“And you think you are too well to require medicine?” he added, addressing the child.
“Iss.” Lally’s speaking was still, as Mrs. Ormson declared, in a deplorably backward condition.
“But if you do not take the medicine I order, you may get ill again.”
Lally turned this view of the question over in her mind, and then remarked, “it would be time enough to have the medicine when she did get ill again.”
“Your mamma does not think so.”
“But then ma has not to take it.”
“Your mamma would not object to taking anything I ordered, if she thought that would cure her little girl,”—at which remark Heather held out her arms to Lally, and the mother and child went through one of those pantomimes which supply the place of all assurance, as they elude all description.
Inexpressibly touching, too, become such pantomimes when the spectator knows the time during which they can be repeated is but short; when he is quite well aware that the days are drawing near on which the child so loved, so idolized, must be laid in the arms of a colder and grimmer nurse to be caressed and hushed to sleep, and pressed close to her mother’s breast, never more, ah! never.
And of this fact Mr. Henry was only too confident. The moment he looked in Lally’s face, he knew for a certainty that which Mr. Stewart had vaguely comprehended. The temporary improvement Heather talked of so thankfully, could not deceive his experience. He understood the nature of such varieties too well to be deceived by them; he knew Lally was doomed, and the bright sunny November day, spite of all its delusive light and glitter, could not blind him to the fact that winter was close at hand.
For which reason he wished Mr. Stewart had not sent Mrs. Dudley to him. He was not a man to delude with false hopes such as Dr. Chickton had held out, and yet to tell this fond, foolish mother that it was a mere question of time and cure, was beyond his ability.