Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

What, indeed, and why was he sent to us, we asked ourselves, as we sat watching Phyllis going swiftly across the lawn with Katy in advance. Katy was happy, and her first exclamation as she sped away from us was, “Oh, I am so glad, and can I see him now?”

I don’t know how long Fan and I sat discussing the situation, she threatening to answer Col. Errington’s letter and I proposing to make the best of what could not be helped. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps it was more, when Phyllis appeared again, holding her apron to her eyes with one hand and beckoning us wildly with the other.

“Mrs. Hathern is done took wus, and has as’t for you,” she said.

In an instant we were on our feet, flying towards the house, Fan, as usual, outstripping me and thinking with remorse of the bitter things she had said of the innocent baby, whose plaintive wail we heard as we entered the hall. In every woman’s heart, be she ever so bad and hard, there is a motherly instinct which, under certain conditions, will assert itself. We were neither very hard nor very bad. We were only rebelling as grown-up daughters sometimes do against the introduction in their midst of a baby, and especially when that baby is the offspring of a stepmother. We had not wanted the stepmother, and we didn’t want the baby; but when its faint cry came to us Fan clutched my arm and whispered, “Oh, Ann, hear the poor little thing. I hope its mother won’t die.”

It seemed to me very probable that she would, when I entered her room and saw her lying there so motionless upon her pillows, with every particle of her bright color gone from her face, which looked pinched and haggard and old for a woman of only forty. She had never seemed more than thirty-five. Her eyes were closed and we might have thought her asleep, but for a fluttering of the lids and a movement of her hand as the rustle of our dresses broke the stillness of the room. Katy, who had been fondling the baby, which a negro woman was caring for in an adjoining room, had joined us, and when she saw the white face so changed from what it had been the previous night, when it looked the picture of health, she ran up to father, who was sitting at the side of the bed, and cried out, “Oh, papa, what is it? What makes her look so? Is she very sick?”

A warning sh—— came from the nurse, who was moistening the patient’s lips with some stimulant; but at the sound of Katy’s voice, Mrs. Hathern moved slightly and opened the great black eyes of which we had stood so much in awe. There was nothing to fear from them now, and it seemed to me there was in them a look of wonderful tenderness and love as they rested upon the little girl who was bending close to her.

“Katy,” she said, putting her hand upon the curly head which nestled down beside her as Katy asked again, “Are you very sick, mamma, and do you know about the baby? We’ve got one in the other room. Old Chloe brought him this morning, with a heap of clothes. I’m so glad.”

A faint smile showed around Mrs. Hathern’s mouth and her hand pressed more heavily upon the golden curls.

“Yes, Katy,” she said, very low as if talking were an effort, “I know about the baby, and I want you to love him and care for him if I should go away. Will you, Katy?”

Just so, ten years before, Katy’s mother, in that very room, had spoken to Fan and me, and the scene came back to us so vividly,—the young mother dying and commending to us the little life which had just begun and had since grown to be a part of our whole being. Now it was another mother, and Katy to whom the charge was given, and for a moment I think we both felt chagrined that we should be forgotten; but only for a moment. Turning her eyes towards us, they shone with a strange light of satisfaction as she said, in detached sentences, “Fanny and Annie, I am glad you have come. I want to tell you it was my way that was in fault, not my heart, and I am sorry for all that has gone wrong. You like Carl; try and like my little baby. I know he is not welcome, and when I am gone he may be still less so; he is not to blame. Perhaps God will take him with me; if not, be kind to him, for his father’s sake, and—” She stopped a few moments as if tired out and then resumed, as her eyes wandered around the room, “Where is Fanny?”