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.