Forsake thy mother’s for thy lover’s arms.
CLAIRE NEVILLE.
———
BY H. L. JONES.
———
Death was in the house; in the room; in the small pallet where, side by side, lay the mother and her newly born child.
Poverty was there, too, hard-featured and repulsive always, but now hanging her head and hiding her face before the stern reality of the dark angel. What mattered it how the soul took its departure? whether in state, with many mourning eyes gazing, and white stoled priest with lifted hands at the bedside; or desolate and wholly forsaken of man as was Clara Neville’s on her straw-bed in her lonely hovel? It mattered not—and yet may our last moments be cheered by the silent and tearful love of friends—as we start on our dark voyage, may we hear the cheering tones and be buoyed up by the affectionate throbs of the beloved hearts around us!
Pestilence had come among the inmates of the hamlet. They were not barbarians, else, to leave the couch of death untended. But bereavement and selfishness and mortal fear had done its work. The few who remained were dying alone, and of this number was Clara Neville and her young daughter. Her husband in a distant land, her kindred estranged or dead, she met her fast coming fate alone, but with one all-absorbing anxiety. With that anxious will, she had kept herself, as it were, alive—that she might not leave her little one in the world behind her. While the death-damps hung on her own brow, her straining gaze yet rested on the form and face of the pale infant, whose fluttering breath grew shorter and shorter every instant. Still she clasped her baby close to her poor heart, with the energy that death itself could not subdue, and when at length the limbs straightened in what the mother knew was the last convulsion, Clara cast her eyes to heaven, and closing her speechless lips, in a glad smile passed away.
So it seemed at least. But help was nighest when it seemed farthest away. The door of the hovel was flung open—the serene air poured in; gentle hands ministered at the couch, and restoratives and cordials on lip and brow brought back the life that seemed to have left its dwelling. The disease had reached its crisis, and the eyes of both mother and child once more opened on the world.