HER MOTHER'S STORY
Sometime after she had gone to sleep, Jerry wakened suddenly with the
disturbing conviction that someone needed her. At the same moment her
ear caught a sound that made her slip her bare feet quickly to the floor
and stand, listening. It had been a soft step beneath her window--a
little sigh.
In a flash Jerry sped down the narrow stairway, past the open door of
the room where Little-Dad lay snoring, and out across the veranda. In
the dim light of the moon that hung low in the arc of the blue-black
sky, Jerry made out the figure of her mother, standing near the rough
bench that overlooked the valley.
"Mother!"
"Jerry, child, and in your bare feet!"
"I heard you out here. Isn't it dreadfully late? Can't you sleep?
Mother, look at me," for Mrs. Westley had kept her face averted.
"Mother, darling, why do you look so--sort of--sad?" Jerry's voice was
reproachful. "We're so happy now that we are together, aren't we? And it
_will_ be nice to have lots of things and Little-Dad won't ever have to
worry and----"
Mrs. Travis lifted her hand suddenly and laid it across Jerry's lips.
"Child, I am not sad. I have been out here fighting away forever the
foolish fears that have stalked by my side since you were a very little
girl. Some day, when you're a mother, you'll know how I've felt--how
I've dreaded facing this moment! How often I've sat with you and watched
the baby robins make their first flight from the nest and have laughed
at the fussy mother robin scolding and worrying up in a nearby
branch----"
"But, mamsey, you've always told me how the mother robin _pushes_ the
little ones out of the nest to make them _know_ that they can fly!"
Mrs. Travis accepted the rebuke in silence. Jerry slipped her hand into
her mother's. Her mother held it close.
"Jerry, dear, I've never told you much about myself because I could not
do that without telling you of your own father. I was a very lonely
little girl; I had no brothers or sisters--no near relatives. My mother
died when I was eight years old, and a housekeeper--good soul--brought
me up. My father was a professor of chemistry in Harvard, as you know,
and he was a queer man and his friends were peculiar, too--not the sort
that was much company for a young girl. But I was very fond of my father
and I was very content with my simple life until I met Craig Winton. He
was so different from anyone else who had ever crossed our threshold
that I fell in love with him at once. My father died suddenly and Craig
Winton asked me to marry him. It was the maddest folly--he had nothing
except his inventive genius and he should never have tied himself to
domestic responsibilities; they were always--such as they were--like a
dreadful yoke to his spirit. But we were happy, oh, we were _happy_ in a
wonderful, unreal way. Sometimes we didn't have enough to eat, but he
always had so much faith in what he was going to do that _that_ somehow,
kept us going. But when his faith began to die--it was dreadful. It was
as though some hidden poison was killing him, right before my eyes."
"What made his faith die?" asked Jerry, curiously.
"Because he grew to distrust his fellowmen. That second visit to Peter
Westley----" Mrs. Travis spoke quickly to hide her bitterness. "He was
so sure that what he had made was good--an inventor has always, my dear,
an irrational love for the thing he has created--and to have it
_spurned_! He was supersensitive, super--everything. Then my own health
went to pieces. I suppose I simply was not getting enough to eat to give
me the strength to meet the mental strain under which I had to live--and
you were coming. From his last visit to Peter Westley he returned with a
little money, but he was as a crushed, broken man--his bitterness had
unbalanced his mind. He said that it was for my health that he came away
with me, but I knew that it was to get away from the world that he
hated--and to hide his failure! Your Little-Dad took us in. He knew at
once that your father was a very sick man and he brought him to his
cabin here on Kettle. But even here your father suffered, and after you
were born he feared for you. He was obsessed with the thought that _you_
had all life to face----"
"How dreadfully sorry you must have felt for him," whispered Jerry,
shyly, trying to make it all seem true.
"I felt sorry for him, child, not that he had been so disappointed but
because he had not the strength to rally from it. I don't believe God
made him that way; I think he sacrificed too much of himself to his
genius. This world we live in demands so much of us--such _different_
things, that, if we are to meet everything squarely, we cannot develop
one side of our minds and let the other side go. I am telling you all
this, Jerry, that you may understand how I have felt--about you. The
months after your father died were sort of a blank to me--I lived on
here because I had nowhere else to go. Gradually my gratitude to John
Travis turned to real affection--not like what I had given your father,
but something quite as deep. And the years I have lived with him here
have been very happy--as though my poor little ship had found the still
waters of an inland stream after having been tossed on a stormy sea. And
I've tried to make myself think that in these still waters I could keep
_you_ always, that you would grow up here and--perhaps--marry
someone----" she laughed. "Mothers always dream way ahead, darling.
But as you grew older I could see that that was not going to be easy.
You've so quickly outgrown everything I can give you--or that
anyone--here--can; you have grown so curious, your mind is always
reaching out. What is here, what is there, what is this, where is
that--questions like these always on your tongue! And you _are_ like
your father--very."
Jerry shivered the least little bit, perhaps from the night air, warm as
it was, perhaps from the thought that she was like poor, poor Craig
Winton, who did not seem at all like a real father.
In a moment her mother had wrapped her in the soft shawl she carried.
Something in the loving touch of her hands broke the spell of unreality
that had held Jerry.
"I don't understand, mamsey," she whispered, cuddling close, "if you
felt like--_that_--and worried, why did you let me go away?"
"Because, my child," there was something triumphant in her mother's
voice, "some inner sense made me believe that though you look like your
father and act like him in many ways, you have a nature and a character
quite of your own. I tried to put away the fears I had had which I told
myself were foolish and morbid. John Westley's arguments helped me. I
knew immediately that he was related to the Peter Westley who had
crushed your father, but I felt certain he knew nothing of it--and I was
glad; to bury the past entirely was the only way to bury forever the
bitterness that had killed your father. And when John Westley made the
offer to give you a year of school, I thought it was only justice! I had
known school life in a big city where I had many schoolmates and I lived
for several years in the shadow of a great university, though the life
in it only touched me indirectly, and when the opportunity opened, I
wanted you to have the same experience; I felt it might solve the
problem that confronted me. And I told myself that I was _sure_ of you
that you could go away to school, go anywhere, and come back again and
be my same girl! Jerry, these people have been very, very good to you;
out of pure generosity they have given you a great deal, do you now--now
that you know the truth--feel any bitterness toward them?"
Never had Jerry associated Uncle Johnny and Mrs. Westley, nor the
younger Westleys, nor the charming, hospitable home, with the Peter
Westley she had pictured from Gyp's vivid descriptions. And, too,
remembering the pathetic loneliness of the old man's last days, she felt
nothing but pity.
"Oh, no," she answered, softly, decidedly. "Anyway, he made up for
everything he'd done when he gave beautiful Highacres to Lincoln
School," she added, loyally.
Then Jerry fell silent. "I was sure of you," her mother's words echoed.
Had she not glimpsed more, in those months at Highacres, than her mother
dreamed? A promise of what college might hold for her--new worlds to
conquer?
"Mother, am--am I the--same girl?" She put the question slowly.
"No, Jerry--and that's what I've been fighting out here--all by myself.
For I realize that it was only selfishness made me dread finding a
change! A mother's selfishness! That you should grow and go on and
forward, even though you leave me behind, darling, I know must be my
dearest wish. But oh, my dear, I understand how the poor mother robin
feels just before she shoves her babies out of the nest! For don't you
think _she_ hates an empty nest as much as any human mother? Do you
remember the little story I used to tell you when you were small enough
to cuddle your whole self on my lap? How yours and my love was a
beautiful, sunny garden where you dwelt and that the garden had a very
high wall around it?"
"I love that story, mamsey. I told it once to Mrs. Westley and she loved
it, too. And you used to say that there was a gate in the wall with a
latch but the latch was quite high so that when I was little I could not
find it!"
"And then you grew bigger and your fingers could reach the latch--you
wanted to open it to go out and see what was outside. I had made the
little garden as beautiful as I knew how and it was very sunny and the
wall was so high that it shut out all trouble--but you wanted so much to
open the gate that I knew I must let you!"
"And then I went away to Highacres----" put in Jerry, loving the story
as much as ever.
"And I was alone in the garden our love had built, but I was not
lonely--I _will_ not be lonely, for--wherever you go--you are my girl
and I love you and you love me! _Nothing_ can change that. And I shall
leave the gate open--it will always be open!" She said it slowly; her
story was finished.
Jerry's face was transfigured. "You mean--you _mean_"--she spoke
softly--"that--if I want to go--back to Highacres--you'll _let me_? I
can _go to college_? Oh, mamsey, you're wonderful! Mothers _are_ the
grandest things. And the gate will always be open so's I can always come
back? And you won't be lonely for I'll always love you most in the world
of anybody or anything. And when I'm very grown-up and can't go to
school any more we'll travel, won't we? You and me and Little-Dad--won't
we, mamsey?"
"Yes, dear." But the mother's eyes smiled in the darkness--she was
thinking of the empty nest.
Jerry laid her cheek against her mother's arm. She drew a long breath.
"The world's so wonderful, isn't it? It's dreadful to think of anyone in
it, like my--father, who's set his heart so hard on just one thing that
he can't see all the other things he might do! I shall _never_ be like
that! And it's dreadful"--she frowned sorrowfully out over the starlit
valley--"to think of girls who haven't mothers and who can't go to
school. Why, I'm the very, very richest girl in the world!" Then she
blushed. "I don't mean _that_ money, mamsey, I mean having you
and--Sunnyside and Kettle and just knowing about--our garden!"