Another moment and Edith fell heavily across the foot of the bed, while Mrs. Barrett’s loud shriek roused Gertie from sleep and brought her to the room.
“It’s a fit,—she is dying,—she is dead,” Mrs. Barrett murmured, pointing to Edith, who for hours lay in a stupor which seemed like death, and from which nothing had power to rouse her.
Gertie had summoned help at once, and the colonel was the first in the room, and held his fainting wife in his arms, and felt a mortal fear steal over him when he saw the deadly paleness and the foam about the lips, the purple rings beneath the eyes, and the head drooping so heavily on his shoulder. It was overtasking her strength, and sitting up so much with her mother, he thought, and the doctor thought so too, and when before the sunsetting they buried in the cemetery the little daughter whose eyes never opened in this world, and whom Edith never saw, they were sure it was over-exertion at a time when she needed all her strength, and the colonel’s affection for his mother-in-law was not perceptibly increased. She had offered no explanation whatever with regard to the fit, except that it came suddenly, when Edith was standing by her. Indeed she was nearly distracted herself, and Gertie, who watched by her, would not have been surprised to see her life go out at any moment.
For some reason there seemed to be a strong prejudice in the house against the woman. Nobody wanted to wait on her, nobody wanted to go near her, and so Gertie became her sole nurse, though she wished so much to be with Mrs. Schuyler, who was raving in the room across the hall, and whom it sometimes took two men to hold.
But Gertie’s duty was plain, and she stayed with the poor old woman, who clung to her like a child, talking strange things at times, and asking questions hard for Gertie to answer.
“Would God forgive her sin? Was there yet hope for her?”
This was the burden of her sorrow; and many times in the day, and during the night-watches she kept so tirelessly, Gertie knelt and prayed that every sin, however great, committed by the wretched woman, might be forgiven and washed away in Jesus’ blood.
“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow,” she repeated often in the ears of the dying woman, who would reply:
“Yes, I know, I know, but some sin beyond hope, and I am one of these. All my life has been a lie, and I meant it should be. And now it is all thick darkness whichever way I look. I never did a genuine good thing in my life. All was for effect, except my love for you, Gertie; there was no motive for that. My love for you was real, and when you left me alone in England I tried once to pray, truly pray on my knees alone when nobody saw me; but something whispered, mockingly, ‘You pray?’ and I did not try again. Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do, the horror is so great?”
“Jesus came to save sinners, even the chief of sinners, and He will do it; He said so, and He never told a lie,” Gertie whispered, softly.