For a moment the child slid again from his arms, and nestled close against the cold breast, kissed the unmoving lips. Then she said,--
“Good-by, this mamma, who can’t see; and good-night, other mamma, that hears Maudie.”
Colonel Trevethick marvelled. Had he, indeed, succeeded in making this little creature understand; or had some one whom he could not see spoken to her words of sweet mother-wisdom?
He carried her then, and laid her in her little bed, and went back to his own loneliness; but half an hour afterward he heard the small voice calling. “Papa, papa!” and again he went to her, and the little arms came up around his neck, and held him fast.
“Can’t I go too, papa? If you ask God, won’t He let me? Because I do so love my mamma.”
That afternoon Colonel Trevethick had felt as if he had nothing at all left in this world; but now he realized how much emptier still his home might be if he lost out of it this child who was so like her mother.
“Mamma would not want you to come,” he said passionately. “_She_ has all heaven, and _I_ only you,--only you, little Maudie, in all the world. Mamma wants you to stay with me.”
After that she was quite quiet; and when he looked in at her, an hour later, she was sound asleep, with one little hand like a crushed white rose under the red rose of her flushed cheek.
She never asked for her mother after that night; but her father was sure that she never forgot her. She was the strangest, gravest little creature. She never made any noise, even at her play; and she never did any of the things for which her mother had been used to reprove her. The trouble was that she was too perfect; there was something unnatural about it which frightened Colonel Trevethick. He would have been glad if she had been naughty, sometimes, like other children. He longed to have her tease him, to see in her some spirit of naughtiness or contradiction; but he saw none. She grew tall quite fast, but she was very thin,--a little white wraith of a creature, who looked as if she had been made out of snow, and might melt away as soon.
It was a good thing for Colonel Trevethick, no doubt, that he had her to tend, and to be anxious about. It kept him from surrendering himself to his own grief.