LII
An elderly servant in plain clothes had admitted her. The man’s face bore traces of watching and anxiety. And at the stair-foot waited the matronly woman who bore the quaint name of Husnuggle, and the first glance at her quivering lips and reddened, swollen eyelids told the daughter that all was not well in the sick-room.
The shadow of Death brooded over the great canopied bed in the luxurious chamber, where a face that was the pallid wraith of Ada’s own lay low amidst the lace-trimmed pillows; its pinched and wasted beauty framed in the dainty little muslin cap that covered the still luxuriant and glossy hair.
A nurse from the Hospice rose up from her seat near the bed-foot, made her report in a few low-toned sentences, and was dismissed to take her needed rest, as a tiny china clock upon the mantelshelf struck one. And as her daughter bent above the sick woman and kissed the fair, unwrinkled forehead between the bands of gray-brown, the sunken eyes opened widely, and the weak voice said:
“You have come back!... Is it very late?... The time has seemed long!...”
“Dear mother, I should never have left you had you not wished it so. Have you been lonely in the midst of all the pain?”
“I have been thinking!...” said the toneless voice.
“Of me, dear mother?”
“Chiefly of you, my own.”
She wished to be raised a little on her pillows, and the daughter’s skilled hands tenderly performed this office, and put nourishment between the pale lips. You saw Ada, moving to and fro in her filmy, trailing laces and flashing jewels, between the glimmer of the silver night-lamp and the oblong patches of gray dawn that showed between the window-curtains, like some fair ministering spirit of pity and love.... And the feeble voice resumed after an interval: