“It’s kind of your honour to try and comfort me; but yours was always the good heart, and the kind one, and you never made the sight of your sunny face a compliment. But it’s no use—there’s no hope. The death’s on her handsome countenance.”
He groaned deeply, and rocked himself backwards and forwards.
“James,” said my father, “we must be resigned to the will of God, but we need not make ourselves miserable by anticipating evils.”
“Your honour was but a slip of a gossoon when you danced at the bright girl’s wedding, and you’re come now in time to see the last of the old woman—the old woman, the old woman,” repeated he, as if something struck him in the sound of the words as strange. “Two-and-forty is not old, but they called her ‘the old woman’ since the boys began to grow up. But she never grew old to me; she’s the same now that she was the first evening I told her, that she was the only treasure on the face of the earth that my heart coveted. Only, much as I loved her then, I love her more now. Oh! Mary, Mary, pulse of my heart, would to God I could die before you!”
The younger son Pat, his mother’s favourite, now entered the room in a state of pitiable excitement. He had been at the dispensary to procure the medicine prescribed by the doctor, and to his imagination every person and every thing seemed to have conspired to delay him, whilst the lookers on deemed his haste almost superhuman.
He immediately attempted to administer the draught he had brought, but his mother could not be made to understand what was wanted of her; and at length, as if teased by his importunities, she suddenly dashed the cup of medicine from her.
The look of unutterable anguish with which he regarded her, as she rejected and destroyed that upon the taking of which depended the last hope, was indescribable.
The almost fierceness of his haste, which he now saw had been utterly useless, had flushed his cheek and lighted up his countenance, and he stood with his hands clasped, and raised as if in prayer, with firmly shut lips, and his eyes, in which you could view the transition from eager hope to utter despair, fixed upon her face, like a being that was changing into stone.
At the other side of the bed was his father, who had resumed his former attitude, and beside him stood his eldest son, whose utterly wretched countenance, alternating from one parent to the other, showed that he suffered that lowest state of misery, which anticipates still further and greater woe as a consequence from that which overwhelms at present.
My father left the room. I looked upon the group one instant. I felt that I could have resigned the possession of worlds to be permitted the luxury of raising the load of grief from those afflicted hearts; but it could not be, and I retired to relieve my surcharged feelings in solitude.