Yes, the
medicines were certainly very quieting,--so quieting, so death-like
in their influence,--she could not tell how a suspicion (perhaps the
strange expression of the child's eye, when they were administered)
glided into her imagination (having so great a reverence for her
husband, it took no place in her mind for an instant,--it was merely a
spectral, haunting shadow) that these things were getting the child
no better,--that they were not medicine for keeping him here, but for
helping him away. This suspicion, breathing its baleful breath across
her mind, weak, vacillating, incapable of energetic action, had
rendered her miserable, morose, irritable, more so than ever before.
Yet little Jacques in his last hour hankered for the medicine, and
craved feverishly the delicate powder, the sweet confection, his
father prepared for him.
While inwardly brooding over this unnamed terror, and cowering before
this shapeless thought which loomed in the darkness of her mental
gloom, an idea entered her mind that I, too, was suspicious that
something was going wrong,--that I was watching,--waiting the evil to
come. The child died. Her fear for him was utterly superseded by fear
for her husband.
Pages:
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234