“Bring me my baby! I want to see it. Every mother wishes to see her
baby.” Tears came rolling from her sweet eyes.
“But child, the baby boy is not well and to bring him to you might cause
serious conditions to arise.”
Well did that Doctor know the mother heart. How ready that heart ever
is to suffer and to bleed that the off-spring may be shielded from some
danger or a single pang.
“I can wait; don’t bring my darling if it will do him harm. A boy! A boy!
My boy! I’ll wait, but where is Walter?”
The Doctor told the nurse to summon Mr. Burton, but cautioned Lucy not to
excite or agitate herself as she had been quite ill.
Let him who has seen the look on the condemned felon’s face, when the
poor wretch gazes on the knife within the guillotine, recall that look.
Let him who has seen the last wild, desperate glance of a drowning man,
recall that look, and mingle with these the look of Love at side of
Hope’s death-bed, and thus find the look on Burton’s face when he entered
his wife’s bedroom.
With arms outstretched she called to the faltering man,
“Walter, it is a boy! My baby! Your baby! My husband!”
The man fell, he did not drop, upon his knees by the bedside and burying
his face in the covering wept bitterly. He took her hands, kissed them,
and wet them with his tears.
“Oh! Don’t weep so, darling. I will soon be well, and Oh! my husband we
have a precious baby boy.” Then she said, as if in the joy of knowing
that her baby was a boy, she had forgotten all else,
“Tell grandfather to come here. Tell him the boy shall bear his name.”
The Doctor went himself to bring her grandfather to her. She never
noticed that strange fact.
James Dunlap, never had you in your seventy-three years of life more need
of strength of mind than now!
Her grandfather came to her leaning heavily upon the Doctor’s arm. He
bent and kissed her brow, and in so doing dropped a tear upon her cheek.
Quickly she looked up and seeing pain and grief in the white face above
her, she started and in the alarmed voice of a little child, she cried,
“Am I going to die? Are you all so pale and weep because I am dying? Tell
me Doctor! Why Mamma Church is crying too.”
She so had called Mrs. Church when a wee maid and sometimes did so still.
The Doctor seeing that she was flushed and greatly excited hastened to
the bedside and said calmly but most earnestly,
“No, my dear. You will not die, they are not weeping for that reason, but
you have been very ill and we all love you so much that we weep from
sympathy for you, my dear. Now please lie down. You must my child, and
all must leave the room but nurse and me,” and speaking thus, he gently
pressed the gold-brown head back on the pillows and urged all to leave
the room immediately.
That night the nurse and Doctor heard the patient often murmur both while
awake and while she slept,
“My baby, my baby, it’s a boy, my baby.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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