All at once she seemed to remember something; for, dropping the child on the bed, she got off at the side, and, with her limbs trembling and her head reeling, went to the bed occupied by Catharine Lacy and the infant that had been lent to her. When she saw Catharine lying there, with a smile on her lips, and the babe sound asleep in her arms, the good woman gave a little shout, and fell down on her knees by the cot, exclaiming, “Glory to God! there she is to the fore; I’ve been draiming. Glory! amin!”
“What is it—what makes you so glad?” said a sweet voice from the bed. “Oh, Mrs. Dillon, I have been sleeping so sweetly.”
Mary Margaret did not seem to hear this. The sting of some sharp anxiety had aroused her for a moment; but when that was removed, the heavy, slumberous feeling came back. Lifting herself from the bed, she moved toward her own cot, swaying heavily to and fro as she walked; but all the while she was muttering thanksgiving for some great mercy received or danger escaped. Directly she reached her own bed, Mary Margaret fell asleep again, taking care of her child dreamily, and with her eyes now and then unclosing when he grew absolutely impatient.
It was the sudden appearance of Jane Kelly that thoroughly aroused her. Had a rattlesnake forced itself across her bed, it is doubtful if she would have shrunk from it more nervously. The sight of that face brought all the transactions of the night before to her mind, and she called out, “Don’t come near me! Don’t touch me!”
“Who wants to touch you, woman, after a drunken sleep like that? Be quiet now, or I’ll have you turned out of the hospital.”
Mary Margaret gazed on the woman in speechless astonishment. “Drunken!—me! me!”
Here the poor woman burst into a passion of angry, fierce crying, for the insult of that insinuation stung her like a wasp.
“Yes, woman, you, you! The doctor saw you; all the women in the ward saw you, lying there dead in for it. If it hadn’t been for me, you would have overlaid that cub of yours and smothered him. Don’t look at me in that way. You ought to hide your head.”
Mary Margaret’s eyes were wide open now. She charged with drinking—she, who never touched a drop year in and year out, not even when Dillon brought his friends to their home, or took her out to a wake. The charge was abominable.
“Jane Kelly,” she said, rubbing the tears from her eyes; “you know that there isn’t a word of truth in what you say. It wasn’t brandy, but something worse, ten thousand times worse, that I took.”