“Is the baby better?”
“Baby is dead,” was the brief reply, and Wilford staggered back against the door-post, where he leaned a moment for support in that first great shock for which he was not prepared.
Upon the doorstep Bell sat down, crying quietly, for she had loved the child, and she listened anxiously while Morris repeated the particulars of its illness and then spoke of Katy’s reproaching herself so bitterly for having brought it from New London. “She seems entirely crushed,” he continued, when they were driving towards the farm-house. “For a few hours I trembled for her reason, while the fear that you might reproach her added much to the poignancy of her grief.”
Morris said this very calmly, as if it were not what he had all the while intended saying, and his eye turned towards Wilford, whose lips were compressed with the emotion he was trying to control. It was Bell who spoke first, Bell who said impulsively, “Poor Katy, I knew she would feel so, but it is unnecessary, for none but a savage would reproach her now, even if she were in fault.”
Morris blessed Bell Cameron in his heart, knowing how much influence her words would have upon her brother, who brushed away the first tear he had shed, and tried to say that “of course she was not to blame.”
They were in sight of the farm-house now, and Bell, with her city ideas, was looking curiously at it, mentally pronouncing it a nicer, pleasanter place than she had supposed. It was very quiet about the house, and old Whitey’s neigh as Morris’s span of bays came up was the only sound which greeted them. In the wood-shed door Uncle Ephraim sat smoking his clay pipe and likening the feathery waves which curled above his head to the little soul so recently gone upward; while by his side, upon a log of wood, holding a pan of the luscious peaches she was slicing up for tea, sat a woman whom Bell knew at once for Aunt Betsy Barlow, and who, pan in hand, came forward to meet her, curtsying very low when introduced by Morris, and asking to be excused from shaking hands, inasmuch as hers were not fit to be touched. Bell’s quick eye took her in at a glance, from her clean spotted gown to her plain muslin cap tied with a black ribbon, put on that day with a view to mourning, and then darted off to Uncle Ephraim, who won her heart at once when she heard how his voice trembled as he took Wilford’s hand and said so pityingly, so father-like, “Young man, this is a sad day for you, and you have my sympathy, for I remember well how my heart ached when, on just such a day as this, my only child lay dead as yours is lying.”
Every muscle of Wilford’s face quivered, but he was too proud to show all that he felt, and he was glad when Helen appeared in the door, as that diverted his mind, and he greeted her cordially, stooping down and kissing her forehead, a thing he had never done before. But sorrow is a great softener, and Wilford was very sorry, feeling his loss more here, where everything was so quiet, so suggestive of death.
“Where is Katy?” he asked.
“She is sleeping for the first time since the baby died. She is in here with the child. She will stay nowhere else,” Helen said, opening the door of the bedroom and motioning Wilford in.
With hushed breath and a beating heart, Wilford stepped across the threshold, and Helen closed the door, leaving him alone with the living and the dead. Pure and beautiful as some fair blossom, the dead child lay upon the bed, the curls of golden hair clustering about its head, and on its lips the smile which settled there when it tried to say “mamma.” Its dimpled hands were folded upon its breast, where lay the cross of flowers which Marian Hazelton had made. There were flowers upon its pillow, flowers around its head, flowers upon its shroud, flowers everywhere, and itself the fairest flower of all, Wilford thought, as he stood gazing at it and then let his eye move on to where poor, tired, worn-out Katy had crept up so close beside it that her breath touched the marble cheek and her own disordered hair rested upon the pillow of her child. Even in her sleep her tears kept dropping and the pale lips quivered in a grieved, touching way. Hard indeed would Wilford have been had he cherished one bitter thought against the wife so wounded. He could not when he saw her, but no one ever knew just what passed through his mind during the half hour he sat there beside her, scarcely stirring and not daring to kiss his child lest he should awaken her. He could hear the ticking of his watch and the beating of his heart as he waited for the first sound which should herald’s Katy’s waking.