MARY MARGARET DILLON.
The poor young creature was aroused at length from the chill torpor that
had seized upon her; but she awoke to a hot flush of fever, raving with
pathetic wildness of a thousand things which no one comprehended—of a
husband that had left her in the depths of trouble, of the child that
she fancied herself clasping, and of the nurse who seemed forever and
ever over her bed, as she persisted in thinking, like a great, black
statue that had chilled her heart to death beneath its shadow. Thus she
raved and muttered, while the fever kindled wilder and hotter within her
veins, and her eyes grew star-like in their glittering brightness.
Hour after hour she kept up these mental wanderings, and then sunk away
again.
Meantime the nurse had been very restless under the doctor’s eye, and
negligent beyond anything known of her before when he was away. But for
the kindly interposition of a convalescent patient in the ward, the poor
invalid must have perished from inattention, if not from positive
violations of all medical rules.
The woman of whom we speak was a plump, wholesome, little Irish dame,
with the freshest face and warmest heart that ever looked poverty in the
face.
She had entered the hospital quietly, and grateful for the asylum thus
provided for her in time of need. In the depths of winter, with three
little children “to the fore,” as she said, and the husband without a
hand’s turn of work, what had she to do eating up the bread that was but
half enough to keep the hunger from so many clamorous mouths. Why
shouldn’t she take herself to the hospital thankfully, while the good
man—for want of better work—minded the childer at home?
Mary Margaret Dillon had no pride in the matter, not she. Bellevue, in
her estimation, belonged to the people. John possesses a right to vote
among the sovereigns and had paid taxes, for which his landlord took the
credit, in the shape of exorbitant rents for the last ten years. Thus he
had secured, as she considered it, a lien upon at least one humble straw
bed in the hospital, and of that she took possession with as little
feeling of humiliation as beset Victoria when she mounted the throne of
England.
When the scene we have just described happened, Mary Margaret, who had
neither lost her roses nor her cheerfulness, was sitting upon the side
of her cot, striving with her active little hands to remedy the fit of a
scant calico dress in which her fourth born was arrayed. As she sat
thus, smiling fondly upon the infant, and finding a world of beauty in
its plump face and tiny red hands, the buxom mother would have made a
capital model for one of Rubens’s Madonnas.
“Isn’t it a darlint?” she murmured, touching each velvet cheek daintily
with the tip of her finger, pursing up her lips and emitting a
succession of audible kisses upon the air, the sound of which almost
brought the first smiles to her baby’s mouth.
“Isn’t it a wonder and a beauty, with its diamond black eyes and ilegant
hair, like his father before him?” she continued, stretching the little
fellow across her lap, and striving to cover the tiny feet that would
peep out from beneath the coarse dress, by two or three vigorous pulls
at the skirt. “Won’t the children be dancing with joy when they get us
home again; and John, faix! but he’ll never grumble that there’s another
mouth to fill—barring the year when it’s in arms, poor crathur—for the
blessed Virgin that sent the baby’ll find work for us long before it’ll
have teeth for the praties, sure.”
Thus the good woman and unconscious philosopher muttered to herself, as
she sought to redeem her babe from the unbecoming effects of his pauper
dress—smoothing its silken hair with the tips of her fingers; and
coaxing it to smile with kisses and gentle touches of the cheek between
whiles, she continued her murmurs of gentle fondness, happy as a mother
bird upon her nest.
She had tied the awkward sleeves back from its shoulders with knots of
faded pink ribbon, taken from her own cap, and was holding it at arm’s
length with a broad smile of triumph, when the nurse passed the cot with
her checkered apron folded over some object that she held to her bosom.
“What have ye there, Misses Kelly, saving yer prisence?” inquired Mary
Margaret, holding her baby poised in mid-air, and turning her kindly
eyes upon the nurse. “It isn’t dead, sure?”
“_She is_,” answered the nurse, nodding her head toward the cot.
Mary Margaret held her breath, and tears stole to her eyes as she stood
up, trembling beneath the weight of her infant—for she was still very
feeble—and looked toward the pale face of the dead.
“And the poor, young crathur in the cot alongside, what has happened to
her?” inquired Mary Margaret.
“She’s as good as dead, don’t you hear how she raves? Mutter—mutter, she
hasn’t strength for more: all the doctors on earth couldn’t save her.”
“And her baby?” asked Mary Margaret, filled with compassion, and hugging
her own child fondly to her bosom.
“Oh? that’s yonder by the dead woman, cold as she is!”
Mary Margaret held her child closer, and the tears streamed down her
face.
“Give me a look at the motherless crathur,” she said, laying her child
upon the cot, and reaching forth her arms.
The nurse hesitated an instant, and then flung back her apron from the
face of the infant.
“Poor thing, poor thing, how deathly it looks! what great, wild eyes!
How it stares at one!” exclaimed Mary Margaret, half sobbing.
“It’s half starved,” answered the nurse, looking down upon her burden
with a callous smile; “it won’t feed. To-night will see the end on’t.”
Mary Margaret glanced at her own sleeping child, and then turned her
brimming eyes upon the other.
“Give it here,” she said, “there’s enough for both—give him here.”
The nurse frowned and drew up her apron.
“The doctor must settle that. It’s not my business, Mrs. Dillon,” she
said, harshly.
“The doctor! Well, where is he? Be quick and ask him, or let me.”
“When he comes in the morning will be time enough,” answered the nurse,
preparing to move on.
“The morning! Why, the poor crathur’ll be gone afore that,” persisted
the kind woman, stepping a pace forward, and supporting herself with
difficulty. “Let me have it, I say!”
The nurse jerked her arm from the feeble grasp laid upon it, and harshly
bade the woman return to her bed and mind her own business.
Mary Margaret tottered back and sat down upon the foot of her couch.
“It’ll die, it’ll die afore the blessed day is over,” she muttered,
sadly, for her maternal heart ached over the orphan. “Arrah, if the
doctor was only to the fore!”
She ended this piteous exclamation with a joyful outburst.
“The saints be praised, here he is, welcome as cowslips in spring!” and
regardless of her feeble state, she arose and stood ready to address the
doctor, as he came down the ward.
The nurse uttered a sharp exclamation, in which an oath was but half
smothered, and advancing fiercely toward the cot, flung the famished
child down by the sleeping babe of Mary Margaret.
“There, take the brat!” she said, with an unnatural laugh. “I meant that
you should nurse it all the time, if you hadn’t teased one’s life out
about it.”
Mary Margaret did not answer; her limbs were trembling like aspens, and
she sunk upon the cot overpowered with fatigue. Drawing the little
stranger softly to her bosom, she pressed it gently there, felt the
thrill of its eager lips, and drawing a deep breath of satisfaction,
watched its great eyes turned upon her own, till, as if struck by the
same mesmeric influence, the woman and the infant slumbered together.
It was a sweet picture of helplessness and charity, a noble proof that
no human being can find a place so humble upon this earth, that some
good to others may not be wrought out of it.
As the woman and children lay thus, buried in that gentle sleep which
sometimes falls like dew after a good action, the lifeless young
creature was lifted from her pauper death-bed, and carried forth to be
stretched in the still more poverty-stricken pine coffin. Then the
marble form of the infant was carelessly carried after, and that
bereaved mother followed it with her wild, bright eyes, and laughed as
the door closed.