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All was still and quiet; only shadows lived and moved about. Midnight struck. That hour to me was always fraught with mysterious significance.
From where I sat I could see the house in which my mother lay. It had happened on that day, as I strolled through the woods, that I had been witness of the love which a mother had for her child. The child was young, the mother was middle-aged, and not pretty, but when she looked at her child, and held out her arms to receive it, as it ran laughing towards her with its fair hair tumbled about its head, her plain face became glorified. Its spiritual beauty smote me with pain; the child's glad voice made me tremble. Some dim sense of what had never been mine forced itself into my soul.
I had the power-which I had no doubt unconsciously cultivated-of raising pictures in the air, and I called up now this picture of the mother and her child. "Are all children like that," I thought, "and are all mothers-except me and mine?" If so, I had been robbed.
The door of the great house slowly opened, and the form of a woman stepped forth. It walked in my direction, and stopped beneath my window.
"Are you up there, Master Gabriel?"
It was Mrs. Fortress who spoke.
"Yes, I am here."
"Your mother wishes to see you."
I went down immediately, and joined Mrs. Fortress.
"Did she send you for me?"
"Yes, or I should not be here."
"She is very ill?"
"She is not well."
The grudging words angered me, and I motioned the woman to precede me to the house. She led me to my mother's bedside.
I had never been allowed so free an intercourse with my mother as upon this occasion. Mrs. Fortress did not leave the room, but she retired behind the curtains of the bed, and did not interrupt our conversation.
"You are ill, mother?"
"I am dying, Gabriel."
I was prepared for it, and I had expected to see in her some sign of the shadow of death. When the dread visitant stands by the side of a mortal, there should be some indication of its presence. Here there was none. My mother's face retained the wild beauty which had ever distinguished it. All that I noted was that her eyes occasionally wandered around, with a look in them which expressed a kind of fear and pity for herself.
"You speak of dying, mother," I said. "I hope you will live for many years yet."
"Why do you hope it?" she asked. "Has my life given you joy-has it sweetened the currents of yours?"
There was a strange wistfulness in her voice, a note of wailing against an inexorable fate. Her words brought before me again the picture of the mother and her child I had seen that day in the woods. Joy! Sweetness! No, my mother had given me but little of these. It was so dim as to be scarcely a memory that when I was a little babe she would press me tenderly to her bosom, would sing to me, would coo over me, as must surely be the fashion of loving mothers with their offspring. It is with no idea of casting reproach upon her that I say she bequeathed to me no legacy of motherly tenderness.
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