A feeling that Rough Moll had never been conscious of before gripped her heart at the sight. Was her boy dead? Had she killed him? What would his father say? What would her husband call her? A murderer? Was she that? Was that what the Stranger had meant when he had looked at her with those piercing eyes? He might have called her a liar, at the sight of the churn full of cream, but he had not done so; and little she would have cared if he had. But a murderer! Was murder in her heart?
Lifting Jan as carefully as she could, she carried him upstairs to the small bedroom under the roof, where he usually lay on a tiny pallet by her side. But this night the child's small figure lay in the wide bed, and big Moll, with all her clothes on, hung over him; or if she lay down for a moment or two, it was only on the hard little pallet by his side.
All that night Moll watched. But all that night Jan never moved. All the next day he lay unconscious, while Moll did her clumsy utmost to staunch the wound in his forehead. Long before it was light, she tried to send one of her maids for the doctor; but the storm was now so violent that none could leave or enter the house.
Her Ladyship's order went unheeded. The thirty pounds of butter were never made. But My Lady, who was a mother herself, not only forgave Moll for spoiling her Yuletide festivities, but even told her, when she heard of the disaster, that she need not trouble about the rent until her boy was better.
Until he was better! But would Jan ever be better? Moll had no thought now for either the butter or the rent. The yellow cream might turn sour in every single one of her pans for all she cared, if only she could get rid of this new unbearable pain.
At length, on the evening of the second day, faint with the want of sleep, she fell into an uneasy doze: and still Jan had neither moved nor stirred. Presently a faint sound woke her. Was he calling? No; it was but the Christmas bells ringing across the snow. What were those bells saying? 'MUR-DER-ER' 'MUR-DERER'—was that it? Over and over again. Did even the bells know what she had done and what she had in her heart? For a moment black despair seized her.
The next moment there followed the shuffling sound of many feet padding through the snow. The storm had ceased by this time, and all the world was wrapped in a white silence, broken only by the sound of the distant bells. And now the Christmas waits had followed the bells' music, and were singing carols outside the ale-house door. Fiercely, Moll stuck her fingers in her ears. She would not listen, lest even the waits should sing of her sin, and shew her the blackness of her heart. But the song stole up into the room, and, in spite of herself, something forced Moll to attend to the words:
'Babe Jesus lay in Mary's lap,
The sun shone on his hair—
And that was how she saw, mayhap,
The crown already there.'
That was how good mothers sang to their children. They saw crowns upon their hair. What sort of a crown had Moll given to her child? She looked across and saw the chaplet of white bandages lying on the white pillow. No; she, Moll, had never been a good mother, would never be one now, unless her boy came back to life again. She was a murderer, and her husband when he returned from the wars would tell her so, and little Jan would never know that his mother had a heart after all.
At that moment the carol died away, and the waits' feet, heavy with clinging snow, shuffled off into the darkness; but looking down again at the head with its crown of white bandages upon the white pillow, Moll saw that this time Jan's eyes were open and shining up at her.