"We will use all precautions. The boys shall be moved to the other end of the house."
I proposed that they should occupy my room, as I had had smallpox, and was safe.
"Thank you, Phineas; and even should they take it, Dr. Jenner has assured me that in every case after vaccination it has been the very slightest form of the complaint. Be patient, love; trust in God, and have no fear."
Her husband's voice gradually calmed her. At last, she turned and clung round his neck, silently and long. Then she rose up and went about her usual duties, just as if this horrible dread were not upon us.
Mary Baines and her children stayed in the house. Next day, about noon, the little lad died.
It was the first death that had ever happened under our roof. It shocked us all very much, especially the children. We kept them far away on the other side of the house—out of the house, when possible—but still they would be coming back and looking up at the window, at which, as Muriel declared, the little sick boy "had turned into an angel and flown away." The mother allowed the fancy to remain; she thought it wrong and horrible that a child's first idea should be "putting into the pit-hole." Truer and more beautiful was Muriel's instinctive notion of "turning into an angel and flying away." So we arranged that the poor little body should be coffined and removed before the children rose next morning.
It was a very quiet tea-time. A sense of awe was upon the little ones, they knew not why. Many questions they asked about poor Tommy Baines, and where he had gone to, which the mother only answered after the simple manner of Scripture—he "was not, for God took him." But when they saw Mary Baines go crying down the field-path, Muriel asked "why she cried? how could she cry, when it was God who had taken little Tommy?"
Afterwards she tried to learn of me privately, what sort of place it was he had gone to, and how he went; whether he had carried with him all his clothes, and especially the great bunch of woodbine she sent to him yesterday; and above all, whether he had gone by himself, or if some of the "angels," which held so large a place in Muriel's thoughts, and of which she was ever talking, had come to fetch him and take care of him. She hoped—indeed, she felt sure—they had. She wished she had met them, or heard them about in the house.
And seeing how the child's mind was running on the subject, I thought it best to explain to her as simply as I could, the solemn putting off of life and putting on of immortality. I wished that my darling, who could never visibly behold death, should understand it as no image of terror, but only as a calm sleep and a joyful waking in another country, the glories of which eye had not seen nor ear heard.
"Eye has not seen!" repeated Muriel, thoughtfully; "can people SEE there, Uncle Phineas?"