Christie Redfern's Troubles

by Margaret M. Robertson

She had awakened one day from a momentary slumber into which she had fallen to hear some very terrible words spoken beside her. She thought she had been dreaming till she heard them repeated, and then she opened her eyes to see the kind faces of the attending physician and another looking at her.

“You have been asleep,” said one of them, kindly and Christie thought again she must have been dreaming, for they spoke to her just as usual, praising her patience and bidding her take courage, for she would soon be well again. She must have been dreaming, she said to herself, twenty times that day. Nothing so terrible as the dread that was upon her could possibly be true; and yet the thought came back again and again.

“I am afraid she must lose it,” she thought she heard one of them say.

“Yes; it looks like that now,” as it seemed to her was the reply.

She could not forget the expression; and during the days and nights that followed, the remembrance of the words came back, sometimes as a dream, sometimes as a certainty. Had she been asleep, or was it true that she must be a cripple all her life? Must she henceforth be helpless and dependent, when her help was so much and in so many ways needed? Had her terrible sufferings been all in vain? Were all these restless days and nights only to have this sorrowful ending? How could she ever bear it? How could she ever tell Effie and the rest at home?

Many times in the day, when there was no one near, she determined to ask the doctor, that she might know the worst or have her fears set at rest, but she could not find the courage to do so. She did speak to the nurse, but she knew nothing about the matter, or said she did not, and quite laughed at her fancies, as she called them. But the fancies still lingered, and for a week or two the face she turned to meet her friend was grave and anxious enough.

He came almost every day now, he hardly knew why. Whatever the cause might be, he could not but see that his coming was always hailed with delight. Wherever the charm might be, whether in his voice or in the words he read, he could not tell; but he saw that his visits soothed her restlessness, and helped to banish the look of doubt and pain that too often saddened her face.

Sometimes he read the Bible, and stranger as he had for many years been to its sacred pages, he could not help yielding himself to the charm which the wonderful words he read there must ever have to a thoughtful mind. But the charm which the words had for his patient listener was something quite different from this. It was not the grandeur or sublimity of the style, or even the loftiness of the thought, that made her listen with such interest. She liked the simplest passages best. The simple narratives of the evangelists never lost their power to please her. Some word or promise, in which he saw little beauty, had often power to excite her deepest emotion, and he could not but wonder as he saw it.

He read other books too—little books left by visitors; very foolish little books he thought them often, and he could not but smile as he marked the interest with which she listened; but he never by smile or word intimated to her that he thought them trifling, at least he was never conscious of doing so. But he sometimes read in the grave, questioning eyes which Christie turned on him, a doubt whether that which was so real and so comforting to her was of any value to him.

He could not but confess to himself that, seen from Christie’s point of view, the subjects discussed in them must seem of grave importance; and he never lost the feeling, as he sat by her bed, that they had a meaning to her that was hidden from him.