Full credence to the tale they tell,
And now her tortured heart and ear,
Hath nothing more to feel, or hear.—Byron.
It was long, very long, before the most strenuous and persevering efforts of her servants could bring the stricken and unconscious sufferer back to consciousness. As always before, the return to sensibility was but the return to sorrow. But the nurse prepared a dose of morphine, and, murmuring to her of her babe, persuaded her to take it. And soon she was buried in the blessed oblivion of sleep.
Leo sat over the kitchen fire, wishing himself a man and a white man, that he might avenge the wrongs of his worshipped mistress. In his small way, very much as the child Willie Douglas felt towards the beautiful and discrowned Mary Stuart, felt this poor fellow towards the wronged lady of his own allegiance. Late in the evening, to him, sitting there, came Pina.
“Well, and how is she now?” inquired the boy.
“Gone to bed. Mammy give her something to put her to sleep. Mammy knows what to do. My goodness, Leo, what a blessing it is that we fetched mammy to her!”
“Yes, indeed, that it was, Pina.”
“And now you clear out here. I want to get some supper ready for mammy to eat. She hasn’t had no dinner, nor even a mortal bite since breakfast. My gracious, what a tiresome thing it is to have a house always up side down like ours. Just as if there was a somebody a being buried or a being borned every day in the week! and all on account of that man! Yes, I will call him ‘that man,’ if I’m hashed for it!—that man! that man! that man! there, now! And I don’t see no use no men ever is, ’cept ’tis to make a fuss in the family! And I know as the Lord made the wimmin; but I b’lieve in my heart and soul the debil made all the men, jest to spile the Lord’s work! And I wish there wasn’t a man in the world, ’cept ’tis you, Leo, and Cousin Charley, and daddy! So there, now! And now why don’t you go ’bout your business and leave me room to move ’round the range and get supper?”
Leo, with a certain sense of shame in belonging to that offending and prescribed sex created by the devil for the confusion of the world, gladly took himself out of the kitchen and went to keep his appointment with his fellow sinner.