“O my dear God! ’t will be a bit of Clement! Had ’e thought o’ that?”
Then she rose suddenly to her feet and expression came to her face—a very wonderful expression wherein were blended fear, awe, and something of vague but violent joy—as though one suddenly beheld a loved ghost from the dead.
“’T is as if all of un weern’t quite lost! A li’l left—a cheel of his! Wummon! You’m a holy thing to me—a holy thing evermore! You’m bearin’ sunshine for your summertime and my winter—if God so wills!”
Then she lifted up her voice and cried to Chris with a strange cry, and knelt down at her feet and kissed her hands and stroked them.
“Go to un,” she said, leaping up; “go to Clem, an’ tell un, in his ear, that I knaw. It’ll reach him if you whisper it. His soul ban’t so very far aways yet. Tell un I knaw, tu—you an’ me. He’d glory that I knawed. An’ pray henceforrard, as I shall, for a bwoy. Ax God for a bwoy—ax wi’out ceasin’ for a son full o’ Clem. Our sorrows might win to the Everlasting Ear this wance. But, for Christ’s sake, ax like wan who has a right to, not fawning an’ humble.”
The woman was transfigured as the significance of this news filled her mind. She wept before a splendid possibility. It fired her eyes and straightened her shrivelled stature. For a while her frantic utterances almost inspired Chris with the shadow of similar emotions; but another side of the picture knew no dawn. This the widow ignored—indeed it had not entered her head since her first comment on the confession. Now, however, the girl reminded her,—
“You forget a little what this must be to me, mother.”
“Light in darkness.”
“I hadn’t thought that; an the gert world won’t pity me, as you did when I first told you.”
“You ban’t feared o’ the world, be you? The world forgot un. ’T was your awn word. What’s the world to you, knawin’ what you knaw? Do ’e want to be treated soft by what was allus hell-hard to him? Four-and-thirty short years he lived, then the world beginned to ope its eyes to his paarts, an’ awnly then—tu late, when the thread of his days was spun. What’s the world to you and why should you care for its word, Chris Blanchard?”