"That is what she meant," he said. "What is it all about?" And he lay
back in an arm-chair and read.
"She rose, frail and graceful, in a long reach of the river. The
willows that thickly lined the bank, the oak that threw his shadow
magnificently from the towing-path, watched her rise, a single reed in
the river. 'Only a reed,' said they. And the reed grew.
"Rain and snow bowed her tall form, but they left her ever the same. In
the summer-time the flat-leaved water lilies gathered round her, and
owned her as their queen. And her life, so weak yet so sure, made the
willows and the oak her friends. The willows spoke to her of their
fifty years of growth; the oak of his battles with the winter wind in
the watches of the night, when she lay along the tops of the wavelets;
and she in return sang to them in the breeze, and laughed back on them
in the sunshine. And they grew to reverence her; for their lord, the
river, on whose banks they lived, had taken her to his arms. From him,
the everlasting river, the king whose silver path lay graven for ever
in the certain earth, she learnt the meaning of the mystery of life;
and she whispered it to them.
"Then came a mighty hurricane. Trees bent or broke to the storm; the
cattle were blown about the field; sheds and houses were overset; and
the oak that had weathered all the other winds strained and creaked and
cracked and crashed over the river. The branches splashed and hissed in
the water, and, swaying up and down beneath the surface, broke the
frail reed and she was swept away.
"And the willow, as he dropped his thin train in the stream, lamented
her; and the lilies that bloomed again in summer time in the place
where her graceful stalk had swung, lamented her; and the birds that
had caroled to her bright laughter lamented her; the sky that had gazed
on her bravery, the sun that had shone on her frailty, the wind that
had worried her, the rain that had beaten her, the stream that had fed
her and tended her, all lamented her; and their world was the poorer
for her loss that day."
"It is like my mother," he said.
The likeness was but partly true; but he fastened on it, and left his
argument unillustrated. Clocks ticked and tinkled through the silent
house as he sat on and thought.
She had taught him his letters, and held him on his pony; she had
watched him as he swam his first yard and leaped his first fence; she
had given him his prayer-book and his little boxing-gloves; she had
held his Latin dictionary, and they had together discussed which words
they must look for and which they might guess at. His earliest hymn,
and his first fairy tale; his Noah's ark, his tops, his whips, his
Irish terrier; his prizes for the hurdle race and for Greek; his
tempers and penitences, his successes and tears, were all so mingled
with her and she with them that he scarcely knew where her life ended
and where his began. In the shadow of her strength his life had been
fostered; and when she was laid helpless for ever on her couch, and the
strong boy's head bent over her at morning and evening, or his dear
arms carried her from bed-room to boudoir, in the shadow of her
strength he grew to manhood. His bat was her gift; her reading table
his.
"What a pity for her and for the rest," her friends would sometimes
say, when they were denied her because she lay in extreme pain, "What a
pity for her and for the rest of them that she did not die." But in the
household neither her husband, whose political career needed a wife to
lead a social throng, nor the servants, who were kept always busy
waiting on her, ever said or thought, or dreamed of such a thing. The
light that shone through her and round her face made her room their
fortress, and with her there they could defy the littlenesses of their
lives.
[The reader thinks this is a rhapsody. "No such woman ever lived," says
he, "in sickness or in health; it is a man's notion of what a woman
might be; a vain ideal; a Pygmalion's bride never kindled into life."
If he is right, history and biography are wrong; the memories of
thousands have deceived them; and scores and thousands of private
letters, too sacred to be printed, are sheets of lies.
I have in one of my note-books a list of names of women which I have
come across in the reading of many histories. If this list could be
re-edited by the fingers of Time, who writes with invisible but
indelible pencil the lives of women unknown to biographical
dictionaries, the pages in this magazine would not be many enough to
contain a tenth even of the initials of those who have been as this
woman was; not though Mr. Pickering should print the letters in type
which you could not read without taking it to the window-seat.]
In the heyday of his life, when all her hopes for him had burst into
bloom, and the beauty of the blossom had pictured to her the coming
fruit, he was caught by the laws of iron that follow the chances of
gossamer, and the life within was crushed.
They brought him home, her hope, her joy, and laid him near her. She
watched him from her couch as he lay unconscious and still.
And Death when he came to calm the numbed buzzing in the brain found
them lying hand in hand. And when he had called him, her life flickered
and wavered and shone so very dim that the shadow, blowing at it never
so gently, left them together in the darkness.
The two were standing in front of the gates at the Ending of the Way.
And when the keeper of the gates opened to them he gave them a paper,
on which was written the name of the road they should take and the
place they should make for. The name of the road I do not know, but the
place was "the Home where strong souls wait."
"Mother," said he, "I should not have been here but for you."
"Nay, my son," she answered, "have we not come together all the way?"
Proofread by Stephanie H. 2008
