“Mother—alone! Oh, where—where has she left father?” exclaimed Lottie, starting up and running to meet her.
Deborah found the door open, and Lottie there with a look of eager inquiry on her face. But no word was uttered; for the sight of her mother’s countenance, and the scraps of shabby mourning which she wore, took from the young, warm-hearted girl all power of speech. She followed Deborah upstairs, thankful that Mrs. Green chanced to be at the moment out of the way.
“How’s father?” asked the son, who had met his mother on the staircase.
Deborah made no reply, but entered the room, sank wearily on a chair, and buried her face in her hands. She was a woman who seldom wept; but now her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs. Lottie knelt down beside her, looking up with anxious grief and fear into her mother’s face. She could with difficulty catch the meaning of Mrs. Stone’s scarcely articulate words:
THE MOTHER’S RETURN.
“Thank God, at least I was in time to see him, to be with him, at the last!”
Then the widow raised her head, stretched out her arms, and drew sobbing to her heart her two fatherless children.
Yes, the long-cherished dream of hope was over; the erring husband—forgiven, loved, and watched for—had returned to his native shore to die. Stone had seen his injured wife, and breathed his last sigh in her arms. Had he died a penitent? Deborah fondly clung to the hope; and when she had a little regained her composure, repeated to her children again and again every faintly-breathed sentence from the lips of the dying man that could possibly be deemed an expression of penitence or an utterance of prayer. Who could have borne to have quenched her hope, or who would dare to say that the daily supplication of wife and children for a wandering sinner had not been answered at last?
As Deborah had hardly had one hour’s uninterrupted sleep during the preceding week, she was almost overpowered by physical weariness as well as by mental distress; and Lottie had little difficulty in persuading her to go to bed at once. This was the poor widow’s only place of refuge from the intrusion of her neighbours; for no sooner was it noised through Axe that Mrs. Stone had returned home after attending the death-bed of her husband, than some impelled by sympathy, some by mere curiosity, visited her humble lodging, tormenting the weeping Lottie with questions, or well-meant attempts at offering consolation. She was thankful to close the door at last upon all, and with a very heavy heart prepare to go herself to rest.