my mother's love.

Midnight came without a message, and I went to bed, slightly comforted,
hoping that a turn for the better had taken place. I slept fitfully,
waking again and again to the bleak possibilities of the day. A
persistent vision of a gray-haired mother watching and waiting for her
sons filled my brain. That she was also longing for Zulime I knew, for
she loved her, and thought of her as a daughter.

In this agony of remorse and fear I wore out the night, and as no word
came in the morning, I ate my breakfast in half-recovered tranquillity.

"It must be that she is better," Zulime said, but at nine o'clock a
telegram from the doctor destroyed all hope. "Your mother is
unconscious. Do not hope to find her alive," was his desolating message.

Every devoted son who reads this line will shiver as I shivered. That
warning came like a wind from the dark spaces of a bleak, uncharted
deep. It changed my world. For twenty years my mother had been my chief
care. My daily thought ran to her. Only when deeply absorbed in my work
had she been absent from my conscious mind. For her I had planned, for
her I had saved, for her I had built, and now----!

That day was the longest, bitterest, I had ever known, for the reason
that, mixed with my grief, my sense of remorse, was a feeling of utter
helplessness. In desperate desire for haste I could only lumpishly wait.
Another day of agony, another interminable night of pain must pass
before I could reach the shadowed Homestead. Nothing could shorten the
interval. Then, too, I realized that she whom I would comfort had
already gone beyond my aid, beyond any comfort I could send.

Over and over I repeated, "If only we had started a few days sooner!"
The truth is I had failed of a son's duty just when that duty was most
needed, and this conviction brought an almost intolerable ache into my
throat. Nothing that Zulime could do or say removed that pain. I could
not eat, and I could not rest.

We reached Chicago in time to catch the night train at ten o'clock, and
in almost utter mental exhaustion I fell asleep about midnight, and
slept till nearly daylight.

* * * * *

Father met us at the train, as he had so often done before, but this
time there was something in the pinched gray look of his face, something
in the filmed light of his eagle eyes which denoted, movingly, the
tragic experiences through which he had just passed. Before he spoke I