Her manner was habitually that of such a prophetess of ill that my first impulse was to believe I must allow here for a great exaggeration. But in a moment I saw that her emotion was real. “Dolcino is dying then,—he is dead?”
“It’s too late to save him. His mother has let him die! I tell you that because you are sympathetic, because you have imagination,” Miss Ambient was good enough to add, interrupting my expression of horror. “That’s why you had the idea of making her read Mark’s new book!”
“What has that to do with it? I don’t understand you; your accusation is monstrous.”
“I see it all; I’m not stupid,” Miss Ambient went on, heedless of the harshness of my tone. “It was the book that finished her; it was that decided her!”
“Decided her? Do you mean she has murdered her child?” I demanded, trembling at my own words.
“She sacrificed him; she determined to do nothing to make him live. Why else did she lock herself up, why else did she turn away the doctor? The book gave her a horror; she determined to rescue him,—to prevent him from ever being touched. He had a crisis at two o’clock in the morning. I know that from the nurse, who had left her then, but whom, for a short time, she called back. Dolcino got much worse, but she insisted on the nurse’s going back to bed, and after that she was alone with him for hours.”
“Do you pretend that she has no pity, that she’s insane?”
“She held him in her arms, she pressed him to her breast, not to see him; but she gave him no remedies; she did nothing the doctor ordered. Everything is there, untouched. She has had the honesty not even to throw the drugs away!”
I dropped upon the nearest bench, overcome with wonder and agitation, quite as much at Miss Armbient’s terrible lucidity as at the charge she made against her sister-in-law. There was an amazing coherency in her story, and it was dreadful to me to see myself figuring in it as so proximate a cause.
“You are a very strange woman, and you say strange things.”