My mother!

I stood for a moment in a kind of consternation before the white-robed innocent creature, to me no more than a child; then a sudden laugh broke from me, without any will of mine something ludicrous, as well as something awful, was in it.  When the laugh was over, I found myself with tears in my eyes, gazing, holding my breath.  The soft features seemed to melt, the lips to move, the anxiety in the eyes to become a personal inquiry.  Ah, no! nothing of the kind; only because of the water in mine.  My mother! oh, fair and gentle creature, scarcely woman, how could any man’s voice call her by that name!  I had little idea enough of what it meant,—­had heard it laughed at, scoffed at, reverenced, but never had learned to place it even among the ideal powers of life.  Yet if it meant anything at all, what it meant was worth thinking of.  What did she ask, looking at me with those eyes?  What would she have said if “those lips had language”?  If I had known her only as Cowper did—­with a child’s recollection—­there might have been some thread, some faint but comprehensible link, between us; but now all that I felt was the curious incongruity.  Poor child!  I said to myself; so sweet a creature:  poor little tender soul! as if she had been a little sister, a child of mine,—­but my mother!  I cannot tell how long I stood looking at her, studying the candid, sweet face, which surely had germs in it of everything that was good and beautiful; and sorry, with a profound regret, that she had died and never carried these promises to fulfillment.  Poor girl! poor people who had loved her!  These were my thoughts; with a curious vertigo and giddiness of my whole being in the sense of a mysterious relationship, which it was beyond my power to understand.

Presently my father came back, possibly because I had been a long time unconscious of the passage of the minutes, or perhaps because he was himself restless in the strange disturbance of his habitual calm.  He came in and put his arm within mine, leaning his weight partially upon me, with an affectionate suggestion which went deeper than words.  I pressed his arm to my side:  it was more between us two grave Englishmen than any embracing.

“I cannot understand it,” I said.

“No.  I don’t wonder at that; but if it is strange to you, Phil, think how much more strange to me!  That is the partner of my life.  I have never had another, or thought of another.  That—­girl!  If we are to meet again, as I have always hoped we should meet again, what am I to say to her,—­I, an old man?  Yes; I know what you mean.  I am not an old man for my years; but my years are threescore and ten, and the play is nearly played out.  How am I to meet that young creature?  We used to say to each other that it was forever, that we never could be but one, that it was for life and death.  But what—­what am I to say to her, Phil, when I meet her again, that—­that angel?  No, it is not her being an angel that troubles me; but she is so young!  She is like my—­my granddaughter,” he cried, with a burst of what was half sobs, half laughter; “and she is my wife,—­and I am an old man—­an old man!  And so much has happened that she could not understand.”