And with the vow, it seemed to her that she laid her youth down on the altar of that unseen Power whose mercy she invoked. Let her prayer only be heard and she would demand nothing more of life—she would spend all her future years in the willing service of love. Was it possible that she had imagined herself unhappy thirty-six hours ago—thirty-six hours ago when her child was not threatened? As she looked back on her past life, it seemed to her that every minute had been crowned with happiness. Even the loss of her newborn baby appeared such a little thing—such a little thing beside the loss of Harry, her only son. Mere freedom from anxiety showed to her now as a condition of positive bliss.
Six o'clock struck, and Marthy knocked at the door with a cup of milk. "Do you think he'll be able to swallow any of it?" she asked, and there were tears in her eyes.
"He is better, Marthy, I am sure he is better. Has mother been here this afternoon?"
"She stopped at the door, but she didn't like to come in on account of the children. They are both well, she says, and send you their love. Do you want any more water in the kettle, ma'am?"
The kettle, which was simmering away beside Harry's bed, under the tent of sheets, was passed to Marthy through the crack in the door; and when in a few minutes the girl returned with fresh water, Virginia whispered to her that he had taken three spoonfuls of milk.
"And he let me mop his throat with turpentine," she said in quivering tones. "I am sure—oh, I am sure he is better."
"I am praying every minute," replied Marthy, weeping; and it seemed suddenly to Virginia that a wave of understanding passed between her and the ignorant mulatto girl, whom she had always regarded as of different clay from herself. With that miraculous power of grief to level all things, she felt that the barriers of knowledge, of race, of all the pitiful superiorities with which human beings have obscured and decorated the underlying spirit of life, had melted back into the nothingness from which they had emerged in the beginning. This feeling of oneness, which would have surprised and startled her yesterday, appeared so natural to her now, that, after the first instant of recognition, she hardly thought of it again.
"Thank you, Marthy," she answered gently, and closing the door, went back to her chair under the raised corner of the sheet. When the doctor came at nine o'clock she was sitting there, in the same position, so still and tense that she seemed hardly to be breathing, so ashen grey that the sheet hanging above her head showed deadly white by contrast with her face. In those three hours she knew that the clinging tendrils of personal desire had relaxed their hold forever on life and youth.
"If he doesn't get worse, we'll pull through," said the doctor, turning from his examination of Harry to lay his hand, which felt as heavy as lead, on her shoulder. "We've an even chance—if his heart doesn't go back on us." And he added, "Most mothers are good nurses, Jinny, but I never saw a better one than you are—unless it was your own mother. You get it from her, I reckon. I remember when you went through diphtheria how she sent your father to stay with one of the neighbours, and shut herself up with old Ailsey to nurse you. I don't believe she undressed or closed her eyes for a week."
Her own mother! So she was not the only one who had suffered this anguish—other women, many women, had been through it before she was born. It was a part of that immemorial pang of motherhood of which the old doctor had spoken. "But, was I ever in danger? Was I as ill as Harry?" she asked.