Her Boy, Ruined by Drink
By Thomas A. Bagshaw
Her boy. He had been hers in his youth. They said he was like her, and he loved her then. She had often sat for hours by his cradle, and read out of that beautiful face his future—and hers; for what was hers belonged to him, and what he had or made was hers. They were one heart. She had sacrificed her youth to give her boy a chance, and her joy had been the tears she shed on his pillow while he slept. He didn’t know, and if he did, he forgot. Most boys do. She had built air-castles for him, sleeping and waking, not of fancy, though her fancy retouched them. She knew his genius, and she knew as well the taint in his blood. She counted him up without it, and it was mother-like to forget it. She loved him as she loved no one else, and a mother’s love is not stern. If she made a mistake, she didn’t know it then. But in the wreck of the years she remembered.
To-day her boy is lost in a sodden, uncouth man of thirty. You would scarcely know in him the blue-eyed, dimpled child whose portrait hangs over the sofa where he lies in torpid slumber. The light is gone from his eye, his face is pale, and in it is the dark tragedy of a beaten manhood.
And the mother, bent not with the weight of her years, but with the burden of a great sorrow, gray with snows that have come in cruel haste on the very heels of summer, sits beside him—her boy. She loves him still—for what he was. She keeps the memory. No part of her early vision is left to her. Her day-dreams have melted, and to-day she gathers the broken threads together and seeks to weave them into the vague vision of other years.12 If you had seen him, you would have wondered if this could be that mother’s boy. Faded she is and marked with the years; but she is beautiful, compared with this soiled garble of a man buried in the fetid fumes of his own debauch. The wind howls against the eaves as if to twist the roof from the cottage shell it had been pledged to protect. The windows rattle in their cases, and the lamp on the rude table where she sits answers every gust of wind that blows. The shadows tremble on that pale, wan face, and she shivers. It is not because the little room is cold, nor because she fears the uncanny noises that the storm is tattooing on the old stove-pipe chimney, nor does she dread that the ragged form upon the sofa will rise from his heavy sleep. It is the bitterness of memory that chafes her sad heart, and makes her tremble. Her boy—still hers—but somehow to-night she wishes for death for him and her. She thinks of the then and the now, the days of his youth and his childhood—the first night he disclosed the appetite she dreaded, the kiss with which he had sealed her lips as he left her, her long delirium of wakefulness, the heavy footfall, the prostrate form lying in the hallway amid the shadows of the midnight, her own tears and the agony that filled her soul, and then the shame and humiliation of that morning meeting. And now age had come and gray hairs. Now her child was a man—and such a man! The world despised him, and in his sober moments he despised himself; but to the mother he was still her boy. Battered and broken, the semblance of what he might have been, friendless and poor, he had still a mother, and she had still—a boy. Rum may shatter homes and break friendships. It may damn and poison everything that a clean hand cares to touch. But there is a citadel that it has not taken, where, while life lasts, the prodigal may find an asylum for his penitence and his misery. The saloon has never yet dammed back the fountain of a mother’s tears, nor has it stifled the full and free affection of a mother’s heart.—Thomas A. Bagshaw.