At the foot of the bed Keith, standing, cried out as if in uncontrollable pain:—
“Mother, do you see Anna? She wants to speak with you.”
Slowly his mother turned her eyes, which had been fixed straight before her, until they rested full upon Anna in a curious, disconcerting stare. This continued in silence for some throbbing seconds, and then, with thick utterance and unaccented monotony of modulation, she said, very slowly:—
“If you had married differently you might have had children of your own.”
This laboured sentence, in its violent discordance with the filial tenderness and sympathy which alone filled the hearts of Keith and Anna at the moment, smote them both as if with a harsh and incredible buffet. Anna turned away from the bed white and appalled, and left the room at the motion of the nurse while Keith, bowing his head upon the bed-rail, groaned aloud. Even in the moment their mother had fallen back into unintelligible confusion of speech. To them both this sinister and unlooked-for expression revealed something of the weary ways in which the clouded mind was straying. Some haunting sense of remorse and accountability, vaguely felt and deviously followed, was torturing the dimness of mental twilight. Again and again during the days following, Anna, sitting just outside the bedroom door, heard the question reiterated in the harsh, toneless voice:—
“Did that baby die?” And always, when answered, there came the same response, “I said it would, I said it would that night.”
Filled with pity and compunction as she recalled the severity of her own utterance in that interview, the memory of which with the sick woman had plainly outlived all other, Anna went once more on the third night into the sick-room, knelt by the bed, and took the hand of the sufferer in both her own.
“Mother,” she said, in a strong, comforting voice, “mother dear, this is Anna. Will you forgive me for my unkindness that night?”
There was no reply.
“Dear mother,” Anna went on, with gentlest kindness, “I wanted to tell you that the little baby has gone to its own mother. It is all right, and I am satisfied.”