"I am John Hayward Graham, Miss Helen, as I told you before. I am a footman now because it seems to be necessary. I did not intend to be a footman so long as this when I obtained the position." Helen thought she detected a shade of embarrassment again. "But after I was employed at the White House my mother's health gave way suddenly and she could no longer support herself and I was compelled to keep the place."
The man saw that he was making an awkward mess of it, and the quick intelligence of Helen's eyes showed him her inferences were all adverse.
"Oh, well," he said, "I'll begin again. It took all the money my mother had, Miss Helen, to pay for my education—all, and more. That she ever met the expense of my tuition has been a miracle to me. But she did it—insisted upon doing it. My father was a Harvard man. He died when I was two years old, leaving as his only admonition the injunction that I be thoroughly educated. My mother was faithful to that exhortation. She spent her meagre fortune and the abundant strength of her life to the last cent and almost to the last heart-beat in a religious obedience to it."
"Your mother is still living?"
"Yes; and please do not think I was so ungrateful and so unfilial as purposely to wait till she was helpless before lifting the burden of breadwinning from her shoulders. I was in five months of graduation when the call came for volunteers in the spring of 191-; yet I could not resist that call, nor would my mother have me resist it."
"A Spartan mother," commented Helen.
"My grandfather died in the front of battle, Miss Helen,—to make men free. My father was a soldier. The first bauble that I can remember playing with as a child was a medal of honour with its red, white and blue ribbon which was given to him for some daring service to the flag, I know not what. That medal and his good name was all that he left to me. I lost the medal before I knew what it stood for, and I have temporarily laid aside the name of Graham; but none the less is the memory of that bronze eagle-and-star an inspiration to me to a life work creditable to the name.
"When I enlisted I was really taking a large financial burden from my mother, and if, after my first term of enlistment was up, I was unthinking of her, it was because out of the blood of my fathers and my army experience had been born a life ambition which filled all my thoughts: the ambition to be a soldier. I was off my guard, for I had never thought of my mother as having a human frailty. When she came to place herself in my care I noticed, as I had not a month before, how far spent was her strength, and I was alarmed at the sudden change in her appearance. This change had come to her as it comes to many—with the moment of her surrender to the inevitable. Men and women may stand with determined and unshaken front against the assaults of weakness until it wins into the very citadel of their strength and possesses everything save the flag which flies at the tower-top. So with my mother: she had stood to her duty till there remained of her wonderful energies only her unshaken resolution, and when that flag was hauled down there was nothing left to surrender."
Everything in the man's tribute to his mother—sentiment and metaphor—appealed to Helen, and the tears came to her lashes.
"But she still has the strength to be vastly ambitious for her son, Miss Helen. Death itself will hardly weaken that. She talks to me of little beside the day when I shall be an officer in the army."