So, in a hand that grew more feeble from day to day, she jotted down her hopes and longings for her son. How much the trembling letters told of her growing weakness! how different were the characters from the bold, flowing, graceful writing of the beginning!
Finally I came to the entry—the last—on the day she had received the news of his approaching marriage. Oh, the anguish that ran through the written words! They seemed to gasp out her grief from the page; sometimes I could scarcely decipher them. I turned back to the entry following the report of his death, and I declare it was no more heart-broken. Another woman had come between them. With unconscious cruelty, in that fatal letter George had told her over and over again how much he loved the woman he was about to marry. She could not get away from it. Innocently enough, he had given her to understand that he loved the girl more than all the world. Thoughtlessly he plunged this dagger into his gentle mother's heart.
I didn't blame him for his feelings. He could not help them; and, as I said, it was human nature anyway. The experience is common to every mother in greater or less degree. She had to expect it, or she ought to have done so. Still, I did wish he had not been quite so enthusiastic; not that it would have made much difference, for it was the fact that killed. His mother had intuition enough, she loved him enough to divine the truth through any reticence.
"I can't bear it," I read, "to know that I have no longer the first place, that another woman is nearer to him than I. To feel that the first of his love is given to a stranger! The best of his heart is hers! Who is she? What right had she to come between us? What has she done for him compared to me? Ever since he was first put in my arms, ever since I heard him cry the first time after the awful pain and anguish of deliverance, he has been mine! Mine! Mine! And she has taken him! Oh, God, pity me! I cannot give him up and live! He must not bring her here. I shall never like her! I hate her! I do not believe she is—Oh, how wicked I am! And he will be so happy while I suffer! I'm glad he will be happy—but it kills me. Thank God! it will not be for long. I don't want to see her. Pity me, my Saviour! You had a mother! I am an old, lonely, dying woman. Mercy, mercy! I don't want to see him—either—that I should write it—my son! with a light in his eyes and love in his voice for another woman. I shall die now. Perhaps I may find comfort then. But I shall never forget. He wrote about her on seven pages of his letter, and one was enough for me. Oh, Sonny Boy, to lose you, to—your little old mother is breaking her heart! Be assured of one thing, my son, I love you and I have loved you better than any one in the whole world will ever love you"—these were the words she had whispered to me on her death-bed—"no matter how much joy you may have, how much happiness, no matter where you may go, whom you may meet, what they may say, no one in this world will ever love you as I have. No one will ever think of you as your mother."
That was all. And I'm afraid it was true.
"There is none
In all this cold and hollow world, no fount
Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within
A mother's heart."
I sat there in the gray of the morning with the open book in my hand. She had told me to give the volumes to George when he returned, and I could not—if I desired to do so—disregard her wish; yet to lay before him the sorrow, the regret, the sadness of that last entry: to leave with him that final thought of his mother, to cloud his wedded life with a suspicion which I knew he could never dispel, that his joy had been her death, his marriage had broken her heart—I could not do it! Still, to withhold from that boy the last words of his mother—it did not seem right!