“Oo dood to Lally,” she said to Mrs. Poole Seymour when that lady bought her a doll’s house furnished complete, and would have had the child play with and enjoy it; “oo dood to Lally, but Lally tired mamma—tell lady—Lally’s very bad.”
There was not a woman who went up in due time to the room where Lally lay that left it with dry eyes. Even Mrs. Raidsford declared the scene was “quite effective.” As for Mrs. Poole Seymour, she was never weary of bringing over toys for the child, which the poor little creature always clutched with weak avidity, and then next moment almost wearily relinquished.
There were two spirits in poor Lally then; the spirit of health and the spirit of sickness, the spirit of her former self, and the spirit which entered into her body as she rose for the last time struggling for life in the cold waters of Mr. Scrotter’s pond. The first was all eagerness, excitement, vivacity; the last was languid, weary, inactive; the first hastened her pulses, sent the blood to her cheeks, loaded her tongue with eager words, and tipped her fingers with quicksilver; the second laid a depressing weight on her heart, caused the unspoken words to die away on her white lips, drew the bright colour from her face, checked the impulses of the little hands, and caused the tired head to be laid on her mother’s breast almost before the new toys were examined,—the latest wonder in doll creation critically inspected.
“Put ’em away,” she was wont to say with the air of a matron of forty, “put ’em away, Lally look at ’em by-and-by.”
But by-and-by came and went,—came and went without bringing much more inclination to Lally to inspect her new possessions.
The loveliest doll on earth could not have retained her attention very long in the days of which I am writing. She would look at it for a moment and then turn her eyes wearily away. “Lally not well,” that was the burden of the song then; “Ma,—Lally not well.”
“But you are better, my pet,” Heather was wont to say. “You are not very bad now, Lally.”
“No, but Lally not well;” and then mother and doctor and friends would look at each other and declare “she is much better, and the spring will do wonders for her.”
Of that spring and of the summer Lally might have been said to rave. Each morning when she opened her eyes, she would ask between sleeping and waking, “Bessie, are the leaves come yet?” or “are the trees green? Is it spring now?”
“Nonsense, puss,” Bessie always answered, “Christmas has not come yet; you are to get well, you know, and be carried downstairs to eat your plum pudding. Little girls who sham sickness are not to have any good things at all. You are to be taken into the drawing-room and kissed under the misletoe—kissed till you are black and blue, you bad child, for all the trouble and anxiety you have caused us.”