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Highacres, a fiction by Jane Abbott |
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Chapter 28. Her Mother's Story |
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_ CHAPTER XXVIII. HER MOTHER'S STORY Sometime after she had gone to sleep, Jerry wakened suddenly with the disturbing conviction that someone needed her. At the same moment her ear caught a sound that made her slip her bare feet quickly to the floor and stand, listening. It had been a soft step beneath her window--a little sigh. In a flash Jerry sped down the narrow stairway, past the open door of the room where Little-Dad lay snoring, and out across the veranda. In the dim light of the moon that hung low in the arc of the blue-black sky, Jerry made out the figure of her mother, standing near the rough bench that overlooked the valley. "Mother!" "Jerry, child, and in your bare feet!" "I heard you out here. Isn't it dreadfully late? Can't you sleep? Mother, look at me," for Mrs. Westley had kept her face averted. "Mother, darling, why do you look so--sort of--sad?" Jerry's voice was reproachful. "We're so happy now that we are together, aren't we? And it will be nice to have lots of things and Little-Dad won't ever have to worry and----" Mrs. Travis lifted her hand suddenly and laid it across Jerry's lips. "Child, I am not sad. I have been out here fighting away forever the foolish fears that have stalked by my side since you were a very little girl. Some day, when you're a mother, you'll know how I've felt--how I've dreaded facing this moment! How often I've sat with you and watched the baby robins make their first flight from the nest and have laughed at the fussy mother robin scolding and worrying up in a nearby branch----" "But, mamsey, you've always told me how the mother robin pushes the little ones out of the nest to make them know that they can fly!" Mrs. Travis accepted the rebuke in silence. Jerry slipped her hand into her mother's. Her mother held it close. "Jerry, dear, I've never told you much about myself because I could not do that without telling you of your own father. I was a very lonely little girl; I had no brothers or sisters--no near relatives. My mother died when I was eight years old, and a housekeeper--good soul--brought me up. My father was a professor of chemistry in Harvard, as you know, and he was a queer man and his friends were peculiar, too--not the sort that was much company for a young girl. But I was very fond of my father and I was very content with my simple life until I met Craig Winton. He was so different from anyone else who had ever crossed our threshold that I fell in love with him at once. My father died suddenly and Craig Winton asked me to marry him. It was the maddest folly--he had nothing except his inventive genius and he should never have tied himself to domestic responsibilities; they were always--such as they were--like a dreadful yoke to his spirit. But we were happy, oh, we were happy in a wonderful, unreal way. Sometimes we didn't have enough to eat, but he always had so much faith in what he was going to do that that somehow, kept us going. But when his faith began to die--it was dreadful. It was as though some hidden poison was killing him, right before my eyes." "What made his faith die?" asked Jerry, curiously. "Because he grew to distrust his fellowmen. That second visit to Peter Westley----" Mrs. Travis spoke quickly to hide her bitterness. "He was so sure that what he had made was good--an inventor has always, my dear, an irrational love for the thing he has created--and to have it spurned! He was supersensitive, super--everything. Then my own health went to pieces. I suppose I simply was not getting enough to eat to give me the strength to meet the mental strain under which I had to live--and you were coming. From his last visit to Peter Westley he returned with a little money, but he was as a crushed, broken man--his bitterness had unbalanced his mind. He said that it was for my health that he came away with me, but I knew that it was to get away from the world that he hated--and to hide his failure! Your Little-Dad took us in. He knew at once that your father was a very sick man and he brought him to his cabin here on Kettle. But even here your father suffered, and after you were born he feared for you. He was obsessed with the thought that you had all life to face----" "How dreadfully sorry you must have felt for him," whispered Jerry, shyly, trying to make it all seem true. "I felt sorry for him, child, not that he had been so disappointed but because he had not the strength to rally from it. I don't believe God made him that way; I think he sacrificed too much of himself to his genius. This world we live in demands so much of us--such different things, that, if we are to meet everything squarely, we cannot develop one side of our minds and let the other side go. I am telling you all this, Jerry, that you may understand how I have felt--about you. The months after your father died were sort of a blank to me--I lived on here because I had nowhere else to go. Gradually my gratitude to John Travis turned to real affection--not like what I had given your father, but something quite as deep. And the years I have lived with him here have been very happy--as though my poor little ship had found the still waters of an inland stream after having been tossed on a stormy sea. And I've tried to make myself think that in these still waters I could keep you always, that you would grow up here and--perhaps--marry someone----" she laughed. "Mothers always dream way ahead, darling. But as you grew older I could see that that was not going to be easy. You've so quickly outgrown everything I can give you--or that anyone--here--can; you have grown so curious, your mind is always reaching out. What is here, what is there, what is this, where is that--questions like these always on your tongue! And you are like your father--very." Jerry shivered the least little bit, perhaps from the night air, warm as it was, perhaps from the thought that she was like poor, poor Craig Winton, who did not seem at all like a real father. In a moment her mother had wrapped her in the soft shawl she carried. Something in the loving touch of her hands broke the spell of unreality that had held Jerry. "I don't understand, mamsey," she whispered, cuddling close, "if you felt like--that--and worried, why did you let me go away?" "Because, my child," there was something triumphant in her mother's voice, "some inner sense made me believe that though you look like your father and act like him in many ways, you have a nature and a character quite of your own. I tried to put away the fears I had had which I told myself were foolish and morbid. John Westley's arguments helped me. I knew immediately that he was related to the Peter Westley who had crushed your father, but I felt certain he knew nothing of it--and I was glad; to bury the past entirely was the only way to bury forever the bitterness that had killed your father. And when John Westley made the offer to give you a year of school, I thought it was only justice! I had known school life in a big city where I had many schoolmates and I lived for several years in the shadow of a great university, though the life in it only touched me indirectly, and when the opportunity opened, I wanted you to have the same experience; I felt it might solve the problem that confronted me. And I told myself that I was sure of you that you could go away to school, go anywhere, and come back again and be my same girl! Jerry, these people have been very, very good to you; out of pure generosity they have given you a great deal, do you now--now that you know the truth--feel any bitterness toward them?" Never had Jerry associated Uncle Johnny and Mrs. Westley, nor the younger Westleys, nor the charming, hospitable home, with the Peter Westley she had pictured from Gyp's vivid descriptions. And, too, remembering the pathetic loneliness of the old man's last days, she felt nothing but pity. "Oh, no," she answered, softly, decidedly. "Anyway, he made up for everything he'd done when he gave beautiful Highacres to Lincoln School," she added, loyally. Then Jerry fell silent. "I was sure of you," her mother's words echoed. Had she not glimpsed more, in those months at Highacres, than her mother dreamed? A promise of what college might hold for her--new worlds to conquer? "Mother, am--am I the--same girl?" She put the question slowly. "No, Jerry--and that's what I've been fighting out here--all by myself. For I realize that it was only selfishness made me dread finding a change! A mother's selfishness! That you should grow and go on and forward, even though you leave me behind, darling, I know must be my dearest wish. But oh, my dear, I understand how the poor mother robin feels just before she shoves her babies out of the nest! For don't you think she hates an empty nest as much as any human mother? Do you remember the little story I used to tell you when you were small enough to cuddle your whole self on my lap? How yours and my love was a beautiful, sunny garden where you dwelt and that the garden had a very high wall around it?" "I love that story, mamsey. I told it once to Mrs. Westley and she loved it, too. And you used to say that there was a gate in the wall with a latch but the latch was quite high so that when I was little I could not find it!" "And then you grew bigger and your fingers could reach the latch--you wanted to open it to go out and see what was outside. I had made the little garden as beautiful as I knew how and it was very sunny and the wall was so high that it shut out all trouble--but you wanted so much to open the gate that I knew I must let you!" "And then I went away to Highacres----" put in Jerry, loving the story as much as ever. "And I was alone in the garden our love had built, but I was not lonely--I will not be lonely, for--wherever you go--you are my girl and I love you and you love me! Nothing can change that. And I shall leave the gate open--it will always be open!" She said it slowly; her story was finished. Jerry's face was transfigured. "You mean--you mean"--she spoke softly--"that--if I want to go--back to Highacres--you'll let me? I can go to college? Oh, mamsey, you're wonderful! Mothers are the grandest things. And the gate will always be open so's I can always come back? And you won't be lonely for I'll always love you most in the world of anybody or anything. And when I'm very grown-up and can't go to school any more we'll travel, won't we? You and me and Little-Dad--won't we, mamsey?" "Yes, dear." But the mother's eyes smiled in the darkness--she was thinking of the empty nest. Jerry laid her cheek against her mother's arm. She drew a long breath. "The world's so wonderful, isn't it? It's dreadful to think of anyone in it, like my--father, who's set his heart so hard on just one thing that he can't see all the other things he might do! I shall never be like that! And it's dreadful"--she frowned sorrowfully out over the starlit valley--"to think of girls who haven't mothers and who can't go to school. Why, I'm the very, very richest girl in the world!" Then she blushed. "I don't mean that money, mamsey, I mean having you and--Sunnyside and Kettle and just knowing about--our garden!" _ |
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