University of Virginia Library

10. X.

“Oh, my children!” cried Mrs. Mitchel, bending over the
huddled sleepers, and calling them one by one to awake, “your
poor little brother is dead—he will never play with you any
more.”

“Let them sleep,” said Jenny, whose grief was less passionate,
“they cannot do him any good now, and the time will come
soon enough that they cannot sleep.”

“I know it, oh, I know it!” she sobbed, “but this silence
seems so terrible; I want them to wake and speak to me, and
yet,” she added, after a moment, “I know not what I want. I
only know that my little darling will not wake in the morning.
Oh,” she continued, “he was the loveliest and the best of
all—he never cried when he was hurt, like other children, nor
gave me trouble in any way;” and she then recounted, feeding
her sorrow with the memory, all his endearing little ways, from

his first conscious smiling to the last word he had spoken; numbered
over the little coats he had worn, and the color of them,
saying how pretty he had thought the blue one, and how proud
he had been of the pink one with the ruffled sleeves, and how
often she had lifted him up to the broken looking-glass to see
the baby, as he called himself, for that he always wanted to
see the curls she made for him. Sometimes she had crossed
him; she wished now she had never done so; and sometimes
she had neglected him when she had thought herself too busy
to attend to his little wants; but now that was all irreparable,
she blamed herself harshly, and thought how much better she
might have done.

The first day of his sickness she had scolded him for being
fretful, and put him roughly aside when he clung about her
knees, and hindered the work on which their bread depended;
she might have known that he was ailing, she said, for that he
was always good when well, and so should have neglected every
thing else for him; if she had done so in time, if she had tried
this medicine or that, if she had kept his head bathed, one night,
when she chanced to fall asleep, and waked with his calling her
“mother,” and saying the fire was burning him; in short, if she
had done any thing she had not done, it might have been better,
her darling Willie might have got well.

“The dear baby,” she said, taking his cold, stiffening feet
in her hand, “he never had any shoes, and I promised so often
to get them.”

“He does not need them now,” interposed Jenny.

“I know it, I know it,” she answered, and yet she could not
subdue this grief that her boy was dead, and had never had the
shoes that he thought it would be so fine to have.

“Oh, mother, do not cry so,” Jenny said; “I will come
home and we will love each other better, we who are left, and
work together and try to live till God takes us where he has
taken the baby—home, home!” but in repeating his dying
words, her voice faltered, and hiding her face in the lap of her
mother, she gave way to agony that till then she had kept down.

But, alas, it was not even their poor privilege to weep uninterruptedly,
and, shuddering, they grew still when, slowly and

heavily climbing the narrow and dark stairs, sounded the well-known
step of the drunken husband and father. A minute the
numb and clumsy hand fumbled about the door-latch, and then
with a hiccup, and a half articulate oath, the man, if man he
should be called, staggered and stumbled into the room.

His dull brain apprehended the case but imperfectly, and
seeing his wife, he supposed her to be waiting for him, as he
had found her a thousand times before; and mixing something
of old fondness with a coarse and brutal familiarity, he put his
arm about her neck, saying, “Why the hell are you waiting
for me, Nancy, when you know them fellers won't never let
me come home? Daughter,” he continued, addressing Jenny,
“just hand me that jug, that's a good girl, I feel faint like,”
and putting his hand to his temple, where the blood was oozing
from a recent cut, he finished his speech with an oath.

“Hush, father, hush,” beseechingly said the girl, pointing to
the bed; but probably supposing she meant to indicate it as a
resting-place for him, he reeled towards and half fell upon it,
one arm thrown across the dead child, and the blood dripping
from his bruised and distorted face, muttering curses and threatening
revenge against the comrades who, he said deprecatingly,
made him drink when he told them he wanted to go home, d—n
them! In such imprecations and excuses he fell into a dreadful
unconsciousness.

Not knowing whom else to call, Helphenstein summoned
Aunt Kitty, and with the aid of his arm and a crutch, but more
than all leaning on her own zeal to do good, she came, and in
her kindly but rude fashion comforted the mourners, partly by
pictures of the glory “ober Jordan,” and partly by narratives
of the terriblest sufferings she had known, as taking the child
on her knees she dressed it for the grave, decently as might be.

“She had lost a baby, too,” she said, “and when her breasts
were aching with the milk, she felt as if she wanted to be
gwine to it wharever it were, for that she couldn't 'xist without
it no ways, but she did, and arter a while she got over it.
Another son,” she said, “was spared to grow up and do a heap
of hard work; he was away from her a piece down the river,
and kep a liberty stable, and at last, when he had saved a'most

money enough, to buy himself, a vile-tempered critter kicked
out his brains, and dat ar was his last. And so,” said Aunt
Kitty, “it was wust for de one dat growed up, arter all.”

The stars grew motionless, the heavy clouds loomed in sombre
and far-reaching masses, and the night went by drearily,
wearily, painfully, till gray began to divide the heavy darkness,
and through the gaps of the thick woods away over the
eastern hills, the chilly river of morning light came pouring in.