The Squire's Daughter

by Silas K. Hocking

In a long, barrack-like room, with uncarpeted floor and whitewashed walls, Ralph and Ruth found their mother. She was propped up with pillows in a narrow, comfortless bed. Her hands lay listless upon the coarse coverlet, her eyes were fixed upon the blank wall opposite, her lips were parted in a patient and pathetic smile.

She did not see the wall, nor feel the texture of the bedclothes, nor hear the sound of footsteps on the uncarpeted floor. She was back again in the old days when husband and children were about her, and hope gladdened their daily toil, and love glorified and made beautiful the drudgery of life. She tried not to think about the present at all, and in the main she succeeded. Her life was in the past and in the future. When she was not wandering through the pleasant fields of memory, and plucking the flowers that grew in those sheltered vales, she was soaring aloft into those fair Elysian fields which imagination pictured and faith made real—fields on which the blight of winter never fell, and across which storms and tempests never swept.

She had lost all count of days, lost consciousness almost of her present surroundings. Every day was the same—grey and sunless. There were no duties to be done, no meals to prepare, no butter to make, no chickens to feed, no husband to greet when the day was done, no hungry children to come romping in from the fields.

There were old people who had been in the workhouse so long that they had accommodated their life to its slow routine, and who found something to interest them in the narrowest and greyest of all worlds. But Mary Penlogan had come too suddenly into its sombre shadow and had left too many pleasant things behind her.

She did not complain. There were times when she did not even suffer. The blow had stunned her and numbed all her sensibilities. Now and then she awoke as from a pleasant dream, and for a moment a wave of horror and agony would sweep over her, but the tension would quickly pass. The wound was too deep for the smart to continue long.

She seemed in the main to be wonderfully resigned, and yet resignation was scarcely the proper word to use. It was rather that voiceless apathy born of despair. For her the end of the world had come; there was nothing left to live for. Nothing could restore the past and give her back what once she had prized so much, and yet prized all too little. It was just a question of endurance until the Angel of Death should set her free.

She conformed to all the rules of the House without a murmur, and without even the desire to complain. She slept well, on the whole, and tried her best to eat such fare as was considered good enough for paupers. If she wept at all she wept in secret and in the night-time; she had no desire to obtrude her grief upon others. She even made an earnest effort to be cheerful now and then. But all the while her strength ebbed slowly away. The springs of her life had run dry.

The workhouse doctor declared at first that nothing ailed her—nothing at all. A week later he spoke of a certain lack of vitality, and wrote an order for a little more nourishing food. A fortnight later he discovered a certain weakness in the action of the heart, and wrote out a prescription to be made up in the dispensary.

Later still he had her removed to the sick-ward and placed under the care of a nurse. It was there Ralph and Ruth found her on the afternoon in question.

She looked up with a start when Ralph stopped at the foot of her bed, then, with a glad cry, she reached out her wasted arms to him. He was by her side in a moment, with his arms about her neck, and for several minutes they rocked themselves to and fro in silence.