There are few things connected with this hospital work which I recall with more pleasure than the simple, earnest gratitude of this bronzed and weather-beaten old man, for the trifling kindnesses which we had been able to offer to his boy. There was something about him altogether so real, so honest, genuine, and sincere, that one could not help feeling drawn to him at once. He was a rough, plain, Western man, primitive in the extreme; but no one could listen to him without the consciousness that a warm, true, noble heart, beat beneath that uncouth exterior.
Had the telegram been a day later, he could not have reached here for nearly a week longer. The train, which only runs on certain days, left the morning after he received the news; he had travelled night and day, making every connection, and performing the journey as rapidly as it could be done.
His boy, he said, had recognized him, and he was pleased to find him better than he had hoped for. He thought with care he would get well now, and he was going at once to telegraph the good news to his wife.
We were thunderstruck; how could he be so deceived? For although we had not seen Robinson that day, we well knew he was in a condition from which he could not rally. It seemed therefore no kindness to allow his mother to be tortured with false hope, and we earnestly represented (hard as it seemed to do so) that the surgeons did not look for any improvement; but all in vain,—he had seen sickness—he had seen doctors mistaken before now—his boy was going to get well; so he accompanied us to the telegraph station, and sent his message. That evening I was told some one wanted to see me, from the —— hospital, and on going out, was met by the words, “Miss ——, my boy’s gone, my boy’s gone!” and a burst of sobs, which seemed as though it must shake that poor old frame to pieces.
He had scarcely left, in the morning, to send his hopeful telegram, when the change took place, and Robinson breathed his last just as his father reached his bedside. The blow fell heavier, as we had feared, from the strong hope he had persisted in entertaining, and even then it seemed as though he were too much bewildered and stunned to realize fully what had occurred. There was something inexpressibly touching in the grief of that poor, bowed-down old man, shattered as he was, too, by hard travel and loss of rest; and yet I hardly knew how to comfort him, or to answer that sad appeal, “How can I go back to his mother without him?” Deep grief must ever bear with it a reverence of its own, and this seemed something one scarcely dared meddle with.
He said the funeral was to take place the next afternoon, and begged that the ladies who had been so kind to him would be present for his mother’s sake; he thought it would comfort her to know it. I readily consented, and promised to inform the others.
He rose to go, and drawing a little paper from his pocket, said, “I thought maybe you might care for this; it is a lock of my boy’s hair, which I cut off for you, and I thought his mother would be glad to know you had it.”
I expressed my feelings in a few words, which seemed to soothe and gratify him.
That poor mother seemed never out of his thoughts; and again and again would he repeat that piteous question, “How can I go back to her without him?”
But he need not have feared; that mother’s heart was anchored on the Rock which alone can withstand the storms of earth. Listen to but one sentence from her first letter (to one of the ladies, who had been a kind and constant correspondent,) after that sad return.