Leon, for the sake of saying something tried to assure her that it was not certain. In vain.
“There is no hope,” she said, “Moreno says there is none. That now....” But she could say no more she covered her face and burst into floods of tears.
This form of suffering was new to Leon, a terrible and unfamiliar grief that had fallen on him like a bolt from the skies. He had first seen the child some few months since, and had found infinite delight in her bewitching little ways, though this alone perhaps hardly suffices to account for the acuteness of his pain in seeing the suffering of a child that was not his, and of a woman who was not his wife.
The croup, to make it more cruel, has deceptive intervals each invariably the precursor of a worse attack. The monster relaxes his grip that the victim may breathe once more, and know how precious air is, how sweet is life. After a violent fit of coughing a spurious amendment is perceptible. Under the influence of tartar emetic, Monina was able to cough away some portion of the false membrane that forms in the windpipe; relieved for the moment, she breathed more freely, and looked round her brightly; Pepa leaned forward to rearrange the bed clothes which she had tossed off in her struggles. When Monina caught sight of Leon she set up the peevish whimper of a sick child when it sees any one standing with its mother or nurse; it is its way of expressing jealousy which is one of the first sentiments developed in the human breast.
“But my pet, it is Leon.... Do not you want him? Then he shall go.... Go away, naughty man,” and a plaintive murmur repeated: “Naughty.”
“Go away, go away. I will punish him.... Spit it out my pretty.” The little girl did as she was bid; then her mind seemed to wander. “More, more,” she said—always a child’s cry when it is pleased or amused. Then, with her eyes shut, and as if in delirium, she put her tiny hand out from under the coverlet and waved it up and down. The infant gesture struck them to the heart; she was bidding them farewell. Its baby grace was tragical.
A moment after all the worst symptoms reappeared—the hard, rasping cough, the suffocation, the agonised struggle and the shrill, crowing noise. Leon, as he heard it, felt as if a red-hot needle was piercing his brain. The child was choking, dying.
Pepa, with a cry of anguish, fell senseless on the floor.
They carried her to her own room. Leon stayed with Monina. How many things flashed through his brain in a minute—in a single minute. He himself wondered to find that his grief completely filled and occupied his mind as if the poor little child was all that the world contained for him to love and care for. Since his father’s death he had not felt his heart so strongly drawn to any creature at the moment of death. He was not even remotely connected with the child’s parents, and yet he felt as if its death would rob him of something strangely near and dear. No doubt the mother and child were to some extent one in the passion of pity which absorbed his soul to the exclusion of every other feeling.