A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

“I shall watch over the baby, you may depend, and come as often as I can,” she said in leaving.

He thanked her, and she made him promise to send for her without delay or hesitation if there were illness among the children or other emergency, and so came away.

The frail little life, unwarmed and unwelcomed by the love which had been bestowed on the other children, seemed to feel itself in an alien air, and failed from week to week. Anna spent every moment she could with the child, and sought to cherish and shield the tiny, flickering flame of life, but in vain. The baby lingered for a month, and then, on a bleak March evening, Anna was sent for, to speed its spirit back into the unknown from which it had scarcely emerged. She sat all night with the child upon her knees, the young father asleep in the leaden sleep of unutterable weariness on a sofa in the room adjoining. It is not given to a man to know the absolute annihilation of the body by love which makes the endurance of long night watches and the supreme skill in nursing the prerogative of women.

The nurse came and went at decent intervals with offers of help and of food, but Anna quietly declined both. She knew that she was about to partake of the sacrament of death, and she wished to receive it fasting, and, if it might be, alone. She knew that she only on earth loved the little child and longed to keep it, and she meant that it should die in loving arms, if they had been denied it for living.

In the slow hours which were yet too swift, as she bent over the small pinched face, brooding tenderly over the strange perfection of this miniature of humanity, the delicately pencilled eyebrows, the fine moulding of the forehead, the exquisite ear with soft fair hair curling about it, the little, flower-like hands, Anna wondered, as she never had thought to wonder before, at the wastefulness of nature. All this exquisite organism made perfect by months of silent upbuilding, a life of full strength paid for its faint breath, and then, this too cut off before the dawn of consciousness!

Harder to bear was the thought, which would not leave her, that if she could have taken the child for her own its life could have been saved. A photograph of Mally on the bedroom wall in her wedding-gown looked down upon her through the yellow gloom of the night lamp, and the eyes seemed to Anna full of sad upbraiding.

In bitterness of soul she groaned aloud:—

“Oh, Mally, Mally, I wanted to keep your baby, but they would not let me! He is going back to you, dear. Oh, if I knew that you were glad, that you forgive me!”

At the sound of her voice the child on her knees, which had been asleep or in a stupor, opened its eyes, and lifted them to hers. They were large blue eyes like Mally’s, and for a moment their look was fixed upon her own,—a clear, direct look, and, with a thrill of awe, Anna felt a conscious look. The instant of that mutual glance with all of mystery, of joy, and of wonder which it held, passed; the waxen whiteness of the lids fell again, but, as it passed, a sense of great peace fell upon Anna’s spirit. The last look of that newborn soul, pure and undefiled, had searched her heart, had found her love, had shed the glory of its passing into her bruised and cabined spirit.

“Now go, little child, go to God and be at rest; we have known each other, and you are mine after all,” she whispered fondly, her tears falling like spring rains upon white blossoms.