Jimmy Quixote: A Novel

by Tom Gallon

He read no more then; he got up and paced about the room, holding the letter in his hands. For he seemed to see her as she had once stood before him, with the tears swimming in her eyes; he seemed to see himself as a lower, meaner thing, because he had told her callously of the arrangement he had made to save her honour. This woman—who could write this and mean it all!

Another letter, further on, was written with beautiful tenderness, as she might have written to him had she stood in the nearest and dearest relation to him. It is scarcely too much to say that he read it with awe and wonder.

"——For they tell me that women sometimes die at such a time as that; and I was never strong. But I am not afraid; that might be best for everyone. Only I want to tell you now—with all the earnestness that is in me, and with all the strength that this change in me has given—that I never loved him. On the night he asked me to marry him I came to you. (Oh, do you remember the old shabby, shadowy room, and you in the light of the lamp, my dear; and all the cold world outside?) I prayed then that you might say something to me; that you might, out of some love for me, snatch me from him. But you did not speak. Then I was sorry for him—and I promised. But so surely as I believe in God, so surely do I write here that I did not love him."

"The child is yours! Don't look away from this when you read it, Jimmy dear,—because it's true. The child that is to be mine—born of my body, and part of my very soul—is the spirit-child that might in some better, happier time have been yours. So much is that so, that I have felt, through all the doubts and fears of these months, that the child is yours; the other man has never for a moment entered into my thoughts. He never did, and the sin was never mine. In the long, long dreams of my girlhood, when thoughts and desires were mine that I did not understand, it was always you—never anyone else. The only sorrow I have had—the bitterest thought of all—was that I had been spoiled in your sight; I never thought of anything else. So that if I die, I shall die with that happiness; that I was your wife, not alone in name, but in thought. I never have belonged to anyone else."

He laid it aside reverently with the others, and went on reading. All the dear intimate thoughts of her—so innocent and so kindly—so sweet and whimsical—were spread here for him; he wondered that he could ever have thought of any other woman. His heart leaped at the thought that she belonged to him; that he might claim her, and tell her that he loved her. He went on reading.

"I scrawl this in pencil; because I want to write to you first of all, my dear—I want to speak to you before I speak to anyone. It is all right; the child lies warm within my arms, just as I used to hold that poor, shabby old doll of mine you laughed at when I was a child. Do you remember? Why do we grow up, I wonder; and yet it's beautiful to grow up—wonderful to suffer, and to know for what we suffer. You won't read this; I shall only dream that you read it, and that something impossible keeps you away from me, and that you are a little sorry and yet a little glad. For your baby—yours and mine, dear—is the prettiest baby in all the world; quite what she ought to be. Aren't you proud of her?"

Proud of her? He longed then to go at once and find the child; wanted, almost savagely, to take the mite in his arms, and hide his shamed face upon her, and whisper his love for the woman who had waited so long for it. For here was the record of all her patience—all the dear wonder of her. He whispered her name brokenly while he read. "Moira!—Moira!"

"You were not kind to me to-day, Jimmy, dear," she wrote again. "I wanted so much for you to be kind to me to-day; I came to tell you about the baby. You were very patient; and once your eyes smiled at me. But you were only sorry for me, as you always are; and I would have been so glad for just a word of tenderness. You asked if you should get a cab for me; you would have said that to any other woman—wouldn't you? And I had dreamt the night before that your arms were about me, and that you whispered to me something I have longed so often to hear you say."

"And the someone else? I am mad at the thought of it; wild at the thought that I could have been so blind as not to understand. I have thought sometimes that only your pride kept you from me—or perhaps a little the thought of what I had done; and all the time you have thought of her. What shall I do; how can I find a way? And yet in my selfish heart I am glad to think that I hold you; that she can never come into your life. Can you forget her? Can you presently come to love me a little, and to think that after all I belong to you?"

A little further on she wrote in a more despondent tone; he remembered by the date that this was the time when she had come to him in the hour of his degradation, and had set him to his work again.