When it was known that I had begun another story my mother might ask what it was to be about this time.
‘Fine we can guess who it is about,’ my sister would say pointedly.
‘Maybe you can guess, but it is beyond me,’ says my mother, with the meekness of one who knows that she is a dull person.
My sister scorned her at such times. ‘What woman is in all his books?’ she would demand.
‘I’m sure I canna say,’ replies my mother determinedly. ‘I thought the women were different every time.’
‘Mother, I wonder you can be so audacious! Fine you know what woman I mean.’
‘How can I know? What woman is it? You should bear in mind that I hinna your cleverness’ (they were constantly giving each other little knocks).
‘I won’t give you the satisfaction of saying her name. But this I will say, it is high time he was keeping her out of his books.’
And then as usual my mother would give herself away unconsciously. ‘That is what I tell him,’ she says chuckling, ‘and he tries to keep me out, but he canna; it’s more than he can do!’
On an evening after my mother had gone to bed, the first chapter would be brought upstairs, and I read, sitting at the foot of the bed, while my sister watched to make my mother behave herself, and my father cried H’sh! when there were interruptions. All would go well at the start, the reflections were accepted with a little nod of the head, the descriptions of scenery as ruts on the road that must be got over at a walking pace (my mother did not care for scenery, and that is why there is so little of it in my books). But now I am reading too quickly, a little apprehensively, because I know that the next paragraph begins with—let us say with, ‘Along this path came a woman’: I had intended to rush on here in a loud bullying voice, but ‘Along this path came a woman’ I read, and stop. Did I hear a faint sound from the other end of the bed? Perhaps I did not; I may only have been listening for it, but I falter and look up. My sister and I look sternly at my mother. She bites her under-lip and clutches the bed with both hands, really she is doing her best for me, but first comes a smothered gurgling sound, then her hold on herself relaxes and she shakes with mirth.
‘That’s a way to behave!’ cries my sister.
‘I cannot help it,’ my mother gasps.
‘And there’s nothing to laugh at.’
‘It’s that woman,’ my mother explains unnecessarily.
‘Maybe she’s not the woman you think her,’ I say, crushed.
‘Maybe not,’ says my mother doubtfully. ‘What was her name?’
‘Her name,’ I answer with triumph, ‘was not Margaret’; but this makes her ripple again. ‘I have so many names nowadays,’ she mutters.
‘H’sh!’ says my father, and the reading is resumed.
Perhaps the woman who came along the path was of tall and majestic figure, which should have shown my mother that I had contrived to start my train without her this time. But it did not.
‘What are you laughing at now?’ says my sister severely. ‘Do you not hear that she was a tall, majestic woman?’
‘It’s the first time I ever heard it said of her,’ replies my mother.
‘But she is.’
‘Ke fy, havers!’
‘The book says it.’
‘There will be a many queer things in the book. What was she wearing?’
I have not described her clothes. ‘That’s a mistake,’ says my mother. ‘When I come upon a woman in a book, the first thing I want to know about her is whether she was good-looking, and the second, how she was put on.’
The woman on the path was eighteen years of age, and of remarkable beauty.
‘That settles you,’ says my sister.
‘I was no beauty at eighteen,’ my mother admits, but here my father interferes unexpectedly. ‘There wasna your like in this countryside at eighteen,’ says he stoutly.
‘Pooh!’ says she, well pleased.
‘Were you plain, then?’ we ask.
‘Sal,’ she replies briskly, ‘I was far from plain.’
‘H’sh!’
Perhaps in the next chapter this lady (or another) appears in a carriage.
‘I assure you we’re mounting in the world,’ I hear my mother murmur, but I hurry on without looking up. The lady lives in a house where there are footmen—but the footmen have come on the scene too hurriedly. ‘This is more than I can stand,’ gasps my mother, and just as she is getting the better of a fit of laughter, ‘Footman, give me a drink of water,’ she cries, and this sets her off again. Often the readings had to end abruptly because her mirth brought on violent fits of coughing.
Sometimes I read to my sister alone, and she assured me that she could not see my mother among the women this time. This she said to humour me. Presently she would slip upstairs to announce triumphantly, ‘You are in again!’
Or in the small hours I might make a confidant of my father, and when I had finished reading he would say thoughtfully, ‘That lassie is very natural. Some of the ways you say she had—your mother had them just the same. Did you ever notice what an extraordinary woman your mother is?’
Then would I seek my mother for comfort. She was the more ready to give it because of her profound conviction that if I was found out—that is, if readers discovered how frequently and in how many guises she appeared in my books—the affair would become a public scandal.
‘You see Jess is not really you,’ I begin inquiringly.
‘Oh no, she is another kind of woman altogether,’ my mother says, and then spoils the compliment by adding naîvely, ‘She had but two rooms and I have six.’
I sigh. ‘Without counting the pantry, and it’s a great big pantry,’ she mutters.
This was not the sort of difference I could greatly plume myself upon, and honesty would force me to say, ‘As far as that goes, there was a time when you had but two rooms yourself—’
‘That’s long since,’ she breaks in. ‘I began with an up-the-stair, but I always had it in my mind—I never mentioned it, but there it was—to have the down-the-stair as well. Ay, and I’ve had it this many a year.’
‘Still, there is no denying that Jess had the same ambition.’
‘She had, but to her two-roomed house she had to stick all her born days. Was that like me?’
‘No, but she wanted—’
‘She wanted, and I wanted, but I got and she didna. That’s the difference betwixt her and me.’
‘If that is all the difference, it is little credit I can claim for having created her.’
My mother sees that I need soothing. ‘That is far from being all the difference,’ she would say eagerly. ‘There’s my silk, for instance. Though I say it mysel, there’s not a better silk in the valley of Strathmore. Had Jess a silk of any kind—not to speak of a silk like that?’
‘Well, she had no silk, but you remember how she got that cloak with beads.’
‘An eleven and a bit! Hoots, what was that to boast of! I tell you, every single yard of my silk cost—’
‘Mother, that is the very way Jess spoke about her cloak!’
She lets this pass, perhaps without hearing it, for solicitude about her silk has hurried her to the wardrobe where it hangs.
‘Ah, mother, I am afraid that was very like Jess!’
‘How could it be like her when she didna even have a wardrobe? I tell you what, if there had been a real Jess and she had boasted to me about her cloak with beads, I would have said to her in a careless sort of voice, “Step across with me, Jess and I’ll let you see something that is hanging in my wardrobe.” That would have lowered her pride!’
‘I don’t believe that is what you would have done, mother.’
Then a sweeter expression would come into her face. ‘No,’ she would say reflectively, ‘it’s not.’
‘What would you have done? I think I know.’
‘You canna know. But I’m thinking I would have called to mind that she was a poor woman, and ailing, and terrible windy about her cloak, and I would just have said it was a beauty and that I wished I had one like it.’
‘Yes, I am certain that is what you would have done. But oh, mother, that is just how Jess would have acted if some poorer woman than she had shown her a new shawl.’
‘Maybe, but though I hadna boasted about my silk I would have wanted to do it.’
‘Just as Jess would have been fidgeting to show off her eleven and a bit!’
It seems advisable to jump to another book; not to my first, because—well, as it was my first there would naturally be something of my mother in it, and not to the second, as it was my first novel and not much esteemed even in our family. (But the little touches of my mother in it are not so bad.) Let us try the story about the minister.
My mother’s first remark is decidedly damping. ‘Many a time in my young days,’ she says, ‘I played about the Auld Licht manse, but I little thought I should live to be the mistress of it!’
‘But Margaret is not you.’
‘N-no, oh no. She had a very different life from mine. I never let on to a soul that she is me!’
‘She was not meant to be you when I began. Mother, what a way you have of coming creeping in!’
‘You should keep better watch on yourself.’
‘Perhaps if I had called Margaret by some other name—’
‘I should have seen through her just the same. As soon as I heard she was the mother I began to laugh. In some ways, though, she’s no’ so very like me. She was long in finding out about Babbie. I’se uphaud I should have been quicker.’
‘Babbie, you see, kept close to the garden-wall.’
‘It’s not the wall up at the manse that would have hidden her from me.’
‘She came out in the dark.’
‘I’m thinking she would have found me looking for her with a candle.’
‘And Gavin was secretive.’
‘That would have put me on my mettle.’
‘She never suspected anything.’
‘I wonder at her.’
But my new heroine is to be a child. What has madam to say to that?
A child! Yes, she has something to say even to that. ‘This beats all!’ are the words.
‘Come, come, mother, I see what you are thinking, but I assure you that this time—’
‘Of course not,’ she says soothingly, ‘oh no, she canna be me’; but anon her real thoughts are revealed by the artless remark, ‘I doubt, though, this is a tough job you have on hand—it is so long since I was a bairn.’
We came very close to each other in those talks. ‘It is a queer thing,’ she would say softly, ‘that near everything you write is about this bit place. You little expected that when you began. I mind well the time when it never entered your head, any more than mine, that you could write a page about our squares and wynds. I wonder how it has come about?’
There was a time when I could not have answered that question, but that time had long passed. ‘I suppose, mother, it was because you were most at home in your own town, and there was never much pleasure to me in writing of people who could not have known you, nor of squares and wynds you never passed through, nor of a country-side where you never carried your father’s dinner in a flagon. There is scarce a house in all my books where I have not seemed to see you a thousand times, bending over the fireplace or winding up the clock.’
‘And yet you used to be in such a quandary because you knew nobody you could make your women-folk out of! Do you mind that, and how we both laughed at the notion of your having to make them out of me?’
‘I remember.’
‘And now you’ve gone back to my father’s time. It’s more than sixty years since I carried his dinner in a flagon through the long parks of Kinnordy.’
‘I often go into the long parks, mother, and sit on the stile at the edge of the wood till I fancy I see a little girl coming toward me with a flagon in her hand.’
‘Jumping the burn (I was once so proud of my jumps!) and swinging the flagon round so quick that what was inside hadna time to fall out. I used to wear a magenta frock and a white pinafore. Did I ever tell you that?’
‘Mother, the little girl in my story wears a magenta frock and a white pinafore.’
‘You minded that! But I’m thinking it wasna a lassie in a pinafore you saw in the long parks of Kinnordy, it was just a gey done auld woman.’
‘It was a lassie in a pinafore, mother, when she was far away, but when she came near it was a gey done auld woman.’
‘And a fell ugly one!’
‘The most beautiful one I shall ever see.’
‘I wonder to hear you say it. Look at my wrinkled auld face.’
‘It is the sweetest face in all the world.’
‘See how the rings drop off my poor wasted finger.’
‘There will always be someone nigh, mother, to put them on again.’
‘Ay, will there! Well I know it. Do you mind how when you were but a bairn you used to say, “Wait till I’m a man, and you’ll never have a reason for greeting again?”’
I remembered.
‘You used to come running into the house to say, “There’s a proud dame going down the Marywellbrae in a cloak that is black on one side and white on the other; wait till I’m a man, and you’ll have one the very same.” And when I lay on gey hard beds you said, “When I’m a man you’ll lie on feathers.” You saw nothing bonny, you never heard of my setting my heart on anything, but what you flung up your head and cried, “Wait till I’m a man.” You fair shamed me before the neighbours, and yet I was windy, too. And now it has all come true like a dream. I can call to mind not one little thing I ettled for in my lusty days that hasna been put into my hands in my auld age; I sit here useless, surrounded by the gratification of all my wishes and all my ambitions, and at times I’m near terrified, for it’s as if God had mista’en me for some other woman.’
‘Your hopes and ambitions were so simple,’ I would say, but she did not like that. ‘They werena that simple,’ she would answer, flushing.
I am reluctant to leave those happy days, but the end must be faced, and as I write I seem to see my mother growing smaller and her face more wistful, and still she lingers with us, as if God had said, ‘Child of mine, your time has come, be not afraid.’ And she was not afraid, but still she lingered, and He waited, smiling. I never read any of that last book to her; when it was finished she was too heavy with years to follow a story. To me this was as if my book must go out cold into the world (like all that may come after it from me), and my sister, who took more thought for others and less for herself than any other human being I have known, saw this, and by some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into being once again the woman she had been. On a day but three weeks before she died my father and I were called softly upstairs. My mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved to sit, in her old chair by the window, with a manuscript in her hands. But she was looking about her without much understanding. ‘Just to please him,’ my sister whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my mother began to read. I looked at my sister. Tears of woe were stealing down her face. Soon the reading became very slow and stopped. After a pause, ‘There was something you were to say to him,’ my sister reminded her. ‘Luck,’ muttered a voice as from the dead, ‘luck.’ And then the old smile came running to her face like a lamp-lighter, and she said to me, ‘I am ower far gone to read, but I’m thinking I am in it again!’ My father put her Testament in her hands, and it fell open—as it always does—at the Fourteenth of John. She made an effort to read but could not. Suddenly she stooped and kissed the broad page. ‘Will that do instead?’ she asked.
For years I had been trying to prepare myself for my mother’s death, trying to foresee how she would die, seeing myself when she was dead. Even then I knew it was a vain thing I did, but I am sure there was no morbidness in it. I hoped I should be with her at the end, not as the one she looked at last but as him from whom she would turn only to look upon her best-beloved, not my arm but my sister’s should be round her when she died, not my hand but my sister’s should close her eyes. I knew that I might reach her too late; I saw myself open a door where there was none to greet me, and go up the old stair into the old room. But what I did not foresee was that which happened. I little thought it could come about that I should climb the old stair, and pass the door beyond which my mother lay dead, and enter another room first, and go on my knees there.
My mother’s favourite paraphrase is one known in our house as David’s because it was the last he learned to repeat. It was also the last thing she read—
Art thou afraid his power shall failWhen comes thy evil day?And can an all-creating armGrow weary or decay?
Art thou afraid his power shall failWhen comes thy evil day?And can an all-creating armGrow weary or decay?
I heard her voice gain strength as she read it, I saw her timid face take courage, but when came my evil day, then at the dawning, alas for me, I was afraid.
In those last weeks, though we did not know it, my sister was dying on her feet. For many years she had been giving her life, a little bit at a time, for another year, another month, latterly for another day, of her mother, and now she was worn out. ‘I’ll never leave you, mother.’—‘Fine I know you’ll never leave me.’ I thought that cry so pathetic at the time, but I was not to know its full significance until it was only the echo of a cry. Looking at these two then it was to me as if my mother had set out for the new country, and my sister held her back. But I see with a clearer vision now. It is no longer the mother but the daughter who is in front, and she cries, ‘Mother, you are lingering so long at the end, I have ill waiting for you.’
But she knew no more than we how it was to be; if she seemed weary when we met her on the stair, she was still the brightest, the most active figure in my mother’s room; she never complained, save when she had to depart on that walk which separated them for half an hour. How reluctantly she put on her bonnet, how we had to press her to it, and how often, having gone as far as the door, she came back to stand by my mother’s side. Sometimes as we watched from the window, I could not but laugh, and yet with a pain at my heart, to see her hasting doggedly onward, not an eye for right or left, nothing in her head but the return. There was always my father in the house, than whom never was a more devoted husband, and often there were others, one daughter in particular, but they scarce dared tend my mother—this one snatched the cup jealously from their hands. My mother liked it best from her. We all knew this. ‘I like them fine, but I canna do without you.’ My sister, so unselfish in all other things, had an unwearying passion for parading it before us. It was the rich reward of her life.
The others spoke among themselves of what must come soon, and they had tears to help them, but this daughter would not speak of it, and her tears were ever slow to come. I knew that night and day she was trying to get ready for a world without her mother in it, but she must remain dumb; none of us was so Scotch as she, she must bear her agony alone, a tragic solitary Scotchwoman. Even my mother, who spoke so calmly to us of the coming time, could not mention it to her. These two, the one in bed, and the other bending over her, could only look long at each other, until slowly the tears came to my sister’s eyes, and then my mother would turn away her wet face. And still neither said a word, each knew so well what was in the other’s thoughts, so eloquently they spoke in silence, ‘Mother, I am loath to let you go,’ and ‘Oh my daughter, now that my time is near, I wish you werena quite so fond of me.’ But when the daughter had slipped away my mother would grip my hand and cry, ‘I leave her to you; you see how she has sown, it will depend on you how she is to reap.’ And I made promises, but I suppose neither of us saw that she had already reaped.
In the night my mother might waken and sit up in bed, confused by what she saw. While she slept, six decades or more had rolled back and she was again in her girlhood; suddenly recalled from it she was dizzy, as with the rush of the years. How had she come into this room? When she went to bed last night, after preparing her father’s supper, there had been a dresser at the window: what had become of the salt-bucket, the meal-tub, the hams that should be hanging from the rafters? There were no rafters; it was a papered ceiling. She had often heard of open beds, but how came she to be lying in one? To fathom these things she would try to spring out of bed and be startled to find it a labour, as if she had been taken ill in the night. Hearing her move I might knock on the wall that separated us, this being a sign, prearranged between us, that I was near by, and so all was well, but sometimes the knocking seemed to belong to the past, and she would cry, ‘That is my father chapping at the door, I maun rise and let him in.’ She seemed to see him—and it was one much younger than herself that she saw—covered with snow, kicking clods of it from his boots, his hands swollen and chapped with sand and wet. Then I would hear—it was a common experience of the night—my sister soothing her lovingly, and turning up the light to show her where she was, helping her to the window to let her see that it was no night of snow, even humouring her by going downstairs, and opening the outer door, and calling into the darkness, ‘Is anybody there?’ and if that was not sufficient, she would swaddle my mother in wraps and take her through the rooms of the house, lighting them one by one, pointing out familiar objects, and so guiding her slowly through the sixty odd years she had jumped too quickly. And perhaps the end of it was that my mother came to my bedside and said wistfully, ‘Am I an auld woman?’
But with daylight, even during the last week in which I saw her, she would be up and doing, for though pitifully frail she no longer suffered from any ailment. She seemed so well comparatively that I, having still the remnants of an illness to shake off, was to take a holiday in Switzerland, and then return for her, when we were all to go to the much-loved manse of her much-loved brother in the west country. So she had many preparations on her mind, and the morning was the time when she had any strength to carry them out. To leave her house had always been a month’s work for her, it must be left in such perfect order, every corner visited and cleaned out, every chest probed to the bottom, the linen lifted out, examined and put back lovingly as if to make it lie more easily in her absence, shelves had to be re-papered, a strenuous week devoted to the garret. Less exhaustively, but with much of the old exultation in her house, this was done for the last time, and then there was the bringing out of her own clothes, and the spreading of them upon the bed and the pleased fingering of them, and the consultations about which should be left behind. Ah, beautiful dream! I clung to it every morning; I would not look when my sister shook her head at it, but long before each day was done I too knew that it could never be. It had come true many times, but never again. We two knew it, but when my mother, who must always be prepared so long beforehand, called for her trunk and band-boxes we brought them to her, and we stood silent, watching, while she packed.
The morning came when I was to go away. It had come a hundred times, when I was a boy, when I was an undergraduate, when I was a man, when she had seemed big and strong to me, when she was grown so little and it was I who put my arms round her. But always it was the same scene. I am not to write about it, of the parting and the turning back on the stair, and two people trying to smile, and the setting off again, and the cry that brought me back. Nor shall I say more of the silent figure in the background, always in the background, always near my mother. The last I saw of these two was from the gate. They were at the window which never passes from my eyes. I could not see my dear sister’s face, for she was bending over my mother, pointing me out to her, and telling her to wave her hand and smile, because I liked it so. That action was an epitome of my sister’s life.
I had been gone a fortnight when the telegram was put into my hands. I had got a letter from my sister, a few hours before, saying that all was well at home. The telegram said in five words that she had died suddenly the previous night. There was no mention of my mother, and I was three days’ journey from home.
The news I got on reaching London was this: my mother did not understand that her daughter was dead, and they were waiting for me to tell her.
I need not have been such a coward. This is how these two died—for, after all, I was too late by twelve hours to see my mother alive.
Their last night was almost gleeful. In the old days that hour before my mother’s gas was lowered had so often been the happiest that my pen steals back to it again and again as I write: it was the time when my mother lay smiling in bed and we were gathered round her like children at play, our reticence scattered on the floor or tossed in sport from hand to hand, the author become so boisterous that in the pauses they were holding him in check by force. Rather woful had been some attempts latterly to renew those evenings, when my mother might be brought to the verge of them, as if some familiar echo called her, but where she was she did not clearly know, because the past was roaring in her ears like a great sea. But this night was a last gift to my sister. The joyousness of their voices drew the others in the house upstairs, where for more than an hour my mother was the centre of a merry party and so clear of mental eye that they, who were at first cautious, abandoned themselves to the sport, and whatever they said, by way of humorous rally, she instantly capped as of old, turning their darts against themselves until in self-defence they were three to one, and the three hard pressed. How my sister must have been rejoicing. Once again she could cry, ‘Was there ever such a woman!’ They tell me that such a happiness was on the daughter’s face that my mother commented on it, that having risen to go they sat down again, fascinated by the radiance of these two. And when eventually they went, the last words they heard were, ‘They are gone, you see, mother, but I am here, I will never leave you,’ and ‘Na, you winna leave me; fine I know that.’ For some time afterwards their voices could be heard from downstairs, but what they talked of is not known. And then came silence. Had I been at home I should have been in the room again several times, turning the handle of the door softly, releasing it so that it did not creak, and standing looking at them. It had been so a thousand times. But that night, would I have slipped out again, mind at rest, or should I have seen the change coming while they slept?
Let it be told in the fewest words. My sister awoke next morning with a headache. She had always been a martyr to headaches, but this one, like many another, seemed to be unusually severe. Nevertheless she rose and lit my mother’s fire and brought up her breakfast, and then had to return to bed. She was not able to write her daily letter to me, saying how my mother was, and almost the last thing she did was to ask my father to write it, and not to let on that she was ill, as it would distress me. The doctor was called, but she rapidly became unconscious. In this state she was removed from my mother’s bed to another. It was discovered that she was suffering from an internal disease. No one had guessed it. She herself never knew. Nothing could be done. In this unconsciousness she passed away, without knowing that she was leaving her mother. Had I known, when I heard of her death, that she had been saved that pain, surely I could have gone home more bravely with the words,
Art thou afraid His power failWhen comes thy evil day?
Art thou afraid His power failWhen comes thy evil day?
Ah, you would think so, I should have thought so, but I know myself now. When I reached London I did hear how my sister died, but still I was afraid. I saw myself in my mother’s room telling her why the door of the next room was locked, and I was afraid. God had done so much, and yet I could not look confidently to Him for the little that was left to do. ‘O ye of little faith!’ These are the words I seem to hear my mother saying to me now, and she looks at me so sorrowfully.
He did it very easily, and it has ceased to seem marvellous to me because it was so plainly His doing. My timid mother saw the one who was never to leave her carried unconscious from the room, and she did not break down. She who used to wring her hands if her daughter was gone for a moment never asked for her again, they were afraid to mention her name; an awe fell upon them. But I am sure they need not have been so anxious. There are mysteries in life and death, but this was not one of them. A child can understand what happened. God said that my sister must come first, but He put His hand on my mother’s eyes at that moment and she was altered.
They told her that I was on my way home, and she said with a confident smile, ‘He will come as quick as trains can bring him.’ That is my reward, that is what I have got for my books. Everything I could do for her in this life I have done since I was a boy; I look back through the years and I cannot see the smallest thing left undone.
They were buried together on my mother’s seventy-sixth birthday, though there had been three days between their deaths. On the last day, my mother insisted on rising from bed and going through the house. The arms that had so often helped her on that journey were now cold in death, but there were others only less loving, and she went slowly from room to room like one bidding good-bye, and in mine she said, ‘The beautiful rows upon rows of books, ant he said every one of them was mine, all mine!’ and in the east room, which was her greatest triumph, she said caressingly, ‘My nain bonny room!’ All this time there seemed to be something that she wanted, but the one was dead who always knew what she wanted, and they produced many things at which she shook her head. They did not know then that she was dying, but they followed her through the house in some apprehension, and after she returned to bed they saw that she was becoming very weak. Once she said eagerly, ‘Is that you, David?’ and again she thought she heard her father knocking the snow off his boots. Her desire for that which she could not name came back to her, and at last they saw that what she wanted was the old christening robe. It was brought to her, and she unfolded it with trembling, exultant hands, and when she had made sure that it was still of virgin fairness her old arms went round it adoringly, and upon her face there was the ineffable mysterious glow of motherhood. Suddenly she said, ‘Wha’s bairn’s dead? is a bairn of mine dead?’ but those watching dared not speak, and then slowly as if with an effort of memory she repeated our names aloud in the order in which we were born. Only one, who should have come third among the ten, did she omit, the one in the next room, but at the end, after a pause, she said her name and repeated it again and again and again, lingering over it as if it were the most exquisite music and this her dying song. And yet it was a very commonplace name.
They knew now that she was dying. She told them to fold up the christening robe and almost sharply she watched them put it away, and then for some time she talked of the long lovely life that had been hers, and of Him to whom she owed it. She said good-bye to them all, and at last turned her face to the side where her best-beloved had lain, and for over an hour she prayed. They only caught the words now and again, and the last they heard were ‘God’ and ‘love.’ I think God was smiling when He took her to Him, as He had so often smiled at her during those seventy-six years.
I saw her lying dead, and her face was beautiful and serene. But it was the other room I entered first, and it was by my sister’s side that I fell upon my knees. The rounded completeness of a woman’s life that was my mother’s had not been for her. She would not have it at the price. ‘I’ll never leave you, mother.’—‘Fine I know you’ll never leave me.’ The fierce joy of loving too much, it is a terrible thing. My sister’s mouth was firmly closed, as if she had got her way.
And now I am left without them, but I trust my memory will ever go back to those happy days, not to rush through them, but dallying here and there, even as my mother wanders through my books. And if I also live to a time when age must dim my mind and the past comes sweeping back like the shades of night over the bare road of the present it will not, I believe, be my youth I shall see but hers, not a boy clinging to his mother’s skirt and crying, ‘Wait till I’m a man, and you’ll lie on feathers,’ but a little girl in a magenta frock and a white pinafore, who comes toward me through the long parks, singing to herself, and carrying her father’s dinner in a flagon.
THE END
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLEPrinters to Her Majesty