Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/75

Rh cheek; she put on her lace cap, and would have Nora get out the best china for the tea table, and went down stairs upon her cane or Bessie's arm as stately as she could hobble. I wonder what the sweet old soul would have thought if she could have looked into her boy's real life, and seen some things whose remembrance might have called a color upon his tanned forehead for many a day, and have understood that he was not altogether supernal, but had, like all humanity, a mortal streak in him; but she never knew of such a possibility—her baby, her boy, had waxed into something like a strong-winged angel, and stood for that with her until the day she died. But, excepting this ideal of her son, she had only two things in her house on which to waste all her motherliness, old Fly, the faithless hound, and a crow that had never uttered a syllable; for Elisabetta lived such a silent life that the crow had no chance for improvement, and Nora, while the black thing watched her with burning eyes, regarded him with secret awe, and had few doubts as to his being in league with the devil. Elisabetta used to pause before his perch, however, and, when coaxing him with almonds, try to say the one word "mother," that she might hear it repeated; but then, as if it were too sacred to be trusted, or she feared the mockery it might make, or her voice was held by a reverential diffidence, the word always faltered on her lips, and somehow, never made more sound than a whisper. But the more faithless the hound, the more silent the crow, the more Elisabetta valued them; she recognized herself this yearning brooding quality of her heart, and conjectured that Elisabeth, the mother of John, patron saint and prototype of mothers, had her in peculiar care. She was grateful in those days for slender mercies—the poor little hunch-backed woman.

The only seasons that Elizabetta failed to fill with enjoyment in this child of hers was when stretched upon her bed in a fever of pain, when the weight of her curved spine, pressing on ganglions of sore nerves, made her scream and hold her breath and bury her face in her pillow, while she cried it through and through with misery and longing for Sebastian; her spirit yearned for him then, her arms ached for him, it seemed to her that he could destroy her suffering, that his touch would soothe these stabs to stupor—when he was still young the thought was if she could but nestle her face to his little warm cheek on the pillow, sleep would come; and, afterward, she said that he would take her in his arms now, she was so small, and he a man so tall and grand, and carry her up and down the room, he would lift her out and bear her through the garden walks, or drive her in a coach along the sea wall for a breath of the reviving east wind; the sight, the sound, the touch of him, if she must bear agony, would make that agony endurable. Sometimes, but that was seldom, she reached a rapt condition, in whose religious ecstacy she supported every pang without a murmur, and