The Purple Heights | Page 8

had his
paper and colors.
It was a beautiful surprise for Peter's mother, that sketch, which was a
larger copy of the one on the fly-leaf of his geography. There was the
gray worm-fence, a bit of brown ditch, an elder in flower, a tall purple
thistle, and on it the Red Admiral. Peter wished to make his mother
personally acquainted with the Red Admiral, so he printed on the back
of his picture:
My buterfly done for mother's burthday by her loveing son Peter

Champneys the 11th Year of his Aige.
The little woman cried, and held him off the better to look at him, with
love, and wonder, and pride, and drew his head to her breast and kissed
his hair and eyes, and wished his dear, dear father had been there to see
what her wonder-child could do.
"I can't to save my life see where you get such a lovely gift from, Peter.
It must be just the grace of God that sends it to you. Your dear father
couldn't so much as draw a straight line unless he had a ruler, I'm sure.
And I'm not bright at all, except maybe about sewing. But you are
different. I've always felt that, Peter, from the time you were a little
baby. At the age of five months you cut two teeth without crying once!
You were a wonderful baby. I knew it was in you to do something
remarkable. Never you doubt your mother's word about _that_, Peter!
You'll make your mark in the world yet! God couldn't fail to answer my
prayers--and you the last Champneys."
Peter was too innately kind and considerate to dim her joy with any
doubts. He knew how he was rated--berated is the better word for it. He
knew acutely how bad his marks were: his shoulders too often bore
witness to them. The words "dunce" and "sissy" buzzed about his ears
like stinging gnats. So he wasn't made vainglorious by his mother's
praise. He received it with cautious reservations. But her faith in him
filled him with an immense tenderness for the little woman, and a
passionate desire, a very agony of desire, to struggle toward her
aspirations for him, to make good, to repay her for all the privations she
had endured. A lump came in his throat when he saw her place the little
sketch under his father's picture, where her eyes could open upon it the
first thing in the morning, and close to it at night.
"Ah, my dear! God's will be done--I'm not complaining--but I wish, oh,
how I wish you could be here to see what our dear child can do!" she
told the smiling crayon portrait. "Some of these days the little son
you've never seen is going to be a great man with a great name--your
name, my dear, your name!"
Her face kindled into a sort of exaltation. Two large tears ran down her

cheeks, and two larger ones rolled down Peter's. His heart swelled, and
again he felt in his breast the flutter as of wings. Far, far away, on the
dim and distant horizon, something glimmered, like sunlight upon airy
peaks.
Peter's mother wasn't at all beautiful--just a little, thin, sallow woman
with mild brown eyes and graying hair, and a sensitive mouth, and
dressed in a worn black skirt and a plain white shirt-waist. Her fingers
were needle-pricked, and she stooped from bending so constantly over
her sewing-machine. She had been a pretty girl; now she was thirty-five
years old and looked fifty. She wasn't in the least intellectual; she
hadn't even the gift of humor, or she wouldn't have thought herself a
sinner and besought Heaven to forgive sins she never committed. She
used to weep over the Fifty-first Psalm, take courage from the
Thirty-seventh, and when she hadn't enough food for her body feed her
spirit on the Twenty-third. She didn't know that it is women like her
who manage to make and keep the earth worth while. This timid and
modest soul had the courage of a soldier and the patience of a martyr
under the daily scourgings inflicted upon the sensitive by biting poverty.
Peter might very well have received far less from a brilliant and
beautiful mother than he received from the woman whose only gifts
and graces were such as spring from a loving, unselfish, and pure heart.
For Peter's sake she fought while she had strength to fight, enduring all
things, hoping all things. She didn't even know she was sacrificing
herself, because, as Emma Campbell said, "Miss Maria's jes' natchelly
all mother." But of a sudden, the winter that Peter was turning twelve,
the tide of battle went against her. The needle-pricked, patient fingers
dropped their work. She said apologetically, "I'm