The room was very still, and in this stillness the light quivered in pools on the brown rugs and the brown walls and the old yellowed engravings. From the high bookshelves, which lined the walls, the friendly covers of books shone down on him, with the genial responsiveness that creeps into the aspect of familiar inanimate things. Over the mantelpiece hung the one oil painting in the room, a portrait of his mother as a girl, by an unknown painter, who drew badly, but had a genuine feeling for colour. The face was small and heart-shaped, like some delicately tinted flower that has only half opened. The hair lay in bands of twilight on either side of the grave forehead, and framed the large, wistful eyes, which had a flower-like softness that made him think of black pansies. Though the mouth was pink and faintly smiling, it seemed to him to express an infinite pathos. It was impossible for him to believe that his mother—the woman with the pallid cameo-like profile and the saintly brow under the thin dark hair—had ever faced life with that touching, expectant smile.
There had been a strong soul in that fragile body, but her courage, which was invincible, had never seemed to him the courage of happiness. She had accepted life with the fortitude of the Christian, not the joy of the Pagan; and her piety was associated in his mind with long summer Sundays, with old hymns played softly, with bare spotless rooms, and with many roses in scattered alabaster vases. Her intellect, like her character, he recalled as a curious blending of sweetness and strength. If the speculative side of her mind had ever existed, life had long ago hushed it, for her capacity for acquiescence—for unquestioning submission to the will of God—was like the glory of martyrdom. Yet, within her narrow field, the field in which religion reigned as a beneficent shade, she had thought deeply, and it seemed to Blackburn that she had never thought harshly. Her sympathy was as wide as her charity, and both covered the universe. So exquisitely balanced, so finely tempered, was her judgment of life, that after all these years, for she had died while he was still a boy, he remembered her as one whose understanding of the human heart approached the divine. "She always wanted me to do something like this," he thought, "to look forward—to stand for the future. I remember...."
From the light and warmth of the room there streamed the sunshine and fragrance of an old summer. After a hot day the sun was growing faint over the garden, and the long, slim shadows on the grass were so pale that they quivered between light and darkness, like the gauzy wings of gigantic dragon flies. Against a flushed sky a few bats were wheeling. Up from the sun-steeped lawn, which was never mown, drifted the mingled scents of sheepmint and box; and this unforgotten smell pervaded the garden and the lane and the porch at the back of the house, where he had stopped, before bringing home the cows, to exchange a word with his mother. The lattice door was open, and she stood there, in her black dress, with the cool, dim hall behind her.
"Mother," he said, "I have been reading about William Wallace. When I grow up, I want to fight kings."
She smiled, and her smile was like one of the slow, sad hymns they sang on Sunday afternoons. "When you grow up there may be no kings left to fight, dear."
"Will they be dead, mother?"
"They may be. One never knows, my son."
All the romance faded suddenly out of the world. "Well, if there are any left," he answered resolutely, "I am going to fight them."
He could still see her face, thin and sad, and like the closed white flowers he found sometimes growing in hollows where the sun never shone. Only her eyes, large and velvet black, seemed glowing with hope.
"There are only three things worth fighting for, my son," she said, "Your love, your faith, and your country. Nothing else matters."