“Oh, Mother Graham, don’t,” Judith said quickly. “If you blame yourself, what about me? He never touched—it—” she stopped, shuddering—“until after baby went. I shut myself up then, alone with my grief. I spent hours just looking at his little clothes. I accused Gilbert of not caring. It seemed to me that all the world should have stood still and mourned with me. I was mad, I think. Too late I realized that misery and loneliness are open doors through which temptation may freely enter. To me the indulgence of grief was a luxury. To Gilbert the sight of a small shoe or toy was agony. Men are so different! Little by little he began to drift away from the cold, empty, silent place that had once been home.”
The older woman did not reply. Hers was the blame, her heart cried out, hers alone! Had she ever taught her son that problems are not solved by shirking them? Had she fitted him to face the world’s woe unflinchingly and do a man’s share toward lifting it? Ah, that “line of least resistance” which she had made so natural for him! She realized now that it is swimming against the current which develops moral muscle—the muscle which can resist temptation in after years. The mother bowed her head with an inarticulate cry, “Oh, God, I have failed, but Thy resources are infinite!”
She put her own sorrow, her own sense of failure, bravely aside in order to help her companion.
“It is hard, I know, to believe—when the sky is as dark as yours seems to be now, Judith, that it will ever be any brighter, but every day it becomes clearer to me that God’s law is a law of annihilation to every discordant condition. It does make the crooked straight and the rough places plain. It will, if we rely wholly upon it, bring harmony and order out of seeming chaos. God did not create us, His children, to be driven by every wind and wave of disaster. When we begin to discern this great truth it is, indeed, the coming of the kingdom of heaven to our consciousness. I have thought so often, of late, of those beautiful lines—
‘I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air,
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.’”
Tears had risen so full in Judith’s dark eyes as Mother Graham finished speaking that she was not at first aware of a small figure which had halted directly in front of her, or of a childish gaze fixed intently upon her face. Gerald, realizing that here was need of some kind, drew nearer.
“You can’t know about it either, or you wouldn’t cry,” he began.