Heaven was kinder to this weak soul than to spare her for such a cruel fate. After Antonia had been visiting her for over a week, in which time there had been no improvement in the symptoms, there came a rally with some hours of consciousness; but this was only the prelude of approaching death.
Lucy recognized Antonia, spoke of her husband and her son in a sage and matter-of-fact tone which was quite unlike her talk in delirium, was glad that the boy was safely out of the way when she was seized with the malady.
"My father came here one night, in a raging fever," she told Antonia. "I was frightened; but I hadn't the heart to drive him out of the house. He looked like a dying man. It was the small-pox. He had sent the disease inward by getting up from his bed and going out into the streets in the rain. He lay ill over a week, and I got an old woman to nurse him. I never went near him after I knew. But the infection was in the house, I suppose. I remember the night of his funeral, and my aching bones, and my burning head. I knew I was going to be ill. And then I remember nothing more—nothing more. Was it last night—the funeral?"
She spoke in a weak voice, in broken sentences, with long pauses between, Antonia holding her hand as she talked. The poor wasted hand was icy cold now; the fever was gone—gone with the life of the patient.
"You'll give Mr. Stobart my love," she said, "and please tell him I was very unhappy after he went to America. It was very kind of you to come to me; but then you like visiting sick people. I don't. Mr. Stobart used to tell me I was no Dorcas."
She lingered for a day and a night after this return of consciousness; but her last hours were passed in a stupor, and she died in her sleep, so quietly that the nurse who kept watch by her bed knew not the moment of her last sigh.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
SWORD AND BIBLE.
Lady Kilrush wrote to Lady Lanigan at the Circus, Bath, to inform her of her daughter-in-law's death. She had written some days before to acquaint that lady with poor Lucy's sad condition; but there had been as yet no reply to the first letter, and there was no time to wait for an answer to the second, so she made all arrangements for the funeral, and chose Lucy's last resting-place in the rural churchyard at Mortlake, not very far from the cottage where she had first seen the Methodist and his young wife. She was suffering from a chill and a touch of fever on the morning of the funeral, but bore up long enough to see George Stobart's wife laid in earth, since there was no one else but the doctor and the nurse to perform that last office. She engaged the old woman whom she had found on the premises to remain in the house as caretaker, till Mr. Stobart's return.