“She does not persist in doubting his unworthiness, does she?” queried the wife, aside, but not so cautiously that her brother did not hear her.
He wheeled about suddenly.
“She SHALL believe it, or call me a liar to my face!” he uttered, angrily. “I will put a stop to this sentimental folly!”
“You are late in beginning your reforms,” observed Mr. Aylett, dryly.
“You are a less sensible man than I give you credit for being, if you ever begin!” interposed his sister.
“Leave Mabel to herself until she recovers from the shock—if it be one—of this intelligence. The surest means of keeping alive a dying coal is to stir and blow upon it. And even we”—lifting the heavy locks of her husband's hair in playful dalliance—“even we are mortal. We have had our peccadilloes and our repentances, and have now our little concealments of affairs that would interest nobody but ourselves. Do you hear what I am saying, Herbert! Leave off your high tragedy airs and attend to reason, as expressed in your sister's advice. While your wife is my invalid guest, I will not have her subjected to any inquisitorial process. There is a time for everything under the sun, saith the preacher. This is the season for tender forbearance, and if need be, of forgiveness.”
Herbert blessed her humane tolerance in his alarmed heart, when Mabel awoke from her troubled slumbers at midnight, in extreme pain, that culminated before dawn, in convulsions.
Two physicians were hastily summoned, and when Mrs. Sutton arrived about noon, she met Phillis outside the door of the sick-chamber, carrying a lifeless infant in her arms, and weeping bitterly.
This was the end of the months of hopeful longing and glad anticipation which were Heaven's messengers of healing and comfort to the sick and lonely heart. The cunningly-fashioned robes were never to have a wearer, the clasping arms to remain still empty. Oh wondrous mystery—past finding out—of the human soul! Had the lungs once heaved with breath, the heart given one throb; the eyes caught one beam of Heaven's light ere they were sealed fast in eternal darkness, she, who travailed with the infant through the inexpressible agony of birth, would have been written a mother among women; have had the right accorded her, without the cavil of formalist or the disputations of science, to claim the precious thing as her own still—a living baby-spirit that had fluttered back to the bosom of the Almighty Father, after alighting, for one painful moment, upon the confines of the lower world. As it was, custom ordained that there should be no mourning for what had never really been. Anguish, hope, and the patient love at which we do not scoff when the mother-bird broods over the eggs that may never hatch—these were to be no more named or remembered. In silence and without sympathy she must endure her disappointment. The tenderest woman about whose knees cluster living children, and who has sowed in tears the blessed seed, that in the resurrection-morn shall be gathered in beauteous sheaves of richest recompense—would smile in pitying contempt over the tiny headstone which should be lettered—“Born Dead.”
All this and much more Mabel was to learn with the return of health and reason, but she lay now, like one who had passed for herself the narrow sea that separates the Now from the Hereafter; her features chiselled into the unmoving outlines of a waxen image, only a feeble flutter of breath and pulse telling that this was lethargy, not death. They watched her all night, Mrs. Sutton on one side and Phillis on the other, the family physician stealing in with slippered tread from hour to hour, to note with his sensitive touch if the few poor drops of vital blood yet trickled from veins to heart, always with the same directions, “Give her the stimulant while she can swallow it. It is the only hope of saving her.”