He cast his eyes, as in a hungry despair, around the empty room--or, rather, I should have said, in that faintness which makes food at once essential and loathsome; for despair has no proper hunger in it.The room seemed as empty as his life.There was nothing for his eyes to rest upon but those bundles and bundles of dust-browned papers on the shelves before him.What were they all about? He understood that they were his father's: now that he was dead, it would be no sacrilege to look at them.Nobody cared about them.He would see at least what they were.It would be something to do in this dreariness.
Bills and receipts, and everything ephemeral--to feel the interest of which, a man must be a poet indeed--was all that met his view.
Bundle after bundle he tried, with no better success.But as he drew near the middle of the second shelf, upon which they lay several rows deep, he saw something dark behind, hurriedly displaced the packets between, and drew forth a small workbox.His heart beat like that of the prince in the fairy-tale, when he comes to the door of the Sleeping Beauty.This at least must have been hers.It was a common little thing, probably a childish possession, and kept to hold trifles worth more than they looked to be.He opened it with bated breath.The first thing he saw was a half-finished reel of cotton--a pirn, he called it.Beside it was a gold thimble.He lifted the tray.A lovely face in miniature, with dark hair and blue eyes, lay looking earnestly upward.At the lid of this coffin those eyes had looked for so many years! The picture was set all round with pearls in an oval ring.How Robert knew them to be pearls he could not tell, for he did not know that he had ever seen any pearls before, but he knew they were pearls, and that pearls had something to do with the New Jerusalem.But the sadness of it all at length overpowered him, and he burst out crying.For it was awfully sad that his mother's portrait should be in his own mother's box.
He took a bit of red tape off a bundle of the papers, put it through the eye of the setting, and hung the picture round his neck, inside his clothes, for grannie must not see it.She would take that away as she had taken his fiddle.He had a nameless something now for which he had been longing for years.
Looking again in the box, he found a little bit of paper, discoloured with antiquity, as it seemed to him, though it was not so old as himself.Unfolding it he found written upon it a well-known hymn, and at the bottom of the hymn, the words: 'O Lord!
my heart is very sore.'--The treasure upon Robert's bosom was no longer the symbol of a mother's love, but of a woman's sadness, which he could not reach to comfort.In that hour, the boy made a great stride towards manhood.Doubtless his mother's grief had been the same as grannie's--the fear that she would lose her husband for ever.The hourly fresh griefs from neglect and wrong did not occur to him; only the never never more.He looked no farther, took the portrait from his neck and replaced it with the paper, put the box back, and walled it up in solitude once more with the dusty bundles.
Then he went down to his grandmother, sadder and more desolate than ever.
He found her seated in her usual place.Her New Testament, a large-print octavo, lay on the table beside her unopened; for where within those boards could she find comfort for a grief like hers?