The countess, with aristocratic self-control, struggled to maintain her composure. Then she said quietly, though her voice sounded faint and hoarse: "The child seems weak, I think it will be better to give him something to eat before washing him."
"Yes," pleaded the little fellow, "I am thirsty." The words reminded the countess of his father, as he said on the cross: "I thirst." When these memories came, all the anguish of her once beautiful love--now perishing so miserably--overwhelmed her. She lifted the boy--he was light as a vapor, a vision of mist--from the bed into her lap, and wrapped his little bare feet in the folds of her morning dress. He pressed his little head, crowned with dark, curling locks, against her cheek. Such moments were sweet, but outweighed by too much bitterness.
"Bring him some milk--fresh milk!" Madeleine von Wildenau repeated in the slightly imperious tone which seems to consider opposition impossible.
"That will be entirely different from his usual custom," remarked Josepha, as if the countess' order had seriously interfered with the regular mode of life necessary to the child.
The mother perceived this, and a faint flush of shame and indignation suffused her face, but instantly vanished, as if grief had consumed the wave of blood which wrath had stirred.
"Is your mother--Josepha--kind to you?" she asked, when Josepha had left the room.
The boy nodded carelessly.
"She does not strike you, she is gentle?"
"No, she doesn't strike me," the little fellow answered. "She loves me."
"Do you love her, too?" the countess went on.