Then Molly’s eyes dropped from Jinnie to the boy, and a cry broke from her. Before her was the child for whom, in spite of the evidence of her smiling lips, she had truly mourned. The wan, blind face was turned upward, the golden hair lying in damp curls on the lovely head. Spontaneously the woman reached forward and took the little hand in hers. All the mother within her leaped up, like a brilliant flash of lightning.
“My baby!” was all she said; and Bobbie, white, trembling and palpitating, cried in a weird, high voice:
“I’ve found my mother!”
Then Jordan Morse understood. The hot blood was tearing to his ear drums. The blind boy he had persecuted and tortured, the boy he had made suffer, was his own son. That wonderful quality in the man, the fatherhood within him, rose in surging insistence. Instant remorse attacked him, as an oak is attacked by fierce winter storms. He saw the boy’s angelic face grow the color of death; saw Molly the Merry gather him up. Then a stab of jealousy cut his heart like a knife. He bent over with set jaws.
“Give him to me,” he cried. “He’s mine!”
Molly surrendered the child with reluctance, but terror and fright were depicted upon Bobbie’s face.
“Jinnie! Lafe! Peggy!” he screamed. “He’ll hurt me! The black man’s goin’ to kill me! Jinnie, pretty Jinnie––”
The passionate voice grew faint and ceased. Then the loving little heart burst in the boyish bosom, and Bobbie’s angels bore away his young soul to another world where blindness is not,—where his uplifted being would understand that the stars he’d loved,—the stars he’d gathered in his small, unseeing head,—were but a reflection 333 of those in God’s firmament. With one final quiver he straightened out in his father’s arms and was silent. All his loves and sorrows were in the eternal yesterdays, and to-day had delivered him into the charge of Lafe’s angels.
Jinnie was crying hysterically, and her father’s dying curse upon her uncle leapt into her mind. She was clinging to the cobbler, and both had moved to Peg, where the woman sat as if turned to stone.
Not a person in the courtroom stirred. In consternation the jury sat in their chairs like graven images, taking in the freshly wrought tragedy with tense expressions. The judge, too, leaned forward in his chair, watching.