"I want to tell you why I am so glad to have found you here, Pamela dear. You’ll understand, I think, when I say that motherhood lives in the present and future, and is almost cruel, cruel to everything not itself, for it forgets the past in the present. Do you see,"—she found the beautiful untruth,—“he is so much in them for me, that I might almost forget him in them—forget to mourn him, as one would if they were not there. So do you see why it comforts me to know that, while I must go on into the future with them, you will be keeping him here and remembering?”
She could look at Pamela now, in safety, and she turned to her, finding rapt eyes upon her.
“Come here often, won’t you, when I’m away as well as when I’m here. We must make it all look again as it did when he was with us—flowers and trees and bird-boxes. You will help me in it all and you will think of him here and love him. I know what happiness you meant to him—more than he was aware of. You were a beautiful part of his life. You say you were always, for him, only together, with the boys. That is only partly true. He used often to speak of you to me, the little passing things people say of any one they are very fond of and take for granted. He appreciated you and counted upon you. I came here so sad, Pamela, so burdened. I’ve never been sadder in my life than I was to-night as I walked here. And you have lifted it all. It makes all the difference to know that you are here, in his garden, remembering him. More difference than I can say.”
It was an unutterable gratitude that, with her tears, with love and pity and reverence, welled up in her, seeing what Pamela had done. The garden was no longer empty, and Charlie not forgotten. In the night of his death and disappearance this flower had become visible. Always, when she thought of him, she would think of evening primroses and of Pamela, so that it would be with tenderness, with the understanding, homely, unexacting, consecrating, that Pamela gave; Pamela herself becoming a gift from Charlie; emerging from the darkness, evident and beautiful,—almost another child whose future she must carry in her heart; though the only gift she could give her now, in return for all that she had given, was the full and free possession of the past, where, outside the garden wall, she had been a wistful onlooker. She felt that she opened the gate, drew Pamela in, and put into her keeping all the keys that had weighed so heavily in her unfitted hands.
AUTUMN CROCUSES
I
