"No doubt you think that would be a most excellent arrangement," John answered, "inasmuch as you being the youngest would naturally live with her, and share the benefits, and in the end hope to fall heir to the whole, by skilful management. Pretty sharp, Benny! I see you have an eye to business."

"I am willing to go to the end of the earth and never set foot in the house again, nor get a cent," Ben exclaimed indignantly, "if mother can have a place of her own to live in comfort while she does live."

"Hold on, my dear boy! Who said she was not going to live in comfort?

I believe we all have comfortable homes, and it will be much more sensible for her to live amongst us than try to keep house, and take care of this place. Women always let property run down; it will only be a trouble."

After much talk and some bickerings, it was arranged that mother had better not try to keep house, but would spend a year or two at a time around among them all.

"A year or two in a place," burst out Benjamin again. "The idea of mother running about like that, begging to be taken in, no place that she can call home; it's too bad! This place is hers, she helped to earn it, and father meant she should have it all; I heard him say so."

"Really, Benjie!" Mrs. Sinclair said, "you are getting excited.

Mother does not care for the property; it would only be a trouble to her; she will live much more easily with us. You ought to see that we propose to be quite generous with mother. Of course the interest of her share will not pay her board anywhere else, but we shall take turns in keeping her, for that, besides making her presents of clothing."

"Keep her!" Ben groaned.

"Perhaps Benny proposes to set up housekeeping on his own account, soon," said John, "then mother will have a royal place to go to, and stay, no doubt."

"By the way, my dear young brother, do you think it quite the thing for you to come around finding fault with us who propose to bear all the burdens ourselves, knowing that you haven't a cent to give toward it?"

The young man restrained the bitter answer that was rising to his lips, for father's mild eye looked into his from the photograph on the wall. He made a firm resolve, though, as he walked sadly away, that the one purpose of his life should be to make a home for mother, and he would never say "burden," either.

Dear old Mrs. Kensett was so smitten, so amazed to find that her other self had gone--where she could not follow, that for days it seemed as if she sat waiting, expecting the summons to go herself.

"Surely, Ephraim would send for me," she thought in her sorrow and bewilderment. It mattered little to her, then, how or where she lived; all places were alike, since he was not in any of them, and she mechanically a.s.sented to any proposal that was made her, though she did cry out as one hurt, when John proposed an auction for the sale of household effects. "Oh, I can't," she moaned. "Your father made some of that furniture with his own hands," but the worldly-wise son, who had outgrown "foolish sentimentality," over-ruled her. It all went, the cradle in which they rocked, the old clock, the table they surrounded so many years. The rage for the antique had not yet shown itself, or John's wife and Maria, would have secured some of the old-fashioned furniture. As it was, they could not think of having their houses lumbered by it. The other two daughters were not well-to-do, and prized money more than mementos. Benjamin protested most earnestly at this sacrilegious disposal of the dear home things.

He could do but little himself, as he was still pursuing his law studies, though he did bid in his father's armchair and a few other cherished articles. John touched him on the shoulder, and said, "Ben, are you crazy? What in the world will you do with a lot of old furniture?"

"You'll see," said Ben quickly.

If John could have seen his brother's next proceeding he would certainly have p.r.o.nounced him a hopeless lunatic. He took the sum that fell to him and placed it in the bank to his mother's credit.

"The interest money won't amount to much, mother," he said, as he handed her the certificate of deposit, "but I shall enjoy thinking that if you want some little thing you can get it without asking anybody."

Mrs. Sinclair was a woman who lived for society; she had long ago cast aside as Puritanical the wholesome restraints that had governed her girlhood. What with parties, operas and theatres, she was a very busy woman. Her young family was much neglected and she was only too glad to transfer to her old mother what little care she did give them. The restful days were gone, one would have supposed that Mrs.

Sinclair had engaged, in her mother, a maid and seamstress. "It's so nice," she told her friends. "Mother takes the entire charge of them, and relieves me; children are such a responsibility." It was news to her friends, the fact that she was an anxious burdened mother.

It was hard for Mrs. Kensett to take up her life at the beginning again, to be confined day after day in a close room with noisy, fretful children, to go through the round of story-telling, tying shoes, mending tops and dolls, and minister to the thousand small wants and worries of undisciplined childhood. She had gone through all that, those chapters of her life she had considered finished and sealed up.

There is no occupation in this world more soul and body trying than the care of young children. What patience and wisdom, skill, and unlimited love it calls for. G.o.d gave the work to mothers and has furnished them for it, and they cannot shirk it and be guiltless.

It was not unusual when there was a heavy press of work in the house, calling for all the forces, for baby too to be bundled into grandma's room and left for hours. This worked very well while all were in good humour, for grandma loved children, but when baby writhed and fretted with aching teeth and would not be comforted, and Master Freddy resented the least correction by vigorous kicks from his stout little boots, and Miss Maude lisped, "I shan't! You ain't my mamma!"--what wonder that grandma, absorbed as she was by sad memories, should lose her patience too, and speak the sharp word that did not mend matters, while she sighed in spirit for the days that would not come back again.

The daughter remembered, too, that mother was cunning with her needle; how very convenient it became to send the mending basket to her room, "just for some work to pa.s.s the time away," and in time numberless little garments were sent there too, ap.r.o.ns and dresses, and she sat and st.i.tched from morning till night when she was not tending baby. n.o.body suggested a ride or a walk for her, or invited her down stairs to while away an evening when there was company.

"Mother isn't used to it," Maria said; "besides, she can't hear half that is said. She enjoys herself better alone; I suppose all old people do." This course of reasoning seemed to soothe Mrs. Sinclair's conscience when it proved troublesome, but in truth she would not have enjoyed introducing her plain-looking mother to her fashionable friends. "So old style." The old ladies she was accustomed to meet wore trail and puffs and dress caps; she might have searched long, though, to find another old face of such sweet placid dignity as her mother's.

This life in the crowded city was so new and strange and dismal. How the mother longed amid its dust and smoke for the sweet air of Hawthorn, for a sprig of lilac, or a June rose from the garden. Once in a rare while she succeeded in getting to church. It was a difficult thing to bring about, though; when nothing happened to prevent, the carriage was driven there, but apparently in that family there were more hindrances to church-going than to any other sort of going.

Now that spring had come again, Mrs. Kensett looked forward to a change of her home with pleasure; she wanted to get into the country once more, and Martha, the second daughter, had married a farmer and lived in the country; it was a long distance from Hawthorn, and she had not visited her daughter since her marriage. The pleasant home among trees and flowers and greenness that she had pictured was not there; instead, a bare frame house on a side hill without a tree or vine; there was no time to enjoy them had they been there; the long hot days were filled up with work; endless milking and baking and churning, and the unselfish mother put in her waning strength, early and late, did what she could to lighten the burden that was making her daughter prematurely old. Then the dismal winter settled down upon them, monotonous days of sleet and snow and darkness, when nothing happened from week to week to break the dreary routine, when even the Sabbaths brought no relief.

Mrs. Kensett had ever been an untiring church goer; rain or shine, she was in her place. Her son-in-law was not a Christian, and always had an excellent excuse for remaining at home, in the summer the horses were tired, or it was too hot; in the winter it was too cold, or too something. Many a dreary Sabbath the sad mother sat at her chamber window and watched the rain come down in slow, straight drizzle, repeating to herself rather than singing, as she rocked too and fro,

"How lovely is thy dwelling-place, O Lord of hosts to me!

The tabernacles of thy grace, How pleasant, Lord, they be!

"My thirsty soul longs vehemently, Yea, faints thy courts to see; My very heart and flesh cry out, O living G.o.d for thee."

Longing meanwhile with intense desire to sit once again in the old pew, and hear the familiar tones of her pastor's voice in that far-away, pleasant village that used to be her home; now she had no home, a wanderer from house to house, and yet she was not a murmurer, her faith and love did not falter.

In due course of time she went on her pilgrim way and tarried for a time at her daughter Hannah's; a good-natured soul, who loved her mother and gave her welcome to such as she had, but she lived in a small house, with a large flock of children, undisciplined, rough, and noisy. It seemed that in the full little house there was no quiet corner for retreat, and grandma often moaned in the words of one of her dear psalms

"O that I like a dove had wings, Said I, then would I flee, Far hence that I might find a place Where I in rest might be."

"After all I need all this," the old saint would say to herself.

"It's a part of my dear Lord's schooling. I was having too nice a time, Ephraim and I all alone. I dare say I got out of the way and he had to bring me back. He sent me all that peaceful, comfortable time; I was very glad to have his will done when it was according to my notion; this is his will all the same, and shall not I be willing to take what he sends? He is only getting me ready.

"Soon the delightful day will come When my dear Lord will call me home, And I shall see his face."

Albeit the house was small, and the children noisy, this persecuted grandmother of many homes found herself dreading to leave it and find a new home with her eldest son. John's wife had always been to her a most uncomfortable sort of person; she had dreaded her not frequent visits to their home. Both were glad when they were over. Twenty years had pa.s.sed since his marriage; she never seemed to get any nearer to his wife. Now the time had come to go and live with them, she shrank from it, and postponed it for weeks, but John was inflexible, he was an upright man, and bound to do his part in sharing the burden of his mother's maintenance.

Mrs. John Kensett was one of those icy women with thin lips and cold grey eyes, made up from the first without a heart--women who make a cool atmosphere about them even in the heat of summer. She was tall and stylish and handsomely dressed, and when she mounted her gold eyegla.s.ses and through them severely looked one over, she was formidable indeed to so meek a woman as her mother-in-law. She must have married John Kensett because an establishment is more complete with a man at the head of it, for that was the chief end of her life to keep all things in perfect running order in that elegantly appointed home, and to keep abreast of the times in all new adornings and furnishings under the sun. One Scripture admonition at least she gave heed to: she looked well to the ways of her household. One might explore from garret to cellar in that house and find nothing out of place, nothing soiled, nothing left undone that should have been done. She was withal, a rigid economist in small things. Everything was kept under lock and key, and doled out in very small quant.i.ties to the servants. Her table could never merit the charge of being vulgarly loaded; the furnace heat was never allowed to run above a certain mark on the thermometer, no matter who shivered, and she had doubtless walked miles in turning gas jets to just the right point.

In this most elegant, precise, immaculate house, where everything and everybody was controlled by certain unvarying and inflexible rules, the old mother felt almost as straitened as she ever had in the small topsy-turvy one.

Her room was scarcely above shivering point, and the back windows overlooked no cheerful prospect. Here day after day she sat alone; she had food and shelter and clothes, what more could old people possibly want? At meal times her son was silent and abstracted or absorbed in his newspaper. If anybody had told him that his old mother's heart was nearly breaking for lack of loving sympathy, he would have been astonished. The faded eyes often grew dim with tears as she looked at him--the frigid, unbending man--and remembered him as he was in those first years of her married life, darling little Johnnie in white dresses and long curls, running after b.u.t.terflies and picking flowers; if he only would kiss her once more, or do something to make her sure that he was Johnnie, she was hungry for a tender word from him. Ah! if mothers could see down the years that stretch ahead, it would not always be so hard to lay the little lisping ones under the ground. Was it decreed that most mothers shall be in sympathy with that other one, of whom it is written, "A sword shall pierce thine, own heart also"?

We shall never know about the wounds from those dear, self-sacrificing mothers, but they are there, even though they may strive to hide them and find excuses for the cold neglect, indifference to their comfort, impatience, and the putting them one side as if to say: "What is all this to you? It is time you were dead."

"John is busy," she would say, as she mounted the stairs to her lonely room, and he b.u.t.toned his coat and hastened away to business, without a 'good-bye' or a 'good night,' then she would draw out her knitting and knit on, often through tear-blinded eyes. Sometimes she did not hear a remark the first time and would ask to have it repeated, but the manifest impatience with which it was done always sent a pang well-likened to a sword-thrust, but the dear mother would cover the wound and think within herself, "I know it is a great trouble to talk to deaf people, I ought to keep still."

Strange that these stabs come not alone from the lost sheep of the family, but from the son who is the honoured citizen; from the daughter who shines in her circle as a woman of many virtues; from grandchildren trained up in the Sabbath-school.

"Into each life some sunshine must fall, as well as rain," and Mrs.

Kensett had much of hers from Benjie's letters; they were regular as the dew and cheery as the sun, a balsam for the wounds in the poor heart. They were not mere scribbles either--"I am well, and I hope you are; I haven't time to write more now"--but good long letters, with accounts of all his comings and goings, the people he met, the books he read, here a dash of fun and there a poetical fancy; and through them all ran like a golden thread the dear boy's tender love and reverence for his mother. Never did maiden watch for lover's missive with more ardour; sometimes he wrote one day, sometimes another, but always once a week, and Mrs. Kensett kept a sharp look out for the postman; when the time drew near for him to come she made many journeys down the stairs to see if she could get a glimpse of him. When the expected letter was not forthcoming she felt somehow as if the postman were to blame. But when he did come, ah! that was the one bright day of the week; how she read and re-read it, and put it in her pocket and thought it over, while she went on with her knitting, then when some little point was not quite distinct in her mind, brought it out and read it again, so that by the time another one came this one was worn out. John's wife thought to regulate this one small pleasant excitement of her mother-in-law's life by remarking to her husband that "somebody ought to tell Benjamin to write on a particular day, mother was so fidgety when it was time for the mail."

How small a thing is a letter to make one happy! and yet some of us let the sword pierce the dear mother heart by withholding that which costs us so little. G.o.d pity us when our mothers are gone beyond the reach of voice or pen.

One day her letter contained news of great importance. It was read and pondered long. Benjie was going to be married! The mother did not like the news; somehow in all her plans for Benjie the wife had not come in. Now this would be the last of her comfort in him; he would marry and settle down, and probably be just like John--given up to business. He pictured out his future bride as good and lovely. Of course he thought so, but poor Mrs. Kensett could get no vision of a daughter-in-law except a tall woman with severe expression. "She is an heiress," Benjie wrote. Well, what of that? John's wife had property too. She would likely be proud, and ashamed of a plain old woman like her.

Benjamin was no fortune-hunter; he was hard at work in his profession with no other ambition directly before him but to get together a humble home to which he might take his mother; he intended to surprise her as soon as his income would at all warrant it. But as John Milton when he met Mary Powell fastened his eyes earnestly upon her, knowing that he had found "Mistress Milton," so Benjamin, the first Sabbath he took a cla.s.s in the mission Sabbath-school, and found himself near neighbour to a sweet-faced young teacher, knew that no other face in all the world could so closely resemble the ideal picture he had sketched of that dim, shadowy, far-off person, his wife.

Marian Ledyard, too, would not willingly have confessed with what a thrill of pleasure she noticed the young stranger was in his place again on the following Sabbath, nor how for a time she searched diligently through every a.s.sembly for that one face that had such strange power to attract her; in no place, though, did she happen to meet him except that one, where there was no opportunity for acquaintance.

Benjamin had fully resolved to seek her out, but learning that she was an orphan who possessed a large fortune in her own right, he was too proud to be counted one of the moths that flutter about a candle, so he made another resolve, to think no more about her, which stoical purpose was not easy to carry out, especially as the blue eyes were often meeting his, much to the discomfiture of their owner. The coveted opportunity came at last. The holidays brought the annual entertainment for the children, and under the friendly boughs of the Christmas tree the acquaintance began, and progressed remarkably fast. It was not strange either, considering that each had been in the other's thoughts constantly for the last six weeks. They walked home in the moonlight wondering at the singular beauty that crowned the earth. The tell-tale eyes of each must have revealed the secret to the heart of the other, for the usual preliminaries, formalities, windings and turnings of modern courtship seemed unnecessary; the two drifted together as naturally as fleecy, white clouds in the blue sky. He forgot that she was worth half a million, and what did she care that he possessed not anything but his own precious self! Had she not enough for both?

Not alone in stocks and bonds were Marian Ledyard's riches. She had been a mere b.u.t.terfly of fashion and frivolity, absorbed in worldly gaieties, but the Lord met her, and she fell at his feet, saying, "What wilt thou have me to do?" And as she had eagerly, unreservedly followed the world, so now she gave herself up body, soul, time and wealth, to the service of the Lord, and she was far more sweet and fascinating in her joyful abandonment to her blessed Master's service than ever she had been in the service of that other master. She was that rare combination, a young, wealthy, consecrated Christian.

"Now, mother," wrote Benjamin, "just as soon as we are married, which will be very soon, you are to come to us. Marian says she remembers her own dear mother, and has been lonely without her these many years." This was no welcome news to the weary mother; had it been dear Benjamin alone that she was to live with, how she would have hailed her deliverance, but another son's wife! How could she face her, and be dependent on her? It would be her house and her money that provided everything. She would feel like a beggar she was sure.

She could by no stretch of imagination conceive of a son's wife to be other than a person to be dreaded. She spent many sleepless nights over it and shed tears in secret. Her triumphant faith was never more tried than now.