第4章

The elder boy's plain white collar,turned down over a closely fitting jacket,made a contrast with his brother's clothing,but the color and material were the same;the two brothers were otherwise dressed alike,and looked alike.

No one could see them without feeling touched by the way in which Louis took care of Marie.There was an almost fatherly look in the older boy's eyes;and Marie,child though he was,seemed to be full of gratitude to Louis.They were like two buds,scarcely separated from the stem that bore them,swayed by the same breeze,lying in the same ray of sunlight;but the one was a brightly colored flower,the other somewhat bleached and pale.At a glance,a word,an inflection in their mother's voice,they grew heedful,turned to look at her and listened,and did at once what they were bidden,or asked,or recommended to do.Mme.Willemsens had so accustomed them to understand her wishes and desires,that the three seemed to have their thoughts in common.When they went for a walk,and the children,absorbed in their play,ran away to gather a flower or to look at some insect,she watched them with such deep tenderness in her eyes,that the most indifferent passer-by would feel moved,and stop and smile at the children,and give the mother a glance of friendly greeting.Who would not have admired the dainty neatness of their dress,their sweet,childish voices,the grace of their movements,the promise in their faces,the innate something that told of careful training from the cradle?They seemed as if they had never shed tears nor wailed like other children.Their mother knew,as it were,by electrically swift intuition,the desires and the pains which she anticipated and relieved.She seemed to dread a complaint from one of them more than the loss of her soul.Everything in her children did honor to their mother's training.Their threefold life,seemingly one life,called up vague,fond thoughts;it was like a vision of the dreamed-of bliss of a better world.And the three,so attuned to each other,lived in truth such a life as one might picture for them at first sight--the ordered,simple,and regular life best suited for a child's education.

Both children rose an hour after daybreak and repeated a short prayer,a habit learned in their babyhood.For seven years the sincere petition had been put up every morning on their mother's bed,and begun and ended by a kiss.Then the two brothers went through their morning toilet as scrupulously as any pretty woman;doubtless they had been trained in habits of minute attention to the person,so necessary to health of body and mind,habits in some sort conducive to a sense of wellbeing.Conscientiously they went through their duties,so afraid were they lest their mother should say when she kissed them at breakfast-time,"My darling children,where can you have been to have such black finger-nails already?"Then the two went out into the garden and shook off the dreams of the night in the morning air and dew,until sweeping and dusting operations were completed,and they could learn their lessons in the sitting-room until their mother joined them.But although it was understood that they must not go to their mother's room before a certain hour,they peeped in at the door continually;and these morning inroads,made in defiance of the original compact,were delicious moments for all three.Marie sprang upon the bed to put his arms around his idolized mother,and Louis,kneeling by the pillow,took her hand in his.Then came inquiries,anxious as a lover's,followed by angelic laughter,passionate childish kisses,eloquent silences,lisping words,and the little ones'stories interrupted and resumed by a kiss,stories seldom finished,though the listener's interest never failed.

"Have you been industrious?"their mother would ask,but in tones so sweet and so kindly that she seemed ready to pity laziness as a misfortune,and to glance through tears at the child who was satisfied with himself.

She knew that the thought of pleasing her put energy into the children's work;and they knew that their mother lived for them,and that all her thoughts and her time were given to them.A wonderful instinct,neither selfishness nor reason,perhaps the first innocent beginnings of sentiment teaches children to know whether or not they are the first and sole thought,to find out those who love to think of them and for them.If you really love children,the dear little ones,with open hearts and unerring sense of justice,are marvelously ready to respond to love.Their love knows passion and jealousy and the most gracious delicacy of feeling;they find the tenderest words of expression;they trust you--put an entire belief in you.Perhaps there are no undutiful children without undutiful mothers,for a child's affection is always in proportion to the affection that it receives--in early care,in the first words that it hears,in the response of the eyes to which a child first looks for love and life.All these things draw them closer to the mother or drive them apart.God lays the child under the mother's heart,that she may learn that for a long time to come her heart must be its home.And yet--there are mothers cruelly slighted,mothers whose sublime,pathetic tenderness meets only a harsh return,a hideous ingratitude which shows how difficult it is to lay down hard-and-fast rules in matters of feeling.