The Heart of Rachael

The thought of all these things used to distress his mother when

she was old and much alone. She attempted to belittle the luxury

of Clarence's boyhood. She told Rachael that he was treated just

as the other boys were. Her conscience was never quite easy about

his upbringing.

"You can't hold a boy too tight, you know, or else he'll break

away altogether," old lady Breckenridge would say to Rachael,

sitting before a coal fire in the gloomy magnificence of her old-

fashioned drawingroom and pressing the white fingers of one hand

against the agonized joints of the other. "I was often severe with

Clarence, and he was a good boy until he got with other boys; he

was always loving to me. He never should have married Paula

Verlaine," she would add fretfully. "A good woman would have

overlooked his faults and made a fine man of him, but she was

always an empty-headed little thing! Ah, well"--and the poor old

woman would sigh as she drew her fluffy shawl about her shoulders-

-"I cannot blame myself, that's my great consolation now, Rachael,

when I think of facing my Master and rendering an account. I have

been heavily afflicted, but I am not the first God-fearing woman

who has been visited with sorrow through her children!"

Clarence had visited his mother often in the weeks that preceded

her death, but she did not take much heed of his somewhat

embarrassed presence, nor, to Rachael's surprise, did her last

hours contain any of those heroic joys that are supposedly the

reward of long suffering and virtue. An unexpressed terror seemed

to linger in her sickroom, indeed to pervade the whole house; the

invalid lay staring drearily at the heavy furnishings of her

immense dark room, a nurse slipped in and out; the bloody light of

the westering sun, falling through stairway windows of colored

glass, blazed in the great hallway all through the chilly October

afternoons. Callers came and went, there were subdued voices and

soft footsteps; flowers came, their wet fragrance breaking from

oiled paper and soaked cardboard boxes, the cards that were wired

to them resisting all attempts at detachment. Clergymen came, and

Rachael imitated their manner afterward, to the general delight.

On the day before she died Mrs. Breckenridge caught her son's

plump cool hand in her own hot one, and made him promise to stop

drinking, and to go to church, and to have Carol confirmed.

Clarence promised everything.

But he did not keep his promises. Rachael had not thought he

would; perhaps the old lady herself had not thought he would. He

was sobered at the funeral, but not sober. Six weeks later all the

bills against the estate were in. Florence had some of the family

jewels and the family silver, Rachael had some, some was put away

for Billy; the furniture was sold, the house rented for a men's

club, and a nondescript man, calling upon young Mrs. Breckenridge,

notified her that the stone had been set in place as ordered. They

never saw it; they paid a small sum annually for keeping the plot

in order, and the episode of Ada Martin Langhorne Breckenridge's

life was over.