What Elizabeth answered she never could remember; perhaps nothing, or her agitation betrayed her, for Mrs. Ascott said again, "Elizabeth, am I going to—to leave my baby?"
Some people might have considered it best to reply with a lie—the frightened, cowardly lie that is so often told at death-beds to the soul passing direct to its God. But this girl could not and dared not.
Leaning over her mistress, she whispered as softly as she could, choking down the tears that might have disturbed the peace which, mercifully, seemed to have come with dying,
"Yes, you are going very soon—to God. He will watch over baby, and give him back to you again some day quite safe."
"Will He?"
The tone was submissive, half-inquiring; like that of a child learning something it had never learned before—as Selina was now learning. Perhaps even those three short weeks of motherhood had power so to raise her whole nature that she now gained the composure with which even the weakest soul can sometimes meet death, and had grown not unworthy of the dignity of a Christian's dying.
Suddenly she shivered. "I am afraid; I never thought of—this. Will nobody come and speak to me?"
Oh, how Elizabeth longed for Miss Hilary, for any body, who would have known what to say to the dying woman; who perhaps, as her look and words implied, till this hour had never thought of dying. Once it crossed the servant's mind to send for some clergyman; but she knew none, and was aware that Mrs. Ascott did not either. She had no superstitious feeling that any clergyman would do; just to give a sort of spiritual extreme unction to the departing soul. Her own religious faith was of such an intensely personal silent kind, that she did not believe in any good to be derived from a strange gentleman coming and praying by the bedside of a stranger, repeating set sayings with a set countenance, and going away again. And yet with that instinct which comes to almost every human soul, fast departing, Mrs. Ascott's white lips whispered, "Pray."
Elizabeth had no words, except those which Miss Leaf used to say night after night in the little parlor at Stowbury. She knelt down, and in a trembling voice repeated in her mistress's ear—"Our Father which art in heaven"—to the end.
After it Mrs. Ascott lay very quiet. At length she said, "Please—bring—my—baby." It had been from the first, and was to the last, "my" baby. The small face was laid close to hers that she might kiss it.