"No, my love, I am sure you would tell me nothing which you did not believe to be true; but anger makes the words and looks, and even the actions of people, appear to us very unlike what they really are. However, you have no time to tell me any thing, even if I wished it, for here we are at Mrs. O'Donnel's."
My readers may not be as unwilling as I was to hear what Mary had to say, so I will tell them what I afterwards heard of the morning's adventures from Margaret and Harriet, as soon as I have given them some account of Mrs. O'Donnel and her baby.
CHAPTER VIII.
A MOTHER AND CHILD.
The little cabin, for it was nothing more, in which Mrs. O'Donnel lived, had been put up only a few months. It was built in a little wood which skirted the road between my house and the village, and stood so near the road that the traveller, as he passed along, could hear the baby who lived there, crying, or the song with which his young mother was hushing him to sleep. She was a very young mother; and there she lived, you might almost say, with no one but her baby—for Pat O'Donnel, her husband, was one of the hands on board a steamboat which went from our village to H—— every morning and returned in the evening, and though he was always at home at night, he was away every day except Sunday, from day-dawn till dark. He had built this cabin, and brought his young wife and his baby son to live there, that he might spend every night with them.
I know nothing more of these people than I have now told you, when the circumstances occurred which I am about to relate, except that Mrs. O'Donnel worked very industriously in a little garden which had been fenced in for her near her cabin, and that on Sunday, the husband and wife, with their bright-eyed boy, might be seen going to church, looking clean, and healthy, and happy. But Harriet had become better acquainted with the family than I, for she loved children, and could never pass little Jem—this was the name of the baby—without a smile or a pleasant word, and the child soon learned to know her; and when she came near, would jump and spring in his mother's arms, give her back smile for smile, and since he could not talk yet, would crow to her words. The mother was pleased with the notice taken of her boy, and whenever we passed the house, would bring him to the low fence nearest the road, and with a courtesy, and "How d'ye do, ma'am?" to me, would hold him to Harriet to kiss, sometimes putting in his hand a bunch of flowers for his young friend, who seldom left home to walk in that direction without taking some present for him. Even when setting out with Mary to deliver her invitations, little Jem had not been forgotten; and when I saw Harriet saving the largest of two peaches I had given her, and putting it in a little basket which she carried in her hand, I well knew that it would go no farther than to Mrs. O'Donnel's cabin. Accordingly, when she came in sight of it, she quickened her pace, saying to her companions, "I want to stop at Mrs. O'Donnel's a minute, so I will run on; and if you do not go too fast, I will be with you again before you have passed there."
Before she reached the house, she called out for little Jem, and wondered that neither his laugh nor his mother's pleasant voice answered her. She would have thought they were not at home, but the door was open, and Mrs. O'Donnel was too careful to leave it so, when she was far away. Unlatching the little gate which opened on the road, she crossed the yard and entered the house. There sat Mrs. O'Donnel, her hands clasped in an agony of grief, and tears washing her face, and falling unheeded on that of her poor boy, who lay extended on her lap, no longer laughing and crowing, but pale and still, with his eyes half closed.
Harriet's exclamation of, "What is the matter, Mrs. O'Donnel?" roused the poor mother, who, looking up, said, "Oh, Miss, and glad am I you're come, for my poor baby loved you, and you're just in time to see him die."
"Oh! I hope not, Mrs. O'Donnel," said Harriet. "He will not die. Do you think he will?" she added, more doubtingly, as again she looked in his pale face, and kneeling down by him, took the little hand which lay so feebly by his side.