Paul Clifford | Page 5

Edward Bulwer Lytton
to her breast, and burst into tears.
"Coom, now, coom," said Dummie, soothingly; "take the stuff, Judith, and then ve'll talk over the hurchin!"
The mother relaxed her grasp of the boy, and turning towards the speaker, gazed at him for some moments with a bewildered stare; at length she appeared slowly to remember him, and said, as she raised herself on one hand, and pointed the other towards him with an inquiring gesture,--"Thou hast brought the book?"
Dummie answered by lifting up the book he had brought from the honest butcher's.
"Clear the room, then," said the sufferer, with that air of mock command so common to the insane. "We would be alone!"
Dummie winked at the good woman at the foot of the bed; and she (though generally no easy person to order or to persuade) left, without reluctance, the sick chamber.
"If she be a going to pray," murmured our landlady (for that office did the good matron hold), "I may indeed as well take myself off, for it's not werry comfortable like to those who be old to hear all that 'ere!"
With this pious reflection, the hostess of the Mug,--so was the hostelry called,--heavily descended the creaking stairs. "Now, man," said the sufferer, sternly, "swear that you will never reveal,--swear, I say! And by the great God whose angels are about this night, if ever you break the oath, I will come back and haunt you to your dying day!"
Dummie's face grew pale, for he was superstitiously affected by the vehemence and the language of the dying woman, and he answered, as he kissed the pretended Bible, that he swore to keep the secret, as much as he knew of it, which, she must be sensible, he said, was very little. As he spoke, the wind swept with a loud and sudden gust down the chimney, and shook the roof above them so violently as to loosen many of the crumbling tiles, which fell one after the other, with a crashing noise, on the pavement below. Dummie started in affright; and perhaps his conscience smote him for the trick he had played with regard to the false Bible. But the woman, whose excited and unstrung nerves led her astray from one subject to another with preternatural celerity, said, with an hysterical laugh, "See, Dummie, they come in state for me; give me the cap--yonder--and bring the looking-glass!"
Dummie obeyed; and the woman, as she in a low tone uttered something about the unbecoming colour of the ribbons, adjusted the cap on her head, and then, saying in a regretful and petulant voice, "Why should they have cut off my hair? Such a disfigurement!" bade Dummie desire Mrs. Margery once more to ascend to her.
Left alone with her child, the face of the wretched mother softened as she regarded him, and all the levities and all the vehemences--if we may use the word--which, in the turbulent commotion of her delirium, had been stirred upward to the surface of her mind, gradually now sank as death increased upon her, and a mother's anxiety rose to the natural level from which it had been disturbed and abased. She took the child to her bosom, and clasping him in her arms, which grew weaker with every instant, she soothed him with the sort of chant which nurses sing over their untoward infants; but her voice was cracked and hollow, and as she felt it was so, the mother's eyes filled with tears. Mrs. Margery now reentered; and turning towards the hostess with an impressive calmness of manner which astonished and awed the person she addressed, the dying woman pointed to the child and said,--
"You have been kind to me, very kind, and may God bless you for it! I have found that those whom the world calls the worst are often the most human. But I am not going to thank you as I ought to do, but to ask of you a last and exceeding favour. Protect my child till he grows up. You have often said you loved him,--you are childless yourself,--and a morsel of bread and a shelter for the night, which is all I ask of you to give him, will not impoverish more legitimate claimants."
Poor Mrs. Margery, fairly sobbing, vowed she would be a mother to the child, and that she would endeavour to rear him honestly; though a public-house was not, she confessed, the best place for good examples.
"Take him," cried the mother, hoarsely, as her voice, failing her strength, rattled indistinctly, and almost died within her. "Take him, rear him as you will, as you can; any example, any roof, better than--" Here the words were inaudible. "And oh, may it be a curse and a-- Give me the medicine; I am dying."
The hostess, alarmed, hastened to comply; but before
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