THE FAIRY THAT CAME FOR RUBY
The night was dark, and the wind was chill outside, but light and warmth
were in two happy hearts. With arms entwined and clasped hands they
walked down the familiar road, transfigured now into strange beauty at
every step. When two souls first pour out their flood of love, whatever
the present happiness, it is the unconscious sense of a glad future that
thrills them. It was the half-conscious sense of a sad past shared
together that touched these two to-night.
"I feel like another man," said Christian; "to have the weight of these
six years of disguise lifted away is a new birth." He seemed to breathe
more freely.
"How glad I am it is gone, this haunting secret," said Mona, with a sigh
of relief; but suddenly a fresh torment suggested itself. "What will
people say?" she asked.
"Don't think of that. Let people say what they will. In these relations
of life the world has always covered its nakedness in the musty rags of
its old conventions, and dubbed its clothes morality. We'll not heed
what people say, Mona."
"But the child?" said the girl, with some tremor of voice.
Christian answered the half-uttered question.
"Ruby is as much my daughter as Rachel was the daughter of Laban, and
you are even now as much my wife as she was the wife of Jacob."
Mona glanced up into his face. "Can this be Christian?" she thought.
"Where one man sets himself apart for one woman," he continued, "there
is true marriage, whether the mystic symbol of the Church be used or
not. No; I've feared the world too long. I mean to face it now."
"I'm afraid I don't understand, Christian," answered Mona. "But surely
to defy the world is foolishness, and marriage is a holy thing."
He stopped, and, with a smile, kissed the girl tenderly. "Never fear,
darling--_that_ shall be made as the world wants it. I was thinking of
the past, not the future. And if ours was a sin, it was one of passion
only, and we whispered each other--did we not?--that He who gave the
love would forgive its transgression." Then they walked on. In the
distance the hill above glowed red through the darkness. Danny's
Contrary fire, which had smoldered all day, showed brightly again.
"Oh, how glad I am that all is over," repeated the girl, creeping closer
beneath Christian's arm. "You said to-night to your father that a secret
sin is a corroding thing. How truly I've felt it so when I've thought of
my own poor father. You never knew him. He died before you came to us.
He was a good, simple man, and loved us, though perhaps he left us
poorer than we might have been, and more troubled than we were in the
old days at Glen Rushen."
"No, I never knew him; but the thought of him has stung me to the quick
when I've seen his daughter working for daily bread. It has been then
that I've felt myself the meanest of men."
"Christian," continued Mona, regardless of the interruption, "have you
ever thought that the dead are links that connect us with the living?"
"How?"
"Well, in this way. From our kin in heaven we can have no secrets; and
when the living kin guess our hidden thought, our secret act, perhaps it
has been our dead kin who have whispered of it."
"That is a strange fancy, Mona, an awful fancy. Few of us would dare to
have secrets if we accepted it."
They were approaching the cottage, and could hear a merry child's voice
singing. "Listen," said Mona, and they stopped. Then the girl's head
dropped. Tears were again in her eyes.
"She's been sorrow as well as happiness to you, my brave Mona," said
Christian. And he put her arms about his neck.
The girl lifted her face to his in the darkness. "That's true," she
said. "Ah, how often in the early days did I gaze into the face of my
fatherless little one, and feel a touch of awe in the presence of the
mute soul that lay behind the speechless baby face, and wonder if some
power above had told it something that its mother must needs hide from
it, and if, when it spoke, it would reproach me with its own shame, or
pity me for mine."
Christian smoothed her hand tenderly. "If the child suffered," he said,
"before her race of life began, let it be mine henceforth to make it up
to her with all that love can yet do."
"And when I heard its cry," said Mona, "its strange, pitiful cry as it
awoke from that mystery, a baby's troubled dream, and looked into its
red startled eyes and into its little face, all liquid grief, and said,
'It's only a dream, darling,' the thought has sometimes stolen up to my
heart that perhaps some evil spirit had whispered to it the story of its
shame--for what else had it to cry about so bitterly?"
Christian kissed her again, a great gulp in his throat. "Yes," he said,
"in the eyes of men we may have wronged the child, but in the eternal
world, when these few painful years are as a span, she will be ours
indeed, and God will not ask by right of what symbol we claim her."
They had walked to the gate.
"Wait!" said Mona, and ran toward the door.
Christian thought she had gone to prepare her mother, but returning in
an instant, and on tip-toe, with the light of laughter struggling
through her tears, she beckoned him to follow her, with stealthy tread.
Creeping up to the window, she took his hand and whispered, "Look!"
They were standing in the darkness and cold, but the house within was
bright this winter's night, with one little human flower in bloom. Ruby
had dressed the kitchen in hibbin and hollen and had scattered wheaten
flour over the red berries to resemble snow. She was standing near Mrs.
Cregeen's knee, being undressed for bed. Her heart had leaped all day at
the thought of a new hat, which she was to wear for the first time next
morning. This treasure had been hung on a peg over the plates above the
dresser, and at intervals more or less frequent Ruby twisted about and
cocked her eye up at it. It took a world of stolen glances to grow
familiar with the infinite splendor of its bow and feather. While the
threads and the buttons were being undone Ruby sang and gossiped. A
well-filled water-crock had been set on the table, and touching this,
the little one said:
"Do the fairies bathe in winter?"
"So they're saying, my veen," answered Mrs. Cregeen.
"Can I see the fairies if I lie awake all night? I'm not a bit sleepy.
Can I see them all in their little velvet jackets--can I?"
"No, no; little girls must go to bed."
There was a pretty pretense at disappointment in the downward curve of
the lip. The world had no real sorrow for the owner of that marvelous
hat. The next instant the child sang:
"I rede ye beware of the Carrasdoo men
As ye come up the wold;
I rede ye beware of the haunted glen--"
Ruby interrupted her song to wriggle out of Mrs. Cregeen's hands, pull
off her stocking, and hang it on one of the knobs of the dresser. "I
hope it will be the Phynnodderee that comes to-night," she said.
"Why that one?" said Mrs. Cregeen, smiling.
"Because Danny says that's the fairy that loves little Manx girls."
"Danny shouldn't tell you such foolish old stories."
"Are they stories?"
"Yes."
"Oh!"
Another sly glance at the wonderful hat on the peg behind. That was a
reality at all events.
"But I'm sure a good fairy will come for me to-night," insisted Ruby.
"Why are sure, Ruby veg?"
"Because--because I _am_."
Christian tightened his grasp of Mona's hand.
At that moment a gust of wind passed round the house. Mona remembered
that to-night she was standing with Christian on the spot where last
night she had parted with Danny.
"Listen," said Mrs. Cregeen to the child. "Pity the poor sailors at
sea."
"Didn't Mona say Danny was at sea?"
"Yes, she was saying so."
Then the little one sang:
"In Jorby curragh they dwell alone
By dark peat bogs, where the willows moan,
Down in a gloomy and lonely glen--"
"Mammy, had Danny any father?"
"Everybody had a father, my veen."
"Had Ruby a father?"
"Hush, Ruby veg!"
Mona's hand unconsciously pressed the hand of Christian. "Oh," she
muttered, and crept closer to his breast. Christian's bowels yearned for
the child.
The silvery voice was singing again:
"Who has not heard of Adair, the youth?
Who does not know that his soul was truth?
Woe is me! how smoothly they speak,
And Adair was brave, and a man, but weak."
"I am quite sure a good fairy is coming," said Ruby, cocking her eye
aslant at that peg on the dresser.
Christian could bear it no longer. He flung open the door, and snatched
up the darling in his arms.
An hour later he and Mona came out again into the night, leaving the
little one with laughing, wondering, wakeful eyes in bed, and Mrs.
Cregeen sitting before the fire with something like happiness in her
usually mournful face.
They took the road toward the town. They had no errand there, but the
restless, tumultuous joy of this night would not leave them a moment's
peace.
As they passed through the market-place they saw that the church windows
were lit up. The bells were ringing. Numbers of young people were
thronging in at the gates. But the parson was coming out of them. There
was no pleasant expression on his face as he beheld the throngs that
sought admission. It was Oiel Verree, the Eve of Mary. The bells were
ringing for the only service in the year at which not the parson but the
parishioners presided. It was an old Manx custom, that after prayers on
Christmas-eve the church should be given up to the people for the
singing of their native carols. Prayers were now over, and on his way
through the market-place the parson encountered Tommy-Bill-beg among the
others who were walking toward the church. He stopped the harbor-master,
and said, "Mind you see that all is done in decency and order, and that
you close my church before midnight."
"Aw, but the church is the people's, I'm thinkin'," said Tommy-Bill-beg,
with a deprecating shake of his wise head.
"The people are as ignorant as goats," said the parson angrily.
"Aw, well, and you're the shepherd, so just make sheeps of them,"
answered Tommy, and passed on.
Laughing at the rejoinder, Christian and Mona went by the church, and,
reaching the quay, they crossed the bridge at the top of the harbor.
Then, hand in hand, they walked under the Horse Hill, and, without
thinking what direction they took, they turned up the path that led
toward the cottage in the old quarry.
Half the hillside seemed to be ablaze. Danny's fire over the Poolvash
had spread north by many hundred yards. The wind was now blowing
strongly from the sea, and fanned it into flame. The castle could be
seen by its light from the black rocks fringed about with foam to the
top of Fennella's Tower.
When they came abreast of the cottage they saw that a dim light burned
in one window. They stepped up and looked into the house. On a bed,
covered by a white sheet, lay all that remained of Kisseck. An old
woman, set to watch the body, sat knitting beside it.
The deep roar of the sea was all that could be heard there above the
moan of the wind.