“Then you stand acquitted of all responsibility of faulty impulse except about the murder of Bill, which didn’t come off,” Gabriel answered in a gentle, serious, and respectful voice that soothed me into a cheerful frame of mind over my crimes even before he had more than half uttered the words. I felt hope for myself rise in my heart.
“And then—then you came to the door and began to sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ so that eyes in my soul opened suddenly, and I saw Him standing and looking pitifully down into my awful black heart, and I felt Him reach out His hand to me in the darkness. I’ve always avoided and been afraid of God before, but now do you think He feels about me as He did the man on the other cross who had done awful things, I forget just what, and as long as Bill and the baby are both alive, and I worked so hard, He will forgive me and love me? And give me more awful work to do? Tell me, and what you say I will believe.” I crouched at his knee as I asked the question breathlessly.
“Oh, you wonderful, foolish woman, you! Don’t you know that the good God knows and claims His own?” Gabriel answered, as he bent forward and put his hand on the head that had bowed on his knee. For a heart-still instant we trembled together, then he said quietly and humbly: “I give up. All my life I have prayed that my ‘woman’ would be one who had seen her Master face to face. Stumbling in the darkness, groping, both of us, we found each other and—clung. Are you mine? God, dare I claim a miracle such as You sent to Your servants of old? Have we together met You in the bush, and is it burning? Can we believe that You mean to”—
Then suddenly, in the very midst of his prayer, came a great, white, steady glare, which rent the black clouds above us and revealed us to each other, like the sun at high noon. The very mountains seemed to reel in it, and the forest behind us was stilled from the rack of the winds.
And clasping his knees, I looked and looked into his eyes, down, down until I found a light more blinding than that without, while I could feel his searching mine sternly, solemnly, and with a hope so great that I was tempted to cower, but was prevented by a fierce hunger that rose in me and demanded. I don’t know how long the light lasted, but when it went out, and had left us in the night, the ordeal was over, and I was welded into his arms, and his lips were pouring out love to me in broken words of blessing and demand.
“Are you real?” he whispered, with my cheek pressed hard against his, and his arms terrific with tenderness. “Can I believe it is true? Can I claim a miracle? Can I?”
“Yes,” I answered with triumphant certainty in my mind and voice—“yes. It’s that revelation you said you—that is, the—the man that was coming for me would have. I know it’s a miracle, because I am as afraid of a preacher as of—of that thing rustling out there in the bushes; but if God let me get into your arms this awful way He means for me to stay. And it’s my miracle, not yours. I needed one, and you didn’t. You are it! You don’t think He will take you away from me in the daylight, do you?”
“Never,” he laughed against my lips, with the coax and woo both in his throat, under my hand pressed against it. And that was the taming of the wild me.
A long time after, when I had settled myself comfortably against his shoulder, and gone permanently to housekeeping in the parsonage of his arms, softly the clouds above us drifted apart, and a glorious full moon shone down on us in the warmest congratulatory approval.
“Let me look good at you, love-woman, so I’ll not confuse you with the other flowers when morning comes,” Gabriel fluted from above my head as he attempted to turn me on his arm a fraction of an inch away from him.