She bade me “lie still. She would send me a cup of tea.”
“I’ll leave you this for company,” she cooed, laying the book tenderly on my pillow. “We think it beautiful.”
With that she went out softly, shutting me in with my “beautiful” first-born. Mea always had her wits within easy call. The sixth sense was born within her.
I saw of the travail of my soul and was satisfied; was repaid a thousandfold for months of toil and years of waiting, when my father read my book. He did not go down-town again that day, after coming home to dinner. My mother told me, with a happy break in her laugh, how he had hardly touched the food on his plate. Aunt Rice’s pleasant prattle saved the situation from awkwardness when he lapsed into a brown study and talked less than he ate. When dessert was brought in, he excused himself and disappeared from general view for the rest of the afternoon. The door of “the chamber” to which he withdrew was fast shut. Nobody disturbed him until it was too dark to read by daylight. My mother took in a lighted lamp and set it on the table by him.
“He didn’t see or hear me!” was her report. “He is a quarter through the book already, and he doesn’t skip a word.”
He spent just fifteen minutes at the supper-table. It was two o’clock in the morning before he reached the last page.
After prayers next morning he put his arm about me and held me fast for a moment. Then he kissed me very gravely.
“I was right about that book, daughter!”
That was all! but it was, to my speechless self, as if the morning stars had sung together for joy.
I record here and now what I did not know in the spring-tide of my happiness. I never had—I shall never have—another reader like him. As long as he lived, he “believed” in me and in my work with a sincerity and fervor as impossible for me to describe as it can be for any outsider to believe. He made the perusal of each volume (and they numbered a score before he died) as solemn a ceremony as he instituted for the first. His absolute absorption in it was the secret jest of the family, but they respected it at heart. When he talked with me of the characters that bore part in my stories, he treated them as real flesh-and-blood entities. He found fault with one, and sympathized with another, and argued with a third, as seeing them in propia personæ. It was strange—phenomenal—when one considers the light weight of the literature under advisement and the mental calibre of the man. To me it was at once inspiration and my exceeding great reward.