“My poor child,” said he, as he stooped and kissed her forehead, after anxiously scanning her pale cheeks and weary eyes; “you have had no rest; you have overtasked yourself: you should have gone to bed.”
“Never mind me, papa dear! I shall do well enough, but let me take Gwyneth back, she will be cold. Come Gwyneth.”
But the child rebelled again, clung to her father, and seemed about to renew her shrieks.
“Hush, hush! this will not do,” said he, “this must not be. Be still, Gwyneth, and you shall see your mother once more.”
He stepped into the darkened room, whose grave and solemn aspect hushed the mourner’s emotion at once. He opened one shutter a little way; the bright morning sun streamed in upon the white bed-curtains, and danced upon the toilet-glass. He brought his young daughter, clinging to his arms, to the bed, drew back the curtain, lifted the sheet, and Gwyneth’s eyes fell on the cold, still face of her, for whom she had called in vain.
Words can not describe the feelings of a child thus brought face to face with death. The dead flower appears as a shriveled atom—the extinguished fire presents an uncouth heap of ashes—the setting sun vanishes from our sight—these speak
for themselves, here the change is real, perceptible, obvious; but the soul departed leaves the body the same, and yet how different, how slight, yet how immense the alteration. Lost in wonder, unable to realize what is gone, the child gazes in unspeakable awe at what remains—death, is that death? it looks but too like a profound and happy sleep; for a moment the eye is deceived: but to the touch the truth is at once revealed, and the young finger shrinks, and never again forgets the strange, cold, unyielding, icy feeling of the dead. For years it will thrill through her frame.
Perhaps it was a hazardous experiment, to place that young and susceptible girl in such a presence. Mr. Duncan did not know what he was doing; he was one of those individuals who can not in the least understand childhood, its deep feelings, its mysterious impulses, its strange associations, its superstitions taught by Nature herself, its heavenly breathings, to which it can give neither form nor words. He believed the experiment was perfectly successful, for Gwyneth’s tears and cries alike ceased in that solemn presence, and she gazed in quiet, awestruck, breathless surprise at the form before her.
Softly and gently her father talked to her, whispering of the absent spirit which had gone away for a time, but which might even now be near, how near to them they could not tell; and of that day when this spirit should return again, and that fair form, now motionless, cold, inanimate as marble itself, should arise once more to everlasting life. And then he knelt with Gwyneth in his arms, and prayed that they might all meet hereafter in that home of everlasting peace, where no partings come. She was very still and subdued as he carried her back from the room, and gave her to the nurse’s charge, and they did not know the effect that sight had produced on her, for she could not speak of her feelings; but sleeping or waking, that face for weeks was before her eyes, and the coldness of death seemed over her lips and cheeks, such as she had felt it, when, at her father’s bidding, she had pressed a last kiss on the corpse; and she would shrink into corners of the house or garden, to cry
and shudder alone, when none saw her, and muse in silence upon what her mother was.