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Come to the mother, when she feels, For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm With banquet song, and dance, and wine; And thou art terrible: the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier, And all we know, or dream, or fear Of agony, are thine.
He looked at the dark head pressed on the pillows and remembered his young wife's half-laughing pride in her first-born's copper coloured aureole of hair. He recollected the day he had first held him in his arms, himself but just arrived at man's estate, and this helpless little baby given into his power and keeping.
"Remember that, as a principle of rectitude, I have recognised my son and accepted your very 'accident of descent' as chief reason for according him all a first-born's rights. That was your instinct towards right his rights of property." "It was righteousness, not rights of property that made you decide," she assured him. "Abel has no rights of property.
Surely He hath set thy misdeeds before Him, and thy secret sins in the light of His countenance. Another blank of misery: but his honour is still safe. Keymis will return with that gold ore, that pledge of his good faith for which he has ventured all. Surely God will let that come after all, now that he has paid as its price his first-born's blood? At last Keymis returns with thinned numbers.
A boy, in all probability, would have squandered the money, let the name sink back again into the gutter. And even had he been the other sort, he could only have been another business man, keeping where I had left him. You will call your first boy Hasluck, won't you? It must always be the first-born's name. It shall be famous in the world yet, and for something else than mere money."
And the mother lifts the lids of her faint eyes, as when a parting vapor reveals rifts of serene heaven, gazes for a moment into the depths of her first-born's tenderness, gropes darkly for his fingers and for the hot little hand thrust eagerly forth to meet hers, closes one about the other, and folds them both upon her own heart.
She placed her arms on the rail of the cradle and gazed at him tenderly. "Lord, keep him clean and pure, and whatever he may do in life, may he never break a woman's heart!" she softly prayed. Into her first-born's face she looked long and in silence. How like her, and how like him, and how marvelous the miracle of this union of flesh and blood and spirit in a living soul!
The young mother, on her bed of pain and ecstasy, has counted thy echoing strokes, and dates from them her first-born's share of life and immortality. The bridegroom and the bride have listened, and feel that their night of rapture flits like a dream away.
Meanwhile that field might open where an honourable death, grasping a scythe in its two hands, cuts a way through the ranks of armed warriors: where the children of weeping mothers are trampled to death by the hoofs of horses: where they throw the first-born's mangled remains into the common burying-pit: perhaps there the son will find what the father sought in vain: those who fled from before the resting-chamber of that melancholy house, on the façade of which was to be read the inscription, covered by the creepers since days long gone by.
"Asher, if you had your choice this minute of all the things you might be, what would you choose to be?" Virginia asked. "Just a common farmer, just a king of a Kansas claim," Asher replied. Then looking out toward the swell of ground beside the Grass River schoolhouse where the one little mound of green earth marked his first-born's grave, he added, "Just a home-builder on the prairies."
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