“If need be—let us wait, dear,” replied her mother, who, grave and pallid as a ghost, would eat nothing that, by any chance, could be made to reach the army.
“I do not want it, my child, there are so many hungrier than I,” she would say when Betty brought her dainty little trays from the pantry.
“But I am hungry for you, mamma—take it for my sake,” the girl would beg, on the point of tears. “You are starving, that is it—and yet it does not feed the army.”
In these days it seemed to her that all the anguish of her life had centred in the single fear of losing her mother. At times she almost reproached herself with loving Dan too much, and for months she would resolutely keep her thoughts from following him, while she laid her impassioned service at her mother's feet. Day or night there was hardly a moment when she was not beside her, trying, by very force of love, to hold her back from the death to which she went with her slow and stately tread.
For Mrs. Ambler, who had kept her strength for a year after the Governor's death, seemed at last to be gently withdrawing from a place in which she found herself a stranger. There was nothing to detain her now; she was too heartsick to adapt herself to many changes; loss and approaching poverty might be borne by one for whom the chief thing yet remained, but she had seen this go, and so she waited, with her pensive smile, for the moment when she too might follow. If Betty were not looking she would put her untasted food aside; but the girl soon found this out, and watched her every mouthful with imploring eyes.
“Oh, mamma, do it to please me,” she entreated.
“Well, give it back, my dear,” Mrs. Ambler answered, complaisant as always, and when Betty triumphantly declared, “You feel better now—you know you do, you dearest,” she responded readily:—
“Much better, darling; give me some straw to plait—I have grown to like to have my hands busy. Your old bonnet is almost gone, so I shall plait you one of this and trim it with a piece of ribbon Aunt Lydia found yesterday in the attic.”
“I don't mind going bareheaded, if you will only eat.”
“I was never a hearty eater. Your father used to say that I ate less than a robin. It was the custom for ladies to have delicate appetites in my day, you see; and I remember your grandma's amazement when Miss Pokey Mickleborough was asked at our table what piece of chicken she preferred, and answered quite aloud, 'Leg, if you please.' She was considered very indelicate by your grandma, who had never so much as tasted any part except the wing.”