“Unto God,” said Elspie, solemnly.—“Dearie, I wadna grieve ye, but I'm aye sure this sickness is unto death.”
It was strange that Olive did not begin to weep, as many a child would have done; but though a cold trembling crept through her frame at these words, she remained quite calm. For Elspie must be kept calm likewise, and how could she be so if her child were not. Olive remembered this, and showed no sign of grief or alarm. Besides, she could not—would not believe a thing so fearful as Elspie's death. It was impossible.
“You must not think thus—you must think of nothing but getting well. Lie down and go to sleep,” she said, in a tone of almost womanly firmness, which Elspie obeyed mechanically. Then she would have roused the household, but the nurse forbade. By her desire Olive again lay down.
It had always been her custom to creep to Elspie's bed as soon as she awoke, but now she did so long before daylight, in answer to a faint summons.
“I want ye, my bairn. Ye'll come to your auld nurse's arms—maybe they'll no haud ye lang,” murmured Elspie. She clasped the child once, with an almost passionate tenderness, and then, turning away, dropped heavily asleep.
But Olive did not sleep. She lay until broad daylight, counting hour by hour, and thinking thoughts deep and strange in a child of her years—thoughts of death and eternity. She did not believe Elspie's words; but if they should be true—if her nurse should die—if this should be the last time she would ever creep to her living bosom!
And then there came across the child's mind awful thoughts of death and of the grave. She struggled with them, but they clung with fearful tenacity to her fancy. All she had heard or read of mortality, of the coffin and the mould, came back with a vivid horror. She thought,—what if in a few weeks, a few days, the hand she held should be cold, lifeless; the form, whose faint breathings she listened to, should breathe no more, but be carried from her sight, and shut up in a grave—under a stone? And then where would be Elspie—the tender, the faithful—who seemed to live but in loving her? Olive had been told that when people died, it was their bodies only that lay in the grave, and their souls went up to heaven to be with God. But all her childish reasoning could not dissever the two.
It was a marvel, that, loving Elspie as she did, such thoughts should come at all—that her mind was not utterly numbed with grief and terror. But Olive was a strange child. There were in her little spirit depths of which no one dreamed.
Hour after hour she lay thinking these thoughts, horrible, yet fraught with a strange fascination, starting with a shudder every time they were broken by the striking of the clock below. How awful a clock sounds in the night-time, and to such a watcher—a mere child too! Olive longed for morning, and yet when the dusk of daybreak came, the very curtains took ghastly shapes, and her own white dress, hanging behind the door, looked like a shroud, within which——. She shuddered—and yet, all the while, she could not help eagerly conjecturing what the visible form of Death would be.
Utterly unable to endure her own thoughts, she tried to rouse her nurse. And then Elspie started up in bed, seized her with burning hands, and asked her who she was and what she had done with little Olive.