Mrs. Allardi's face brightened. Lynn had divined her inmost thought. She yearned for the child. She hungered to die, holding him. But Fate, implacable as iron to the profitless wishes of poor foolish, failing, mortal things, decreed otherwise. A change on the dying face, an ominous rattle and choking, arrested Lynn's footsteps and brought her hurriedly back.
Clara Allardi gasped a little, a very little, then lay quiet. Lynn stood and watched her, looking pinched and plain in the trying light of early dawn. The other woman lay with eyes that stared a little. Presently Lynn realized that she was dead; it did not come as a shock, only as an added desolation. She leaned forward and touched the cold cheek, timidly.
"Mother!" she said in a low voice, "Mother!"
There was a brief and bitter silence. Then Lynn took the cold head in her arms and held it for a moment while her tears fell fast and bitterly over it.
"She was my mother," she said, weeping, "she—was—my mother!" There was no complaint in her tones, only a dull pain. Her face held an unconscious desolation as she laid the fair head back on the pillow and settled it, decently. She shivered a little as one soft, scented tress fell against her hand. She had never touched her mother's hair in life and, oddly enough, this trifling remembrance cut her to the naked soul. She gasped and looked away, choking down her rising sobs with a species of horror and disgust. Life had taught her self-control, and she disliked noise in the presence of the dead.
Presently she rose and moved softly to the cot where the boy lay sleeping. She looked at him in silence. He stirred in his sleep and smiled a little. Her sallow face flamed into sudden life and beauty as she stood, watching him, an adoring smile curving her thin lips. She had forgotten the other silent inmate of the room who lay, smiling too, the dead eyes which her daughter had forgotten to close, gazing in front of her as though she saw nothing to fear in the eternity upon which she had entered.
Suddenly there was a burst of radiance, a riot of colour and fragrance and song. The chill, pink light of sunrise streamed through the window and lay on the dead face, making it very lovely. A delicate rose was reflected in the icy cheek, a brilliant gold in the faded hair. Lynn, who had turned, startled by the sudden light, was struck by her mother's beauty. Despite anxiety, illness, sorrow, Clara Allardi made rather an exquisite corpse; and, as her plain daughter sat watching her in the trying light of early dawn, she reflected with a smile that held no mirth that even in death it was well to have regular features and abundance of soft hair. Then her face changed and softened. She moved reverently to the side of the bed, veiled the staring eyes, crossed the thin hands. Then she knelt and prayed; while far, immeasurably far below, the slow wail of the sick child, the low moan of the hungry animal, smote on the deaf ear, the cold heart, of great New York.
CHAPTER VII
A SHORT REPENTANCE
"Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore—but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring and rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore."
—The Rubaiyat.