When, after making other arrangements, Martha went back to the bedroom, she was startled to hear the sick woman muttering to herself, or perhaps because she had forgotten Martha's absence.
"But the shadows on the meadow didn't stay; they passed on, and then the sun was all the brighter on the flowers. We used to string sweet-williams on spears of grass—don't you remember?"
Martha gave her a drink of the opiate in the glass, adjusted her on the pillow, and threw open the window, even to the point of removing the screen, and the gibbous moon flooded the room with light. She did not light a lamp, for its flame would heat the room. Besides, the moonlight was sufficient. It fell on the face of the sick woman, till she looked like a thing of marble—all but her dark eyes.
"Does the moon hurt you, Tilly? Shall I put down the curtain?"
The woman heard with difficulty, and when the question was repeated said slowly:
"No, I like it." After a little—"Don't you remember, Mattie 'how beautiful the moonlight seemed? It seemed to promise happiness—and love—but it never come for us. It makes me dream of the past now—just as it did o' future then; an' the whip-poor-wills too——"
The night was perfectly beautiful, such a night as makes dying an infinite sorrow. The summer was at its liberalest. Innumerable insects of the nocturnal sort were singing in unison with the frogs in the pools. A whip-poor-will called, and its neighbor answered it like an echo. The leaves of the trees, glossy from the late rain, moved musically to the light west wind, and the exquisite perfume of many flowers came in on the breeze.
When the failing woman sank into silence, Martha leaned her elbow on the window sill, and, gazing far into the great deeps of space, gave herself up to unwonted musings upon the problems of human life. She sighed deeply at times. She found herself at moments in the almost terrifying position of a human soul in space. Not a wife, not a mother, but just a soul facing the questions which harass philosophers. As she realized her condition of mind she apprehended something of the thinking of the woman on the bed. Matilda had gone beyond or far back of the wife and mother.
The hours wore on; the dying woman stirred uneasily now and then, whispering a word or phrase which related to her girlhood—never to her later life. Once she said:
"Mother, hold me. I'm so tired."