And Mrs. Dan Mulcahy saw him go and went back to the death-bedside to do her little best to carry out his orders and ease the sufferer over the end—as women so often have to do in the outside country.
Mrs. Durgan was lying still, breathing noisily, and white to the lips, that were tinted pale blue. Only her fingers were never still, and plucked at the coverlet and twisted themselves ceaselessly. Mrs. Dan wiped the perspiration from the damp forehead, and moistened the tight-drawn lips, and took her seat beside the bed.
Now and again she slipped noiselessly from the room and pushed a pot on the fire, or pulled it back and threw a billet of wood on. And when the trooper, her husband, came in, bringing the sergeant with him to dinner, she served the meal, and took her own with her, and went back to the sick room and closed the door, so that the murmur of voices should not disturb the woman.
And presently the sick woman opened her eyes and lay looking steadily at the roof over her, and Mrs. Dan saw the light of reason again in the eyes that had looked blank as the shuttered windows of an empty house for days and nights on end.
“She will recover consciousness just before the end,” the doctor had said. “Give her a spoonful of this, and she may speak and tell all she can before she goes.”
The trooper’s wife moved quietly, but very quickly, to the door, and opened it and beckoned to the two men, and laid her fingers on her lips as a sign for silence. And the two rose and slipped the boots from their feet, and in stocking soles crept into the room and took their stand behind the screen that was placed close beside the bed, and between it and the door, while Mrs. Dan brought the medicine and held it to the woman’s lips.
“Drink this,” she said gently. “It will help you and make it easier.”
The woman swallowed. “I’m goin’, ain’t I?” she said calmly; and Mrs. Dan whispered “Yes,” for in “the outside” men and women are more used to the thought of facing death than the people of the cities are, and there is not held to be the same need to lie to them and cheat them about their end.
“The baby?” asked the woman.
“It died,” said Mrs. Dan.