WAS IT HER MOTHER?
Just a little voice, calling through the dark, “Mamma, O mamma!” and then a low sound of stifled sobbing.
Colonel Trevethick heard them both, and they smote him with a new sense of loss and pain. He had scarcely thought of his little girl since his wife died, five hours before,—died at the very instant when she was kissing him good-by, taking with her into the far heavens the warm breath of his human love. He had loved her as, perhaps, men seldom love, from the first hour of their first meeting.
“There is Maud Harrison,” some one had said; and he had turned to look, and met the innocent gaze of two frank, gentle, very beautiful brown eyes. “Brightest eyes that ever have shone,” he said to himself. Their owner had other charms besides,—a fair and lovely face, round which the ruffled hair made a soft, bright halo; a lithe, girlish figure; a manner of unaffected cordiality, blent with a certain maidenly reserve, and which seemed to him perfection. He loved her, then and there. His wooing was short and his wedding hasty; but he had never repented his haste, never known an unhappy hour from the moment he brought his wife home, nine years ago, till these last few days, in which he had seen that no love or care of his could withhold her from going away from him to another home where he could not follow her,—the home where she had gone now, far beyond his search.
She was a good little creature, and she did not rebel even at the summons to go out of her earthly Eden in search of the paradise of God. She longed, indeed, to live, for she so loved her own, and she could have resigned herself to die more willingly but for her husband’s uncontrollable passion of woe. That very day she had said to him, as he knelt beside her,—
“Do not grieve so, darling! I am not going so far but that I shall come back to you every day. Something tells me that I shall be always near you and Maudie. You cannot call, or she cry, but that I shall hear you. I know that when she most needs, or you most want me, I shall be close beside you.”
And with that very last kiss, when her breath was failing, she had whispered,—