“I shall not go so far as you think.”
Now when he heard the low call of his little Maudie and her smothered sobbing, he remembered the words of his dead wife. Did she, indeed, hear Maudie cry, and was it possibly troubling her? He got up and went into the little room where the child had slept alone ever since her sixth birthday, a couple of months ago. He bent over her low bed, and asked tenderly,—
“What is it, darling?”
A tiny night-gowned figure lifted itself up and two little arms clung round his neck.
“Bessie put me to bed without taking me to mamma. Mamma did not kiss me good-night, and I want she should,—oh, I want she should! Bessie wouldn’t carry me to see her; and I want you to. Bessie said mamma never would kiss me again but that isn’t true, is it? You know I’ve heard mamma say Bessie wasn’t always ’sponsible.”
Colonel Trevethick considered for a moment what he should say to his child—how he could make her understand the great, sad, awful, yet triumphant mystery which had come to pass that day under their roof—the great loss, and the great hope that hallowed it.
She was such a mere baby it seemed hard to choose his words. Must he tell her that her mamma would never kiss her again? But how did he know that? When the dear Lord promised the “all things” to those who loved Him, did it not include the joining of broken threads, the up-springing of dead hopes, the finding one’s own again, somewhere? He thought it must; for what a word without meaning heaven would be to him if his own Maud were not there! He temporized a little.
“She cannot kiss you now, my darling, but you shall kiss her.”
So he lifted the little white figure in his arms, holding it close, as one who must be father and mother both together, now, and carried his little one across the hall to the room, where her dead mother lay,—oh, so fast asleep!—with a look like a smile frozen upon her fair, sweet face. He held Maudie down by the pillow on which her mother’s head rested, but that did not satisfy her.
“Put me on the bed, please, papa. I get on the bed every night and kiss her, since she’s been ill.”