Her husband stood by speechless, choking back the tears of which, being an Englishman, he was ashamed.
“She will wake,” returned the boy. “She always wakes when I kiss her.”
He knelt beside her, to prove upon her white face the efficacy of the measure he had never until now known to fail. That he had already tried it was plain, for he had kissed away much of the dust, though none of the death. When once more he found that she did not even close her lips to return his passionate salute, he desisted. With that saddest of things, a child’s sigh, and a look that seemed to Mrs. Porson to embody the riddle of humanity, he reseated himself on the beam, with his little feet on his mother’s bosom, where so often she had made them warm. He did not weep; he did not fix his eyes on his mother; his look was level and moveless and set upon nothing. He seemed to have before him an utter blank—as if the outer wall of creation had risen frowning in front, and he knew there was nothing behind it but chaos.
“Where is your papa?” asked Mr. Porson.
The boy looked round bewildered.
“Gone,” he answered; nor could they get anything more from him.
“Was your papa with you here?” asked Mrs. Porson.
He answered only with the word Gone, uttered in a dazed fashion.
By this time all the men left in the town were doing their best, under the direction of an intelligent man, the priest of a neighbouring parish. They had already got one or two out alive, and their own priest dead. They worked well, their terror of the lurking earthquake forgotten in their eagerness to rescue. From their ignorance of the language, however, Mr. Porson saw they could be of little use; and in dread of doing more harm than good, he judged it better to go.
They stood one moment and looked at each other in silence. The child had dropped from the beam, and lay fast asleep across his mother’s bosom, with his head on a lump of mortar. Without a word spoken, Mrs. Porson, picking her way carefully to the spot, knelt down by the dead mother, tenderly kissed her cheek, lifted the sleeping child, and with all the awe, and nearly all the tremulous joy of first motherhood, bore him to her husband. The throes of the earthquake had slain the parents, and given the child into their arms. Without look of consultation, mark of difference, or sign of agreement, they turned in silence and left the terrible church, with the clear summer sky looking in upon its dead.