Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/64

56 "It is worth more to you than other days?"—dryly.

"We never observed it before. God has been so good to us, Jerome,—and it is His day of the whole year,—the day," her voice sinking with an inexpressible tenderness, "when Love came into the world as a little child,—as a little child."

He looked at her wistfully for a moment, then took up his stick and an hygrometer, saying, as he opened the door,—

"But hear to the cry of the sea! it grows more muffled and dull each hour. If Death itself could speak, that is his voice, I think." He spoke vaguely, with an anxious, absent look, then went groping down the dark stairway. Presently she heard him come back hurriedly.

"Will it cost you much to give up this day, child?" he demanded, coming close and putting his hand on her head. "I ask it of you. I must be with you in your little plans, and"

"Your mother kept it," interrupted she, sharply.

"I know,"—with dull, pained looks at the fire, at the night without, everything but her face. "Her faith is not mine."

"No, Jerome," gently,—for she was tender with him always, when he seemed weaker than herself. "But if it could be, my husband?"—her voice growing unsteady. "Humor me this one time: I have looked forward to it so long! Perhaps it was to remember my own childhood; perhaps I had some little gifts to offer you. But let me keep it. If it be childish, let me be a child."

Something in the broken voice reminded him of little Tom's. She put her hands on his arms, too, and in the thin face turned up to his there was a look left by all the years of patient love and work she had borne for him; it struck him back somehow, as by a touch, to those first days when they were lovers together in Canada. It was curious, that, in after years, when M. Jacobus remembered his wife, it was always as she looked at that last moment.

"Don't think me harsh, Sharley," he faltered.

She caught at her advantage. "We will keep it together,"—eagerly.

He thrust her hands from his arms, and went about the room with long, unsteady strides.

"I cannot lie to God! I cannot lie!" he said.

His wife, seeing his face, when he turned, cried hurriedly,—

"It is a trifle; let it go, Jerome. I can give you my little gifts all the same; it is a trifle."

Down below his credulous simplicity and the weight of borrowed ideas with which books had loaded his brain, (borrowed infidelity with the rest,) M. Jacobus was a sturdy, honest man, with a keen sense of honor: it was no trifle to him. She saw that some rough touch of hers had reached a secret depth of his soul never bared to her before.

"What is it, Jerome?"—coming up to catch him again with her trembling hand. "It is to me a matter of so little import!"

He stopped.

"It is this to me. She did keep it,—my mother. It is my first remembrance of our home,—when she was dead. We children made yet a feast upon that day, that she might look back and see. Now that I am no longer a child, and know that she can never look back, that what was my mother is but a heap of bones and dust, I—I cannot keep the day."

She stood in his way.

"Dead is dead!" he cried, fiercely, "When I know that she and the child I loved cannot speak or look at me more than this stone at my feet, I cannot believe in the day on which you say He came to bring eternal life."

"There is nothing more alive to me than my little Tom. I'm sorry you do not feel it so, Jerome," said matter-of-fact Charlotte. "I was not what you call a religious woman before he died; and when better thoughts come to me now, I am sure he brings them from the good Lord."

"Do you remember," he said,