I DON’T LOVE YOU NOW, MOTHER
A great many years ago I knew a lady who had been sick for two years, as you have seen many a one, all the while slowly dying with consumption. She had one child, a little boy named Henry.
One afternoon I was sitting by her side, and it seemed as if, she would cough her life away. Her little boy stood by the post of the bed, his blue eyes filled with tears to see her suffer so. By and by the terrible cough ceased. Henry came and put his arms around his mother’s neck, nestled his head in his mother’s bosom, and said, “Mother I do love you, I wish you wasn’t sick.” An hour later, the same loving, blue-eyed boy came in all aglow, stamping the snow off his feet. “O mother may I go skating? It is so nice Ed and Charley are going.” “Henry” feebly said the mother the ice is not hard enough yet.” “But mother,” very pettishly said the boy, “you are sick, how do you know?” “My child, you must obey me,” said his mother.’ It is too bad angrily sobbed the boy, who so loved his mother. “I would not like to have my little boy go,” said his mother, looking sadly at the little boy all covered with frowns; “you said you loved me, be good.” “No, I don’t love you now, mother’,” said the boy, going out and slamming the door.
Again the dreadful coughing came upon her, and thought no more of the boy. After the coughing had commenced, I noticed tears falling thick upon her pillow, but sank from exhaustion into a light sleep. In a little while muffled steps of men’s feet were heard coming into the house, as though carrying something; and they were carrying the almost lifeless body of Henry. Angrily had he left his mother and gone to skate, \ disobeying her; and then broken through the ice, sunk under the water, and now saved by a great effort, was brought home barely alive to his sick mother. I closed the doors, feeling more danger for her life than the child’s, and coming softly in, drew back the curtains from the bed. She spoke, “I heard them-it is Henry; Oh I knew he went. Is he dead?” But she never seemed to hear the answer I gave her. She commenced coughing-she died in agony — strangled to death. The poor mother! The boy’s disobedience killed her.
After a couple of hours I sought the boy’s room. “Oh I wish I had not told mother I did not love her. Tomorrow I will tell her I do,” said the child sobbing painfully. My heart ached; tomorrow I knew we must tell him she was dead. We did not till the child came fully in the room, crying, “Mother I do love you.” Oh l may I never see agony like that as the lips he kissed gave back no kiss as the hands he fell lifeless from his hand instead of shaking his hand like it always had and the boy knew she was dead “Mother I do love you now” all the day he sobbed and cried “O mother mother forgive me” Then he would leave his mother “Speak to me, mother!” but she could never speak again, and he – he last words she had ever never speak again him say, were, “Mother, I don’t love you now.”
That boy’s whole life was changed; sober and sad he was ever after. He is now a gray haired old man, with one sorrow-over his one act of disobedience, one wrong word embittering all his life — with those words ever ringing in his ears, “Mother, I don’t love you now.”
Will the little ones who read this remember, if they disobey their mother, if they are cross and naughty, they say every single time they do so, to a tender mother’s heart, by their actions, if not in the words of Henry, the very same thing, “I don’t love you now, mother?”
Milo 