The Precipice, page 99 by Elia W. Peattie
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and a mother might minister well to a child's corporeal part without once ministering to its soul. It was possible that there never had been any bond save a physical one between Mrs. Leger and her son. Perhaps they looked at each other with strange, uncomprehending eyes. That, she could imagine, would be a tantalization from which a sensitive woman might well wish to escape. It was within the realm of possibility that he was happier with his grandmother than with his mother. There might be temperamental as well as physical "throwbacks."
Kate remembered a scene she once had witnessed at a railway station. Two meagre, hard-faced, work-worn women were superintending the removal of a pine-covered coffin from one train to another, and as the grim box was wheeled the length of a long platform, a little boy, wild-eyed, gold-haired, and set apart from all the throng by a tragic misery, ran after the truck calling in anguish:--
"Grandmother! Grandmother! Don't leave me! I'm so lonesome, grandmother! I'm so afraid!"
"Stop your noise," commanded the woman who must have been his mother. "Don't you know she can't hear you?"
"Oh, maybe she can! Maybe she can," sobbed the boy. "Oh, grandmother, don't you hear me calling? There's nobody left for me now."
The woman caught him sharply by the arm.
"I'm left, Jimmy. What makes you say such a thing as that? Stay with mother, that's a good boy."
They were lifting the box into the baggage-car. The boy saw it. He straightened himself in the manner of one who tries to endure a mortal wound.
"She's gone," he said. He looked at his mother once, as if measuring her value to him. Then he turned away. There was no comfort for him there.
Often, since, Kate had wondered concerning the child. She had imagined his grim home, his barren days; the plain food; the compulsory task; the kind, yet heavy-handed, coarse-voiced mother. She was convinced that the grandmother had been different. In the corner where she had sat