Read Ebook: A little child by Cummins Mary Hornibrook

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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.'"

Coming so closely upon what Mother Graham had said the child's words were almost a shock.

"Who?" Both women put the question together.

"The man that drawed me with a pencil."

They turned and looked at each other involuntarily. Each had a mental picture of a strong, supple hand and its quick, masterful work when anything appealed to the artistic sense controlling it.

"Do you mean a man who drew a picture of you?" Mother Graham asked.

Gerald nodded.

"Here?"

"Over near that rock." He pointed with an extended forefinger.

"Did he tell you his name?"

A vigorous shake of the head answered this.

"Do you think you could tell us what he looked like?"

"He looked sorry, until I told him about the 'very present help' and 'God is love'--'unfailing, quick.'"

Judith's breath was coming with difficulty.

"It couldn't be--it couldn't," she whispered. "And, yet, he might have been drawn back to this place, even as I was!"

"He's coming back," Gerald announced.

Judith started and looked around.

"When?" she breathed.

"I hope so--I believe so."

"If he was your little boy you'd know about the big wave that swept him out."

"I don't think that he could have been my boy"--a shade of disappointment had crossed the elder woman's sweet, patient face--"for I never knew of his being swept away by a wave."

"Oh, it wasn't that kind of sea"--motioning to the water behind him--"it was a sea called sin and he said the wave had carried him 'way, 'way out. He knew about 'most every kind of sea. But I told him my mamma said it didn't matter a bit what the sea was called, Love could walk over it."

Judith had covered her eyes with her hand. Gerald touched her cheek with one finger.

"God knows I am!"

"Where did you learn all this?" Mother Graham asked, for the child was voicing thoughts which had been struggling for recognition in her own consciousness of late.

"My mamma told it to me. She tells me something more about 'a very present help' every day. And she says that the 'very present help' was always here, but that a long, long time ago people forgot how much of a help it was; and then a good woman found out how much of a help it was and she put it in a book so that other people might know, and that's how my mamma knows. Is this"--he touched Judith's face again--"your little girl?"

"Yes," Mother Graham answered promptly.

"Then you can tell her about it, just like mamma tells me!"

"I am only beginning to learn about it myself, dear, in the same way that your mamma learned; but I thank God that I have even begun, and I think"--Mother Graham laid one hand on Judith's shoulder--"that my little girl is ready to learn also."

"Yes, and"--he nodded confidently--"you know Love can walk over the sor-row sea just as easy as any other!"

Judith raised her wet face and drew the boy into her arms.

"I believe," she said slowly "that you are God's messenger to me."

THE BIG WAVE

Instead of staying the few weeks upon which they had planned at Snug Harbor Beach, Judith Graham and her husband's mother remained on for nearly two months. Neither spoke to the other of the secret hope which chained them to the place, but each morning their eyes swept the beach with eager expectancy and each evening they said, "Perhaps, to-morrow."

Judith often sat for hours on the low slab of rock where her husband had made the sketch of Gerald. Whenever he saw her thus, Gerald would invariably leave his play for a few minutes and lean against her knee, just as he had leaned against Gilbert's. Sometimes neither of them spoke and sometimes Judith would ask--without removing her eyes from the distant horizon--"Do you think he'll come back?" to which Gerald's unvarying response was, "Sure."

The moments when she was thus alone with him soon became to Judith the part of the day that counted. It seemed to her that while she sat with one arm round the boy, leaning her tired head against the warmth of his small body, the wounds which life had given her were being silently healed. No matter which way her path might lie, existence was no longer the dreary thing that it had been when she came to Snug Harbor Beach. Was it possible that Love had, indeed, walked over the sea of sorrow, to that desolate waste of waters where her bark drifted, and was saying, even to her, "It is I, be not afraid"?

At the end of the seventh week a northeast storm of unusual violence swept the coast and Judith was compelled to remain indoors for several days. She sat much near the window, sometimes reading, with deep interest, a small, leather-covered book which Mother Graham had recently purchased, and sometimes gazing out at the storm-lashed ocean. She thought how One had risen from sleep and said to such a sea, "Peace, be still." That the Christ could speak those words to-day with the same authority--was speaking them, now, to her storm-racked consciousness--daily became a more assured and glorious fact.

When she again saw the strip of sandy beach, which had grown so dear because of its association with her own little son and with Gerald, the only trace of the recent storm was a heavy, sullen swell--called by sailors "the old sea"--which lifted and broke upon the shore, rushing in with tremendous force. Although the tide was out, Judith could not on this morning seek her usual seat, so far-reaching were the waves. She stood for some minutes on a path which wound through a maze of sweet fern and berry bushes, watching Gerald who, because of three days' enforced absence from the sand, was bent on building a wonderful pyramid.

"The tide's turned," an old sailor said, in passing, "she's coming in and she'll be pretty high."

Judith, who liked these simple fisherfolk, turned aside to talk with him for a few minutes.

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