Half unconsciously she gave the invalid some drink, and then moved with slow, leaden steps across the floor. It seemed as if she had been walking miles when she reached the bed, and turned back the blankets with her heavy hand. The two infants were huddled together below the pillows. One was her own child: with that she wished to lie down and sleep; but the other, it must not perish with her, some one must care for it, but who?
Heavier and heavier grew her brain; still, kind thoughts lingered there last. She took up the strange baby, staggered with it down the ward, and laid it softly into the fair bosom of the young girl but late so feverish and delirious.
“It must not starve, and it must not die,” said Mary Margaret, in her thick, fettered speech. “Take care of it. I—I must take no baby but my own.”
And with a still slower and more dragging step, Margaret went back to her cot, fell down, and became senseless as stone.
The sick girl grew calm as Mary became more and more like the dead. Her slender arms clasped themselves like vine tendrils around the child. A smile stole over her mouth, and a cool moisture crept, like dew upon the leaves of a lily, over her neck and forehead. With sweet, drowsy fondness, she drew the little creature closer and closer to her bosom—gave out one long sigh of exquisite satisfaction, and murmured some words which sounded, in their sweet indistinctness, like the cooing of a ring-dove.
The fever had abated. That wicked nurse was struggling in vain for the sleep that had fallen so calmly on her intended victim. Thus with bland, healthful life closing around her, the young creature was left to her pure motherhood, dreaming that her own child had crept back close, close to her bosom, from which the pain was melting away in soft warm drops, which broke like pearls between the infant’s lips.
CHAPTER IX.
EARLY IN THE MORNING.
Early the next morning Jane Kelly came into the ward, pale and heavy-eyed, as if she had been watching all night. Her step was heavy and reluctant as she moved down between that double row of beds, glancing furtively over them toward a distant cot, which was that morning the only point of interest for her. As she drew near that bed, the woman grew pale and paler. She hesitated and turned aside; now settling the blanket over some patient; now stopping to move a pillow, but all the time drawing nearer and nearer to that one spot.
At last she came to a bed where a woman lay with a child on her arm, in the deepest and most deathly slumber that ever fell upon a human being who lived to see the daylight again. The plump, round face was white as snow under the voluminous ruffles of a cap, quilled like a dahlia and radiating round her head like a sun-flower. Purple shadows lay all around her closed eyes, and gave a deathly hue to her lips, which were just ajar, revealing the edges of strong, white teeth underneath.
“What’s the matter here?” cried the terrified nurse, seizing Mrs. Dillon by the shoulders, and shaking her till the cap trembled in all its borders.