"No, thank you; I don't want it—but you can kindle the fire."
Then she sat, the papers and the photograph in her lap, till the crackling flame was bright. And again the wistful eyes pored over the past as though it were an open book. Far clearer now she saw it than before. For every leaping tongue of flame babbled of other days while the hearth-fire plied its ancient subtle industry, calling up long-vanished faces as it ever does, rebuilding the ruined past, echoing once again the long silent tones of love—and the panorama of the bygone years passed in a lane of light between the burning eyes and the mystic fire, both knowing, both caring, both sorrowing.
It was almost dark when the spare and slender form rose from the chair, moving to the secretary in the corner of the room. From the lowest compartment of it she lifted, very gently, a little bundle of letters. Then she picked up the photograph again, extracting an old newspaper from the parcel before her; a quick glance at its date confirmed what she already knew. Then, with the old daguerreotype and the old letters and the old faded newspaper in her hand, she sank upon a hassock that lay beside the fire—the fire too was old, so old and dear—and she smiled to herself as she settled down in the old girlish way, the lonely blaze greeting her as it flung its glow again upon the flushed and quivering face, as dear to it as in the gladder days of yore. One by one she turned them over—the picture and the letters and the paper—the whole story of her life was there. The shadows gathered deeper and darker as she sat and fondled these precious things, the only real treasure of all her treasure-laden house—but the fire burned on as brightly as in other days, as brightly as if it had never faltered through the years.
It was a new sensation that crept about Harvey Simmons' heart that night, such a sensation as can come only to the youth who is denied for the first time the vision of his mother's face. It seemed strange to have said good-night to nobody in the old familiar way, to hear no reassuring sound of voices indistinctly chatting in the distance, as Jessie's and his mother's always could be heard, and to give or hear no final word of mirth or message as the lamp went out and the comfortable couch received him.
The room appointed to him was replete with all that might minister to comfort, even rich and elegant in its appointments. How often Harvey had wished his own humble home had boasted such a room, not for himself but for another; yet, now that he had come into possession of all he had so often envied, how paltry and insignificant it seemed, how far beneath what he had imagined—and how gladly he would have exchanged it all for his little room at home, if he might have but again been near the dear ones from whom he had never been parted a single night in all the course of his uneventful life.
His eyes fell upon a little table in the corner, generously furnished with materials for writing. It was, in consequence, very late before he committed himself to sleep. Yet he had only written two letters, the first to his mother, a faithful and exhaustive narrative of every hour since he had seen her last. It was a new experience to him, and he wondered a little at the almost mysterious ease with which he filled page after page. It was a new-found joy, this of writing—and both intellect and emotion entered into the task with a zest and instinct that surprised himself.
The second letter was begun with much misgiving, and after long consideration. For it was to Madeline, to whom, in a kind of way he was quite at a loss to understand, his thought went out in his loneliness—far more, indeed, than it had ever done when he lived beside her. Much misgiving about this second letter there was, as has been said; and yet he felt it could not be unwelcome since its purpose was so far from personal—for its main story was of the little child and the poor family of whom he had come to know through his contact with Dr. Wallis. And he knew Madeline would love to help, in some way her own delicate judgment would suggest. But before he was through his pen had rather run away with him; and some of his impressions of the new life about him, with a little, too, that treated of life in general, had sighed itself in a kind of lonely soliloquy through the expanding pages. And he read this second letter over twice, correcting it with great care, a process the first had been denied.
His trunk had been duly delivered, as Miss Farringall had assured him it should be, and it was with a kind of reverent tenderness that the lonely stranger raised the lid and surveyed all his poor belongings, each one lying where it had been placed by the loving hands that were now so far away. The care-worn face rose again before him as he bended over these last tokens of his mother's devoted care; and instinctively, with a dumb sense that she would have wished it so, he searched first for the sacred book he had seen her place there. He soon found it, and carrying it to where the light might fall upon it, he turned wistfully to the fly-leaf. Still with his eyes fixed on it he sat down on the bed beside him, the dim mist gathering as the poor misguided handwriting looked up at him in all the eloquence of sightless love:
"Dear Harvey
From his loving mother"