In this worship of the child she forgot earth, she forgot heaven, she forgot God.
And God punished her.
Sammy was cutting his teeth, and was feverish and fretful for some days, but although every care was lavished upon him neither Alizon nor Mrs. Tasker deemed the illness to be anything worse than a slight infantile malady. But one evening, Alizon bending over his sleeping form, saw his face grow black, his little limbs begin to twitch, and in a moment the poor child was in strong convulsions. Pale with terror, she shrieked for Mrs. Tasker and sent off a groom at once for the village doctor who had attended to Sammy since his birth. Mrs. Tasker, terribly anxious, yet restraining herself so as not to affright the agonised mother, did what she could under the circumstances and placed the child in a hot bath. The doctor arrived as quickly as possible, but he was too late--the child was dead.
Dead!
When the doctor told her, she could not believe it, and throwing herself on her knees beside the tiny corpse, tried in vain to see some sign of life. Alas it was all in vain, and after an hour of agonising dread she was obliged to accept the inevitable.
She did not lament, she did not weep, but only sat in dumb tearless silence by the side of her dead child. One thing only she muttered, with ashen lips, and restless hands plucking at her dress.
"It is the judgment of God, because I loved His creature better than Himself."
There is no grief so terrible as that silent, self-concentrated agony which gives no sign. All through the lonely hours of the night she sat beside the crib, where all that she held dearest and best was lying stiff and cold, the tiny hands crossed on the breast, a smile on the placid little face. They tried in vain to persuade her to go to bed, to take some refreshment, to leave the room where the dead child lay, but all in vain, for rejecting all offers of consolation and kindness, she sat frozen with grief in the darkened room.
The morning came, the time that she had been accustomed to hear the merry little voice and see the happy face, but the voice was silent now for evermore, and the face--could that still, white mask be the face she had seen smiling in her own, the face that she had covered so often with kisses? She could not cry, although tears would have been a relief, she could not talk, although it would have eased her pain, she could only sit in a trance of speechless, thoughtless horror beside her dead.
Mrs. Tasker, wise old woman that she was, knew that unless something was done, and that speedily, to rouse her mistress from this apathetic state, there would be danger of the mind becoming unhinged, so finding out Mr. Gartney's address in London, which she obtained by sending over to Castle Grim, sent a telegram and afterwards a letter to him urging him to bring the husband, the father, to the stricken mother.