“She could not have liked it,” pondered the child, and the first dim consciousness of duty rose in her mind to puzzle her. Sorely troubled was Jennie; she did not fancy giving up her own will in anything. She had an instinctive dislike to law and order, to getting up early, setting things to right, and losing her own pleasure.
A little flash of light seemed let into her soul, and all her daily wrong-doing lay clear before her. She read selfishness on all, or at the best, thoughtlessness for others’ pleasure. Before her like a picture, she saw her dear mother stretched on her patient bed of pain, smiling ever to keep sadness out of the hearts of her little ones, and fading slowly day by day out of their beautiful bright world into what seemed loneliness, chilliness, darkness to Jennie in her fresh youth. Now and then the sweet weak voice had begged her daughter to read the Word of Life to her as she went through the valley of the Shadow of Death; and many times this seemed a wearisome task. How glad the child would have been to remember having volunteered once to cheer her mother’s waiting-time with the words of Jesus! Such anguish as it was then to know that many times the mild request for a Psalm or the lessons of the day had been met by a frowning, fretful compliance. Too late, too late, thought Jennie with anguish and yearning for
“The touch of the vanished hand,
And the sound of the voice that was still.”
And almost the last words that dear mother had uttered were:
“Jennie, be good to the little ones, dear—patient, loving. They will have no mother, and the world is dreary without love, my child; give it to them, all that you can, and fill my place.”
It had been long ago in her child life, when time is counted by hours and days, and we think a year so long, since her mother went to rest, but it was not till that hour that the meaning of her mother’s words came to her. There had never seemed to be much need for the exercise of her care over the little ones; so she thought. It seemed as if there were nothing she could do—at least nothing that she liked to do—teaching the Catechism, reading aloud, telling stories and such things were so disagreeable, and she could not have patience with the little ones.
While Jennie was sitting at the window, looking out on the winter scene and thinking, with the tears drying on her cheek, Miss Lane had gone to the piano, and was playing softly—she was singing too, in a low voice, and the silent darkness was creeping over the lawn under the trees and into the room, gathering shadows on the walls and settling stilly over the fields and sky.
“Broken-hearted, lone and tearful,
By that cross of anguish fearful,