“Go on! What did you dream?” The words were peremptory but the voice was
gentle. Even in that moment Frances noted the difference of tone.
There was a momentary pause, then the child spoke, her face uplifted
like the face of a dreamer.
“I dreamt first about Daniel in the lions’ den, and then it turned into
someone up by the Stones—someone who was lost and frightened—and
praying for help. So I went to see.”
“Weren’t you afraid?” the man said.
“I? Oh no! There was nothing to frighten me. I knew the way. Besides,
God was there,” the child said simply. “It was quite safe. Is the lady
better now?”
“She is getting better.” The man reached out and grasped the slender
shoulder nearest to him. “Come and hold her hand!” he said.
“May I? Won’t she mind?” The small fingers clasped Frances’ trembling
ones. “You are not lost now,” she said softly. “You are found.”
Somehow Frances found her hold transferred. The man rose from his knees.
The child nestled down by her side. A sense of peace stole upon her. She
knew that she was safe. She closed her eyes to the glare of the fire and
lay still. . . .
What happened to her afterwards she never clearly recalled. She was in
the hands of strangers who yet in some inexplicable way were friends.
They waited upon her, tended her, succoured her with every comfort, till
at last the awful shivering passed. She drifted into sleep.
It was a strange sleep of inexplicable happenings—a fevered jumble of
impressions, ideas curiously mingled. Daniel in a place of lions—or was
it devils?—that was oddly called “The Stones”! Daniel, lost and very
frightened, praying for help! And later the coming of an angel to his
deliverance!
Yes, she remembered that part of it very clearly. “My God hath sent His
angel. . . .” She heard again the voice of a little child singing in the
darkness—a child who lived in utter darkness yet knew not the meaning
of the word. She called to memory the closed eyes that no sun would ever
open, and like a voice within her soul there came to her the words: “You
are not lost now. You are found.”
No, she was not lost any longer, but she was ill, terribly ill. There
came a time when sleep no longer held her and pain took
possession—dreadful intervals when breathing was agony and rest a thing
impossible. It stretched out into days of suffering when her very soul
seemed to be lacerated with the anguish that racked her body, days when
she lay in the cruel grip of a torture such as she had never imagined in
all the hardships of her life. Sometimes during those days, it seemed to
her that death was very near. She stood on the brink of an abyss
unfathomable and felt her soul preparing as it were for that great leap
into the unknown. And it had ceased to appall her, as is the merciful
way of nature when the body can endure no more. There was nought to fear
in Death. It was only pain—earthly pain—that had any power to torment
her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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