Over the face of the child as Pelleas and I stood helplessly looking down at her came a strangeness. We thought that she was hardly conscious of our presence. Her eyes seemed rather to deepen than to widen as she looked at her mother, and the woman, startled and unstrung, threw out her hands and laughed weakly and without meaning.
“Mamma!” the child cried, “mamma!” and did not take her eyes from her face, “O, mamma, you look as if you had been dead forever—are you dead? You are dead!” cried Margaret. “O, They won’t touch you. They are running away from you. You’re dead—dead,” sobbed the child and threw herself back on her pillow. “O, papa—my papa!”
She stretched her little arm across the vacant pillow beside her.
“Halverson, I will—I will,” we heard her say.
As soon as we could we got the little Quakeress, for Mrs. Trempleau fainted and we were in a passion of anxiety for the child. She lay without moving, and when the village physician came he could tell us nothing. We slipped away to our rooms as the East was whitening and I found myself sobbing helplessly.
“She will die,” I said; “she knows how to do it—Pelleas, she knows what we don’t know—whatever it is we can’t know till we die.”
“Etarre!” Pelleas besought me, “I do believe she has made you as fantastic as she.” But his voice trembled and his hands trembled. And it was as if we had stood in places where other feet do not go.
But Margaret did not die. She was ill for a long time—at the last languidly, even comfortably ill, able to sit up, to be amused. Mrs. Trempleau was to be married in town, and on the day before the ceremony Pelleas and I went in, as we often did, to sit with Margaret. She was lying on a sofa and in her hands were some white, double lilies at which she was looking half-frowning.
“These don’t smell any,” she said to us almost at once; “I thought they would. It seems to me they used to smell but I can’t—find it now.”