I am not ashamed to say that I put the book down and cried like a baby when I read what she had written. Broken-hearted sentences, bits of prayer, words of Scripture, "Oh, Absalom, my son, my son!" Tears on the pages. The leaves were alive with her words. As I said, they spoke as no human voice could have spoken. They told a tale which humanity could not have revealed. And her heart was broken.
Then came the entry on the day when I had told her she was doomed. The subdued joy with which she heard the news, with which she looked forward to the prospect of a speedy meeting, was quite evident. One phrase struck me on that page:
"The work of years is over; I lay down the pen," she had written.
"Sonny Boy"--she never failed to use that t.i.tle; she clung to it the more tenaciously as he grew older; it seemed very sweet to me--"is gone and I am going, thank G.o.d! In death as in life we will be together. "The book may close over" and be opened no more.
He cannot return to me, but I shall go to him. I shall write no more. I have left directions that this story of a life--or two lives, his and mine--shall be burned when I am gone to meet Sonny Boy."
But on the next page the entries began again. She had taken up her wonted life-long task once more when she found that he was living.
Curiously enough, while there was joy in the pages now, I seemed to read in them more of regret--in spite of herself. The doom written against her could not be revoked. Yet the conditions were changed. She had to look forward to a long parting instead of an eternal meeting, and it hurt her. Yet she must live until he came back. I saw it was her will power alone that kept her up. She must see him again before she went out into the dark, or the light rather, to wait for him.
So, in a hand that grew more feeble from day to day, she jotted down her hopes and longings for her son. How much the trembling letters told of her growing weakness! how different were the characters from the bold, flowing, graceful writing of the beginning!
Finally I came to the entry--the last--on the day she had received the news of his approaching marriage. Oh, the anguish that ran through the written words! They seemed to gasp out her grief from the page; sometimes I could scarcely decipher them. I turned back to the entry following the report of his death, and I declare it was no more heart-broken. Another woman had come between them. With unconscious cruelty, in that fatal letter George had told her over and over again how much he loved the woman he was about to marry. She could not get away from it. Innocently enough, he had given her to understand that he loved the girl more than all the world. Thoughtlessly he plunged this dagger into his gentle mother"s heart.
I didn"t blame him for his feelings. He could not help them; and, as I said, it was human nature anyway. The experience is common to every mother in greater or less degree. She had to expect it, or she ought to have done so. Still, I did wish he had not been quite so enthusiastic; not that it would have made much difference, for it was the fact that killed. His mother had intuition enough, she loved him enough to divine the truth through any reticence.
"I can"t bear it," I read, "to know that I have no longer the first place, that another woman is nearer to him than I. To feel that the first of his love is given to a stranger! The best of his heart is hers! Who is she? What right had she to come between us?
What has she done for him compared to me? Ever since he was first put in my arms, ever since I heard him cry the first time after the awful pain and anguish of deliverance, he has been mine! Mine!
Mine! And she has taken him! Oh, G.o.d, pity me! I cannot give him up and live! He must not bring her here. I shall never like her! I hate her! I do not believe she is--Oh, how wicked I am! And he will be so happy while I suffer! I"m glad he will be happy--but it kills me. Thank G.o.d! it will not be for long. I don"t want to see her. Pity me, my Saviour! You had a mother! I am an old, lonely, dying woman. Mercy, mercy! I don"t want to see him--either--that I should write it--my son! with a light in his eyes and love in his voice for another woman. I shall die now. Perhaps I may find comfort then. But I shall never forget. He wrote about her on seven pages of his letter, and one was enough for me. Oh, Sonny Boy, to lose you, to--your little old mother is breaking her heart! Be a.s.sured of one thing, my son, I love you and I have loved you better than any one in the whole world will ever love you"--these were the words she had whispered to me on her death-bed--"no matter how much joy you may have, how much happiness, no matter where you may go, whom you may meet, what they may say, no one in this world will ever love you as I have.
No one will ever think of you as your mother."
That was all. And I"m afraid it was true.
"There is none In all this cold and hollow world, no fount Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within A mother"s heart."
I sat there in the gray of the morning with the open book in my hand.
She had told me to give the volumes to George when he returned, and I could not--if I desired to do so--disregard her wish; yet to lay before him the sorrow, the regret, the sadness of that last entry: to leave with him that final thought of his mother, to cloud his wedded life with a suspicion which I knew he could never dispel, that his joy had been her death, his marriage had broken her heart--I could not do it! Still, to withhold from that boy the last words of his mother--it did not seem right!
What did I do? you ask. Well, with a horribly guilty feeling, I cut the last leaf containing those terribly piteous words out of the diary. I did it carefully so that he would never know that anything had been taken away. I felt like a thief all the time, somehow.
I did not destroy the leaf. I could not do so. I put it away carefully with my other treasures, and when George came home with his sweet, beautiful young wife,--and I thanked G.o.d he had her to help him bear his unfeigned sorrow at the loss of his mother,--I gave him the diary without the missing leaf; and her last message to him, as I delivered it, was one simply of love and blessing. And I almost felt as if his mother thanked me for it. I hope so.
I take out that missing leaf sometimes when I am alone in my study, and read it over and wonder whether, after all, I did right or not.
EXTRAVAGANZAS
""Tis a pleasure to please, and the straw that can tickle us Is a source of enjoyment, though slightly ridiculous."
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
"A careless song with a little nonsense in it now and then does not misbecome a monarch."
WALPOLE
THE AMAZING YARN OF THE BO"S"N"S MATE
AN ACCOUNT OF AN UNUSUAL PRIZE
"Now this is the tale that was told to me By a battered and shattered old son of the sea, To me and my messmate, Silas Green, When I was a guileless young marine."
ANCIENT SEA SONG
The second dog-watch, from six to eight in the evening, is the sailor"s play-time. Unless some emergency requires it, drills and duties are suspended for the time being and Jackie, except for supper, has his time to himself. The older seamen usually collect on the forecastle; sometimes in the lee gangway in rough weather. There they sprawl themselves on the deck, or dispose themselves comfortably against the rails or the bitts, or even the anchor-fluke, if every place is occupied, or the boom boats if the waist be the place of a.s.semblage, and smoke their pipes and yarn.
The ordinary seamen, the landsmen, and the ship"s boys, if they are not rigorously excluded from the top-gallant forecastle, or from close proximity to the group of worthies who literally "take the deck," are forced to stand afar off, at any rate, where they listen to marvellous recitals as best they can. The midshipmen, however, as a species of privileged intermediaries between officers and men, often make a part of these exclusive circles, especially when yarning is going on.
Among all the tellers of strange tales on the famous United States frigate _Neversink_, Jack Lang, the old bo"s"n"s mate, held the chief place by general consent, and the sound of his deep voice raised in narration was sure to attract to his side every available reefer not specifically on duty, and all the old sh.e.l.lbacks, to whom yarning and listening to yarns were as the breath of life. And nowhere will you find better listeners than at a dog-watch "gam" on a ship"s forecastle. The old man"s services on the _Neversink_ were invaluable in every way, his word was law forward of the mast as the captain"s was on the quarter-deck, and even as a story-teller he was supreme.
One mild, pleasant evening this before-the-mast autocrat and raconteur found himself the centre of an interested group on the forecastle. The midshipmen were burning for a yarn. They had learned, however, that the surest way not to have their desire gratified was to ask a sailor for a story. Certainly this was true of this particular old salt, and it was necessary to approach him by indirection. The conversation turned, as it frequently does in the forecastle, on the quarter-deck, and everywhere else, on woman.
"Wot"s the matter with leetle Sammy Bowline?" queried the old man in a pause in the conversation. "I seed him a-weepin" an" a-bellerin" like wot you Yankees call a "caow" in the fust dog-watch."
"A cow don"t weep, Jack," answered a maintopman who had been a lumbering bucolic dairyman when the _Neversink_ left port six months since, but who was now a smart young light yardman.
"Hev you seen all the cow critters on the yearth, youngster?"
"No, but----"
"Well, some cows weeps, I sez, an" this"n" did," answered the old sailor, sententiously. "Anyway, Sammy Bowline, he bawled awful."
"I reckon he"s homesick fer his ma," remarked Billy Clumpblock, the captain of the maintop. "I just guv him a few teches with me colt to take it out"n him, w"ich I"ve larned that w"alin" is werry good fer homesickness, an" sent him up in the top, as he calls it, to "spell a watch.""
"It"s a sing"lar thing," continued the old bo"s"n"s mate, "how much men an" boys thinks of feemales, sech as mothers an" sech like pussons. It stands ter reason thay ain"t necessary to n.o.body"s existence, though it"s agreed that we all had "em onct, though I"ve got no evidence of it in my own case "ceptin" general report. Look at this ship, now. There ain"t a woman on board of her, an" if they was, she"d be considerably disorganized, w"ich I means the ship an" p"raps the feemale too."
"They seems ter be necessary on sh.o.r.e, though," remarked the chief quartermaster, a much-married man.
"P"raps they be. But they"re no "count on sea."
"I"ve heered them called the weaker s.e.x," said the purser"s yeoman, who was fond of literature of the dime novel variety. "I guess that"s becus they can"t make sailor-men out"n "em."
"Wall, naow," drawled the Jack-o"-the-dust, a studious New Englander, given to historic research as he could manage it, "there hev been wimmin sailor-men. I"ve read abaout "em. There was two pyrates once an" they was wimmin. An" they was the wust kind of pyrates, too."
"That"s nateral," said the autocrat of the forecastle; "it stands ter reason that a woman"d be a bad sailor an" she"d also make a bad pirate."
"They wus good pyrates," continued the down-easter.
"Good pirates? There ain"t no sech thing," chimed in another sailor, filling the responsible position of captain of the hold.
"I mean they wus bludthirsty feemale villains, an" they done the pyrate bisness up jest"s fine"s if they"d a-bin men."
"I had an amazin" experience with wimmin onct," said the old bo"s"n"s mate, reflectively.