“I don’t mean kiss him or anything,” the little girl said; “only don’t call him ‘John’—it’s such an ugly name; and don’t keep saying ‘Don’t!’; and don’t let Nellie keep telling him he’s dirty and clumsy,—please, dearest Megsie!”
Meg kissed her silently.
What a wise little child it was! What a dear little child! And oh, what a poor little child, for it had never in its life known a mother!
Her thoughts leapt back across the years to that dear, fading memory of her mother. She saw the bedroom, with the bright lights that seemed strangely painful in such a place.
“I want to see them all, John, please,” the voice from the pillows had said when the Captain moved away to turn the gas down; “it can’t hurt me now.”
And they had gathered up close to the white pillows that gleamed with the loose, bright hair—all the little, frightened children,—herself, hardly thirteen; Pip in a sailor suit and his eyes red; little dear Judy with wild, bright eyes and trembling lips; Nellie with a headless doll clasped in her arms; Bunty in a holland pinafore stained with jam.
[63]
]Nobody heeded the tiny baby that lay just in the hollow of mother’s arm,—what was a baby, even one almost new to them all, when mother was dying?
But the next day, when all was over, and every one was tired of crying and feeling the world had stopped for them for ever, the strange nurse brought in the little lonely baby and gave it to Meg to nurse, because she was the eldest.
“You’ll have to be its mother now, little miss,” she said, as she laid it in all its long, many clothes in Meg’s frightened arms.
Its mother!