Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All through the night he had felt it; during the hours before the dawn there had been times when the small pulse wavered, flickered, almost ceased. With the daylight there had been a trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of hope, enough to make harder Peter’s acceptance of the inevitable.
The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he opened his eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face, smiled back. Peter died many deaths that night.
At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor. Marie, creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy apparently asleep and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He raised his head at her footstep and the girl was startled at the suffering in his face. He motioned her back.
“But you must have a little sleep, Peter.”
“No. I’ll stay until—Go back to bed. It is very early.”
Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet, and now it was useless. At eight o’clock he let Marie take his place, then he bathed and dressed and prepared to face another day, perhaps another night. For the child’s release came slowly. He tried to eat breakfast, but managed only a cup of coffee.
Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was insistent—the boy’s mother was in Vienna and he was dying without her. Peter might know in his heart that he had done the best thing for the child, but like Harmony his early training was rising now to accuse him. He had separated mother and child. Who was he to have decided the mother’s unfitness, to have played destiny? How lightly he had taken the lives of others in his hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where; the boy dying without his mother. Whatever that mother might be, her place that day was with her boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He was humbled as well as stricken, poor Peter!
In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to trace the mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the letter. The letter, signed only “Mamma,” was not helpful. The clipping might prove valuable.
“And for Heaven’s sake be quick,” wrote Peter. “This is a matter of hours. I meant well, but I’ve done a terrible thing. Bring her, Mac, no matter what she is or where you find her.” The Portier carried the note. When he came up to get it he brought in his pocket a small rabbit and a lettuce leaf. Never before had the combination failed to arouse and amuse the boy. He carried the rabbit down again sorrowfully. “He saw it not,” he reported sadly to his wife. “Be off to the church while I deliver this letter. And this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in remembrance.”
At eleven o’clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the horsehair sofa.
“He asks for you.”
Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy’s eyes were open and fixed on him.
“Is it another day?” he asked.
“Yes, boy; another morning.”
“I am cold, Peter.”
They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay he could see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter, very humble, found himself wondering in how many ways he had been remiss. To see this small soul launched into eternity without a foreword, without a bit of light for the journey! Peter’s religion had been one of life and living, not of creed.
Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.
“He knows, poor little one!” she whispered.
And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from the boy.
“One is sick, Jimmy boy,” he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:—
“If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?”
“Yes, honey, I think so.”
The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech. His mind too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes. Peter bent over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.
“What is it, dear?”
“I’m afraid—it’s going to die!”
“Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?” asked Peter gently. “To go to heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer and the sun always shines?”
No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their dead mother.
“Is there grass?”
“Yes—soft green grass.”
“Do—boys in heaven—go in their bare feet?” Ah, small mind and heart, so terrified and yet so curious!
“Indeed, yes.” And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint—a heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of dear departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees in fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers. Painted his heaven with smiling eyes and death in his heart, a child’s heaven of games and friendly Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.
The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech was increasingly an effort.
