"RECLAIMED."
Day after day, week after week, an autumn sun glared fiercely down,
baking and cracking the clean shorn stubbles, burnishing the meadows,
all parched and smooth and shining, licking up with fiery thirst the
shrunken threads of mountain streams, scorching the heather bloom to
powder, burning to rich ripeness the strips of late-sown oats that
through our wild hill-countries fringe the purple moorland with a border
of gold, beating on heated wall and glowing pavement in the small close
streets about the Marlborough Road, drying the outer air to the
temperature of an oven, and withering without pity the humble little
growth of mignionette in the sick child's window.
Morning and night Jin watered that homely box of mould in vain. The
dying plants no more revived for her care, than did her darling for all
the tears she shed on his behalf. They wanted for nothing now that money
could supply,--Kate Cremorne would have taken care of that; but Jin's
friends, directly they found out her hiding-place, had rallied round her
with kindly offers of sympathy and assistance. Mrs. Lascelles, indeed,
wished to bring mother and child home to No. 40 at once, but the latter
was too ill to be moved; and kind-hearted Rose, in spite of her present
happiness, felt sadly vexed to think that the former could refuse
persistently to see her now, denying herself to every human being except
Miss Cremorne.
With all her resolution it was more than Jin could endure to be reminded
of the happiness she had once so nearly grasped, and in her dull,
forlorn misery she told herself it was better to hide her weary head,
and wait in hopeless apathy for the end.
She had gone through those cruel changes that seem so hard to bear till
the one fearful certainty teaches us they were merciful preparations for
that which we should not otherwise have found strength to encounter. She
had watched the doctor's face day by day, and hung on his grave,
sympathising accents, believing now that the "shade better" meant
recovery, now that the "trifle worse" was but the necessary ebb and flow
of disease; anon, lifted to unreasonable happiness from darkest despair,
because when her ignorance thought all was over, the man of science
still found anchorage for a new ephemeral hope.
Alas! that henceforth there must be no more vicissitude, no more
uncertainty! The last strand of the cable was obviously parting--the
little lamp was flickering with the gleam that so surely goes out in
utter darkness--the simple flower, drooping and dying, was to bloom
never more but in the gardens of God!
Even Kate, who seldom failed to find a word of comfort at the worst, to
discover seeds of encouragement in the most alarming symptoms, had
turned from the boy's bed to-day with a quiver over all her bonny face,
that showed how hard it was for her to keep back the tears.
Jin caught her friend's hand, and pressed it to her breast.
"God bless you, dear!" she gasped. "Whatever happens, you've been an
angel from heaven to me!"
The other dropped her veil till it covered brow and face.
"My poor dear!" she answered, with a strange tremor in her voice, "the
angels in heaven are like _him_, not _me_. If it _must_ be--if you _are_
to lose him--try and think of him as one of them--try and hope you and I
may get to see him there at last, even if we have to sit waiting for
ages on a stone outside the gate."
Both women were silent, Kate turning away to cry passionately. In a few
minutes she recovered herself, pressed her lips fiercely to the child's
cold hand lying helpless on the bed-clothes, again to Jin's pale,
sorrowing brow, and so departed, with a promise, in a husky, choking
whisper, of returning speedily, and an entreaty that she might be sent
for at a moment's notice if she were wanted.
So the mother was left alone with her dying child. She had not shed a
tear--no--though the other woman wept without restraint; that infection,
usually so irresistible, had failed to reach her now. Her eyes were dry,
her face cold and fixed like marble. Mechanically she moved about the
room, arranging the furniture, straightening the sheets, smoothing the
pillows, mixing a cooling drink for the poor pale lips that would never
drink again. Then, as in unconscious routine she watered the mignionette
at the window, she caught her breath with a great gasp, her face worked
like that of a woman in convulsions, and she burst into a fit of weeping
that seemed intense relief for the moment, and rendered her capable of
enduring the worst, which was yet to come.
In such paroxysms memory seems, as it were, to lift us out of the
present, and furnishing us with a new sense--keen, subtle, and
intense--throws our whole existence back once more into the past. Again
she was nursing Gustave under the poplars in Touraine; again she was
impressing on a homely peasant-woman, at Lyons, the care and culture of
her darling; again she mourned for his loss and rejoiced in his
recovery, staring with incredulous pleasure to recognise him on the road
to Ascot, thrilling with a mother's holiest instincts to fold him to her
breast in the old cottage by the riverside. Her troubles, her intrigues,
her love, her rivalry, Picard, Frank Vanguard, Helen herself, were
forgotten; no human interest, no earthly image, came between her and her
dark-eyed boy.
It seemed impossible he could be dying. Dying? Oh, no! or why had he
been given back to her before? Was there no Providence? Was it only
blind chance that thus juggled with her? She thought of women she had
known in her earlier years--_femmes croyantes_, as they called
themselves--their penances, duties, attendance at mass, frequent
confessions, and the courage with which they boasted their religion
enabled them to accept every trial--till it came.
Pain was lashing her into rebellion. She roused herself. She dashed her
tears from her eyes. "Bah!" she exclaimed; "if he gets well, I will be
like these. Why not for me also a miracle? What have I done that I am to
be so tortured?"
A weak voice called her from the bed. "Maman," it murmured, in the dear
French accents of its infancy, "embrasse-moi donc, puis ce que je ne te
vois plus."
She laid her head--the two black comely heads together--on the pillow by
his side. The hope that had flickered for a moment died out for
evermore. Not see her! and it was broad noon of the golden summer day!
"Here is mamma, darling!" she murmured, pressing hard to her lips the
little helpless hand, dull and yellow like waxwork. "Mamma will never
leave Gustave! never--never!"
She tried to borrow courage from the assurance, and to fancy that _he_
was not leaving _her_, swiftly, surely, as the outward-bound bark that
spreads its canvas to a wind off shore.
He nestled nearer--nearer yet. His little frame shook all over. Raising
him on the pillow, his curly head sank back on her bosom, more heavily,
more helplessly than in earliest infancy. He murmured a few indistinct
syllables. Straining every nerve to listen, she knew they formed part of
a child's prayer that Mrs. Mole had taught him in her cottage home. But
he finished that prayer at the feet of his Father who is in heaven.
Minutes, hours--she never knew how long--the sorrowing mother bowed her
head, and wailed in agony over her dead child. Neither stunned nor
stupefied by an affliction for which her daily life had of late been but
a training and a preparation, every nerve in her frame, every fibre of
her heart, quivered with the sting and sharpness of the blow.
Had she not wept, she must have gone mad; but her tears flowed freely,
and with tears came that lassitude of the feelings which is the first
step to resignation, as lacking the rebellious energy of despair. For
her, indeed, the silver cord was loosed, the golden bowl broken, the
desire of her eyes taken away. The day had gone down; the night seemed
very dark and cold. How should she seek for comfort in the hope of
another dawn?
But when the skies are at their blackest, then morning is near at hand.
It was through thickest gloom, brooding over a lowering wave, that the
luminous figure of their Teacher walked the waters on the Sea of
Tiberias, and the boldest of his servants had sunk to the knees ere he
took refuge in his panic-stricken outcry, "Lord, save me!" and, trusting
solely to the Master, found help in the very weakness of his fears.
Perhaps angels in heaven recognise and mark in golden letters the hour
of conviction, the accepted time, the turning-point, it may be, of a
soul's eternity. Perhaps, even, in their lustrous happiness, they
rejoiced with celestial sympathy over the lonely penitent who flung
herself down by her child's death-bed, and poured out her heart in
prayer that, through any sacrifice, any suffering, she might follow
where he was gone before. Perhaps they knew how poor, contrite,
sorrowing Jin Ross had made her first step on the narrow path that leads
to the Shining Gate, over which, for sinners of far deeper dye than her,
stands emblazoned the eternal promise--"Knock, and it shall be opened
unto you!"
THE END.