Читать книгу Journal of Small Things - Helen Mackay - Страница 21

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Eliane let me come to-day, for the first time since her boy went, on the Tuesday. She has changed so, one can scarcely believe it, in just these few days. She does not look young any more. How badly he would feel; he always loved his pretty little mother to look young. He loved it when people took her for his sister, and how delighted he was that time she went to see him when he was in barracks, and the captain was shocked. She is no more young and pretty and she does not care.

Her eyes looked as if they never could cry again. She told me that the last night she had listened outside his door, and when she was quite sure he was asleep, she crept in, and groped for a chair at the foot of his bed, and sat there, not seeing him, just knowing him near, all night long while he slept. She went quietly out of the room before he waked, when the light began to show the oblong of the windows—she did not want him to know that she had watched. She said he slept the whole night long, never stirring, and that she had known she must not cry, for fear of waking him. She thought something had happened in that night to her throat and to her eyes, so that she could never have tears any more.