In some alarm Comethup, with a hasty glance behind him, called out hurriedly to know who was there. The movement began again, and a figure came slowly from between the trees and approached him in a sidelong, hesitating fashion. Comethup, summoning his courage, made a hasty step forward and was confronted by old Medmer Theed, the shoemaker.
“Why, how you startled me!” exclaimed the young man. “Why are you dodging and hiding among the trees like this?”
The old man came nearer to him and laid a thin, knotted hand on his arm. “To watch for her, to wait for her,” he whispered. “See”—he waved his other hand toward the dark old house—“it’s all silent and empty now, nothing to be seen. But she’ll come back, she’ll come back—just as the other child might have come; I wait for her as I waited for the other. But all my dreams have confused me. I don’t know which is alive and which is dead, or whether both are alive or both dead, or whether there was only one, after all. But she’ll come back, and so I wait for her. Sometimes I dream that she has come back already, after I’ve gone to my bed; and I wake with a start, thinking I hear her knocking, knocking at the door. But there’s no one there and the street is empty. But she’ll come back here.”
“But why should she come back?” asked Comethup sadly. “She is in London with her husband, happily married. Didn’t you know that?”
The old man laughed a little scornfully. “Happily married!” he echoed. “Does a child weep when it is happy? are there tears in a woman’s eyes when all is well with her?”
“Yes, of course, sometimes,” replied Comethup. “But why do you ask?”
“Listen. She was sent to me as a tiny child, straight from the arms of God, to comfort me when—when all my dreams were wrong. I have watched her grow up; have seen the sunlight gladly follow her across the doorway and across the floor of my shop when she flitted in—brighter than any sunlight—and sat beside me. The time came when she came to me less and less often; when she would only flit in sometimes, bringing the sunlight, and put her arms about my neck and her cheek against mine, and whisper a word or two and run away again. But I loved her—she was sent to me, she belonged to me. Mine was the charge to watch over her, and I watched for a long, long time. I saw her grow to girlhood; I saw her become a woman—just as the other had grown; and then began the time when I must watch her indeed. I have lain here among the trees many and many a night, only that I might see the light burning calmly in her window. And then the time came when I saw something else.”
“Go on,” said Comethup in a low voice.
“I saw him come—come like a thief in the night, calling softly to her; whispering softly, with his arms about her. See”—he stretched out his arms and shook them stiff and hard before Comethup—“I am strong; much labour has made me strong. I wish now that I had caught him by his white throat and turned his smiling face up to the stars and held him so until he died.”