She went to the bowl, and wringing a cloth in ice water, bathed the sick
woman’s head and held the cool cloth to the face and wiped the parched
lips and rubbed the feverish hands, while Guy stood, looking on,
bewildered and confounded, and utterly unable to say a word or utter a
protest to this angel, as it seemed to him, who had come unbidden to his
aid, forgetful of the risk she ran and the danger she incurred. Once, as
she turned her beautiful face to him and he saw how wondrously fair and
lovely it was, lovely with a different expression from any he had ever
seen there, it came over him with a thrill of horror that that face must
not be marred and disfigured with the terrible pestilence, and he made
another effort to send her away. But Daisy would not go.
"I am not afraid," she said. "I have just been vaccinated, and there was
already a good scar on my arm; look!" and she pushed back her sleeve,
and showed her round, white arm with the mark upon it.
Guy did not oppose her after that, but let her do what she liked, and
when, an hour later, the doctor came, he found his recent visitor
sitting on Julia’s bed, with Julia’s head lying against her bosom and
Julia herself asleep. Some word which sounded very much like
"thunderation" escaped his lips, but he said no more, for he saw in the
sleeping woman’s face a look he never mistook. It was death; and ten
minutes after he entered the room Julia Thornton lay dead in Daisy’s
arms.
There was a moment or so of half consciousness, during which they caught
the words, "So kind in you; it makes me easier; be good to the children;
one is called for you, but Guy loved me too. Good-bye. I am going to
Jesus."
That was the last she ever spoke, and a moment after she was dead. In
his fear lest the facts should be known to his guests, the host insisted
that the body should be removed under cover of the night, and as Guy
knew the railway officials would object to taking it on any train, there
was no alternative except to bury it in town; and so there was brought
to the room a close plain coffin, and Daisy helped lay Julia in it, and
put a white flower in her hair and folded her hands upon her bosom, and
then watched from the window the little procession which followed the
body out to the cemetery, where, in the stillness of the coming day,
they buried it, together with everything which had been used about the
bed, Daisy’s party dress included; and when at last the full morning
broke, with stir and life in the hotel, all was empty and still in the
fumigated chamber of death, and in the adjoining room, clad in a simple
white wrapper, with a blue ribbon in her hair, Daisy sat with Guy’s
little boy on her lap and her namesake at her side, amusing them as best
she could and telling them their mamma had gone to live with Jesus.
"Who’ll be our mamma now? We must have one. Will oo?" little Daisy
asked, as she hung about the neck of her new friend.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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