: A little child by Cummins Mary Hornibrook - Short stories; Children Fiction; Redemption Fiction

@FreeBooksThu 08 Jun, 2023

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k with delight when the water swept in round his father's knees. It seems to me now that those weeks were my very last gleam of sunshine. To think that in less than two months from that time my baby was dead!"

The older woman made no attempt to stem this outburst of grief. Youth must make its plaint, she thought pitifully; and the girl--she was little more--at her side was one of those who are capable of receiving death-wounds through the very completeness of their love.

"Of late," she said, after a while, speaking in a low tone, "it has seemed to me that this cannot be the end, Judith, either for you or Gilbert. I have been thinking much of God's all-loving, all-wise plan for each one of us, and how we seem to draw back from it, even to dread it; whereas, in reality, it can hold nothing but happiness for every creature. I wish--oh, I wish with all my heart that I had thought of these things earlier in life, while Gilbert was still a boy! But then I was so proud of his good looks, of his popularity, of his talent for drawing, that I unconsciously made the turning aside into easier paths his rule of living. It has been the old story--no restraining father's hand, an over-fond mother and an impressionable boy."

The older woman did not reply. Hers was the blame, her heart cried out, hers alone! Had she ever taught her son that problems are not solved by shirking them? Had she fitted him to face the world's woe unflinchingly and do a man's share toward lifting it? Ah, that "line of least resistance" which she had made so natural for him! She realized now that it is swimming against the current which develops moral muscle--the muscle which can resist temptation in after years. The mother bowed her head with an inarticulate cry, "Oh, God, I have failed, but Thy resources are infinite!"

She put her own sorrow, her own sense of failure, bravely aside in order to help her companion.

"It is hard, I know, to believe--when the sky is as dark as yours seems to be now, Judith, that it will ever be any brighter, but every day it becomes clearer to me that God's law is a law of annihilation to every discordant condition. It does make the crooked straight and the rough places plain. It will, if we rely wholly upon it, bring harmony and order out of seeming chaos. God did not create us, His children, to be driven by every wind and wave of disaster. When we begin to discern this great truth it is, indeed, the coming of the kingdom of heaven to our consciousness. I have thought so often, of late, of those beautiful lines--

'I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air, I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.'"

Tears had risen so full in Judith's dark eyes as Mother Graham finished speaking that she was not at first aware of a small figure which had halted directly in front of her, or of a childish gaze fixed intently upon her face. Gerald, realizing that here was need of some kind, drew nearer.

"You can't know about it either, or you wouldn't cry," he began.

"Know about what, dear?"

Judith had taken one small, brown hand and drawn him closer to her. He was three years older than her own little son would have been, had he lived, but her heart yearned over him as it did over all children now.

"About 'God is love'--'unfailing, quick.'"

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