“And my mother. How often has her clinging kiss muttered a prayer as I left home, and impressed a welcome as I returned. An heroic character, enriched by the depth of a mother’s love, was hers. When I reached home on that cold, gray day in early spring, she lay there sorely stricken with the dread pneumonia which had taken my father, but patient, tender, unselfish as ever. To my broken attempt at encouragement, she replied: ‘Yes, I must try and live for you children.’ But, as life ebbed and she saw that it was not to be, that noble heart, ever resigned to the will of God, accepted the inevitable. It seemed that to join him who had gone was her dearest wish; without him life, as she lay there suffering, must have seemed cold, empty, cheerless. But even this she seemed prepared to bear, so that she might keep a home open for her children, and endeavour to help them from falling from the path of duty. Then came the day when she was told that hope of recovery was gone. ‘I knew it,’ she said. Calling us around her, in a voice greatly weakened, she uttered her heart’s wish in a simple sentence—‘I want you all to be good, so that you may meet us There.’ I am naturally rather disposed to be cold, I fear, but in that moment the depth of that mother’s love came to me as never before, and the sublimity of her faith burst upon me. From that day dates a new epoch in my life.
“To the last her thoughts were of us. Faithfully, unobtrusively, but unswervingly, she had throughout life worked and lived that we might know truth, and not stray from what she was wont to call ‘the straight and narrow path.’
“At four o’clock in the morning the end came. How cold the dawn of that morning! Without a struggle her soul went to its God. How delicate the thread which binds us to eternity! But a short time before she was there and knew all that was happening; that she was going; and, that we must fight the battle of life, with the snares and temptations with which we are beset by our human passions and weaknesses. Not a doubt seemed to enter into that mind, which had held steadfastly to the eternal truth throughout a noble, fearless life. She had run her race, she had kept the faith. The sturdy integrity, inherited from her father, and a gentle, loving kindness, which probably came from the mother who died when she was yet a child, combined to make a character which by its sweetness, beauty and nobility, has woven itself into my life. Pray God that I may never be unworthy of her memory.”
And unworthy of so holy a memory Harper never was. While spared to him, the love and affection of his father and mother were his greatest inspiration, and his great reward; taken from him, the remembrance of their example, and a belief in their continued existence, constituted an abiding presence, helping him ever to nobler conduct and aim.
Yet, how irreparable this loss was, words cannot tell. Harper could never bring himself to speak of it without the deepest emotion. What seemed hardest to him was that his father and mother should have been taken just when he had hoped to be able to make them fully conscious of his gratitude.
In a letter written some months after, he says:
“Great as is my pride in the noble lives of my beloved parents, and confident as I am that they will enjoy their reward unto all eternity, I find it impossible to get away from the sense of the emptiness of the world without them. Their lives were devoted to their children, and their children were devoted to them. A kinder father, and a more loving mother, never lived. To them we looked for congratulation upon any success which fell to our lot and for sympathy if our sky were dark. They never failed us. And at the moment when we were all comfortably settled in our professions, and there was the prospect of a long peaceful life before them, they were taken away. Herein lies the chief bitterness of it all. But we have the lesson of their lives, and fond memories which we can ever cherish.”
Some time later, in acknowledging hospitality shown him during a brief visit in Toronto, he wrote on his return to Ottawa:
“As I lay in my berth last night, looking out at the beautiful, silent, star sprinkled sky, a feeling settled upon me that the curtain had just fallen upon one of the happiest days of my life. The warmth of your welcome, and the kindly thoughtfulness of your every word and action, were appreciated by me the more, because I have learned what it is, both to have, and to be without, that most happy and most sacred of human associations, a home.”