When Queenie entered, her eyes were closed, but they opened quickly, and a smile of joy and surprise broke over her face, when Queenie exclaimed:
“Oh, Christine, you are sick, and you did not let me know it, or I should have come before!”
For an instant Christine’s lips quivered in a pitiful kind of way; then the great tears rolled down her cheeks as she whispered faintly:
“I am sick—I am dying; but I did not want you to know. I wished to spare you and him. How is he now?”
Queenie explained that he was sleeping quietly, and that she believed all danger had passed. Then, sitting down by the bedside, she took the hot, burning hands in hers, and rubbed and bathed them as carefully and gently as if they had been Phil’s, instead of this woman’s, toward whom she had felt so bitter and resentful. All that was gone now, and she was conscious of a strange feeling stirring within her as she sat and met the dying eyes fixed upon her with so much yearning tenderness and love. This woman was her mother. Nothing could change that; and whatever her faults had been, she was a good woman now, Queenie believed; and, as the dim eyes met hers so constantly and appealingly, she bent close to the pillow, and said:
“Mother, I am sorry I was so unforgiving and hard. It came so suddenly. Forgive me if you can.”
A low, pitiful cry was Christine’s only answer for a moment, and then she said:
“I have nothing to forgive; the wrong was all my own, and I deserved your scorn. But oh, Queenie, my child, you can never know how I was deceived, or how wholly I trusted your father whom I loved so much, and after I had kept Margery’s birth a secret, I must go on concealing. There was no other way. He would have murdered me, or left me to starve with you. Oh, Margery. Margery, my other child! and, Queenie, you will not mind if I say my dearest child, for she has been all the world to me. Tell her so, Queenie; tell her I blessed her with my last breath, and loved her with all my strength, and soul, and might. She is so sweet, so good, so true! God bless her, and make her perfectly happy!”
During this conversation, which was carried on in French, the sister whom the physician had sent to attend Christine stood looking on wonderingly, and never dreaming of the relationship between the two. She was, however, anxious lest so much talking and excitement should be injurious to her patient, and she said so to Queenie, who replied:
“Yes, you are right. I should try to quiet her now. If you will be kind enough to look after the young man in No. 40, I will stay with Sister Christine. She wishes it to be so. She was my nurse in France. I knew her—her—”