“Can’t I go too, papa? If you ask God, won’t He let me? Because I do so love my mamma.”
That afternoon Colonel Trevethick had felt as if he had nothing at all left in this world; but now he realized how much emptier still his home might be if he lost out of it this child who was so like her mother.
“Mamma would not want you to come,” he said passionately. “She has all heaven, and I only you,—only you, little Maudie, in all the world. Mamma wants you to stay with me.”
After that she was quite quiet; and when he looked in at her, an hour later, she was sound asleep, with one little hand like a crushed white rose under the red rose of her flushed cheek.
She never asked for her mother after that night; but her father was sure that she never forgot her. She was the strangest, gravest little creature. She never made any noise, even at her play; and she never did any of the things for which her mother had been used to reprove her. The trouble was that she was too perfect; there was something unnatural about it which frightened Colonel Trevethick. He would have been glad if she had been naughty, sometimes, like other children. He longed to have her tease him, to see in her some spirit of naughtiness or contradiction; but he saw none. She grew tall quite fast, but she was very thin,—a little white wraith of a creature, who looked as if she had been made out of snow, and might melt away as soon.
It was a good thing for Colonel Trevethick, no doubt, that he had her to tend, and to be anxious about. It kept him from surrendering himself to his own grief.
Nearly two years went on, and all the time the little girl grew more and more frail; until, at last, when she had just passed her eighth birthday, she was taken very ill. Her illness seemed a sort of low, nervous fever, and she grew daily more feeble. A skilful nurse came to share with Bessie the task of tending her, and her father was seldom far away. Half the day he would be sitting in her room, and half a dozen times in the night he would steal in to watch her breathing.
One afternoon, as he sat by her bed, she looked up at him with a sad, tender look, too old for her years,—but then all her words and ways were too old for her years.
“Papa,” she said, “I would get well if I could, to please you. I should get well, I know, if I had mamma to nurse me. Don’t you know how she used, if my head ached, to put her hand on it and make it stop?”
A sudden mist of tears came between his eyes and the little white face looking up at him. She had not spoken before of her mother for so many months, and yet how well she remembered! Instantly his wife’s words, that last day, came back to his memory. She had said, “I know that when Maudie needs me most, or you most want me, I shall be there beside you.”