“No, no, this is not the one. I want my lost baby, with the blue eyes. Will no one find it for me?”
Then in a curious way she would examine her surroundings and whisper to herself:
“Handsome furniture, fine linen, silken curtains, and silver dishes to eat from. This is not the place. Mother, mother, where am I, and are you there by the fire with baby?”
She was back again in London in the forlorn room in Dorset street, and the rain was splashing against the windows just as it did that dreary day, and she heard the footsteps of the lodgers on the stairs and the roar of the great city, and fought again the battle for her child, and the iron hand came back and clutched her throat and strangled her until her face was purple and she writhed in the agonies of suffocation. Then, when the paroxysm was over she lay for hours in a swoon so nearly resembling death, that at last they thought her gone and the whisper that she was dead ran through the hall, down to the servants’ quarters, where it was told to Gertie Westbrooke, who had come to inquire for her.
“No, no, not dead; oh, what shall I do?” Gertie cried, as with a low moan she sank down upon the grass by the door, and covering her face with her hands wept passionately.
During the past year Edith and Gertie had met often by the grave which the child tended with so much care, and they had learned to know each other well. Together they had talked of French and music and the books which Gertie liked best and the flowers of which Gertie knew so much; and Edith had written to the white-haired old lady among the heather hills, and sent the roses Gertie had pressed. And when the answer came which had in it a blessing for “the bonny lassie who looks after my puir laddie’s grave,” Edith read it to Gertie as they sat under the shadow of the whispering pine which grew above the grave. And now all this had come to an end, and all the brightness of Gertie’s life seemed stricken out with the words:
“Mrs. Schuyler is dead.”
“And she so lovely and good,—and she liked me, too. Oh, I cannot bear it,—I cannot!” Gertie sobbed, just as a footstep came near.
Looking up, she saw Emma, who, overhearing the words, and guessing at their meaning, said to her:
“Gertie, she is not dead. She has revived a little and is breathing still, though the doctor thinks her dying.”