“My darling, what good can he do?” Bessie inquired; but Cuthbert was despatched for him, nevertheless.
Before many minutes more, however, had elapsed, the child began to move from side to side, and talk wanderingly. She moaned gently, and tried to raise herself in bed. Agnes put her arm behind the pillow, and lifted her a little. Involuntarily Heather and Bessie stood up, as though they heard and felt something approaching, and the former murmured in the very extremity of her anguish, “My child—my child!”
“Don’t, Heather—don’t?” Bessie said, in an agony of entreaty.
At sound of her voice, Lally opened her eyes wide and looked on the speaker with an expression of recognition.
Almost immediately her moaning ceased, her restlessness subsided; there came a glimmer into her face of remembrance, and a smile—a very ghost of the old whimsical smile—played about her lips as she stretched out her little arms and said,—
“Bessie carry me down among the blackberries, and cover me with leaves?”
Oh Lord! in the days when that was their pastime, who would have dreamed of so pitiful an ending to the short story!
For a moment, for her—for the child—no doubt the chamber was flooded with golden sunbeams—without question she saw the landscape lying still and tranquil in the clear, calm, bright light of those summer evenings which had been so happy and so glad.
She beheld the trees gently waving their branches in the soft breeze; she heard the light stirring of the wind amongst the foliage; she saw the lawn sloping away to the Hollow, the sheep dotting the fields beyond; she was in her home—her own very home—as she had often called it; the past was present with her once again, and Bessie stood beside her on the smooth green turf.
The mortal sickness was gone; the months of feeble health were wiped out; the limbs felt tireless as of old; pain was to her an unknown experience, weakness a thing she had never felt; she was lithe, and active, and strong; restless and insatiable for movement, as ever; the game they had played at so often was to be played once more; adown the slope they were to go, swift, and happy, and free; adown the slope, over the grass, under the trees, into the Hollow, among the blackberry bushes, and then——