Only, if
you have any anxiety about the little one's father, and if he is within a
day's journey, I would really advise you to send for him."
Clarissa did not answer. She was hanging over the bed, watching every
difficult breath with unutterable agony. The child had only begun to droop
a week ago, had been positively ill only four days.
All the rest of that day Clarissa was in a kind of stupor. She watched the
child, and watched Jane administering her remedies, and the landlady coming
in now and then to look at the boy, or to ask about him with a friendly
anxiety. She tried to help Jane sometimes, in a useless tremulous way,
sometimes sat statue-like, and could only gaze. She could not even
pray--only now and then, she whispered with her dry lips, "Surely God will
not take away my child!"
At dusk the doctor came again, but said very little. He was leaving the
room, when Clarissa stopped him with a passionate despairing cry. Until
that moment she had seemed marble.
"Tell me the truth," she cried. "Will he be taken away from me? He is all
the world to me--the only thing on earth I have to love. Surely God will
not be so pitiless! What difference can one angel more make in heaven? and
he is all the world to me."
"My dear lady, these things are ordered by a Wisdom beyond our
comprehension," the doctor answered gently. That picture of a disconsolate
mother was very common to him--only Clarissa was so much lovelier than most
of the mothers, and her grief had a more romantic aspect and touched him a
little more than usual.
Pages:
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655