Rutledge

by Miriam Coles Harris

I soon forgot the severity of the rebuff I had received, however, when coming into the nursery, I took the struggling child from Félicie, and watched with anxiety the gradual subsiding of the fit of passion that had convulsed her. From whatever cause it might be, she was evidently growing quieter, and in less than half an hour, the little head on my arm had relaxed its tossings, and sunk into repose, while a dreamy languor dulled the wildness of her eyes, and save when the slightest movement woke an alarm that I would leave her, she lay quite motionless.

"She is better now," said Félicie, in a low tone, who was watching her with her basilisk eyes as she lay apparently sleeping. A nervous tightening of the slight fingers on my wrist at the sound of her voice, showed me that it was only apparently.

When Mrs. Churchill had completed her toilette, she came upstairs. Esther, with her long eyelashes sweeping her crimsoned cheeks, lay so quiet that there seemed some reason in her mother's cutting rebuke for the unnecessary alarm I had given her. I began to feel heartily ashamed of it myself, and wondered that I had been so easily frightened. Félicie, with a wicked look of exultation, said, that if Miss Esther hadn't been in a passion, she wouldn't have brought the fever on again. She had been better all day, the doctor had said she had scarcely any fever, when he was here.

Mrs. Churchill hoped, with a withering look, that I would get used to ill temper in time, and not think it necessary to disturb the household whenever Esther had a fit of crying. Then feeling the child's pulse, and giving many and minute directions for the care of her during the night, she went away. As, a moment after, the hall door closed with a heavy sound, a momentary tremor passed over the child's frame, and opening her eyes, a strange light fluttered for an instant in them, as she murmured, "you will not go away?" then closed them again, and she seemed to sleep. I watched beside her for an hour; then releasing myself from her unresisting hands, and kissing her lightly, I went into my own room.

I returned several times to look at her again, before I put the light out and lay down to sleep. How many times the monotonous nursery-clock struck the half hour before I slept, I cannot tell; the heavy air was broken by no other sound; there was nothing in the silent house, shrouded by the close fog without and the dead silence within, to keep me awake, yet it was long before I slept. But sleep, when it came, was heavy and dreamless—a sort of dull stifling of consciousness, in keeping with the night.

Hours of this sleep had passed over me, when a fierce grasp upon my arm, and a hissing voice in my ear, woke me with a terrified start, and chilled me with horror, as struggling to collect my senses, I tried to comprehend Félicie's frantic words. In a moment, they made their way to my brain, and burned themselves there.

"I've given her too much—I cannot wake her! O mon Dieu! Je l'ai tuée! Je l'ai tuée!"

A horrible sickening faintness for an instant rushed over me, then a keen sense of agony like an electric flash thrilled through me, and without a look, a thought, a word, I was kneeling at the little bed in the nursery. But, as my eager eyes searched the whitened face on the pillow there, and as my aching ears listened for the almost inaudible breathing, and my hand touched the cold arms that lay outside the covers, such a cry burst from my lips as might have waked the dead, if dead were indeed before me. But there was no voice nor answer; there was an awful stillness when I listened for response; when I raised my eyes in wild appeal from the white face of the child, there was but a horrible face above me, whereon was all the pallor of death, without its calm repose; such a face as the lost and damned may wear when their sentence is new in their ears—when endless perdition is but just begun, and life and hope but just cut off.

Another moment, and all the house was roused. Putting back, with one strong effort, the agony and hopelessness that welled up from my heart, I mastered myself enough to direct the terrified and helpless servants. Dispatching different ones to the nearest doctors I could think of, another for my aunt, another for all the restoratives that occurred to me, the next few minutes of suspense passed.

But before the doctor could arrive, I knew there was no need of his coming. There had been a little flutter of the drooping eyelid, ever so slight a quiver of the parted lip, and bending down, I had listened, with agonized suspense, for the low breathing, and called her name with the tenderness that never finds perfect expression till death warns us it shall be the last. Then a little arm crept round my neck, the soft eye opened for a moment, a sigh stirred the bosom that my forehead touched, and, as the arm relaxed its faint clasp, I knew that Essie was a stranger and an alien no longer, but was where it were better for us all to be—where there is peace, eternal, unbroken, beyond the reach of sin forever.