"Love doesn't mean just happiness," she said.
David was silent for a moment; then he said, very gently, "You are thinking of—of your little boy, who died?"
"Yes; and of my marriage; it was not happy, David."
He pressed his cheek against hers, without speaking. The grief of an unhappy marriage he had long ago guessed, and in this moment of his own happiness the remembrance of it was intolerable to him. As for the other grief: "when I think of the baby," he said, softly, "I feel as if that little beggar gave me my mother. I feel as if I had his job; and if I am not a good son—" he stopped, and looked at her, smiling; but something in her face—perhaps the pitiful effort to smile back through the tears of an old, old sorrow, gave him a sudden, solemn thrill; the race pain stirred in him; he seemed to see his own child, dead, in Elizabeth's arms.
"Mother!" he said, thickly, and caught her in his arms. She felt his heart pounding heavily in his side, but she smiled. "Yes," she said, "my little boy gave me another son, though I didn't deserve him! No, no, I didn't," she insisted, laying her soft mother-hand over his protesting lips; "I used to wonder sometimes, David, why God trusted you to me, instead of to a—a better woman—" again she checked his outburst that God had never made a better woman! "Hush, dear, hush. But I didn't mean that love might mean sorrow. There are worse things in the world than sorrow," she ended, almost in a whisper.
"Yes, there are worse things," he said quietly; "of course I know that. But they are not possible things where Elizabeth is concerned. There is only one thing that can hurt us: Death."
"Oh, my dear, my dear! Life can hurt so much more than death! So much more."
But David had nothing more to say of life and love. He retreated abruptly to the matter of fact; he had gone to his limit, not only of expression, but of that modesty of soul which forbids exposure of the emotions, and is as exquisite in a young man as physical modesty is in a girl. He was unwilling, indeed he was unable, to show even to his mother, even, perhaps, to Elizabeth, the speechless depths that had been stirred that afternoon by the first kiss of passion, and stirred again that night by the sight of tears for a baby,—a baby dead for almost a quarter of a century! He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets, and whistled. "Heaven knows how long it will be before we can be married! How soon do you think I can count on getting patients enough to get married?"
Mrs. Richie laughed, though there was still a break of pain in her voice. "My dear boy, when you leave the medical school I mean to give you an allowance which,—"
"No, Maternal" he interrupted her; "I am going to stand on my own legs!" David's feeling about self-support gave him a satisfaction out of all proportion to the pain it sometimes gave his mother. She winced now, as if his words hurt her.