“What did you say, mother dear?” he returned, all astray, seeming to have once known several things, but now to know nothing at all.
“It is under your pillow, Richard,” she said again, very tenderly.
“What is it, mother? Something seems strange. I don't know what to ask you. Tell me what it means.”
“You have been very ill, my boy; that is what it means.”
“Have I been out of my mind?”
“You have been wandering with the fever, nothing more.”
“I have been thinking so many things, and they all seemed real!—And you have been nursing me all the long time?”
“Who should have been nursing you, Richard? Do you think I would let any one else nurse my own child? Didn't I nurse the—”
She stopped; she had been on the point of saying—“the mother that bore you?” Her love of her dead sister was one with her love of that sister's living child.
He lay silent for a time, thinking, or rather trying to think, for he felt like one vainly endeavouring to get the focus of a stereoscopic picture. His mind kept going away from him. He knew himself able to think, yet he could not think. It was a revelation to him of our helplessness with our own being, of our absolute ignorance of the modes in which our nature works—of what it is, and what we can and cannot do with it.