From the moment when Edith fell fainting across her mother’s feet, she had never known a moment’s consciousness, but had either lain like one from whom life had fled forever, or raved in wild delirium as she tossed from side to side, trying in vain to free herself from the strong arms which in mercy held her so fast. Her lost baby was her theme; but at first the colonel attached no meaning to it, thinking it but natural that her mind should dwell upon the little one dead before it was born. Still, it was strange, he thought, that she should rave about it so furiously, begging him to go and find it and rescue it from the streets, and bring it to her, so she could tell it she was not altogether to blame.
“Oh, my daughter! my lost daughter!” she would moan; “where are you now, and where have you been these many years, when I thought you dead in your little grave?”
Then she would whisper to some fancied person standing by her bed, and ask him to forgive her for the wrong done to his child, and when the colonel said to her, gently, “Edith, darling, you have not harmed our child,” she would answer him:
“No,—not yours! Oh, you don’t know,—you would kill me if you did! Oh, my baby! my baby, who went in the rain!”
What she meant the colonel could not guess, and he grew old and worn as he watched beside her, listening to her ravings, and trying to find some cause for them. She never mentioned her mother, and did not know when she died; but she seemed quieter that day, and while the people were at the grave she suffered her husband, for the first time since her illness, to hold her hand in his; but her lips quivered and the tears rained down her cheeks as she kept whispering: “I am so sorry, Howard,—so sorry! and I did not know it, or I would have told you.”
“Sorry for what, darling? There’s nothing to be sorry for,” the colonel said, as he kissed her tears away and bade her try to sleep. She knew Godfrey, and as if feeling intuitively that she had a friend in him, she tried to tell him something about a child lost in the streets, whom he was to find and bring to her, “pure, spotless, unharmed.” She laid great stress on the last words, and Godfrey promised to do her bidding if she would go to sleep and not distress herself so much.
“I will, I will. See, I’m asleep!” she said, closing her eyes tightly, and lying so still that in a few moments she was asleep.
When she awoke Gertie was standing near, and at sight of her a bright smile broke over Edith’s face as she looked up at Godfrey, and said:
“You found her, didn’t you, pure and unspotted as an angel?”
Nobody knew at all what she meant, or spoke to her as she fondled Gertie’s face and hands, and asked her where she had been so long, and how it was she was so fair and sweet, so different from the girls in the street. Then for a moment consciousness struggled to assert itself, and she seemed to know who Gertie was, and whispered to her: