Mary’s heart sickened within her, and she could not speak.
“What is it?” she repeated. “Will you tell me?” She still looked at Mary, with the same childlike gaze of wonder and patient entreaty.
What could she answer?
“I telled ye not to heed her,” said Mrs. Davenport, a little angrily. “She knows well enough what it is—too well, belike. I was not in when they sarved it; but Mrs. Heming (her as lives next door) was, and she spelled out the meaning, and made it all clear to Mrs. Wilson. It’s a summons to be a witness on Jem’s trial—Mrs. Heming thinks to swear to the gun; for yo see, there’s nobbut her as can testify to its being his, and she let on so easily to the policeman that it was his, that there’s no getting off her word now. Poor body; she takes it very hard, I dare say!”
Mrs. Wilson had waited patiently while this whispered speech was being uttered, imagining, perhaps, that it would end in some explanation addressed to her. But when both were silent, though their eyes, without speech or language, told their hearts’ pity, she spoke again in the same unaltered gentle voice (so different from the irritable impatience she had been ever apt to show to everyone except her husband—he who had wedded her, broken-down and injured),—in a voice so different, I say, from the old, hasty manner, she spoke now the same anxious words—
“What is this? Will you tell me?”
“Yo’d better give it me at once, Mrs. Wilson, and let me put it out of your sight. Speak to her, Mary, wench, and ask for a sight on it; I’ve tried and better-tried to get it from her, and she takes no heed of words, and I’m loth to pull it by force out of her hands.”
Mary drew the little “cricket” out from under the dresser, and sat down at Mrs. Wilson’s knee, and, coaxing one of her tremulous ever-moving hands into hers, began to rub it soothingly; there was a little resistance—a very little, but that was all; and presently, in the nervous movement of the imprisoned hand, the parchment fell to the ground.
Mary calmly and openly picked it up, without any attempt at concealment, and quietly placing it in sight of the anxious eyes that followed it with a kind of spell-bound dread, went on with her soothing caresses.
“She has had no sleep for many nights,” said the girl to Mrs. Davenport, “and all this woe and sorrow,—it’s no wonder.”
“No, indeed!” Mrs. Davenport answered.
“We must get her fairly to bed; we must get her undressed, and all; and trust to God in His mercy to send her to sleep, or else”—
For, you see, they spoke before her as if she were not there; her heart was so far away.
Accordingly they almost lifted her from the chair, in which she sat motionless, and taking her up as gently as a mother carries her sleeping baby, they undressed her poor, worn form, and laid her in the little bed upstairs. They had once thought of placing her in Jem’s bed, to be out of sight or sound of any disturbance of Alice’s; but then again they remembered the shock she might receive in awakening in so unusual a place, and also that Mary, who intended to keep vigil that night in the house of mourning, would find it difficult to divide her attention in the possible cases that might ensue.
So they laid her, as I said before, on that little pallet bed; and, as they were slowly withdrawing from the bedside, hoping and praying that she might sleep, and forget for a time her heavy burden, she looked wistfully after Mary, and whispered—
“You haven’t told me what it is. What is it?”
And gazing in her face for the expected answer, her eyelids slowly closed, and she fell into a deep, heavy sleep, almost as profound a rest as death.
Mrs. Davenport went her way, and Mary was alone,—for I cannot call those who sleep allies against the agony of thought which solitude sometimes brings up.
She dreaded the night before her. Alice might die; the doctor had that day declared her case hopeless, and not far from death; and at times, the terror so natural to the young, not of death, but of the remains of the dead, came over Mary; and she bent and listened anxiously for the long-drawn, pausing breath of the sleeping Alice.
Or Mrs. Wilson might awake in a state which Mary dreaded to anticipate, and anticipated while she dreaded;— in a state of complete delirium. Already her senses had been severely stunned by the full explanation of what was required of her—of what she had to prove against her son, her Jem, her only child—which Mary could not doubt the officious Mrs. Heming had given; and what if in dreams (that land into which no sympathy or love can penetrate with another, either to share its bliss or its agony—that land whose scenes are unspeakable terrors, are hidden mysteries, are priceless treasures to one alone—that land where alone I may see, while yet I tarry here, the sweet looks of my dear child)—what if, in the horrors of her dreams, her brain should go still more astray, and she should waken crazy with her visions, and the terrible reality that begot them?
How much worse is anticipation sometimes than reality! How Mary dreaded that night, and how calmly it passed by! Even more so than if Mary had not had such claims upon her care!
Anxiety about them deadened her own peculiar anxieties. She thought of the sleepers whom she was watching, till, overpowered herself by the want of rest, she fell off into short slumbers in which the night wore imperceptibly away. To be sure, Alice spoke, and sang during her waking moments, like the child she deemed herself; but so happily with the dearly-loved ones around her, with the scent of the heather, and the song of the wild bird hovering about her in imagination—with old scraps of ballads, or old snatches of primitive versions of the Psalms (such as are sung in country churches half draperied over with ivy, and where the running brook, or the murmuring wind among the trees makes fit accompaniment to the chorus of human voices uttering praise and thanksgiving to their God)— that the speech and the song gave comfort and good cheer to the listener’s heart, and the grey dawn began to dim the light of the rush-candle, before Mary thought it possible that day was already trembling in the horizon.
Then she got up from the chair where she had been dozing, and went, half-asleep, to the window to assure herself that morning was at hand. The streets were unusually quiet with a Sabbath stillness. No factory bells that morning; no early workmen going to their labours; no slip-shod girls cleaning the windows of the little shops which
