Just a little voice, calling through the dark, “Mamma, O mamma!” and
then a low sound of stifled sobbing.
Colonel Trevethick heard them both, and they smote him with a new sense
of loss and pain. He had scarcely thought of his little girl since his
wife died, five hours before,--died at the very instant when she was
kissing him good-by, taking with her into the far heavens the warm
breath of his human love. He had loved her as, perhaps, men seldom
love, from the first hour of their first meeting.
“There is Maud Harrison,” some one had said; and he had turned to look,
and met the innocent gaze of two frank, gentle, very beautiful brown
eyes. “Brightest eyes that ever have shone,” he said to himself. Their
owner had other charms besides,--a fair and lovely face, round which
the ruffled hair made a soft, bright halo; a lithe, girlish figure; a
manner of unaffected cordiality, blent with a certain maidenly reserve,
and which seemed to him perfection. He loved her, then and there. His
wooing was short and his wedding hasty; but he had never repented his
haste, never known an unhappy hour from the moment he brought his wife
home, nine years ago, till these last few days, in which he had seen
that no love or care of his could withhold her from going away from him
to another home where he could not follow her,--the home where she had
gone now, far beyond his search.
She was a good little creature, and she did not rebel even at the
summons to go out of her earthly Eden in search of the paradise of
God. She longed, indeed, to live, for she so loved her own, and she
could have resigned herself to die more willingly but for her husband’s
uncontrollable passion of woe. That very day she had said to him, as he
knelt beside her,--
“Do not grieve so, darling! I am not going so far but that I shall come
back to you every day. Something tells me that I shall be always near
you and Maudie. You cannot call, or she cry, but that I shall hear
you. I know that when she most needs, or you most want me, I shall be
close beside you.”
And with that very last kiss, when her breath was failing, she had
whispered,--
“I shall not go so far as you think.”
Now when he heard the low call of his little Maudie and her smothered
sobbing, he remembered the words of his dead wife. Did she, indeed,
hear Maudie cry, and was it possibly troubling her? He got up and went
into the little room where the child had slept alone ever since her
sixth birthday, a couple of months ago. He bent over her low bed, and
asked tenderly,--
“What is it, darling?”
A tiny night-gowned figure lifted itself up and two little arms clung
round his neck.
“Bessie put me to bed without taking me to mamma. Mamma did not kiss
me good-night, and I want she should,--oh, I _want_ she should! Bessie
wouldn’t carry me to see her; and I want you to. Bessie said mamma
never _would_ kiss me again but that isn’t true, is it? You know I’ve
heard mamma say Bessie wasn’t always ’sponsible.”
Colonel Trevethick considered for a moment what he should say to
his child--how he could make her understand the great, sad, awful,
yet triumphant mystery which had come to pass that day under their
roof--the great loss, and the great hope that hallowed it.
She was such a mere baby it seemed hard to choose his words. Must he
tell her that her mamma would never kiss her again? But how did he know
that? When the dear Lord promised the “all things” to those who loved
Him, did it not include the joining of broken threads, the up-springing
of dead hopes, the finding one’s own again, somewhere? He thought it
must; for what a word without meaning heaven would be to him if his own
Maud were not there! He temporized a little.
“She cannot kiss you now, my darling, but you shall kiss her.”
So he lifted the little white figure in his arms, holding it close, as
one who must be father and mother both together, now, and carried his
little one across the hall to the room, where her dead mother lay,--oh,
so fast asleep!--with a look like a smile frozen upon her fair, sweet
face. He held Maudie down by the pillow on which her mother’s head
rested, but that did not satisfy her.
“Put me on the bed, please, papa. I get on the bed every night and kiss
her, since she’s been ill.”
So he let her have her will; and for a moment she nestled close to the
still dead heart, which had always beaten for her so warmly. Then she
lifted up her head.
“Mamma is very cold,” she said, “and she does not stir. Can she hear
what I say?”
Again something invisible seemed to warn him against taking away from
the child her mother. He answered very gently and slowly,--
“She’s dead, my darling,--what we call dead. _I_ do not understand
it--no one understands it; but it comes, one day, to everybody, and it
is God’s will. Your mamma cannot speak to us any more, and soon she
will be gone out of our sight; but she truly believed that she would
always be able to see your face and hear your voice, as when she was
here.”
“She _is_ here. Won’t she be here always?” the little girl asked,
growing cold with the shadow of an awful fear.
“No, dear, she will not be here long. In a few days this dear white
face will be put away, underneath the grass and the flowers; but the
real mamma, who loves little Maudie, will not be buried up. She will be
somewhere, I truly believe, where she can see and hear her little girl.”
For a moment the child slid again from his arms, and nestled close
against the cold breast, kissed the unmoving lips. Then she said,--
“Good-by, this mamma, who can’t see; and good-night, other mamma, that
hears Maudie.”
Colonel Trevethick marvelled. Had he, indeed, succeeded in making this
little creature understand; or had some one whom he could not see
spoken to her words of sweet mother-wisdom?
He carried her then, and laid her in her little bed, and went back to
his own loneliness; but half an hour afterward he heard the small voice
calling. “Papa, papa!” and again he went to her, and the little arms
came up around his neck, and held him fast.
“Can’t I go too, papa? If you ask God, won’t He let me? Because I do so
love my mamma.”
That afternoon Colonel Trevethick had felt as if he had nothing at all
left in this world; but now he realized how much emptier still his home
might be if he lost out of it this child who was so like her mother.
“Mamma would not want you to come,” he said passionately. “_She_ has
all heaven, and _I_ only you,--only you, little Maudie, in all the
world. Mamma wants you to stay with me.”
After that she was quite quiet; and when he looked in at her, an hour
later, she was sound asleep, with one little hand like a crushed white
rose under the red rose of her flushed cheek.
She never asked for her mother after that night; but her father was
sure that she never forgot her. She was the strangest, gravest little
creature. She never made any noise, even at her play; and she never did
any of the things for which her mother had been used to reprove her.
The trouble was that she was too perfect; there was something unnatural
about it which frightened Colonel Trevethick. He would have been glad
if she had been naughty, sometimes, like other children. He longed
to have her tease him, to see in her some spirit of naughtiness or
contradiction; but he saw none. She grew tall quite fast, but she was
very thin,--a little white wraith of a creature, who looked as if she
had been made out of snow, and might melt away as soon.
It was a good thing for Colonel Trevethick, no doubt, that he had her
to tend, and to be anxious about. It kept him from surrendering himself
to his own grief.
Nearly two years went on, and all the time the little girl grew more
and more frail; until, at last, when she had just passed her eighth
birthday, she was taken very ill. Her illness seemed a sort of low,
nervous fever, and she grew daily more feeble. A skilful nurse came to
share with Bessie the task of tending her, and her father was seldom
far away. Half the day he would be sitting in her room, and half a
dozen times in the night he would steal in to watch her breathing.
One afternoon, as he sat by her bed, she looked up at him with a sad,
tender look, too old for her years,--but then all her words and ways
were too old for her years.
“Papa,” she said, “I would get well if I could, to please you. I
_should_ get well, I know, if I had mamma to nurse me. Don’t you know
how she used, if my head ached, to put her hand on it and make it stop?”
A sudden mist of tears came between his eyes and the little white face
looking up at him. She had not spoken before of her mother for so many
months, and yet how well she remembered! Instantly his wife’s words,
that last day, came back to his memory. She had said, “I know that when
Maudie needs me most, or you most want me, I shall be there beside you.”
_Was_ she there now? Could she breathe upon the little wasting life
some merciful dew of healing? or was she, perhaps, by her very love and
longing, drawing the child home to herself?
That night Bessie was to sit up until one o’clock, and then to call the
nurse. As for Colonel Trevethick, he would be in and out, as usual.
He went to bed, and fell into sleep and a dream. His own Maud was
beside him as he saw her first, then as his bride, his wife, then with
Baby Maudie on her breast; just as of old he seemed to have her with
him again,--his pride, his darling, the one woman he had ever loved.
He woke at last. Had his dream, then, lasted the night through? Was
this red ray that touched his face the first hint of the rising sun? He
sprang up quickly. The whole night had indeed passed, and he had not
seen Maudie. He hurried into a dressing-gown and went to her room. He
expected to find the nurse there, but, instead, Bessie sat beside the
table just where he had left her the night before, but sound asleep.
Evidently she must have been asleep for hours, and had not called the
nurse, who had slept in her turn: they were all tired enough, Heaven
knows. But, meantime, what of Maudie? What harm had come to her, alone,
unattended?
He drew aside the curtain of her little bed and looked in. Surely this
was not the Maud he had left the night before, so pale and worn upon
her pillows? A face looked up at him bright as the new day. A soft,
healthy color was in the cheeks, and the moist lips were crimson.
“I knew I should be well if _she_ tended me,” a voice cried, gayer and
gladder than he had heard from her lips in two years.
What _did_ the child mean? Had she gone mad? He controlled himself, and
asked,--
“Who tended you, my child? I found Bessie sound asleep.”
“Yes; mamma made her sleep, and you, and nurse. She sent all of you the
dreams you like best; and all night long she sat here beside my bed,
with her hand on my head, just as she used to put it long ago. She was
all in white, and her hair fell about her shoulders, and her eyes were
very, very bright, and her lips, when she kissed me, seemed somehow to
melt away.”
“So you, too, dreamed about mamma, darling?”
“No, indeed, papa, I did not dream. Mamma sat there all night long,
with her hand upon my head. Sometimes I slept, but more often I woke up
to look at her; and all the time she sat there, and did not tire, until
the first sunshine came in at the windows; and then she kissed me and
went away. I did not see her go. Perhaps I shut my eyes a moment. Then
I looked and she was gone, and then I heard you coming in. She said she
was with me every day, but she couldn’t have come to me like _this_,
except because I needed her so very, very much. And she wanted to make
me well, because you would grieve for me if I came to her; and I was to
be very good, and tend you and make you comfortable; and I must laugh
and must make you laugh, for laughter was good, and the reason I got
ill was because I had been sorry so long, and had not laughed at all.
And I was _not_ to be sorry after _her_ any more, because she was very
happy, and nothing grieved her except when she saw you and me mourning
for her, and not knowing that she was waiting close beside us.”
“_Was_ it her mother? Can it _be_ it was the child’s mother?” the
father cried, uttering his thought aloud unconsciously.
“Of course it was mamma; and she has made me well. See if Dr. Dale does
not tell you I am well.”
Two hours afterward Dr. Dale came. He stood for a few moments beside
the little bed. He looked in the child’s glad eyes, he counted the
throbs of her pulse, he made her put out her healthy little tongue.
Then he turned to her father.
“Trevethick,” he said, “can you swear that this is the same little girl
I left here last night? If the days of miracles were not gone by, I
should say that one had been wrought here. I left, I thought, a very
sick little person, about whom I was anxious enough, certainly, to make
this my first call this morning; and I find my small patient so well
that I shall only keep her in bed a day or two longer, for form’s sake.”
“Perhaps it _is_ a miracle,” Colonel Trevethick said, smiling. But he
did not explain. There are some experiences too marvellous for belief
and too sacred for doubt or question, and that was one of them.
Two days afterward little Maudie went down to tea. She wore a fresh
white gown, with lovely blue ribbons, and looked as much like a little
angel in festal attire as a human child can be expected to look. But
she did not take her usual seat. She sat down, instead, behind the
tea-pot, where Bessie usually stood to pour out the tea.
“Hadn’t Bessie better do that?” papa asked, as he saw the little hand
close round the handle of the tea-pot.
But Maud laughed, and shook her head.
“No, I don’t think Bessie is ’sponsible,” she said; “and mamma said I
was to live just on purpose to do every thing for papa.”