Seasons of Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #4) (30 page)

Robbie, dumbfounded, could only shake his head.

“Are you sure you don’t mind, Robbie?” Alice asked anxiously, and they were the very words he had been struggling with, wondering how to say them to her. Surely God was good. Good to both of them.

“Na na! I’m happy for you!”

And with those words, Robbie Dunbar was once again a free man.

It was that very evening—why wait?—that Robbie wended his way to the Bloom homestead. He had no right to Tierney’s love, but he had to have her forgiveness. But yesterday, at the Bloom table, he had seen something . . . something in her eyes akin to the flame that had blazed between them in earlier days in Binkiebrae, and it gave him hope. At any rate, he decided doggedly, he had to know.

The evening shadows were lengthening when he rode into the Bloom yard, slid from the horse’s back, and knocked on the door of the house.

“Why, hello, Robbie. Come on in.” It was Lydia, friendly, inviting.

“I’ve coom to talk wi’ Tierney,” he said without preamble, looking over Lydia’s shoulder, into the room beyond.

“She’s not here, Robbie. She may be in the pasture with a pail of milk, teaching a calf to drink, or she may be taking a walk, which she does often of an evening. If it’s important . . . will you come in and wait?”

Lydia was cautious in her invitation, remembering the moment Tierney had shared with her about Robbie’s agreement to marry Alice Hoy. In fact, she had often prayed with Tierney, when her heart was about to break and she needed comfort and strength to face the future. A future without Robbie Dunbar, it seemed, was almost more than Tierney could contemplate. The thought of it, or prayers about it, may have been what drove her to these times she got away from the house, to walk the wilderness roads, to sit beside the lake, to be alone with her pain.

“Or,” Lydia offered, “you might rather come back another time—”

“Na na,” Robbie said, studying the farmyard, looking for a glimpse of Tierney. “I canna wait.”

“I hope, Robbie,” Lydia said gently, “it’s good news. That is, it isn’t anything that’ll upset our Tierney.”

“It’s good news, ma’am. The best!” And Robbie’s eyes, turned on his questioner, blazed with something Lydia had never seen in them before.

“Why, Robbie,” she said, “you look—”

“Look how, ma’am?”

“I don’t know how to put it . . . you look—you look
different
, somehow.”

“I
am
different!” Robbie, it seemed, could keep it a secret no longer. “I’m as different as night an’ day! An’ thass what I need to tell Tierney . . . it’s part of what I need to tell her.”

Lydia’s eyes, studying Robbie’s face, were slowly filling with comprehension.

“Robbie!” she said wonderingly. “Robbie Dunbar—is it possible you’ve given yourself to the Lord, that He’s become your Savior?”

The answer was clear to be seen. Robbie’s face—in spite of a deep tan and a day’s growth of beard—radiated the transaction that had changed him. Lydia caught her breath, with wonder and with awe.

Robbie looked happy enough to caper; Scotch dignity kept him flat-footed but couldn’t disguise the happiness that glowed from his eyes.

“Yes, ma’am. Thass what happened, a’ reet! An’ thass the first thing I want to tell her.

“I know I have no reet . . . no right,” he continued, humbly now, “to Tierney,
or
her love. But I jist have to try, don’t I? I’ve niver told her how much . . . how much I care. Though I think she knows.”

Lydia, a romantic at heart, was nodding.

“She needs to hear it, Robbie; she needs to hear you say it.”

“But first—
after
I tell her about accepting the Lord, and
before
I tell her I love her—I have to tell her how sorry I am—”

Robbie’s voice faltered. He scuffed his shoe on the porch as he took a moment to get his feelings under control. It was a time of highs and lows for Robbie Dunbar.

“I think, ma’am,” he said, taking a deep breath, “I’ll jist wander off toward the pasture an’ see if she’s there.”

Lydia watched him go with a prayer on her lips—for him and the urgency upon him, and for Tierney, who needed, more than anything, to hear what he had to say.

Turning to the house, the motherly woman wandered aimlessly around the kitchen, checked the reservoir for bathwater, flexed her aching fingers . . .

The screen door slammed.

“Oh, it’s you, Tierney,” Lydia said, asking immediately, “Did you see Robbie?”

Tierney stopped short. “See Robbie? Na na—”

“He’s looking for you. I didn’t know for sure where you were . . . he’s out there, somewhere, looking for you. He wants to talk to you.”

Lydia could barely keep from blurting out the secret.

Her expression turning heavy, Tierney headed for the stairs and her room. “I dinna care to see him. I canna see him . . .”

“But maybe you should—”

“Na na. I made up my mind to that when . . . when—well, you know,” Tierney said firmly yet with a sigh, and she took another step toward the stairs and escape.

“Wait!” Lydia was desperate. “I think . . . I think you should talk to him, Tierney.”

Surprised, Tierney paused. “Whativer can ye mean?” she asked slowly.

“There’ve been some changes . . . changes in the way things were.”

Tierney’s glance sharpened, and she asked again, “Whativer do ye mean? Tell me . . . oh, do tell me!”

Lydia could keep it a secret no longer.

“Tierney, darling Tierney,” the older woman’s voice trembled, and her eyes misted with happy tears, “he’s come . . . Robbie’s come to tell you that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior. And to ask, now, your forgiveness, too—”

With a choked cry, Tierney was across the expanse of the kitchen; the screen door slammed behind her, the porch resounded to the clatter of her shoes, the steps never felt the touch of her feet as she flew to find Robbie.

Flew to find Robbie Dunbar and saw a vision she was to remember the rest of her life: Striding toward her across the pasture, Robbie’s beloved figure was etched against the last rays of the sun, ringed about with an aura of light. Coming toward her. Robbie, coming to her at last.

Robbie, seeing her, breaking into a run, his leaping and bounding feet—feet that had once taken him away and were now bringing him back to her, his raised arm, his shout—expressing what words had not said all these years.

Stepping out of the loose shoes that so hindered her, her bare feet flying over the grassy expanse that divided them, Tierney sped, straight and true, into the arms of Robbie Dunbar.

Also by Ruth Glover

A Place Called Bliss

With Love from Bliss

Journey to Bliss