THE FAIRY THAT CAME FOR RUBY

The night was dark, and the wind was chill outside, but light and warmth were in two happy hearts. With arms entwined and clasped hands they walked down the familiar road, transfigured now into strange beauty at every step. When two souls first pour out their flood of love, whatever the present happiness, it is the unconscious sense of a glad future that thrills them. It was the half-conscious sense of a sad past shared together that touched these two to-night.

"I feel like another man," said Christian; "to have the weight of these six years of disguise lifted away is a new birth." He seemed to breathe more freely.

"How glad I am it is gone, this haunting secret," said Mona, with a sigh of relief; but suddenly a fresh torment suggested itself. "What will people say?" she asked.

"Don't think of that. Let people say what they will. In these relations of life the world has always covered its nakedness in the musty rags of its old conventions, and dubbed its clothes morality. We'll not heed what people say, Mona."

"But the child?" said the girl, with some tremor of voice.

Christian answered the half-uttered question.

"Ruby is as much my daughter as Rachel was the daughter of Laban, and you are even now as much my wife as she was the wife of Jacob."

Mona glanced up into his face. "Can this be Christian?" she thought.

"Where one man sets himself apart for one woman," he continued, "there is true marriage, whether the mystic symbol of the Church be used or not. No; I've feared the world too long. I mean to face it now."

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Christian," answered Mona. "But surely to defy the world is foolishness, and marriage is a holy thing."

He stopped, and, with a smile, kissed the girl tenderly. "Never fear, darling—that shall be made as the world wants it. I was thinking of the past, not the future. And if ours was a sin, it was one of passion only, and we whispered each other—did we not?—that He who gave the love would forgive its transgression." Then they walked on. In the distance the hill above glowed red through the darkness. Danny's Contrary fire, which had smoldered all day, showed brightly again.

"Oh, how glad I am that all is over," repeated the girl, creeping closer beneath Christian's arm. "You said to-night to your father that a secret sin is a corroding thing. How truly I've felt it so when I've thought of my own poor father. You never knew him. He died before you came to us. He was a good, simple man, and loved us, though perhaps he left us poorer than we might have been, and more troubled than we were in the old days at Glen Rushen."

"No, I never knew him; but the thought of him has stung me to the quick when I've seen his daughter working for daily bread. It has been then that I've felt myself the meanest of men."

"Christian," continued Mona, regardless of the interruption, "have you ever thought that the dead are links that connect us with the living?"

"How?"

"Well, in this way. From our kin in heaven we can have no secrets; and when the living kin guess our hidden thought, our secret act, perhaps it has been our dead kin who have whispered of it."

"That is a strange fancy, Mona, an awful fancy. Few of us would dare to have secrets if we accepted it."

They were approaching the cottage, and could hear a merry child's voice singing. "Listen," said Mona, and they stopped. Then the girl's head dropped. Tears were again in her eyes.

"She's been sorrow as well as happiness to you, my brave Mona," said Christian. And he put her arms about his neck.

The girl lifted her face to his in the darkness. "That's true," she said. "Ah, how often in the early days did I gaze into the face of my fatherless little one, and feel a touch of awe in the presence of the mute soul that lay behind the speechless baby face, and wonder if some power above had told it something that its mother must needs hide from it, and if, when it spoke, it would reproach me with its own shame, or pity me for mine."

Christian smoothed her hand tenderly. "If the child suffered," he said, "before her race of life began, let it be mine henceforth to make it up to her with all that love can yet do."

"And when I heard its cry," said Mona, "its strange, pitiful cry as it awoke from that mystery, a baby's troubled dream, and looked into its red startled eyes and into its little face, all liquid grief, and said, 'It's only a dream, darling,' the thought has sometimes stolen up to my heart that perhaps some evil spirit had whispered to it the story of its shame—for what else had it to cry about so bitterly?"

Christian kissed her again, a great gulp in his throat. "Yes," he said, "in the eyes of men we may have wronged the child, but in the eternal world, when these few painful years are as a span, she will be ours indeed, and God will not ask by right of what symbol we claim her."

They had walked to the gate.

"Wait!" said Mona, and ran toward the door.

Christian thought she had gone to prepare her mother, but returning in an instant, and on tip-toe, with the light of laughter struggling through her tears, she beckoned him to follow her, with stealthy tread. Creeping up to the window, she took his hand and whispered, "Look!"

They were standing in the darkness and cold, but the house within was bright this winter's night, with one little human flower in bloom. Ruby had dressed the kitchen in hibbin and hollen and had scattered wheaten flour over the red berries to resemble snow. She was standing near Mrs. Cregeen's knee, being undressed for bed. Her heart had leaped all day at the thought of a new hat, which she was to wear for the first time next morning. This treasure had been hung on a peg over the plates above the dresser, and at intervals more or less frequent Ruby twisted about and cocked her eye up at it. It took a world of stolen glances to grow familiar with the infinite splendor of its bow and feather. While the threads and the buttons were being undone Ruby sang and gossiped. A well-filled water-crock had been set on the table, and touching this, the little one said:

"Do the fairies bathe in winter?"

"So they're saying, my veen," answered Mrs. Cregeen.

"Can I see the fairies if I lie awake all night? I'm not a bit sleepy. Can I see them all in their little velvet jackets—can I?"

"No, no; little girls must go to bed."

There was a pretty pretense at disappointment in the downward curve of the lip. The world had no real sorrow for the owner of that marvelous hat. The next instant the child sang:

Ruby interrupted her song to wriggle out of Mrs. Cregeen's hands, pull off her stocking, and hang it on one of the knobs of the dresser. "I hope it will be the Phynnodderee that comes to-night," she said.

"Why that one?" said Mrs. Cregeen, smiling.

"Because Danny says that's the fairy that loves little Manx girls."

"Danny shouldn't tell you such foolish old stories."

"Are they stories?"

"Yes."

"Oh!"

Another sly glance at the wonderful hat on the peg behind. That was a reality at all events.

"But I'm sure a good fairy will come for me to-night," insisted Ruby.

"Why are sure, Ruby veg?"

"Because—because I am."

Christian tightened his grasp of Mona's hand.

At that moment a gust of wind passed round the house. Mona remembered that to-night she was standing with Christian on the spot where last night she had parted with Danny.

"Listen," said Mrs. Cregeen to the child. "Pity the poor sailors at sea."

"Didn't Mona say Danny was at sea?"

"Yes, she was saying so."

Then the little one sang:

"Mammy, had Danny any father?"

"Everybody had a father, my veen."

"Had Ruby a father?"

"Hush, Ruby veg!"

Mona's hand unconsciously pressed the hand of Christian. "Oh," she muttered, and crept closer to his breast. Christian's bowels yearned for the child.

The silvery voice was singing again:

"I am quite sure a good fairy is coming," said Ruby, cocking her eye aslant at that peg on the dresser.

Christian could bear it no longer. He flung open the door, and snatched up the darling in his arms.

An hour later he and Mona came out again into the night, leaving the little one with laughing, wondering, wakeful eyes in bed, and Mrs. Cregeen sitting before the fire with something like happiness in her usually mournful face.

They took the road toward the town. They had no errand there, but the restless, tumultuous joy of this night would not leave them a moment's peace.

As they passed through the market-place they saw that the church windows were lit up. The bells were ringing. Numbers of young people were thronging in at the gates. But the parson was coming out of them. There was no pleasant expression on his face as he beheld the throngs that sought admission. It was Oiel Verree, the Eve of Mary. The bells were ringing for the only service in the year at which not the parson but the parishioners presided. It was an old Manx custom, that after prayers on Christmas-eve the church should be given up to the people for the singing of their native carols. Prayers were now over, and on his way through the market-place the parson encountered Tommy-Bill-beg among the others who were walking toward the church. He stopped the harbor-master, and said, "Mind you see that all is done in decency and order, and that you close my church before midnight."

"Aw, but the church is the people's, I'm thinkin'," said Tommy-Bill-beg, with a deprecating shake of his wise head.

"The people are as ignorant as goats," said the parson angrily.

"Aw, well, and you're the shepherd, so just make sheeps of them," answered Tommy, and passed on.

Laughing at the rejoinder, Christian and Mona went by the church, and, reaching the quay, they crossed the bridge at the top of the harbor. Then, hand in hand, they walked under the Horse Hill, and, without thinking what direction they took, they turned up the path that led toward the cottage in the old quarry.

Half the hillside seemed to be ablaze. Danny's fire over the Poolvash had spread north by many hundred yards. The wind was now blowing strongly from the sea, and fanned it into flame. The castle could be seen by its light from the black rocks fringed about with foam to the top of Fennella's Tower.

When they came abreast of the cottage they saw that a dim light burned in one window. They stepped up and looked into the house. On a bed, covered by a white sheet, lay all that remained of Kisseck. An old woman, set to watch the body, sat knitting beside it.

The deep roar of the sea was all that could be heard there above the moan of the wind.