“Oh, I do but feel my trouble more and more! more and more as the hours go by! If I only could see him! If I could see him once and speak to him, he would hear me! he could not let me die before his sight,” she sobbed forth, with her eyes streaming with tears, whose fountains seemed exhaustless.
“It’s like p’isoning of her to save her life; but it’s what the doctors do, and I must do it,” said Pina, as she poured out a large dose of valerian and coaxed the sufferer to drink it.
As before, the powerful sedative quickly took effect. And Drusilla let her maid lead her to her resting chair near the window, and seat her in it, and put a foot cushion under her feet.
“There, mist’ess, sit there and be quiet. I wouldn’t lay down on the bed too much. It isn’t good for you. Sit by the window and look out at the Lord’s good sunshine. Bless you, the sun shines still, spite of all the fools and wilyuns in the world. And here, I’ll bring you your Bible and set it on your little stand before you. You used to take comfort in your Bible. Lor’! if we only loved Him half as well as we do some of his onworthy creeturs we needn’t have our hearts broke by ’em,” said Pina, as she made the arrangement she proposed. But her last sentiment was spoken sotto voce and did not reach the ears of her inattentive mistress.
Instead of deriving the consolation from the sacred volume which indeed she was too much overcome to seek, Drusilla dropped her head upon its open pages and seemed to pray, or weep, in silence.
“To think, when she gets wiolent, I have to knock her down with a dose of walerian this way! It’s a most like murder. And how’s it a gwine to end? I wish mammy would come. I hope she ’aint got no engagement nowhere else,” muttered Pina to herself as she went and made up the bed.
At noon it was a work of difficulty and of diplomacy for Pina to get her mistress to swallow a few spoonfuls of the chicken broth she had prepared for her.
In the afternoon Drusilla was so much prostrated that Pina assisted her to bed, and darkened the room, that she might sleep, if possible.
Late in the evening Leo returned from Alexandria, bringing with him a middle-aged, motherly-looking colored woman, who called herself “Aunt Hector, honey,” but whom Pina rushed to embrace as “mammy.”
As soon as the overjoyed daughter had relieved her mammy of bonnet, shawl and umbrella, and had sent them by Leo with the “big box, little box, ban-box and bundle,” up to the servants’ bedrooms over the kitchen, she set about getting tea for the traveller.