child. If humanity can approach more
near the infinite in capacity of suffering, it is hard to know how. We
must all bow down before this extremity of anguish, humbly begging the
pardon of that sufferer, that in our lesser griefs, we dare to bemoan
ourselves in her presence. And whether it is the dear companion--man or
woman grown--or the infant out of her clasping arms, would seem to
matter very little. According as it happens, so is the blow the most
terrible. To Lucy, enveloped by that woe, there could have been no
change that would not have lightened something (or so she felt) of her
intolerable burden. Could he have breathed his fever and pain into
words, could he have told what ailed him, could he have said to her only
one little phrase of love, to be laid up in her heart! But the pitiful
looks of those baby eyes, now bright with fever, now dull as dead
violets, the little inarticulate murmurings, the appeals that could not
be comprehended, added such a misery as was almost too much for flesh
and blood to bear. This terrible ordeal was what Lucy had to go through.
The child, though he had, as the maids said, no constitution, and though
he had been enfeebled by illness for half his little lifetime, fought on
hour after hour and day after day. Sometimes there was a look in his
little face as of a conscious intelligence fighting a brave battle for
life. His young mother beside him rose and fell with his breath, lived
only in him, knew nothing but the vicissitudes of the sick room, taking
her momentary broken rest when he slept, only to start up when, with a
louder breath, a little cry, the struggle was resumed. The nurses could
not, it would be unreasonable to expect it, be as entirely absorbed in
their charge as was his mother. They got to talk at last, not minding
her presence, quite freely in half whispers about other "cases," of
patients and circumstances they had known. Stories of children who had
died, and of some who had been miraculously raised from the brink of the
grave, and of families swept away and houses desolated, seemed to get
into the air of the room and float about Lucy, catching her confused
ear, which was always on the watch for other sounds. Three or four times
a day Sir Tom came to the door for news, but was not admitted, as the
doctor's orders were stringent. There was no one admitted except the
doctor; no cheer or comfort from without came into the sick room. Sir
Tom did his best to speak a chee