There is however no use in talking to a Scotchman who has made up his mind. God Almighty alone can change it, so I took to praying. Perhaps it was not very loyal to pray against my husband’s plans, but circumstances alter cases, and this farming scheme was a case that had to be altered.
Events which no one had foreseen put a stop to this discussion at least for a time. In the soft, hazy days of a beautiful November, a single word was whispered which sent terror to every heart. It was a new word—the designation of what was then thought to be a new disease, which had been ravaging portions of the Old World, and had finally appeared in the New. 233 I had seen it described in Harper’s Weekly, and other New York papers, and I was afraid as soon as I heard of it. Robert came home one day and told me Mrs. Carron’s eldest daughter was dead, and her other daughter dying. Every hour its victims seemed to increase, and by December all of my friends had lost one or more of their families. I remained closely at home, and kept my children near me. Though they did not know it, I watched them day and night.
On the eighth of December near midnight, I noticed that Ethel had difficulty in nursing and appeared in great distress, and I sent for the doctor with fear and trembling.
“Diphtheria!” he said; and the awful word pierced my ears like a dart, and my spirit quailed and trembled within me. For no cure and no alleviations had then been found for the terrible malady, and indeed many people in Austin contended that the epidemic from which we suffered, was not diphtheria, but the same throat disease which had slain the deer and cattle by thousands during the summer.
In the chill gray dawn of the ninth, as the suffering babe lay apparently unconscious on my knees, the Angel of Death passed by, and gave me the sign I feared but expected—a warning not unkind but inexorable. The next twenty-four hours are indescribable by any words in any language. A little before they ended, the doctor led me into another room. Then I fell on my face at the feet of the Merciful One, and with passionate tears and outcry pleaded for her release—only that the cruel agony might cease—only that—dear, and lovely, and loving as she was, I gave her freely back. I asked now only for her death. I asked Christ to remember his own passion and pity her. I asked all the holy angels who heard me praying to pray with me. If a mortal can take the kingdom of heaven by storm, surely my will to do so at that hour stood for the deed. Breathless, tearless, speechless, I lay at last at His Mercy. And it faileth not! In a few minutes Robert entered. He looked as men look who come out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I thought he also was dying. I stood up and looked anxiously into his face, and he drew me to his heart, and said softly, “All is over, Milly. She has gone.”
What I suffered for many weeks only God knows, but at last he took pity on my grief, and comforted me. One night Robert had gone to some public meeting, the children were asleep, and I was walking up and down the parlor floor, whispering to my heart my dead baby’s name. There was a lamp on a small marble table which I had pushed aside, in order to get the full length of the room for my restless feet. On this table there were a few books, and one small one was lying open, face down upon the marble. Without thought I lifted it, and finding a leaf crumpled, I mechanically began to straighten it. In doing so, my eyes fell on two lines; from the rest of the page they stood out as if illumined, and this was the message they brought me,
“Weep not for her, she is an angel now,
And treads the sapphire floors of Paradise.”
I saw nothing but these two lines. I wanted nothing more. They held a strange and heavenly comfort for me. I kissed them reverently and put the book in my bosom. Later I saw that they were part of a poem by a prominent writer for Blackwood’s Magazine, called Moir, a name well known in the early part of the nineteenth century, and always dear to my memory. I never learned the whole poem; I just took with a grateful heart the two lines given me.