He bent his cheek to mine.
“You’ve never failed in anything, sweetest mother in the world. And Caro loves you just as I do—I’d swear it. Sometimes you can’t help hurting the people you love best. I—I’m hurting you myself; and I can’t help it. I’d give my right hand to help it; but I can’t—yet.”
“There’s no need, Davy, dear,” I said steadily, glad that the dark had fallen to curtain my eyes. “Don’t try to be anything with me, or to say anything, but what is natural and right to you. The one thing I couldn’t get over, dear, would be your playing a part with me. I understand; and I can wait—a life-time, if you wish.”
He kissed my hand, and sat there till the moon rose over the eastern hills and strewed the lawn with shadows. A mocking-bird stirred in his sleep and sang softly to himself. I could not speak. I lay straining my eyes through the dark to see his face, but it was all in the shadow. He rose to go at last, and, before I knew it, unbidden words had risen from some subconscious depth and uttered themselves through my lips.
“David,” I said, with a sudden, foolish up-lift of my heart, “I’m going to be walking all about by Thanksgiving; and before the year is out I will help with my own hands to decorate this house for your and Caro’s wedding. I don’t know how I know it; but I do!”
“Amen,” said David solemnly. “Mammy Lil, you’re a corker when it comes to prophesying. Keep up the habit; it’s sure comforting; and you always could see further through a stone wall than anybody else.”
He had—or feigned—more faith in my prophecy than I had myself. I felt like a fool who has published his folly to the world. And as I lay there, tearless and sleepless the long night through, I had no hope for David, and only a dull anguish at thought of the girl I had called my daughter so long.
May 13th. The world is all in a mist this morning as the sky blossoms above the eastern hills. The wren sings first, bringing the tears for which my lids have burned all night. A cardinal calls somewhere—Cheer! Cheer!—no, it is a mocking-bird, for his own notes bubble out after his cardinal call, before he wanders into a thrasher’s song, repeating his notes as carefully as “the wise thrush” himself. There he is, on the topmost twig of that mist-dimmed oak. He has tuned his voice to the oriole’s carol now, but again his own notes bubble through. Now he scolds like an angry wren, following the tirade with harsh cries and the blackbird’s censorious tsck! Then he slips into a catbird melody—a jumble of music, jeering, and captious squawks. Gradually the music overflows all else. Clearer and sweeter grow the notes, slow, soft, and wondrous pure. His head is thrown up in rapture while the flood of melody rises and swells till it sweeps him bodily into air. He opens his mist-gray wings and tail, spreading to the light the gleaming white of the in-folded feathers, and rises through the vapors to clearer air, singing as one to whom all mists are crystal clearness, all darkness as the light. He trembles at the height an instant, poised above the vapor-shrouded earth, while his song floats upward to the heaven of which it speaks,—a blending of calm and rapture, of aspiration and peace. Back to his perch he falls, still singing, content with earth as with heaven, and rises once again, to poise an instant, to fall, to rise, again and yet again.
It is the Song of the Open Vision. Haunting, appealing, alluring, the rapturous notes search the listener’s heart to draw response from every memory of mist-drenched darkness dissolved in growing light.