No one told the “little mothers” that one of their number lay up-stairs in Miss Mary’s room waxen white and still in her last sleep. They sang and played and ran and shouted, perhaps jangled as well. Death often met them in the byways of the slums, but in this land of enchantment they were not looking for it. Their holidays were brief enough; their days of toil and deprivation stretched out interminably. How could they sorrow for this pale, quiet little girl who had not even played with them?
In the afternoon John Travis brought up Patsey and Owen, who were stunned by the unlooked-for tidings. Dil had on her white frock, Patsey’s gift, that had been both pride and pleasure to him.
Owen looked at her steadily and in great awe, winking hard to keep back the tears. Patsey wiped his away with his coat-sleeve.
“Ther’ wasn’t ever no girl like Dil Quinn,” he said brokenly. “She was good as gold through and through. Nobody never loved any one as she loved Bess. Seems like she couldn’t live a’thout her. O mister, do you think ther’s railly a heaven as they preach ’bout? Fer if ther’ is, Dilly Quinn an’ Bess are angels, sure as sure. An’ Owen, we’ve got to be tip top, jes’ ’s if she was watchin’ us all the time. But it’s norful to think she can’t never come down home to us.”
He leaned over and kissed the thin hands, and then sobbed aloud. But all his life long the tender remembrance followed him.
In a corner of the pretty burying-ground where they laid her, there is a simple marble shaft, with this quaint, old-fashioned inscription:—
“Sacred to the Memory of
BESS AND DILSEY QUINN.”
For, even if Bess is elsewhere in an unknown grave, her unfailing and sweetest remembrance is here with Dilsey.