“Pooh! Are you any worse off for hearing about this great surgeon? If you are so indifferent to yourself that you will not endure a little suffering to be made well, you are certainly too small-minded to be very greatly hurt; and if you are willing, isn’t it love for you that has prompted me to find out all about it, and tell you? I thought I’d sound you first, yourself, because it all rests with you. Then, if you had any sense, I would get Uncle Fritz, who is as wise as the wisest where surgery is concerned, to tell you everything he knows. He doesn’t know that I am going to talk with you, nor anybody; and no one need know if you do not choose differently.”
“Octave, if I were never so willing, Grandmother Capers would never allow it.”
“No, Melville; I know that. But—why hide it? You know, you must know, what the others all think, that dear old Mrs. Capers is just slowly and gently dying. She cannot live very long to wait upon you, even if she gets up from this strange sickness which nobody understands exactly, and I should think you would like to change places and do a few things for her, who has done so many for you.”
Poor Octave had been sorely troubled by Mrs. Capers’s illness. All the household had reassured her again and again that she was mistaken, but she could not help fancying that her little brother’s encounter with “the Witch of Endor” had something to do with his victim’s fading away. And, since she could do nothing for her personally, she longed beyond telling to help the grandson who was more to the doting old heart than its own life. After she ceased speaking the cousins lay each very quiet for a long time. Octave was frightened by her own temerity, now that the deed had really been done; and in Melville’s breast hope and despair surged up and down tumultuously.
So occupied, indeed, were they with their own thoughts that they did not perceive the entrance of a frail little figure of a woman, which glided softly in its old familiar way to the foot of Melville’s lounge.
“What is that, my darling, about your being cured?” said a pathetically feeble voice, so suddenly that both the hearers started violently.
Mrs. Capers had seated herself on the lounge, but so weakly and tremblingly that the others expected to see her fall. Octave half slipped from her low bed, forgetting her own injury in her eagerness to support the tottering old lady; but she was arrested as much by the words which followed as by the exquisite torture of her injured ankle.
“Melville, I have heard the whole talk. I—I am going to die—as this young girl says. I am not sorry, except for you; and now I am not sorry at all. I could not bear to see you suffer any more, or to endure—an operation,—even though it might cure you. I love—I love you too well. But, when I am gone, I want you to try it, if—if you have the courage. There will be money enough, plenty of money to pay anything this great doctor asks. Promise me, darling; that is, if—you don’t mind, if you wish to, that you—will see this surgeon. I shall die happy then.”
The sick woman’s long speech, and her eagerness to utter it, exhausted her. Appalled by the unexpected effect of their own words, the children gazed at her in helpless silence. But suddenly, upon the wan features turned so anxiously toward Melville, there came a change which even his inexperienced eye was swift to interpret.
With a strength born of excitement,—or given by God,—he forced his useless body downward upon the lounge until he could clasp and hold his grandmother’s head against his breast.