The Shield of Silence Part 6

But everything seemed settling into calm, and Meredith fell asleep looking as she used to look in the old days before she had been forced outside the gates. At daylight she opened her eyes.

"Is it morning?" she asked of Sister Angela who sat beside her.

"Yes, dear heart."

"Raise the shade, Sister." Then, as Angela raised it--"Why, how strange!

What is that, Sister?"

Angela looked and saw The s.h.i.+p! In that hour when vitality runs low and with the past horrors of the night still holding her, all the superst.i.tion of The Gap claimed her.

"I--I was afraid I would lose the s.h.i.+p." Meredith's mind wandered back to her hurried home-leaving; the dread that the s.h.i.+p that was to bear her from the Philippines might have gone. The mystic s.h.i.+p upon The Rock was all that was needed to fix her fancy.

"But--I was in time. I _am_ in time. The s.h.i.+p--is waiting. Everything is all right now!--quite all right, Sister?"

Angela went close to the bed.

"My dear one!" she whispered and slipped her arm under Meredith's head.

"It all seems so--plain in the morning, Sister. It is the night that makes us afraid. The night! I cannot remember--what it was--I dreamed."

"Never mind, little girl"--Angela's tears were dropping on the soft, smooth hair that was growing clammy; she felt the cold breath on her face--"never mind, little girl, the dream is past."

"Sister, it was a bad dream. I do not like bad dreams--tell Doris--what is it that I want you to tell Doris?"

"Try to sleep, beloved." Angela knelt.

Meredith slipped back to her childhood--she gave a short, hurting laugh.

"Tell her--tell Doris--I did try to learn my lesson--but----"

It was the opening of the door that startled Angela into consciousness.

Doris Fletcher stood within the room. Her eyes took in the scene, the pretty face against Sister Angela's bosom; the sunlight lying full across the bed and picking out into a gleam the golden cross that hung to the floor.

"I'm too--late!"

Agony rang in the quiet words.

"And I've travelled day and night! Her letter was forwarded to me."

The letter burned against Doris's bosom like a tangible thing. She crossed the room and sank beside the bed.

They all slipped through the following days as people do who realize that troubles do not come to them, but are overtaken on the way. They seemed always to have been there; some people pa.s.s on the other side, but if one's path lies close, then one must go with what courage possible--look hard, feel and groan with the understanding, and pa.s.s on as best he can bearing the memory with him.

Father n.o.ble came from many miles back in the hills. Riding his st.u.r.dy little horse, his loose black cloak floating like benignant wings bearing him on; his radiant old face s.h.i.+ning even in the face of death.

He stayed until the wound in the hillside was covered over Meredith's little form; stayed to see the flowers hide the scar, murmuring again and again: "In the hope of joyful resurrection." His was the task to bridge life and death, and there was no doubt in his beautiful soul.

"And now," he said, after four days, "I must go to Cleaver's Clearing"--the Clearing was twenty hard miles away. "There are children there who never heard of G.o.d until I took some toys to them last Christmas. Then they thought that I was G.o.d. They are sick now, poor children--bad food; no care--ah! well, they will learn, they will learn."

And the old man rode away.

And still Doris had not seen Meredith's child.

"I cannot, Sister," she had pleaded. "I can think of it only as George Thornton's child."

The hate in Doris's heart was so new and appalling a sensation that it frightened her.

She tried to think of the unseen child with the love that she felt for all children--but that one! She struggled to overcome the sickening aversion that grew, instead of lessened, while the days dragged on. But always the helpless child represented nothing but pa.s.sion, brutality, suffering, and disgrace. It was _not_ a child, a piteous, pleading child--it was the essence of Wrong made visible.

Sister Angela was deeply concerned. The unnatural att.i.tude called forth her old manner of authority. Sitting alone with Doris before the fire in the living room the evening of Meredith's funeral and Father n.o.ble's departure she grew stern and commanding.

"This will never do, my dear," she said. "It cannot be that life has made of you a cruel, unjust woman."

Doris dropped her eyes--they were wonderful eyes, her real and only claim to beauty. Dusky eyes they were, with a light in them of amber.

"How much did Merry tell you?" she asked, faintly, for the older woman looked so frail and pure that it seemed impossible that she knew the worst.

"My dear, she told me--nothing. Her letter said that she wanted to tell me things--things that she could not tell to G.o.d"--Angela unconsciously touched her cross--"but there was no time. No time."

"There are things that women cannot tell to G.o.d, Sister. Things that they can only tell to some women!"

A bitterness that she could not control shook Doris's voice. She shrank from touching the exquisite detachment of Sister Angela by the truth, and yet she must have as much sympathy as possible and, certainly, cooperation.

"Sister, this child should never have been born!"

The words reached where former words had failed. A flush touched Angela's white face--it was like sunrise on snow. Then, after a pause:

"Did--Meredith--think that?" A growing sternness gave Doris hope that she might be saved the details that were like poison in her blood.

"Yes. Protected by--by what is law--George Thornton----"

But Angela raised her thin, transparent hand commandingly. It was as if she were staying the torrents of wrong and shame that threatened to deluge all that she had gained by her life of renunciation and repression--and yet in her clear eyes there gleamed the understanding of the depths.

"May G.o.d have mercy upon--the child!" was what she said, and by those words she took her stand between past wrong and hope of future justice.

"You must take this child, Doris," she said. "All that you know and feel but make the course imperative and inevitable."

"Sister, how can I--feeling as I do?"

"Can you afford not to? Can you leave it--to such a man?"

"But, Sister, you do not know him. If I should conquer my aversion and take the child, if I succeeded in loving it--he would bide his time and claim it. The law that made this horrible thing possible covers his claim to the child."

Angela drooped back in her chair. She looked old and beaten.

"He must not have the child," she murmured. "It's the only chance for the salvation of Meredith's little girl. He _shall_ not have it!"

Doris bent toward the fire holding her cold, clasped hands to the heat.

Suddenly she turned.