Part 34 (1/2)
I never before had realized how dangerous a thing it was to touch with even the daintiest hand, the festering wound that both pride and remorse conspire to hide from the sight even of the sufferer's self. I could not have done anything worse for poor Essie's cause, than just what I did do, and she shared with me in the feeling of vexation and resentment that my words awakened in her mother's breast.
I soon forgot the severity of the rebuff I had received, however, when coming into the nursery, I took the struggling child from Felicie, and watched with anxiety the gradual subsiding of the fit of pa.s.sion that had convulsed her. From whatever cause it might be, she was evidently growing quieter, and in less than half an hour, the little head on my arm had relaxed its tossings, and sunk into repose, while a dreamy languor dulled the wildness of her eyes, and save when the slightest movement woke an alarm that I would leave her, she lay quite motionless.
”She is better now,” said Felicie, in a low tone, who was watching her with her basilisk eyes as she lay apparently sleeping. A nervous tightening of the slight fingers on my wrist at the sound of her voice, showed me that it was only apparently.
When Mrs. Churchill had completed her toilette, she came upstairs.
Esther, with her long eyelashes sweeping her crimsoned cheeks, lay so quiet that there seemed some reason in her mother's cutting rebuke for the unnecessary alarm I had given her. I began to feel heartily ashamed of it myself, and wondered that I had been so easily frightened.
Felicie, with a wicked look of exultation, said, that if Miss Esther hadn't been in a pa.s.sion, she wouldn't have brought the fever on again.
She had been better all day, the doctor had said she had scarcely any fever, when he was here.
Mrs. Churchill hoped, with a withering look, that I would get used to ill temper in time, and not think it necessary to disturb the household whenever Esther had a fit of crying. Then feeling the child's pulse, and giving many and minute directions for the care of her during the night, she went away. As, a moment after, the hall door closed with a heavy sound, a momentary tremor pa.s.sed over the child's frame, and opening her eyes, a strange light fluttered for an instant in them, as she murmured, ”you will not go away?” then closed them again, and she seemed to sleep.
I watched beside her for an hour; then releasing myself from her unresisting hands, and kissing her lightly, I went into my own room.
I returned several times to look at her again, before I put the light out and lay down to sleep. How many times the monotonous nursery-clock struck the half hour before I slept, I cannot tell; the heavy air was broken by no other sound; there was nothing in the silent house, shrouded by the close fog without and the dead silence within, to keep me awake, yet it was long before I slept. But sleep, when it came, was heavy and dreamless--a sort of dull stifling of consciousness, in keeping with the night.
Hours of this sleep had pa.s.sed over me, when a fierce grasp upon my arm, and a hissing voice in my ear, woke me with a terrified start, and chilled me with horror, as struggling to collect my senses, I tried to comprehend Felicie's frantic words. In a moment, they made their way to my brain, and burned themselves there.
”I've given her too much--I cannot wake her! O mon Dieu! _Je l'ai tuee!
Je l'ai tuee!_”
A horrible sickening faintness for an instant rushed over me, then a keen sense of agony like an electric flash thrilled through me, and without a look, a thought, a word, I was kneeling at the little bed in the nursery. But, as my eager eyes searched the whitened face on the pillow there, and as my aching ears listened for the almost inaudible breathing, and my hand touched the cold arms that lay outside the covers, such a cry burst from my lips as might have waked the dead, if dead were indeed before me. But there was no voice nor answer; there was an awful stillness when I listened for response; when I raised my eyes in wild appeal from the white face of the child, there was but a horrible face above me, whereon was all the pallor of death, without its calm repose; such a face as the lost and d.a.m.ned may wear when their sentence is new in their ears--when endless perdition is but just begun, and life and hope but just cut off.
Another moment, and all the house was roused. Putting back, with one strong effort, the agony and hopelessness that welled up from my heart, I mastered myself enough to direct the terrified and helpless servants.
Dispatching different ones to the nearest doctors I could think of, another for my aunt, another for all the restoratives that occurred to me, the next few minutes of suspense pa.s.sed.
But before the doctor could arrive, I knew there was no need of his coming. There had been a little flutter of the drooping eyelid, ever so slight a quiver of the parted lip, and bending down, I had listened, with agonized suspense, for the low breathing, and called her name with the tenderness that never finds perfect expression till death warns us it shall be the last. Then a little arm crept round my neck, the soft eye opened for a moment, a sigh stirred the bosom that my forehead touched, and, as the arm relaxed its faint clasp, I knew that Essie was a stranger and an alien no longer, but was where it were better for us all to be--where there is peace, eternal, unbroken, beyond the reach of sin forever.
For those first moments, when I knelt alone beside the little bed, with the soft arm still round my neck, and the breath of that sigh still on the air, there was no feeling that I had suffered a bereavement, that death and sorrow had entered the house; but holy thoughts of G.o.d and heaven--strange longings for the rest that she had entered into--a sort of hushed and hallowed awe, as if the new angel still lingered, with a half regret at leaving me alone--as if the parting, if parting there were to be, were but for a ”little while”--as if the communion of saints were so divine and comfortable a thing, that there was no need for tears and sorrow.
But when there came a sudden tumult below, hurried steps upon the stairs, a sound beside me, a pause, and then a cry that made my blood freeze in my veins, I knew that there was more than joy in heaven--that there was bitter agony on earth: that there was more than an angel won above--that there was a child dead below--a household in mourning--a mother's heart writhing in torture--a judgment fallen--a punishment following close upon a sin--a remorse begun that no time could heal, that no other life could quench, no other love allay.
CHAPTER XXIII.
”Back, then, complainer; loathe thy life no more, Nor deem thyself upon a desert sh.o.r.e, Because the rocks thy nearer prospect close.”
KEBLE.
Felicie had fled. When, in the agonized confusion of that dreadful night, she was at last remembered and searched for, there was no trace of her to be found, and all future inquiry was equally unavailing. The wretched woman need not have concealed herself with such desperate fear; no one felt any heart to search her out, or revenge on her the death of her little charge. No one of that sad household but knew, in their hearts, that there was a sin at more than her door--a sin that lay heavy in proportion to its unnaturalness and strangeness.
Those were wretched nights and days that followed little Esther's death.
The vehement grief that, in the first hours of amazement and remorse, had burst from the miserable mother, was succeeded by a calm more unnatural and more alarming. My heart ached for the misery that showed itself but too plainly in her haggard face and restless eyes; but, shutting herself up in her cold and speechless wretchedness, from all sympathy, I longed, but did not dare, to offer any. And I, perhaps more than any other, involuntarily recalled the phantom she was trying to fly, the remorse that she was struggling to subdue. Though her self-control, even then, was almost perfect, I could see that she never looked at me unmoved--that she winced at any attention from me, as if a newly bleeding wound had been roughly handled, and shrunk more than ever into herself. She refused all visitors, even the most intimate.
Josephine was the only one of the family whose presence did not seem to pain her, and at times even she was sent away. She was too strong and proud a woman not to bear her sorrow, as she bore all other emotions, alone. Not even Josephine saw any further into her heart than strangers did.
With the resumption of the ordinary household ways, came the cold insincerity that custom sanctions, of banis.h.i.+ng from familiar mention the name that, a month ago, had been a household word, now recurring hourly to the lips, but hourly to be hushed and sent back to deal another pang to the aching heart. No more allusion was made to Essie than if, a few short weeks ago, she had not been one of this small circle, the youngest, and ”the child,” who, welcome or unwelcome, had necessarily, and by virtue of her position, claimed some part of the time and notice of those around her.
It was impossible to define how much of the subdued apathy of Grace's manner was owing to the grief she felt at her sister's loss, and how much to a sort of cowardly nervousness and shrinking from the idea of death. For days after the shock, she was like my shadow, dreading, evidently more than anything else, to be left alone, shunning her mother and everything that brought the hateful subject to her thoughts, trying, with all ingenuity, to divert herself and think of other things. It was useless to attempt to lead her higher, to make her see in her little sister's death anything but dread and horror. She shrunk from all mention of it with aversion, and turned eagerly to any diverting subject, and before any other member of the family, she shook off the depression it had caused. With Josephine it had been different. At first she was awe-struck and stunned, and for a while there seemed a danger of her falling into a morbid state of feeling; but as the freshness of the shock wore away, her elasticity returned, and with it the old impatience and imperiousness, that the absence of amus.e.m.e.nt and excitement only heightened.