Adam Johnstones Son

Adam Johnstone's Son, by F.
Marion Crawford

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Title: Adam Johnstone's Son
Author: F. Marion Crawford

Release Date: August 29, 2007 [eBook #22455]
Language: English
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The Complete Works of F. Marion Crawford
ADAM JOHNSTONE'S SON
by
F. MARION CRAWFORD
With Frontispiece

[Illustration: "I SOMETIMES THINK THAT ONE'S PAST LIFE IS
WRITTEN IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE," SAID MRS. BOWRING,
SHUTTING THE BOOK SHE HELD.]

P. F. Collier & Son New York
Copyright 1895, 1896, 1897 by F. Marion Crawford All Rights
Reserved

ADAM JOHNSTONE'S SON
CHAPTER I
"I sometimes think that one's past life is written in a foreign language,"
said Mrs. Bowring, shutting the book she held, but keeping the place
with one smooth, thin forefinger, while her still, blue eyes turned from
her daughter's face towards the hazy hills that hemmed the sea thirty
miles to the southward. "When one wants to read it, one finds ever so

many words which one cannot understand, and one has to look them
out in a sort of unfamiliar dictionary, and try to make sense of the
sentences as best one can. Only the big things are clear."
Clare glanced at her mother, smiling innocently and half mechanically,
without much definite expression, and quite without curiosity. Youth
can be in sympathy with age, while not understanding it, while not
suspecting, perhaps, that there is anything to understand beyond the
streaked hair and the pale glance and the little torture-lines which paint
the portrait of fifty years for the eyes of twenty.
Every woman knows the calendar of her own face. The lines are years,
one for such and such a year, one for such and such another; the streaks
are months, perhaps, or weeks, or sometimes hours, where the
tear-storms have bleached the brown, the black, or the gold. "This little
wrinkle--it was so very little then!" she says. "It came when I doubted
for a day. There is a shadow there, just at each temple, where the cloud
passed, when my sun went out. The bright hair grew lower on my
forehead. It is worn away, as though by a crown, that was not of gold.
There are hollows there, near the ears, on each side, since that week
when love was done to death before my eyes and
died--intestate--leaving his substance to be divided amongst indifferent
heirs. They wrangle for what he has left, but he himself is gone, beyond
hearing or caring, and, thank God, beyond suffering. But the marks are
left."
Youth looks on and sees alike the ill-healed wounds of the martyrdom
and the rough scars of sin's scourges, and does not understand. Clare
Bowring smiled, without definite expression, just because her mother
had spoken and seemed to ask for sympathy; and then she looked away
for a few moments. She had a bit of work in her hands, a little bag
which she was making out of a piece of old Italian damask, to hold a
needle-case and thread and scissors. She had stopped sewing, and
instinctively waited before beginning again, as though to acknowledge
by a little affectionate deference that her mother had said something
serious and had a right to expect attention. But she did not answer, for
she could not understand.

Her own young life was vividly clear to her; so very vividly clear, that
it sometimes made her think of a tiresome chromolithograph. All the
facts and thoughts of it were so near that she knew them by heart, as
people come to know the patterns of the wall-paper in the room they
inhabit. She had nothing to hide, nothing to regret, nothing which she
thought she should care very much to recall, though she remembered
everything. A girl is very young when she can recollect distinctly every
frock she has had, the first long one, and the second, and the third; and
the first ball gown, and the second, and no third, because that is still in
the future, and a particular pair of gloves which did not fit, and a
certain pair of shoes she wore so long because they were so
comfortable, and the precise origin of every one