Go farther! Let it serve to trample on.”
Mrs. Wise was dead.
The second year of the little school life at Sunnymeade she had fallen ill of typhoid fever, and though cured at length of that, she had seemed too listless and tired to struggle back to health.
She slipped away, away; there came a week when the little boys trod softly about the house, and looked at her with round awed eyes, and never answered a word back when she fretted at them as usual for their noise, their muddy boots, their quarrellings.
What was the strange thing their father had told them that morning? Their mother dying, dying fast. And yet how strange!—she still lay on the old sofa in the dining-room, and only that very morning [166] ]had sewn up the buttonhole of little Alf’s braces, and stitched the torn brim of Teddie’s hat.
Dying! Why, she had spoken irritably to their father an hour ago, and had smacked baby’s hands because he would squeeze the thin kitten and drag it across the room by the tail. Surely dying people spoke softly and wept, and said gentle things and prayed—prayed all the time!
The boys were inclined to disbelieve their father, who had told them the fact thus beforehand, that she, poor soul, might in her last days have gentleness and tenderness around her all the time.
“Doesn’t she know, Daddie?” little Alf whispered in the afternoon that followed the morning on which they had first learnt the news.
He had been sitting on a stool not far from the sofa, gazing at his mother with solemn, half-frightened eyes, while she sewed on a commonplace and necessary button. She had scolded him for getting it off again so soon—surely, surely it was impossible that she could think of such things if she were as ill as his father had said?
When Dr. Wise entered the room, the child could not forbear to put the question, though he had been warned carefully to say nothing before his mother.