“What does make me so lonely and fearful?” exclaimed the lady, wringing her cold hands.
She busied herself in little things, trying to drive the trouble away; refolded the paper her son had not found time to read, pushed his arm-chair nearer the table for herself, and, discovering a flake of smooth-pressed clay which his boot had left on the carpet, took it up, and threw it into the fireplace. That homely little service brought a faint smile to her face.
“The careless boy!” she said fondly. “He never could remember to wipe his boots on coming in, even when he was a mere lad. I can see his bright face now as it looked when he would argue me out of scolding him. His mind was occupied with lofty matters, he said; he could not bring it down to boots and mud. It sounded like a jest; but who knows if he might not even then have been about his Father’s business!”
Dropping into his chair, she sat thinking over the old time and her boy’s childhood. How happy and peaceful their life had been! Half chiding herself, as if she knew he would have called it folly, she went into her bedroom, and brought our a little trunk, in which were preserved souvenirs memorable in her life and his.
There was his christening-robe. She shook out the length, and pushed two of her fingers through the tiny embroidered sleeve.
“How little we dream what the future is to be!” she murmured. “I wonder how I would have felt if, when I was embroidering this, there had risen before my eyes the vision of a chasuble hanging above it? But I couldn’t have been prouder of him than I was. He was a fine healthy boy, and had a will of his own even then. When he was baptized, he got the priest’s stole in his baby fist, and I had to pull it away finger by finger, the little fellow clinging all the time.”
There were boyish toys, schoolbooks adorned with preposterous pencil-drawings, in which the human figure was represented by three spheres set one over the other, and supported on two sticks; there were letters written his mother while he was away from home, at school or college, and a collection of locks of hair cut on successive birthdays, till the boy had laughed her out of the custom. She placed these side by side now, ranging them according to their dates, and studied the gradual change from the silken-silvery crescent of a curl cut from the head of the year-old babe, through deepening shades, to the thick brown tress cut on his twentieth birthday. Every little lock had its story to tell, and she went over each, ending with a kiss, in fancy kissing the child’s face she seemed again to see. And as she sat there conning the past, memory struck every chord of her heart, from the sweet, far-away vibration when her first-born was placed in her arms, and coming down through deepening tones to the present.
She lifted her face, that had been bent over these mementos. “Now he is Father Chevreuse, and I am an old woman!” she said; and, sighing, rose and put the souvenirs all away. “We have had a glad and prosperous life; how little of sorrow, how little of adversity! I never before realized how much I have to be thankful for.”
Presently she put a veil over her head, and went out through the basement into the church to say her prayers. She always said her evening prayers before the altar; and now she had double cause to be scrupulous. She must atone for past unthankfulness, and pray for her son’s safe return.
By ten o’clock, the house was closed for the night, and the inmates had all gone to their quiet slumber. Mother Chevreuse’s uneasiness was all gone, and, after devotions of unusual fervor, she felt an unwonted peace. “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” she said, and sank to sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.