The old woman’s eyes glistened through their tears. It was the second time that Elsie had called her mother; and the very heart seemed blossoming afresh in her bosom, as she listened to the holy sound.
The beehives—Elsie’s beehives? Alas! they had been taken away from beneath the old pear-tree more than twenty years ago. The bees had been left to plunder the adjoining thickets and clover-fields, year after year, while no one touched the honey; and thus they had hived in neglect, dispersed, and left their cells empty so long that the old people had almost forgotten that they ever existed.
“The bees! oh, Elsie! they have gone to the woods,” said the old man, in a voice of touching apology. “We did not kill them; we never gathered an ounce of their honey. You do not mind that they are gone, Elsie dear?”
“Oh,” answered Elsie, wearily, as if the effort to remember had exhausted her,—“gone, are they? what for? why did they go? How everything slides, slides, slides away, and I keep running after, forever and forever running after. Oh! I am tired.”
The old people looked at one another, and at Catharine, hopefully.
“Let her rest,” said Catharine, in a gentle whisper. “Perhaps it may end better than we think!”
“Yes,” said the old man, stealthily clasping the withered hand of his wife. “Let us watch. She may wander back to her youth again, and forget all that has passed.”
“It may be so—God help the poor child—it may be so,” murmured the old lady, casting looks of wistful tenderness across the table, while her daughter began to eat daintily, putting on airs like a child entrusted with a fork for the first time.
It was remarkable that the old lady never spoke of her daughter, though an elderly woman with waves of gray in her hair, except as “the child,” or “the dear young creature.” To her, those white hairs had no significance of age, but were the marks of a deep sorrow, over which the mother’s heart mourned perpetually.
The breakfast was finished in silence. Catharine, usually so attentive to every movement of her charge, sat preoccupied and thoughtful. The old people dropped back into their habitual calm, and Elsie still amused herself by arranging and re-arranging the folds of her robe, claiming admiration for the effect, by child-like glances at her mother. Perhaps they were right; the woman certainly did seem to be going back to her childishness again.