“Well, of course she did not go on the stage, yet singing is, in a way, like it,” said Anne. “You know your mother was a singer and she couldn’t keep away from the old life: singing, and applause, and all that, after she was a widow. You know she left you here to go back to it.”
“Yes, I knew all that,” said Jane slowly, “but I seem to have to try to know it; it isn’t real to me. I never can make my mother real to me, Anne. You knew her. I wish you could make me feel what she was like.”
“Knew her? I came over with her before she married and I stayed with her till she went back to England. She left me; never I her,” said Anne warmly. “Just a slender bit of a thing was she, like a primrose, one that you couldn’t help spoiling, such coaxing ways she had and such a pretty face, with a little droop of her shoulders and a fall in her voice as if she begged a body to be good to her. I’d have cut off my head for her willingly. So I stayed, and did my best for her babies, without her.”
“And what a best!” cried Jane, with a flashing look of grateful love. “Oh, I wish I had seen her! You make her a darling, Anne; just a sort of toy mother, to be petted and to be proud of! Why did she die, Anne? Do you know? No one ever told us; not even Mary knows about her death.”
“I never heard one word about her dying, Jane; never the time, nor place, nor any syllable,” said Anne truthfully. “I mustn’t stand clacketing here any longer, Jane; I’ve more to do than I’ve minutes, though the good Lord gives to each of us all the time there is, if only we think about it.”
Anne hastened away, and Jane walked over to the window, absently watching Mark Walpole returning from his call on Mr. Moulton, though without consciously seeing him, nor remembering that she had been deeply interested in the result of this visit.
“What a pretty little toy mother! How I wish I had her, or had even seen her!” thought Jane, swinging the shade pull. “And now Mary can’t remember her more than as a shadow before a mirror! Oh, little coaxing mother, I wonder why you left your three girl babies? Perhaps because you were only a girl yourself. But we lost something we can never get back.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“HOME AT EVENING’S CLOSE, TO SWEET REPAST AND CALM REPOSE”
Mark Walpole came up the walk at a rapid gait, swinging one arm and breathing through his puckered lips as though he were whistling, though the tune of it was in his mind only; no sound came forth. Mary met him at the door with her pretty air of self-forgetfulness and absorption in others, the manner that was all Mary’s, as if she were an anxiously motherly old lady and, at the same time, a childishly innocent young girl.