As it seemed, she did not perceive my presence. Her eyes were transfixed and fascinated. She did not even seem to me to breathe. Horror and anguish at last overcame my stupefaction.
“What—what is it?” I cried; “what ails my child, my darling child?”
“I’d be glad to know, myself,” he replied, coolly; “it is certainly something very queer.”
“What is it, darling?” I repeated, frantically, addressing the child.
“What is it?” he reiterated. “Why it’s pretty plain, I should suppose, that the child is ill.”
“Oh merciful God!” I cried, half furious, half terrified—“You have injured her—you have terrified her. Give me my child—give her to me.”
These words I absolutely shouted, and stamped upon the floor in my horrid excitement.
“Pooh, pooh!” he said, with a sort of ugly sneer; “the child is nervous—you’ll make her more so—be quiet and she’ll probably find her tongue presently. I have had her on my knee some minutes, but the sweet bird could not tell what ails her.”
“Let the child go,” I shouted in a voice of thunder; “let her go, I say—let her go.”
He took the passive, deathlike child, and placed her standing by the window, and rising, he simply said—
“As soon as you grow cool, you are welcome to ask me what questions you like. The child is plainly ill. I should not wonder if she had seen something that frightened her.”
Having thus spoken, he passed from the room. I felt as if I spoke, saw, and walked in a horrid dream. I seized the darling child in my arms, and bore her away to her mother.
“What is it—for mercy’s sake what is the matter?” she cried, growing in an instant as pale as the poor child herself.
“I found that—that demon—in the parlour with the child on his lap, staring in her face. She is manifestly terrified.”
“Oh! gracious God! she is lost—she is killed,” cried the poor mother, frantically looking into the white, apathetic, meaningless face of the child.
“Fanny, darling Fanny, tell us if you are ill,” I cried, pressing the little girl in terror to my heart.
“Tell your own mother, my darling,” echoed my poor little wife. “Oh! darling, darling child, speak to your poor mother.”
It was all in vain. Still the same dilated, imploring gaze—the same pale face—wild and dumb. We brought her to the open window—we gave her cold water to drink—we sprinkled it in her face. We sent for the apothecary, who lived hard by, and he arrived in a few moments, with a parcel of tranquillising medicines. These, however, were equally unavailing.
Hour after hour passed away. The darling child looked upon us as if she would have given the world to speak to us, or to weep, but she uttered no sound. Now and then she drew a long breath as though preparing to say something, but still she was mute. She often put her hand to her throat, as if there was some pain or obstruction there.
I never can, while I live, lose one line of that mournful and terrible portrait—the face of my stricken child. As hour after hour passed away, without bringing the smallest change or amendment, we grew both alarmed, and at length absolutely terrified for her safety.
We called in a physician toward night, and told him that we had reason to suspect that the child had somehow been frightened, and that in no other way could we at all account for the extraordinary condition in which he found her.
This was a man, I may as well observe, though I do not name him, of the highest eminence in his profession, and one in whose skill, from past personal experience, I had the best possible reasons for implicitly confiding.
He asked a multiplicity of questions, the answers to which seemed to baffle his attempts to arrive at a satisfactory diagnosis. There was something undoubtedly anomalous in the case, and I saw plainly that there were features in it which puzzled and perplexed him not a little.
At length, however, he wrote his prescription, and promised to return at nine o’clock. I remember there was something to be rubbed along her spine, and some medicines beside.
But these remedies were as entirely unavailing as the others. In a state of dismay and distraction we watched by the bed in which, in accordance with the physician’s direction, we had placed her. The absolute changelessness of her condition filled us with despair. The day which had elapsed had not witnessed even a transitory variation in the dreadful character of her seizure. Any change, even a change for the worse, would have been better than this sluggish, hopeless monotony of suffering.
At the appointed hour the physician returned. He appeared disappointed, almost shocked, at the failure of his prescriptions. On feeling her pulse he declared that she must have a little wine. There had been a wonderful prostration of all the vital powers since he had seen her before. He evidently thought the case a strange and precarious one.
She was made to swallow the wine, and her pulse rallied for a time, but soon subsided again. I and the physician were standing by the fire, talking in whispers of the darling child’s symptoms, and likelihood of recovery, when we were arrested in our conversation by a cry of anguish from the poor mother, who had never left the bedside of her little child, and this cry broke into bitter and convulsive weeping.
The poor little child had, on a sudden, stretched down her little hands and feet, and died. There is no mistaking the features of death: the filmy eye and dropt jaw once seen, are recognised whenever we meet them again. Yet, spite of our belief, we cling to hope; and the distracted mother called on the physician, in accents which might have moved a statue, to say that her darling was not dead, not quite dead—that something might still be done—that it could not be all over. Silently he satisfied himself that no
