Yes, Flo was going to God.
The doctors knew it—the nurses knew it—she could not recover. What a bright lot for the little tired out London child! No more weary tasks—no more dark days—no more hunger and cold. Her friends had hoped and planned for a successful earthly life for her—God, knowing the uncertainty of all things human, planned better. He loved this fair little flower, and meant to transplant it into the heavenly garden, to bloom for ever in His presence.
But though Flo was not to recover she got better, so much better, for the time at least, that she herself thought she should get quite well; and as from the first she had suffered very little pain, she often wondered why they made a fuss about her, why Mrs Jenks seemed so upset when she came to see her, why the nurses were so gentle with her, and why even the doctors spoke to her in a lower, kinder tone than they did to the other children. She was not very ill; she had felt much, much worse when she had lain on the little bed that God had lent her—what agony she had gone through then! and now she was only weak, and her heart fluttered a good deal. There was an undefined something she felt between her and health, but soon she must be quite well.
In the pleasant Buxton Ward were at this time a great many little children, and as Flo got better and more conscious, she took an interest in them, and though it hurt her and took away her breath to talk much, yet her greatest pleasure was to whisper to God about them. There was one little baby in particular, who engrossed all her strongest feelings of compassion, and the nurses, seeing she liked to touch it, often brought it, and laid it in her cot.
Such a baby as it was! Such a lesson for all who gazed at it, of the miseries of sin, of the punishment of sin!
The child of a drunken mother, it looked, at nine months old, about the size of a small doll. Had any nourishment been ever poured down that baby’s throat? Its little arms were no thicker than an ordinary person’s fingers—and its face! Oh! that any of God’s human creatures should wear the face of that baby!
It was an old man’s face, but no man ever looked so old—it was a monkey’s face, but no monkey ever looked so devoid of intelligence. All the pain of all the world seemed concentrated in its expression; all the wrinkles on every brow were furrowed on its yellow skin.
It was always crying, always suffering from some unintelligible agony. (The writer saw exactly such a baby at the Evelina Hospital a short time ago.) The nurses and doctors said it might recover, but Flo hoped otherwise, and her hope she told to God.
“Doesn’t you think that it ’ud be better fur the little baby to be up there in the Gold Streets?” she said to God, every time she looked at it. And then she pictured to herself its little face growing fair and beautiful, and its anguish ceasing for ever—and she thought if she was there, what care she would take of the baby.
Perhaps she does take care of the baby, up There!