From the other end of the house, from the depths of the bedrooms,
came the moans of a man and a woman, the heart-rending lamentations
of the parents who could not be convinced of the truth of those
aphorisms about angels in heaven, administered by friends as a sort
of moral sedative on these occasions. They believed, on the contrary,
that this world is the proper and natural habitation for angels; nor
could they admit the theory that the death of a grown person is far
more lamentable and disastrous than that of a child. Mingled with
their grief was that profound pity which the death-agony of an infant
always inspires, and to them there was no sorrow in life like that
which was tearing their very vitals. A thousand memories and painful
visions struck at their hearts like so many daggers. The mother's
ears rang with Celinina's lispings,--that enchanting baby-talk that
gets everything wrong, and converts the words of our language into
delicious philological caricatures, which caricatures, flowing from
rosy mouths, are the tenderest and most affecting music to a mother's
heart.
Nothing so characterizes a child as his style,--his spontaneous
mode of expression, the art of saying everything with four letters,
his prehistoric grammar, which is like the first sobbing of the
words at the dawn of humanity, his simple rules of declension and
conjugation, innocent corrections of the languages which usage has
legitimatized. The vocabulary of a child of three, like Celinina, is
the real literary treasure of a family. How could her mother ever
forget the little pink tongue that said "wat" for hat, and called a
bean a "ween"! No matter where she turned, the good woman's eyes were
sure to fall upon some of the toys with which Celinina had cheered
the last days of her life; and as these were the days that preceded
Christmas, the floor was strewn with little clay turkeys on wire
legs, a Saint Joseph that had lost both hands, a manger in which lay
the Christ-Child, like a little pink ball, a wise man from the Orient
mounted upon a proud, headless camel. What these poor little figures
had endured during the past few days, dragged here and there, made to
assume this or that posture, was known only to God, the mother, and
the pure little spirit that had taken its flight.
All this broken statuary was imbued with Celinina's very
soul,--clothed with a peculiar sad light, which was the light from
her, as it were. The mother trembled from head to foot as she gazed
at them, and she felt that the wound had been dealt to her innermost
being. Strange association of things! How all these broken pieces
of clay seemed to weep! They seemed so grieved, so full of intense
sorrow, that the sight of them was scarcely less bitter than the
spectacle of the dying child herself, who with appealing eyes begged
her parents to take the pain away from her burning head. To the
mother nothing could have been more pathetic than that turkey with
its wire legs, which in its frequent changes of posture had lost its
crest and its bill.