My mother turned very white when I showed her the letter. She had heard ugly things about the Gallipoli Peninsula. People were saying that the life of a junior subaltern on Helles was working out to an average of fourteen days; and that, in the heat, the flies and dust were scattering broadcast the germs of dysentery and enteric. And I believe my restless excitement hurt her. But she only said: "I'm so proud of it all," and kissed me.
The last night, however, as she sat in her chair, and I, after walking excitedly about, stood in front of her, she took both my hands and drew me, facing her, against her knees. I know she found it sweet and poignant to have me in that position, for, when I was a very small boy, it had been thus that she had drawn me to tell me stories of my grandfather, Colonel Ray. She had dropped the habit, when I was a shy and undemonstrative schoolboy, but had resumed it happily during the last two years, for, by then, I had learnt in my growing mannishness to delight in half-protectingly, half-childishly stroking and embracing her.
She drew me, then, this last night against her knees and looked lovingly at me. Her yearning heart was in her eyes. Her hands, clasping mine, involuntarily gripped them very tight, as though she were thinking: "I cannot give him up; I cannot let him go."
I smiled down at her, and, as I saw the moisture veil her eyes, I felt that I, too, would like to cry. At last she said:
"If I'm never to see you again, Rupert, I shall yet always be thankful for the nineteen years' happiness you've given me."
"Oh, mother," I said. No more words could I utter, for my eyes were smarting worse than ever. I felt about eight years old.
"If all the rest of my life had to be sorrow," she whispered, no longer concealing the fact that she was breaking down, "the last nineteen years of you, Rupert, have made it all so well worth living. I shall have had more happiness out of it than sorrow. Thank you—for all you've given me."
She let go of my left hand, so as to free her own, with which she might wipe her overflowing eyes. Then she dropped the cambric handkerchief into her lap, and grasped my hand again. As for me, I kept silence, for my mother's thanks were making my breath come in those short, quick gasps, which a man must control if he would prevent them breaking into sobs.
"You see," she explained, "you had his eyes. Your grandfather used to say of you, 'he has that Rupert's eyes.'"
"Mother!" I ejaculated. Only in that last moment did I, thoughtless boy that I was, enter into an understanding of my mother's love for the father I had never seen. In the last evening of nineteen years there was revealed to me all that my mother's young widowhood had meant to her.