E-text prepared by Bruce Albrecht, Louise Pryor,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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| Note: | The title page shown below indicated the presence of a second novel, A Rose of Yesterday. This e-book contains only the novel Adam Johnstone's Son. |
“I SOMETIMES THINK THAT ONE’S PAST LIFE IS WRITTEN IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE,” SAID MRS. BOWRING, SHUTTING THE BOOK SHE HELD.
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF
F. MARION CRAWFORD
Adam Johnstone’s Son
A Rose of Yesterday
BY
F. MARION CRAWFORD
WITH FRONTISPIECE
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 foreignlanguage,” said Mrs. Bowring, shutting the book she held, but keepingthe place with one smooth, thin forefinger, while her still, blue eyesturned from her daughter’s face towards the hazy hills that hemmed thesea thirty miles to the southward. “When one wants to read it, one findsever so many words which one cannot understand, and one has to look themout in a sort of unfamiliar dictionary, and try to make sense of thesentences 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 canbe in sympathy with age, while not understanding it, while notsuspecting, perhaps, that there is anything to understand beyond thestreaked hair and the pale glance and the little torture-lines whichpaint 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 streaksare months, perhaps, or weeks, or sometimes hours, where the tear-stormshave bleached the brown, the black, or the gold. “This littlewrinkle—it was so very little then!” she says. “It came when I doubtedfor a day. There is a shadow there, just at each temple, where the cloudpassed, 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 arehollows there, near the ears, on each side, since that week when lovewas done to death before my eyes and died—intestate—leaving hissubstance to be