The sun was almost setting, but its low light came in at the western windows, and lit up a pale face lying upon the pillows, till it seemed to the watchers beside the bed as if some glory from heaven had already touched the brow of the dying. These watchers were only two,—a girl of fourteen, rather tall of her age, with gray eyes that were almost green sometimes, and dark hair, short like a boy’s, and curling all over her head; and a middle-aged woman, who had tended this girl when a baby, and was half friend, half servant, to the dying mother.
Mrs. Ash had been lying all the day, almost in silence. Her husband had brought her, a year before, to California, because she was stricken with consumption, and he hoped the change from the harsh east winds of New England to the balmy airs of the Pacific coast might restore her to health.
For a time the result had seemed to fulfil his hope; but, very suddenly, he himself had been taken ill and died; and then the half-baffled disease seized again on the mourning wife, who had now no strength to repel its onset.
I think she would fain have lived—even then, when all the joy seemed gone from her life—for her daughter Helen’s sake; but she was too weak to struggle, and so she lay there dying, quite aware of what was before her.
All day she had seemed to be thinking, thinking, and waiting till she had settled something in her own mind before she spoke. At last, with the sunset light upon her face, she beckoned to the woman, who bent nearer.
“As soon as all is over, Woods,” she said, as tranquilly as if she were speaking of the most ordinary household arrangement, “you will take Helen to my sister’s in Boston. You must make the journey by easy stages, so as not to tire her too much. Fortunately she will not be dependent. She has money enough, and she needs only care and love, which my sister will give her, I know well.
“I shall be glad if you can stay with her; but that must of course be as Mrs. Mason will arrange. You will find when my affairs are settled that you have been remembered. You will lay me by my husband’s side, and then take Helen away.
“All is arranged so that there can be no trouble, and now, if you please, leave me a little while with my daughter.”
The woman went out of the room, and then Mrs. Ash opened her arms, and Helen crept into them and lay there silently, as if she were a baby again whom her mother comforted.
She was a strange compound, this Helen Ash, of impulsiveness and self-control. She had an intense nature, and her temptations would grow chiefly out of her tendency to concentrate all her heart on a single object,—to seek whatever thing she wished for with an insistence which would not be denied.