In vain her pleading. The tongue that was already stiffening uttered one inexorable word.
“No!”
“Oh, then I promise, mother!” she cried through bursting tears. “And may God forgive me if I promise wrongly, seeing how much I love you, dearest dear!”
Ah me! the dying!—how pitiless they are! What heavy fetters their feebleness can rivet on our limbs, what galling yokes their parting wishes have power to lay upon our aching necks! How they stretch us on the rack with their strengthless hands; ruthlessly seize the levers, turn the jolting wheel; and wring from us, with tears of blood, and groanings of the flesh and of the spirit, the pledge we most shrink to give! and pass content, knowing we dare not break the promise given to one upon whom the grave is about to close.
“Promise me, my son,” I heard the worn-out drudge of a London insurance office say to his boy of twelve years, grasping the small warm hand in his, that was gaunt and cold, and damp with the sweat of death—“promise me that when I lie beside your mother in the cemetery you will never fail to visit our grave each Sunday; and lay upon it of the flowers that are in season, the freshest and best, as you have seen and helped me to do ever since she died! Promise me that weeds shall never grow above her resting-place; that dust and soil shall never smirch the stone we placed above her; and see that the fee to the man who mows the grass be regularly paid. Do not fail me in this, my little son!”
Little son, with wide blue eyes fixed in awe and terror upon the whitening stare of impending dissolution, sobbed out the asked-for promise, and the bankrupt died content.
He knew that on the day following the shabby funeral that was to swallow up the last remaining five-pound note of his miserable savings, his penniless child was to be taken by his sole living relative—a struggling tradesman resident in a remote London suburb—to help the uncle in his business as a tobacconist and newsvendor, clean the shop windows, carry out the papers, perform odd offices in the household, and generally fulfill the duties of an unpaid errand-boy, yet he died content!
No realization of the crushing weight of responsibility laid on those thin, childish shoulders; no thought of the desperate, fruitless effort to be made, Sunday after Sunday, to keep the extorted pledge, marred the moribund’s happy complacency in the undertaking given. Almost with his final breath he whispered something about the flowers in season, and the tidy gravestone, and the weeds that were never to be allowed to grow....