Mary Margaret tottered back and sat down upon the foot of her couch.
“It’ll die, it’ll die afore the blessed day is over,” she muttered, sadly, for her maternal heart ached over the orphan. “Arrah, if the doctor was only to the fore!”
She ended this piteous exclamation with a joyful outburst.
“The saints be praised, here he is, welcome as cowslips in spring!” and regardless of her feeble state, she arose and stood ready to address the doctor, as he came down the ward.
The nurse uttered a sharp exclamation, in which an oath was but half smothered, and advancing fiercely toward the cot, flung the famished child down by the sleeping babe of Mary Margaret.
“There, take the brat!” she said, with an unnatural laugh. “I meant that you should nurse it all the time, if you hadn’t teased one’s life out about it.”
Mary Margaret did not answer; her limbs were trembling like aspens, and she sunk upon the cot overpowered with fatigue. Drawing the little stranger softly to her bosom, she pressed it gently there, felt the thrill of its eager lips, and drawing a deep breath of satisfaction, watched its great eyes turned upon her own, till, as if struck by the same mesmeric influence, the woman and the infant slumbered together.
It was a sweet picture of helplessness and charity, a noble proof that no human being can find a place so humble upon this earth, that some good to others may not be wrought out of it.
As the woman and children lay thus, buried in that gentle sleep which sometimes falls like dew after a good action, the lifeless young creature was lifted from her pauper death-bed, and carried forth to be stretched in the still more poverty-stricken pine coffin. Then the marble form of the infant was carelessly carried after, and that bereaved mother followed it with her wild, bright eyes, and laughed as the door closed.