right."
His middle-aged heart surprised him by giving one quick, soft beat. He
smiled to himself after he had felt it.
"The first moment or so I only stood and looked," Rupert said; "I was
startled."
"And so was I," said Sheba.
"But when she leaned forward and looked down on me," he went on, "I
remembered something----"
"So did I," said Sheba. "I leaned forward like that and looked down at
you from the porch at the tavern--all those years ago, when I was a
little child."
"And I looked up at you--and afterwards I asked about you," said Rupert.
"It all came back when you spoke to-night, and I knew you must be Sheba."
"You knew my name, but I did not know yours," said Sheba. "But, after
all," rather as if consoling herself, "Sheba is not my real name. I have
another one."
"What is it?" asked the young fellow, quite eagerly. His eyes had
scarcely left her face an instant. She was standing by Tom's chair and
her hands were on his shoulders.
"It is Felicia," she said. "Uncle Tom gave it to me--because he wanted me
to be happy." And she curved a slim arm round Tom's neck and kissed him.
It was the simplest, prettiest thing a man could have seen. Her life had
left her nature as pure and translucent as the clearest brook. She had
had no one to compare herself with or to be made ashamed or timid by. She
knew only her own heart and Tom's love, and she smiled as radiantly into
the lighting face before her as she would have smiled at a rose, or at a
young deer she had met in the woods. No one had ever looked at her in
this way before, but being herself a thing which had grown like a flower,
she felt no shyness, and was only glad. Eve might have smiled at Adam so
in their first hours.
Big Tom, sitting between them, saw it all. A man cannot live a score of
years and more, utterly cut off from the life of the world, without
having many a long hour for thought in which he will inevitably find
himself turning over the problems which fill the life he has missed. Tom
De Willoughby had had many of them. He had had no one to talk to whose
mind could have worked with his own. On winter nights, when Sheba had
been asleep, he had found himself gazing into the red embers of his wood
fire and pondering on the existence he might have led if fate had been
good to him.
"There must be happiness on the earth somewhere," he would say.
"Somewhere there ought to have been a woman I belonged to, and who
belonged to me. It ought all to have been as much nature as the rain
falling and the corn ripening in the sun. If we had met when we were
young things--on the very brink of it all--and smiled into each other's
eyes and taken each other's hands, and kissed each other's lips, we might
have ripened together like the corn. What is it that's gone wrong?" All
the warm normal affections of manhood, which might have remained
undeveloped and been cast away, had been lavished on the child Sheba. She
had represented his domestic circle.
"You mayn't know it, Sheba," he had said once to her, "but you're a
pretty numerous young person. You're a man's wife and family, and mother
and sisters, and at least half a dozen boys and girls."
All his thoughts had concentrated themselves upon her--all his
psychological problems had held her as their centre, all his ethical
reasonings had applied themselves to her.
"She's got to be happy," he said to himself, "and she's got to be strong
enough to stand up under unhappiness, if--if I should be taken away from
her. When the great thing that's--that's the meaning of it all--and the
reason of it--comes into her life, it ought to come as naturally as
summer does. If her poor child of a mother--Good Lord! Good Lord!"
And here he sat in the moonlight, and Delia Vanuxem's son was looking at
her with ardent, awakened young eyes.
How she listened as Rupert told his story, and how sweetly she was moved
by the pathos of it. Once or twice she made an involuntary movement
forward, as if she was drawn towards him, and uttered a lovely low
exclamation which was a little like the broken coo of a dove. Rupert did
not know that there was pathos in his relation. He made only a simple
picture of things, but as he went on Tom saw all the effect of the hot
little town left ruined and apathetic after the struggle of war, the
desolateness of the big house empty but for its three rooms, its bare
floors echoing to the sound of the lonely pair of feet, the garden grown
into a neglected jungle, the slatternly negro girl in the kitchen singing
wild camp-meeting hymns as she went about her careless work.
"It sounds so lonely," Sheba said, with tender mournfulness.
"That was what it was--lonely," Rupert answered. "It's been a different
place since Matt came, but it has always been lonely. Uncle Tom," putting
his hand on the big knee near him, as impulsively as a child, "I love
that old Matt--I love him!"
"Ah, so do I!" burst forth Sheba. "Don't you, Uncle Tom?" And she put her
hand on the other knee.
Rupert looked down at the hand. It was so fair and soft and full of the
expression of sympathy--such an adorably womanly little hand, that one's
first impulse was to lay one's own upon it. He made a movement and then
remembered, and looked up, and their eyes met and rested on each other
gently.
When the subject of the claim was broached, Sheba thought it like a fairy
tale. She listened almost with bated breath. As Rupert had not realised
that he was pathetic in the relation of the first part of his story, so
he did not know that he was picturesque in this. But his material had
strong colour. The old man on the brink of splendid fortune, the strange,
unforeseen national disaster sweeping all before it and leaving only
poverty and ruin, the untouched wealth of the mines lying beneath the
earth on which battles had been fought--all the possibilities the future
might hold for one penniless boy--these things were full of suggestion
and excitement.
"You would be rich," said Sheba.
"So would Uncle Tom," Rupert answered, smiling; "and you, too."
Tom had been listening with a reflective look on his face. He tilted his
chair back and ran his hand through his hair.
"At all events, we couldn't _lose_ money if we didn't gain any," he said.
"That's where we're safe. When a man's got to the place where he hasn't
anything to lose, he can afford to take chances. Perhaps it's worth
thinking over. Let's go to bed, children. It's midnight."
When they said good-night to each other, the two young hands clung
together kindly and Sheba looked up with sympathetic eyes.
"Would you like to be very rich?" she asked.
"To-night I am rich," he answered. "That is because you and Uncle Tom
have made me feel as if I belonged to someone. It is so long since I have
seemed to belong to anyone."
"But now you belong to us," said Sheba.
He stood silently looking down at her a moment.
"Your eyes look just as they did when you were a little child," he said.
He lifted her hand and pressed his warm young lips to it.