Page:Dombey and Son.djvu/503

414 contains his jewel; and in a deplorable condition of mind, and not unsuspected by the police, gazes at a window where he sees a light, and which he has no doubt is Florence’s. But it is not, for that is Mrs. Skewton’s room; and while Florence, sleeping in another chamber, dreams lovingly, in the midst of the old scenes, and their old associations live again, the figure which in grim reality is substituted for the patient boy’s on the same theatre, once more to connect it—but how differently!—with decay and death, is stretched there, wakeful and complaining. Ugly and haggard it lies upon its bed of unrest; and by it, in the terror of her unimpassioned loveliness—for it has terror in the sufferer’s failing eyes—sits Edith. What do the waves say, in the stillness of the night, to them?

"Edith, what is that stone arm raised to strike me? Don’t you see it?"

"There is nothing, mother, but your fancy."

"But my fancy! Everything is my fancy. Look! Is it possible that you don’t see it?"

"Indeed, mother, there is nothing. Should I sit unmoved, if there were any such thing there?"

"Unmoved?" looking wildly at her—"it’s gone now—and why are you so unmoved? That is not my fancy, Edith. It turns me cold to see you sitting at my side."

"I am sorry, mother."

"Sorry! You seem always sorry. But it is not for me!"

With that, she cries; and tossing her restless head from side to side upon her pillow, runs on about neglect, and the mother she has been, and the mother the good old creature was, whom they met, and the cold return the daughters of such mothers make. In the midst of her incoherence, she stops, looks at her daughter, cries out that her wits are going, and hides her face upon the bed.

Edith, in compassion, bends over her and speaks to her. The sick old woman clutches her round the neck, and says, with a look of horror,

"Edith! we are going home soon; going back. You mean that I shall go home again?"

"Yes, mother, yes."

"And what he said—what’s-his-name, I never could remember names—Major—that dreadful word, when we came away—it’s not true? Edith!" with a shriek and a stare, "it’s not that that is the matter with me."

Night after night, the lights burn in the window, and the figure lies upon the bed, and Edith sits beside it, and the restless waves are calling to them both the whole night long. Night after night, the waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds are on their trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to the invisible country far away.

And still the sick old woman looks into the corner, where the stone arm—part of a figure of some tomb, she says—is raised to strike her. At last it falls; and then a dumb old woman lies upon the bed, and she is crooked and shrunk up, and half of her is dead.

Such is the figure, painted and patched for the sun to mock, that is drawn slowly through the crowd from day to day; looking, as it goes, for