The winter had come and gone, and come again and the watchful eye of Imelda detected that the mother’s step was slower. The tall figure was slightly bent and an unnameable something about her struck terror to the daughter’s heart. She drooped and faded day by day, and the much tired girl knew that darker days were coming. Often on coming home in the evening she would find her mother lying on the bed, not asleep, but broken down, without ambition enough to lift the weary head from the pillow; little Nellie crying bitterly with cold and hunger, or perhaps the poor baby had sobbed itself to sleep upon the floor while its mother seemed to have lost all interest in what was going on around her.
Imelda moaned in despair. She was needed oh, so much at home. The ailing, wasted form of her mother appealed so strongly to her aching heart for the care there was no one to bestow. The baby felt like ice as she pressed the tiny thing to her heaving bosom. But how could they live if she remained at home? Only what her tender hands were able to earn did they have to keep the wolf from the door. And if she ceased to work? What then?
Imelda knew and felt that darker days were coming, darker than she had yet known, and her impotence to ward them off almost drove her to despair. But the time came when she felt that she could no longer remain away from the bedside of the dying mother, come what would. To make matters still worse little Nellie had contracted a severe cold, and many sleepless nights fell to her share walking to and fro, from the bedside of the sick woman to that of the ailing child. One by one all the little comforts and luxuries of former days were parted with. Pretty trinkets her father had given her and which, therefore were of great value to her, were all sacrificed.
In the early spring the change came. The baby had been unusually feverish for several days while the mother was sinking fast. The night was bitter cold and Imelda knew she must not sleep. Both patients were nearing their end. Folding her shawl more closely around her shoulders to be more comfortable, she prepared for her long and dreary vigil. Never a word did the mother speak, breathing heavily in a dull stupor. Toward midnight she moved uneasily. Imelda bending over her saw her lips move. She bent lower and caught the whispered words, “Frank, Cora.” That was all.
The wayward ones, who had taken their mother’s life with them, to them the last breath was given. Nellie and Imelda were with her. It was the absent wayward ones that had left a void. When the morning dawned, it was to find the weary woman at rest; the woman whose life had been one long mistake. The baby moaned. Imelda lifted her to her knee, and as the sun sent its first rays through the dim window pane the fluttering breath left the little purple lips, and Imelda was alone—alone with her dead!
CHAPTER IV.
After the body of her mother had been laid away, by the side of that of her dead husband, with the youngest of eight children clasped in her arms, Imelda changed her home to a little attic room. When all was over she returned to the store where she had now been employed three years.
In the early days of her engagement there she had become acquainted with a bright cheery little girl, Alice Day by name, with whom she had become fast friends, although a greater contrast one could scarcely imagine than existed between the personalities of the two girls. The one, small, bright, saucy, sparkling; the other, tall, stately, sad. Although Alice did not have that high order of intelligence that Imelda was the possessor of, yet she was so purely child-like and frank, that they at once attracted each other; each supplying to the other that which she did not possess. Their friendship, however, was of short duration. Pretty Alice had a lover, a traveling salesman at the time, whose home was in the east. He was about to establish a business of his own and so would no longer have opportunities of seeing his little lady-love; a state of affairs that did not meet the approval of either the young gentleman in question or that of the fair Alice. So he proposed to take her with him as his wife.
Alice was married and Imelda saw no more of her friend. Now and then a letter came and she knew that the husband was prospering; that Alice lived in a beautiful home, and that two sweet babies, girl babies, had come to make music in that stately home.