Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/345

 on the floor in front of the cradle a few silvery silhouettes, faint, feeble images.

In the room there is a deep silence interrupted only by the breath of two human beings,—the mother’s breath, full and apparently free, but occasionally shortened as in anxiety, and the delicate breath of the child, a breath alarmingly quickened.

The mother’s breath suddenly stops; then a deep sigh follows, and a half-suppressed groan, as she awakes from a troublesome dream, sits up, and fastens her eyes upon the cradle and the child.

The child lies on its back; a faint reflex of the scattered rays of the moon falls directly upon the baby face; the eyes are shut. To the mother the face looks deadly pale. She leaps to the cradle, and puts her hand on the child’s forehead; it is hot. The mother bends lower; she feels a hot breath which she thinks to be the breath of death.

She would cry out in pain, but she cannot. Her breath is stopped; the word dies on the trembling lips. Unutterable anxiety brings the cold sweat upon her brow; the blood rushes violently to her heart and back to her head; the arteries are beating more and more wildly; her head is dizzy.

How gladly she would press the child to her heart, how gladly she would kiss death away from the pale lips! and yet there she stands helpless, bent over the cradle, as if benumbed.

Only a mother who, in feverish excitement, has spent a sleepless night by the cradle of a sick child, will understand the state of this woman’s mind. Before her mental sight there passes, in wild chaos, one picture after another, each one more terrible, more threatening, and darker than the one before, until at last the most dreadful of all appears on the scene.

She sees a man with the stern features of a zealot, with a cold and yet expressive face,—the parson. Two years ago he had come to sprinkle the grave of a rich farmer with holy water and say a prayer at his coffin, and on that occasion he also came under the thatched roof of the grave-digger’s house to baptize a new-born child,—a poor unfortunate creature.

With fear and shame the youthful mother approached the