CHAPTER III.
Reader, think of some lovely picture of rustic life, with tender lights and pleasant shadows, with hard lines softened, and sharp angles touched into gentle curves, with a background of picturesque, satisfying appropriateness, with the magic touches that bring out the beauty and refinement and elegance of the scene, which are really there, and that subtly tone down all the roughness and awkwardness and coarseness, which are also equally there. And then, imagine it, if you can, changing under your very eyes, with glaring lights and heavy shadows deepening and sharpening and hardening wrinkles and angles and lines, exaggerating defects, bringing coarseness and age and ugliness into painful prominence, and taking away at a sweep the pretty, rural background which might have relieved and soothed the eye, and putting a dull, common-place, incongruous one in its place. It was something of this sort that happened to John Carter that night, when the picture he had been painting with the sweet lights of love and childhood's fancies, and the tender shadows of memory throwing over it all soft tones of long ago and far away, suddenly stood before him in unvarnished reality, with all the glamor taken away, an every-day fact in his present London life.
I am glad to write it of him that, for the first minute, pleasure was the uppermost feeling in his mind. First thought are often the best and purest. He started up, saying, "Mother! why mother!" in the same tone of glad surprise as he would have done fifteen years before if she had come unexpectedly into the shop at Martel; he did not even think if the door were closed, or what Mr. Hyder would think; he did not notice that she was crumpled and dirty with travel, or that she put her pattens down on his open book and upset the glass of violets; he just took hold of her trembling, hard-worked hands, and kissed her furrowed old cheek, wet with tears of unutterable joy, and repeated "Mother! why, mother!"
I am glad to write it of him; glad that she had that great happiness, realizing the hopes and longings of years past, consoling in days to come when she had to turn back to the past for comfort, or forward to the time of perfect satisfaction. There are these exquisite moments in life, let people say what they will of the disappointments and vanity of the world, when hope is realized, desire fulfilled; but it is just for a moment, no more—just a fore taste of the joys that shall be hereafter, when every moment of the long years of eternity will be still more full and perfect, when we shall "wake up" and "be satisfied."
She was clinging meanwhile to his arm, sobbing out, "Laddie, my boy, Laddie!" with her eyes too dim with tears to see his face clearly, or to notice how tall and grand and handsome her boy was grown, and what a gentleman. Presently, when she was seated in the armchair, and had got her breath again, and wiped her foolish old eyes, she was able to hunt in her capacious pocket for the silver-rirnmed spectacles that had descended from her father, old Master Pullen, in the almshouse, and that Laddie remembered well, as being kept in the old family Bible, and brought out with great pomp and ceremony on Sunday evenings.
"I must have a good look at you, Laddie boy," she said.
And then I think her good angel must have spread his soft wing between the mother and son (though to her mind it seemed only like another tear dimming her sight, with a rainbow light on it), to keep her from seeing the look that was marring that son's face. All the pleasure was gone, and embarrassment and disquiet had taken its place.
"However did you come, mother?" he said, trying his best to keep a certain hardness and irritation out of his voice.
"I come by the train, dear," the old woman answered "and it did not terrify me more nor a bit at first, I'll not go for to deny; but, bless you! I soon got over it, and them trains is handy sort of things when you gets used to 'em. I was a good deal put to though when we got to London station, there seemed such a many folks about, and they did push and hurry a body so. I don't know whatever I should 'a done if a gentleman hadn't come and asked me where I wanted to get to. He were a tallish man with whiskers, a bit like Mr. Jones over at Martel, and I dare say you knows him; but he was terrible kind, however."
John Carter did not stop to explain that there were many tallish men with whiskers in London.