“Yes,” whispered the woman, “it is hard to realize—I have been so strong, but life has been losing its hold on me for some time, I think. Gwen, let me take your hand, dear, touch me as if you were used to it, as if you had tumbled over me and I had played with you ever since you can remember.”
Gwen’s hand shook as she gave it with white lips and wide eyes. What was that growing shadow on the small face, what was this bringing such confidence, such a curious compelling air of possession into the timid eyes?
Mrs. Waring gave a soft far-away little laugh, that made Gwen’s blood turn in the ghastly listening silence.
“I saw the other day a young mother, a little creature with blue eyes and yellow hair and so young—so young—put her little baby’s fingers into her mouth, and bite them softly in play, and the baby laughed and kicked. Jubelte! Why does English sometimes fall so short? Ah, Gwen, I wish you could have seen it, nothing is like it, nothing—”
Gwen stirred in anguish, her brain was surging wildly, her whole heart and soul were prostrate in one wild prayer for help from the horrors that were closing her in. There was no idea of God in the prayer, however.
“Humphrey, Humphrey, Humphrey!” was the only thought that possessed her, and tried to break aloud in sound through her dry lips.
Then her mother’s eyes closed again and she murmured in her half sleep; when she aroused herself after a few minutes her gentle eyes were bright and wild. She caught Gwen’s dimpled pink fingers and put them into her mouth and she set, to bite them softly and to kiss them with little ripples of a girl’s laughter, and her few wrinkles smoothed themselves and the sweet rosy colour came again into the thin cheeks, and she was a careless, happy young mother playing with her first child.
Mr. Waring had come softly into the room some minutes before; he paused and peered eagerly forward, and then there leapt into his eyes a blinding agony; he swayed, shivering, and dropped on his knees by the bed. But of this Gwen saw nothing.
As her mother kissed, and bit, and mumbled over her hand, and half sang little quaint snatches of baby song, and took her pretty fingers one by one and told them with low silvery laughs “this little pig went to market and the other stayed at home!” and broke out into a louder ripple as “the little one cried queak!” her own baby “leapt in her womb” and the scales fell from her eyes and her heart melted within her, and the breast of her dying mother was as an open book to her; she could read all the love there and the remorse and the infinite sorrow.
Gwen’s heart stopped and her breath refused to come—she would have died then. Her soul hovered shuddering on the threshold of life, but her baby stirred imperiously and pulled it back, and then a torrent of tears came to her help and left her with soft moist eyes, a child by her mother’s side.