a pretty face comes across. I might have thought of that last Tuesday, when I felt as if thou wert all my own, and the judge were some wild animal trying to rend thee from me. I spoke up for thee then; but it’s all forgotten now, I suppose.”
“Mother! you know all this while, YOU KNOW I can never forget any kindness you’ve ever done for me; and they’ve been many. Why should you think I’ve only room for one love in my heart? I can love you as dearly as ever, and Mary too, as much as man ever loved woman.”
He awaited a reply. None was vouchsafed.
“Mother, answer me!” said he, at last.
“What mun I answer? You asked me no question.”
“Well! I ask you this now. Tomorrow morning I go to Liverpool to see her who is as my wife. Dear mother! will you bless me on my errand? If it please God she recovers, will you take her to you as you would a daughter?”
She could neither refuse nor assent.
“Why need you go?” said she querulously, at length. “You’ll be getting in some mischief or another again. Can’t you stop at home quiet with me?”
Jem got up, and walked about the room in despairing impatience. She would not understand his feelings. At last he stopped right before the place where she was sitting, with an air of injured meekness on her face.
“Mother! I often think what a good man father was! I’ve often heard you tell of your courting days; and of the accident that befell you, and how ill you were. How long is it ago?”
“Near upon five-and-twenty years,” said she, with a sigh.
“You little thought when you were so ill you should live to have such a fine strapping son as I am, did you now?”
She smiled a little and looked up at him, which was just what he wanted.
“Thou’rt not so fine a man as thy father was, by a deal,” said she, looking at him with much fondness, notwithstanding her depreciatory words.
He took another turn or two up and down the room. He wanted to bend the subject round to his own case.
“Those were happy days when father was alive!”
“You may say so, lad! Such days as will never come again to me, at any rate.” She sighed sorrowfully.
“Mother!” said he at last, stopping short, and taking her hand in his with tender affection, “you’d like me to be as happy a man as my father was before me, would not you? You’d like me to have some one to make me as happy as you made father? Now, would you not, dear mother?”
“I did not make him as happy as I might ha’ done,” murmured she, in a low, sad voice of self-reproach. “Th’ accident gave a jar to my temper it’s never got the better of; and now he’s gone where he can never know how I grieve for having frabbed him as I did.”
“Nay, mother, we don’t know that!” said Jem, with gentle soothing. “Anyhow, you and father got along with as few rubs as most people. But for HIS sake, dear mother, don’t say me nay, now that I come to you to ask your blessing before setting out to see her, who is to be my wife, if ever woman is; for HIS sake, if not for mine, love her whom I shall bring home to be to me all you were to him: and, mother! I do not ask for a truer or a tenderer heart than yours is, in the long run.”
The hard look left her face; though her eyes were still averted from Jem’s gaze, it was more because they were brimming over with tears, called forth by his words, than because any angry feeling yet remained. And when his manly voice died away in low pleadings, she lifted up her hands, and bent down her son’s head below the level of her own; and then she solemnly uttered a blessing.
“God bless thee, Jem, my own dear lad. And may He bless Mary Barton for thy sake.”
Jem’s heart leapt up, and from this time hope took the place of fear in his anticipations with regard to Mary.
“Mother! you show your own true self to Mary, and she’ll love you as dearly as I do.”
So with some few smiles, and some few tears, and much earnest talking, the evening wore away.
“I must be off to see Margaret. Why, it’s near ten o’clock! Could you have thought it? Now don’t you stop up for me, mother. You and Will go to bed, for you’ve both need of it. I shall be home in an hour.”
Margaret had felt the evening long and lonely; and was all but giving up the thoughts of Jem’s coming that night, when she heard his step at the door.
He told her of his progress with his mother; he told her his hopes and was silent on the subject of his fears.
“To think how sorrow and joy are mixed up together. You’ll date your start in life as Mary’s acknowledged lover from poor Alice Wilson’s burial day. Well! the dead are soon forgotten!”
“Dear Margaret! But you’re worn-out with your long evening waiting for me. I don’t wonder. But never you, nor any one else, think because God sees fit to call up new interests, perhaps right out of the grave, that therefore the dead are forgotten. Margaret, you yourself can remember our looks, and fancy what we’re like.”
“Yes! but what has that to do with remembering Alice?”
“Why, just this. You’re not always trying to think on our faces, and making a labour of remembering; but often, I’ll be bound, when you’re sinking off to sleep, or when you’re very quiet and still, the faces you knew so well when you could see, come smiling before you with loving looks. Or you remember them, without striving after it, and without thinking it’s your duty to keep recalling them. And so it is with them that are hidden from our sight. If they’ve been worthy to be heartily loved while alive, they’ll not be forgotten when dead; it’s against nature. And we need no more be upbraiding ourselves for letting in God’s rays of light upon our sorrow, and no more be fearful of forgetting them, because their memory is not always haunting and taking up our minds, than you need to trouble yourself about remembering your grandfather’s face, or what the stars were like—you can’t forget if you would,
