I stood for a moment in a kind of consternation before the white-robed innocent creature, to me no more than a child; then a sudden laugh broke from me, without any will of mine something ludicrous, as well as something awful, was in it. When the laugh was over, I found myself with tears in my eyes, gazing, holding my breath. The soft features seemed to melt, the lips to move, the anxiety in the eyes to become a personal inquiry. Ah, no! nothing of the kind; only because of the water in mine. My mother! oh, fair and gentle creature, scarcely woman, how could any man’s voice call her by that name! I had little idea enough of what it meant,—had heard it laughed at, scoffed at, reverenced, but never had learned to place it even among the ideal powers of life. Yet if it meant anything at all, what it meant was worth thinking of. What did she ask, looking at me with those eyes? What would she have said if “those lips had language”? If I had known her only as Cowper did—with a child’s recollection—there might have been some thread, some faint but comprehensible link, between us; but now all that I felt was the curious incongruity. Poor child! I said to myself; so sweet a creature: poor little tender soul! as if she had been a little sister, a child of mine,—but my mother! I cannot tell how long I stood looking at her, studying the candid, sweet face, which surely had germs in it of everything that was good and beautiful; and sorry, with a profound regret, that she had died and never carried these promises to fulfillment. Poor girl! poor people who had loved her! These were my thoughts; with a curious vertigo and giddiness of my whole being in the sense of a mysterious relationship, which it was beyond my power to understand.
Presently my father came back, possibly because I had been a long time unconscious of the passage of the minutes, or perhaps because he was himself restless in the strange disturbance of his habitual calm. He came in and put his arm within mine, leaning his weight partially upon me, with an affectionate suggestion which went deeper than words. I pressed his arm to my side: it was more between us two grave Englishmen than any embracing.
“I cannot understand it,” I said.
“No. I don’t wonder at that; but if it is strange to you, Phil, think how much more strange to me! That is the partner of my life. I have never had another, or thought of another. That—girl! If we are to meet again, as I have always hoped we should meet again, what am I to say to her,—I, an old man? Yes; I know what you mean. I am not an old man for my years; but my years are threescore and ten, and the play is nearly played out. How am I to meet that young creature? We used to say to each other that it was forever, that we never could be but one, that it was for life and death. But what—what am I to say to her, Phil, when I meet her again, that—that angel? No, it is not her being an angel that troubles me; but she is so young! She is like my—my granddaughter,” he cried, with a burst of what was half sobs, half laughter; “and she is my wife,—and I am an old man—an old man! And so much has happened that she could not understand.”
I was too much startled by this strange complaint to know what to say. It was not my own trouble, and I answered it in the conventional way.
“They are not as we are, sir,” I said; “they look upon us with larger, other eyes than ours.”
“Ah! you don’t know what I mean,” he said quickly; and in the interval he had subdued his emotion. “At first, after she died, it was my consolation to think that I should meet her again,—that we never could be really parted. But, my God, how I have changed since then! I am another man,—I am a different being. I was not very young even then,—twenty years older than she was; but her youth renewed mine. I was not an unfit partner; she asked no better, and knew as much more than I did in some things,—being so much nearer the source,—as I did in others that were of the world. But I have gone a long way since then, Phil,—a long way; and there she stands, just where I left her.”
I pressed his arm again. “Father,” I said, which was a title I seldom used, “we are not to suppose that in a higher life the mind stands still.” I did not feel myself qualified to discuss such topics, but something one must say.
“Worse, worse!” he replied; “then she too will be, like me, a different being, and we shall meet as what? as strangers, as people who have lost sight of each other, with a long past between us,—we who parted, my God! with—with—”
His voice broke and ended for a moment then while, surprised and almost shocked by what he said, I cast about in my mind what to reply, he withdrew his arm suddenly from mine, and said in his usual tone, “Where shall we hang the picture, Phil? It must be here in this room. What do you think will be the best light?”