'It all came so suddenly,' says she, putting her hand up with a bewildered air to her damp forehead and disordered hair. 'And yet now it seems centuries since he was running about. How he ran and jumped, did not he? There never was such an active child. And now it seems centuries that he has been lying in his little bed.'
For a moment she breaks down entirely, but fights her way on again.
'It was only a cold at first—quite a slight cold! He was not the least ill with it, and I thought nothing of it; and then on Tuesday there came an acrobatic company to Darnton'—the little neighbouring market-town—'and he was so excited about them, and begged so hard to be allowed to go and see them, that I took him; and he was so delighted with them—he clapped and applauded more than anybody in the house; and all the evening afterwards he was trying to do the things he had seen them do—you know how clever he always is in imitating people—and telling nurse about them. Nurse and I agreed that we had never seen him in such spirits. But he did not sleep well; he was always dreaming about them, and jumping up; and next morning he was in a high fever, and I sent for the doctor, and he has been getting worse ever since; and now——'
Again she breaks down, but again recovering herself, goes on rapidly:
'But it is not the same as if it were a grown-up person, is it? Children have such wonderful recovering power, have not they?—down one day and up the next. They pull through things that would kill you or me, do not they? He will pull through, won't he? You think that he will pull through?'
'I am sure that he will,' replies Talbot earnestly.
It is, of course, an answer absolutely senseless, and in the air; but what other can he give, with those miserable eyes fastened in such desperate asking upon his?
'Oh, if you knew what it has been,' she says, her arms falling with a gesture of measureless tired woe to her sides as she speaks, 'to have been kneeling by him all these two days, hearing him moan, and seeing him try to get his breath!—he does not understand what it means; he has never been ill before. He thinks that I can help him. O God! he thinks I can help him, and that I don't! He turns to me for everything. You know that he always did when he was well, did not he? He is always asking me when the pain will go away? Asking me whether he has been naughty, and I am angry with him? Angry with him! I angry with him! O God! O God!'
Her excitement and her grief have been gaining upon her at each fresh clause of her speech, and at the end she flings herself down on the ground and buries her face in the cushion of a low chair, while dry, hard sobs shake her from head to foot.
What is he to say to her? Nothing. He will not insult such a sorrow by the futility of his wretched words. He can only stoop over her, and lay his hand no harshlier than her mother would have done, no harshlier than she herself would have laid hers upon her little dying boy, on her heaving shoulder. But she shakes off his light touch, and raising her distorted face, again tries to address him. But the rending sobs that still convulse her make her utterance difficult; and her words, when they come, scarcely intelligible.