"No, no, darling; stay by her side—she may not be long spared to you, and I shall go. Past three in the morning, and dark as midnight. I'll take a lantern and be off."
"Oh, thank you, Winny, thank you!" said the girl, kissing the old woman's shrivelled cheek, and with hasty and trembling fingers assisting to muffle her in a cloak, and to light a lantern; and then seeing her issue forth upon her errand with all the speed her love and charity inspired, and her old limbs could exert; and with clasped hands, and a prayer upon her lips, Sybil at the door for a little space watched the lantern (Winny's figure was soon lost amid the gloom), as its fitful light fell in succession upon the grey, upright blocks of the stone avenue that marked the desolate moorland road, till at last it diminished to a spark, like an ignis-fatuus, and then she stole back once more to her mother's side.
The left arm of the latter was outside the coverlet now, and her hand, so snowy in its whiteness, rested on the edge of the bed. With her eyes full of tears, and her heart full of earnest prayer, Sybil knelt reverently down to kiss it, taking the hand between her own caressingly.
How heavy that little hand felt now!
Cold, too—its touch startled her. She threw back the curtain; her mother lay motionless with jaw somewhat relaxed, her eyes still, and staring upward. Death was too surely there, but Sybil had never looked upon it, and only felt wildly startled and terrified. She tried to raise the head, but felt powerless.
"Oh mamma—dear mamma, do not leave me! Come back to me, mamma—come back to me!" she exclaimed, in a voice the tones of which seemed discordant and shrill to her own ear. "Is this sleep or death? oh, no! no, not death—NOT death!"
But it was so, and how terribly pale, serene and still, how calm and peacefully she lay, with something of a smile gathering on her lips, like one "who had ended the business of life before death, and who, when the hour cometh, hath nothing to do but to die."
Bewildered and awe-struck, with a wild beating in her heart and in her brain, Sybil drew back; then she stood still and listened.
There was no sound save the pulsations in her own breast, and the odious ticking of the old wooden clock, which now seemed to have become unnaturally loud. Then emotions which appeared to be stifling came over her, and a craven terror which she could not describe, and of which she was afterwards ashamed, as if it had been a sin or crime, possessed her, and she fled from the room, and from the house itself, for she could not remain alone with the dead; and so, crouching down on the wet, damp soil near the entrance door, she muffled her head in her shawl.
A ray of light was streaming out into the darkness, but she could not look upon it, for it came where the dead was lying, and where the light of life had passed away.