Ruth Erskine's Son

by Pansy

"He is very much like his grandfather."

As the boy grew older he laughed at all these opinions, and asked his mother if she did not think it would be difficult for a fellow to have any individuality who was strikingly like three people who were all, as nearly as he could make out, strikingly unlike one another.

This remark was one of the memories that came back to her as she looked out at the swift-falling night, and listened to that musical strain which was being played over and over and over. She seemed to be watching the people who were hurrying homeward, glancing apprehensively now and then at the sky; for despite the glow of sunset there were premonitions of a coming storm, and already a few advance snowflakes were beginning to fall. But Mrs. Burnham saw neither people nor snowflakes; or rather she saw them without seeing. Her eyes were swimming in tears that she did not intend to let have their way. Not as girl or woman had Ruth Erskine Burnham been given to tears, although there had been reason enough in her life for them. Since she had not indulged them then, she did not mean to begin now that she was middle-aged and her hair was being sprinkled with gray.

She had been going over the story of the years with herself, that afternoon, which might account in part for the dimmed eyes. It seemed to her, looking back, that her chief mission in life had been to minister at dying beds and follow as chief or almost chief mourner in funeral processions. She had gone away back to the betrothed of her youth, and added one more heavy sigh to the multitude that stood for a lost opportunity. How entirely Harold Wayne had been under her influence! how utterly she had failed him! And she had felt it only when she was following him to the grave. Then those other graves, her father's and Judge Burnham's daughters', Seraph and Minta, what strange sad memories she had connected with both those graves that were not a year apart in their making. And then their father had been laid beside them and they two were left alone in the world, she and Erskine.

He was not yet eighteen, but there were times when it seemed to his mother that he was much older, and that he and she had been alone together always. All these memories that, because it was an anniversary of one of her bereavements, had been more vivid with her than usual that day, trooped again about her as she stood in the waning light, apparently intent on watching the outside world, in order to escape being watched by her world, inside.

To people who were acquainted with the girl, Ruth Erskine, it will not seem strange that a look backward over her checkered life brought sombre thoughts that were close to tears.

Of the four girls who, years and years before when they were young and full of courage, went to Chautauqua together and lived their eventful summer and began their new lives together, hers had had the strangest, saddest story; it had been marked by experiences so unlike the commonplace that the world had stopped to look, and express its astonishment.

The unusual began with her father's strange revelations about that new mother who yet was not new, but had been her stepmother for years. Was ever daughter before called upon to receive a new mother in such way as that? But why go over all that ground again? She too had been followed to the grave, and no one of all Mrs. Burnham's friends had been more sincerely missed and mourned. Then there was her sister, Susan Erskine. Was ever heavier cross or greater blessing thrust into a life than that girl represented to the girl Ruth Erskine? It had been one of her later trials to give Susan up to China. She was sorely missed, but it had been good for Erskine to have such a missionary Auntie as she made. And those two strange girls Seraphina and Araminta Burnham. Could some writer put into print the story of those two lives as it interlaced with hers, the foolish world would call it fiction, and criticise it as unnatural.

Over the early days of her widowhood Ruth Burnham knew better than to linger. Though so many years had intervened that the little boy he left had grown to young manhood, she still missed his father so sorely that she could not trust herself to stay among those few precious months before he went suddenly from her.

She had been left, without even the warning of an hour, to bring up their boy alone! It was from this form of her bereavement that she had shrunken back most fearfully. Judge Burnham, with his life consecrated to God, had seemed eminently fitted to guide the life of just such a boy as theirs; but God had planned differently.