“Her child?” he asked, looking sadly at the little creature.
“Yes, the only one. She takes it hard. I really don’t know what to do with her.”
“Poor lamb, poor lamb!” he muttered, as madame hurried him to the door.
Shortly after the doctor left, there was a little ripple of excitement, which entered even into the sick-room—the sound of wheels, and Raste giving orders in a subdued voice, while two large, handsome trunks were brought in and placed in the corner of the back apartment. These two immense boxes looked strangely out of place amid their humble surroundings; and when madame looked at them she almost trembled, thinking of the difficulty of getting rid of such witnesses should a day of reckoning ever come. When the little green door closed on them, it seemed as if the small house had swallowed up every trace of the mother and child, and that their identity was lost forever.
For several days the doctor continued his visits, in a more or less lucid condition, and every day he departed with a more dejected expression on his haggard face. He saw almost from the first that the case was hopeless; and his heart (for he still had one) ached for the child, whose wide eyes seemed to haunt him with their intense misery. Every day he saw her sitting by her mother’s side, pale and quiet, with such a pitiful look of age on her little face, such repressed suffering in every line and expression as she watched him for some gleam of hope, that the thought of it tortured him and forced him to affect a cheerfulness and confidence which he did not feel. But, in spite of every effort to deceive her, she was not comforted. She seemed to see deeper than the surface. Her mother had never recognized her, never spoken to her, since that dreadful night, and, in one respect, she seemed already dead to her. Sometimes she seemed unable to control herself, and would break out into sharp, passionate cries, and implore her mother, with kisses and caresses, to speak to her—to her darling, her baby. “Wake up, mama, wake up! It’s Lady Jane! It’s darling! Oh, mama, wake up and speak to me!” she would cry almost fiercely.
Then, when madame would tell her that she must be quiet, or her mother would never get well, it was touching to witness her efforts at self-control. She would sit for hours silent and passive, with her mother’s hand clasped in hers, and her lips pressed to the feeble fingers that had no power to return her tender caress.
Whatever was good in Madame Jozain showed itself in compassion for the suffering little one, and no one could have been more faithful than she in her care of both the mother and child; she felt such pity for them, that she soon began to think she was acting in a noble and disinterested spirit by keeping them with her, and nursing the unfortunate mother so faithfully. She even began to identify herself with them; they were hers by virtue of their friendlessness; they belonged to no one else, therefore they belonged to her; and, in her self-satisfaction, she imagined that she was not influenced by any unworthy motive in her treatment of them.
One day, only a little more than a week after the arrival of the strangers, a modest funeral wended its way through the narrow streets of Gretna toward the ferry, and the passers stopped to stare at Adraste Jozain, dressed in his best suit, sitting with much dignity beside Dr. Debrot in the only carriage that followed the hearse.
“It’s a stranger, a relative of Madame Jozain,” said one who knew. “She came from Texas with her little girl, less than two weeks ago, and yesterday she died, and last night the child was taken down with the same fever, and they say she’s unconscious to-day, so madame couldn’t leave her to go to the funeral. No one will go to the house, because that old doctor from the other side says it may be catching.”